My first two answers do follow my algorithm. The third one does not, you’re right. I guess, then, I would say that, rather than being obligated to disobey any order that carries a risk of harming innocents during an unjust war, you should evaluate the ethics of any set of acts independently of orders when you’re in an unjust war. That is, the fact that the army tells you to do something has negligible bearing on whether you ought to do it, when you’re in an unjust war. By engaging in this unjust war, the army has forfeited its moral right to lead.
When you’re part of a just war, there’s a tremendous good that may be achieved, and your cooperation in the war effort will help achieve that end. Under such circumstances, one of the risks you face by not following orders is that you’ll undermine the achievement of that great end. If you’re responsible for the predictable consequences of your choices, you need to be taking that predictable consequence into account; and so you ought to follow orders under most circumstances.
When you’re part of a somewhat unjust war, there’s not a tremendous good that may be achieved: your army’s victory in an unjust war has all sorts of problems with it (the exact problems depend on the particular war, but if nothing else, victory in an unjust war encourages more unjust wars). Therefore, there’s no great risk in undermining the achievement of victory, since victory is so problematic. Therefore, you don’t need to take that into account when deciding whether to follow orders: you ought to judge the orders independently.
When you’re part of an extremely unjust war, one in which your side’s victory is a horrific possibility, then you’ve got a prima facie duty NOT to follow orders. If, for example, you’re fighting on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, and you find out that one of your fellow soldiers is captured, then you’ve got a duty NOT to rescue him, because such a rescue will help achieve a horrific end. Only exceptional circumstances may overturn this, e.g., the special forces soldier who’s about to die and only you can save him.
I don’t think this addresses my argument. One reason is that the contract is not just between you and the Army. It is also between you and your fellow soldiers. If the Army breaks their end of the deal, that doesn’t absolve your responsibility to protect your fellow soldiers like you swore to do.
Also, since your promise to follow orders isn’t conditioned upon whether or not you believe those orders to be just, you’re still breaking your promise, which is still immoral. You might argue that this is far outweighed by the immorality of following some orders, but I’ve already shown why that consequences-based analysis is inadequate.
Finally, you’ve not addressed this:
p.s. It seems like you’ve sort of lost interest in this debate. If you don’t want to continue, I won’t take it as a concession or anything–I don’t consider this a contest.
:smack: I swear I previewed. Anyway, I agree with most of your above analysis. But I don’t think that taking away the positive consequence of helping the entire effort, or adding the negative consequence of helping an evil effort, is the determining factor in whether one ought or ought not to follow a given order.
Thanks, but I’m also trying to finish up a semester’s worth of homework while I post. Maybe I should wait till I’m done before continuing the debate :).
Yet many people fought for the Khmer Rouge. Morals come from within the culture you are raised in. People aren’t inherently born with a particular moral sense, instead this is instilled in them in childhood and beyond. Thus, I think you could fight for a group like the Khmer Rouge and still be following your moral code in so doing. It certainly wouldn’t be my moral code. But I think it raises the question of who determines whether a war is justifed or not and what the criteria is.
When I joined the Canadian military it was for economic reasons, not from some sense of patriotism. Yet, before I joined I reconciled myself to the fact that I may have to kill someone while serving. So, when I was on the rifle range shooting at paper targets I understood that those targets actually represented people. Morally I had little problem with this as I understood that I was in a military in a country like Canada where it would be very unlikely I’d be in a situation of having to worry about unjustified wars.
Yet, after reading this thread, I have come to better realization of what I would actually do if I found myself in a situation where the war was unjustified.
If I hadn’t already joined up then I wouldn’t. I have no desire to inflict my moral, culture, or society on others if they don’t want it.
If I had already joined, then I’d do what is necessary to protect myself and my comrades. If this involved the total genocide of the opposing forces, civilians and all, then so be it. This is just a general comment upon warfare. It shouldn’t be entered into unless you are willing to do what it takes to win.
