While randomly perusing the board, I found this thread over in the Pit about Zenster. I haven’t been keeping up with too many of the Afgani/Taleban/AlQueda related threads floating about for much the same reason someone felt the need to take Zenster to task: those sorts of arguments get very heated and emotional, and tend to run wild.
So, when I saw the title I found myself curious as to what an established posted was being taken to task for. What I got drawn into was an elaborate debate between several folks (Andros, Obfus., and Scylla) about the ethics versus tactics of this and historical conflicts.
It raised some interesting thoughts for me, and several people in that thread suggested the hijack was more worth of a Great Debate. So, I’m bringing it here. Obviously, much of the discussion will relate to the current wartime situation in the U.S., but that’s not the focus of this thread.
What I’m hoping to see discussion on is the ethics of war. How do ethics relate to war? Should our actions be restrained through an ethical code of conduct (Geneva convention)? Or is tactical advantage the quickest, most efficient, and bloodless way to an end? Think carefully on this. Tactics do not, in my mind, mean a disregard for ethics. If one’s goal is to end a war as quickly and with as little loss of life as possible, what sacrifices are ethical to those ends? U.S. vs. Japan and the end of WWII are an excellent basis for discussion of this.
InkBlot
“Ethics”, as applied to war, is a somewhat silly notion. In some respects drawing-up the Geneva Convention almost seems to abet going to war rather than anything else. That is, it’s easier to get people to fight for your side if they think a mere stay in a prison camp may be one possible outcome for them if captured than, say, horrible torture (of course this has the downside for your enemy in that you will fight tooth and nail to stay out of their hands rather than just surrender as we saw so many Iraqis do during the Gulf War).
Mostly I believe ethics in war only applies as far as a particular side can afford to practice them and maybe not even then. In the US during the Civil War southern prison camps were on par with Nazi concentration camps (they didn’t actively execute large numbers of people as the Nazis did but the privation was every bit as bad if not worse). I doubt the southerners set out to have them that way but as the war went bad for them certain ethical treatments got tossed out the window.
Ethics in war also depends on the goals and extent of the war. Is it a Gulf War type where there are short-term, easily achievable goals or is it WWIII where it is a knockdown, drag out fight to the finish…last country standing is the winner (i.e. Total War)? The US can afford to be all nice and ‘ethical’ in its prosecution of the war in Afghanistan but if it was a war to the finish you’d see ethics get tossed on its ear. It’s all nice and fine to agree to a gentlemenly fight till you find yourself scrapping for your life (at which point eye gouging, ear biting and shots to the nuts suddenly become ‘ok’).
I think you need to define ‘bloodless’ a little bit better here. Specifically, who’s blood are you talking about? Let’s say you’re a commander and you have the following decision facing you. You can send your troops in and estimate 100,000 of your men dead and 200,000 of the enemy dead. Or, you can drop your new bomb, kill 400,000 of the enemy and achieve the same results. Which is more ethical?
In the case of Japan you asked about most estimates I have seen would have resulted in many more deaths (not least of which were American) than dropping the A-bomb resulted in. In this case there were less deaths overall, certainly American but including Japanese, by dropping the Bomb than an invasion would have caused. Knowing what I know today, and if it were my decision, I would drop the Bomb all over again on Japan given the same circumstances. In this case I think it actually was the ethical choice as well as the militarily correct choice. (Before anyone goes off on how the A-bomb killed innocents we had actually done worse damage by fire-bombing cities such as Tokyo than we did with the atomic bombs…not nice but a reality of the war at that time).
War, someone once opined, is “the directed application of force.” It’s one nation attempting to do something it considers important by the specific application of superior force to attain the ends it seeks.
Note that the morality of those ends is not applicable to the discussion of the morality of acts of war. It can be to gain Lebensraum, kill every last Jew or Croat, make the world safe for democracy, depose the Corsican dictator, or seize the world’s only supply of quadium.
The point is that it is not the total antithesis to peaceful, moral behavior; it is violation of the code governing peaceful relations between nations in a specific way for a specific end.
As such, the morality of acts of war and of those ends can be debated.
One can make the case that at no time in no way is any human being morally justified in using force against another human being. This would be the extreme pacifist position. One can say that any means is acceptable for a moral end. One can place various weights on various means and various ends, attempting a balance that describes a “just war” as opposed to, presumably, an unjust one. This would be a relativist stance. One can assume that the war engaged in by one’s country deserves one’s support, regardless. And so on.
