Currently this thread in the Pit is re-hashing the age-old ‘are soldiers morally responsible for the wars in which they participate’ question.
It seems to me that the folks who say “yes” are asserting that a soldier, when faced with a questionable war, is under the moral obligation to quit his/her job.
For quite some time I felt basically the same. Heck, if you signed up for a job in the military, you are responsible for your actions insofar as you allow yourself to do whatever someone else tells you without question.
But, I think there’s a fatal flaw with this distribution of responsibility.
Assuming that a standing army is necessary (which I most definitely believe), then as a citizenry that employs that army, we have to allow some latitude where moral responsibility is concerned. If soldiers didn’t participate in any action that their personal moral code had some questions about, then we could not have an army as we know it. I certainly wouldn’t want to pay (via taxes) to educate and train soldiers who might decide to quit when we went to war, the very event that validates the job of a soldier.
So, if I expect soldiers to do their jobs appropriately, which in the best of circumstances involves steadfastly obeying orders in the face of danger, personal distaste and moral ambiguity, then I cannot cherry-pick which choices a soldier is responsible for, particularly when those choices are as broad as, “am I going to deploy.”
I grant that there are extenuating circumstances, and am not suggesting that a soldier rape babies on the order of his CO. However, I think there is a lot of latitude that we need to grant soldiers, because it is the nature of the job that we hired them for that they not question orders, and that they put their personal feelings aside for the good of their fellow soldiers and their country.
In summary, I’d like to debate whether or not a standing army can exist if each soldier is burdened with the moral responsibility of every action he is asked to take in the course of his job.