More to the OP. We live in democracies where the military works for the people, not the other way round. If the democratically elected representatives of our societies decide it is the right thing to go to war then it is not for the soldier to then decide that the war he is fighting is unjustified or to fight that war in a different fashion because of his ‘opinion’. You fight to win because that is what you are paid to do. You defend yourself and your comrades as best you can while trying to accomplish the goals of the people who put you in the lousy situation in the first place. And you do all this with one hand tied behind your back trying to follow laws put in place by your government, international bodies, or by all the assorted monday morning quarterback types who will always criticize you no matter what you do, good or bad.
This is a moral relativism argument. I reject moral relativism. Either something is right or wrong for everyone, independent of what they believe is right or wrong; or the concepts of right and wrong are meaningless from a moral perspective.
Your smarmy laughter doesn’t make you sound smart, you know. On the contrary, it comes across as bespeaking an inability to discuss a point respectfully, or to imagine that other people aren’t as smug in their opinions as you appear to be in yours.
If I didn’t think my beliefs were correct, I’d hold different beliefs.
I am not, however, convinced that my conclusions about morality are correct. I fully allow that they could be wrong, which is why I am eager to discuss them and hear what other folks believe. If someone presents a solid argument showing me that my moral conclusions are incoherent, illogical, or cruel (as Parker did above in showing me that some of my answers were contradictory), I’m willing to change my conclusions.
Moral relativism is not a coherent position, for many reasons, but the simplest is this: the statement that we ought not impose our moral systems on others is itself an absolute moral position.
Depends on how one splits one’s hairs. I wouldn’t care to say that there’s no such thing as an absolute right and wrong, but I would argue that it’s absolutely impossible to detect what that is, so moral absolutism that proscribes other moral systems is inherently flawed. I wouldn’t try to argue to tell someone they should believe… or not believe… in God for the very same reason. It’s impossible to say, so to reach out and persuade someone - no matter how much I believe it - would be acting with a false certitude. People do that all the time of course - it’s just not an exercise I care to engage in.
And I just was trying to clarify the debate in my own sarcastic fashion. We’re not actually debating soldier’s personal responibility, we’re debunking LHoD’s entire moral worldview.
Ya failed, honey. As usual, your participation in this thread betrays an unexamined philosophy and an inability to grapple with alternative views; as such, I’m not real interested in your future contributions to it. Doubtless they’ll appear anyway.
Which I suspect is the reason that we have separate countries vs a single world state. If everyone believed the same thing, or had the same morals, what would we be fighting about?
Well, if wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak; but they ain’t and we’re not.
Folks do have different moral guides; but that doesn’t mean that discussion of morality is fruitless, nor that there’s no way to choose among competing moral systems.
No, it doesn’t depend on how you split hairs. You have two options: a) there are no moral absolutes. In which case, you have no basis by which to persuade anyone that they ought not impose a moral system on others; b) there are moral absolutes, in which case, you must determine why some absolutes are acceptable while others are not.
Moral relativism is a great excuse for apathy and isolationism, as you’ve outlined in your post. That is foremost among the reasons why we must reject it. If a nation is slaughtering an ethnic group, for example, we should be able to tell them they are wrong–and more importantly, impose our moral views using physical force.
Oh, and the notion that concepts of absolute ethical values must be religious in origin is simply wrong.
However I think someone needs to analyze military commitment and decide as to whether or not they think their moral code is compatible with what would fall under the category of “lawful order” in the military.
If you join the military, then you’re scum if you decide to disobey a direct lawful order in combat. There’s no other way to hash that. Disobeying direct orders in combat gets your comrades killed. Someone like you should never be in the military in the first place, and that’s fine as the military is not for everyone.
I think it’s reprehensible for someone to refuse an order in combat because it “violates their moral code.” If you think a combat order might violate your moral code, then you are committing a deception by joining the military in the first place.
Actually, yes, it very much does matter. Because what I’m advocating isn’t really moral relativism. It only sounds like that on the surface. It’s actually “moral uncertainty.” There’s an absolute morality, but we can’t know what that is.
Well, fanatics cause more wars than apathists.
Which would be a simply wonderful comment if that’s what I’d simply said, but I simply didn’t.