The point is that one needs to define clearly what standards one is using to do this evaluation. Otherwise we’re arguing apples and hand grenades, and failing to communicate, raising far more smoke than light.
An interesting idea is one about how ethical behavior is determined by the society one lives in. In such a case, war has no ethics because it is between two seperate ethical systems without an objective referent.
However, IMO, each person involved in each society has the ability to make moral judgements about behavior. IMO, every large-scale ethical system should have an unbreakable rule: survival. If survival is threatened because of an ethical tenet then it should be abandoned completely IMO. I competely fail to see the importance of ethics if you are dead. :shrug: I wouldn’t have made a very good knight in a fairy tale, but I think Machiavelli and I might toss a few beers back (though, admittedly, I have never read “The Prince”).
So, the ethics of war are reducible to the ethics of the combatants, or more specifically, those who guide the combatants who have a possibly larger perspective.
This seems to point itself towards an “all or nothing” viewpoint, or what I’ve seen referred to around here lately as a Total War. I feel this is a very valid viewpoint: if you’re not willing to go as far as necessary to end a conflict in your favor, does one have any chance of surviving a conflict at all? But the clause, “as far as necessary,” is what piques my interest. In specific actions, we frequently debate how necessary any given action may be, and it is understandable there will always be dissent. But even going into a Total War, is there any place for ethics? To me, the very phrase “last resort”, as in a weapon of last resort, or a tactic of last resort, indicates there is. That there are steps any given side in a conflict would be willing to take as the conflict escalates. And in that sense, it makes war a game of chicken - who will flinch first?
A flaw based on idealism or merely circumstance? Was the Confederacy at that point in the war even capable of providing ethical treatment to captured troops, or enforcing discipline within its own ranks? Or were these last ditch policy changes designed to boost morale among confederate soliders while deflating that of union troops? What you’ve focused on here is the the breakdown of one side in a conflict towards the end of that conflict. I apologize for not knowing more about this aspect of the Civil War, but without more information to go on, this doesn’t seem to suggest an incompatiblity of ethics and war, merely a breakdown of ethics towards the end of one. I don’t see how it applies here.
Once again, evidence of gradiated ethical standards. Tactically speaking, many longer term conflicts may have been brought shorter through more exterme measures. The consequences, both during the conflict and in world relations thereafter, may have been too ethically steep. Likewise, that can be carried too far, resulting in greater losses all around due to oversensitive ethical standards. Near the heart of this is the eternal debate, how publicized should a war be? For certainly, public opinion in times of war can sway a country and may possibly impact its ability to act in its own best interests.
This brings us back to the question of ethics again. If public outrage is enough to curb military action, was that action ethical to begin with? If not in the sort term, then in the long term? And in looking at the long term, are we entering a question of the ends justifying the means?
Ethically speaking? I would say everyone’s, with preference to your own side first. I can’t answer your hypothetical, though, because I feel it’s too narrow in its choices. Too simplified. Your next paragraph details why. An actual case to which your scenario might apply (we don’t know, because we don’t have accurate data as to what might have happened had we chosen a different tactic), but one in which all available evidence today points to a correct choice.
Is it? Do not the ends which one combatant seeks directly impact their opponent? While erislover makes the point that:
…each society participating in a war has its set of ethics to reference their own actions. If your morality has been expanded to include the wholesale genocide of a particular people, the ethics of your approach will change to reflect this. So, it is a POV question.
I do not wish to discuss the moral superiority of one side over another in a given conflict. The question is one of how ethics fits into war, or to rephrase: must one abandon one’s ethics in wartime?
Which does not seem a complete enough answer to me. This definiton of pacifist seems to be an absolute ideal, and incompatible with the real world.
Again, an idealistic phrase. Which is not to say that either viewpoint might not be used by any side of any particular conflict, but in the first case one would assume the pacifist would automatically lose, being incapable of defensive force. In the second case, one would, if not be absolute victor, escalate a conflict so quickly it’d be over nearly before it began. The terrorist attacks in NY/PA/DC were nearly that drastic.
And this is the ethical ground in the middle I wish to look at. Naturally, any given side tends to see its actions as just and necessary, but in war time do they necessarily need to abandon all sense of ethics in persuit of their goals?
The questions you raise here are the ones I’ve been asking myself, and hence the reason for this thread. I’d hoped to open discussion to any given historical conflict within reason (someone who wishes to use ancient Sumerian battles to lend weight to their arguments might not find a lot of support here (or understanding)), but if we need to narrow things a bit, we can.
A country, such as America, with a strict ethical code for maintaing peace among its citizens and with other countries around the world will often find itself at odds with other nations with tighter/similar/looser codes of ethics than ourselves. At that time, we will find it necessary to resolve the conflict quickly, for the maxmimum benefit to ourselves and our allies, and with minimal disruption to our citizens and international relations. To this end, how ethical should we (or any other country) be to persue these ends?
There is always a place for ethics. Have you ever done something out of pique or anger that you are ashamed of to this day? It can happen to countries too. Minus some skinheads Germans generally are pretty ashamed of what happened in WWII even to this day. It is a national shame that it will take a LONG time to live down (and it may never go away entirely).
You need to ask yourself, “At what cost victory.” (NOTE: I don’t remember who said that originally) There are lines that individuals and even countries are unwilling to cross. More ruthless leaders like Saddam Hussein probably has no line that is too despicable to cross but I like to think that countries like the US do have points at which they say, “Even if it means losing we just can’t go there.”
You don’t see how it applies here because you’ve taken that piece out of context. Ethics seems to be for the side that can afford to have them. Not that ethics don’t exist anymore but as a given side becomes less able to support the ‘cost’ of ethical treatments the more likely they are to get ignored. My point about Southern prison camps in the Civil War merely illustrates that point. I don’t believe the Southerners set out to treat the prisoners that way but in the end conditions got pretty bad. If you’re interested try this link to Andersonville Prison which was perhaps the most notorious of the prison camps (the warden was court martialed and hung after the war due to the state the prison camp had been in). I can’t find the quote but some Southern General after seeing the camp said something to the effect of what an ass-kicking the South would get if the North ever saw that prison (ok…that’s majorly paraphrased but that was the upshot).
What would have been ethical in a case like Andersonville? I don’t know. Let the prisoners go (and risk having them rejoin the war against your side)? Shoot the prisoners rather than let them starve? A bigger prison and more food would have been ideal but the South couldn’t afford that at that point. Ethics isn’t always easy.
I don’t see why you can’t answer. Certainly it is simplified but that’s why it’s nice. It strips away extraneous issues and asks what is more ethical…sacrificing your own soldiers in the interests of fewer overall deaths or keeping your men and women alive but resulting in more total deaths at the end? I’ll grant real life never gives such clearcut choices not least because you can never know what the final result will be till you get there. Still, I think the question helps the process of debate on ethics in war.
Agreed. If the Confederacy did not “loose” its ethics, they merely lost the capacity to maintain them as the tide of war overwhelmed them.
The issues you find extraneous, I find vital to the decision making process, and thus why I cannot answer it. What has brought your commander to the point of that decision? What is his military objective? What is the expected response of the enemy? Are you on the offensive or defensive?
We are entering an age of technological warfare, making it easier all the time to choose option B - use bombs and eliminate any risk to your own forces, but it makes the ethical questions even more important. What is so important that killing more overall people is acceptable?
If you apply your simplified scenario to Japan in WWII, the “correct” answer (or the answer chosen to be correct at the time) seems to invalidate your conditions because other vital conditions have not been taken into account. America was fighting a war on two fronts-pacific and Europe, it had taken significant loses to its pacific fleet, and engagements with the enemy to that date revealed a formidible enemy not afraid to give their lives for their country. It makes one wonder if option A would have worked at all.
However, if you apply the same scenario to Afganistan there’s a much different outlook. Our objective is to route out terrorism with as little collateral damage to civillians as possible. Option B is right out, no matter how much things escalate. Wars, battles, or even single executive orders rarely boil down to two simple options, nor is the ethics of war limited to military casualties.
Ok…let me rephrase. What is more ethical…saving lives (whoever those lives may belong to) or saving your particular sides lives at the cost more lives lost overall. Ignore victory conditions or desired outcomes. I’m a magical space alien that has put the people in question in a box and given you that choice. If you don’t choose everyone will die.
By the time we dropped the atomic bomb (the time we are talking about here) on Japan the war in Europe was over. In addition towards the end of the war our Pacific fleet was huge and largely unopposed. You are right however that the Japanese had shown over and over their willingness to fight to the death no matter how imminent their defeat might seem thus vastly improving the ethical calculation for dropping an atomic bomb on them.