Necessity of the Military and Moral Responsibility

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
You mean the ones that are falling down, prone to electrical fires, filled with toxic fumes, or have water spraying from plumbing in the ceiling ? No, they don’t count.
[/QUOTE]

They’re not all like that, and you know it.

Your entire mode of argument is a fallacy; you extrapolate from the subset to the whole. In your view, one fact of “something bad” taints “the whole.”

You do not allow any fine division, and shade of grey, to color your jaundiced perceptions.

Unless it suits your purpose, of course.

42

[QUOTE=John Mace]
If the US had no military, we’d be invaded in a nanosecond.
[/QUOTE]

Really? By who?

43

[QUOTE=ExTank]
They’re not all like that, and you know it.
[/QUOTE]
I “know” nothing of the sort. The fact that our “rebuilding” efforts have been a joke, and nothing more than a method of making us look better at home and funneling money to people like Haliburton has been a theme since the start of this disaster. As has the fact that what we build has been garbage.

44

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
He’s still evil, because his job there is NOT to do good. It’s to do evil.
[/QUOTE]

And just how the fuck do you know this? Just how the fuck do you the intent of every fucking soldier. You’re living in a comic book, pal. One illustrated by a brush as wide as the fucking Pacific. Unbelievable.

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
And they are not doing good there, to put it mildly. Being there puts him in the wrong.
[/QUOTE]

Because you say so? Pardon me if, based on your posting history, I don’t give your opinions much weight. and you are aware what the broad brush fallacy is, right?

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Yes, slaughtering people is so very selfless.
[/QUOTE]

Slaughter? SLAUGHTER? Uh, they’re not the ones who behead people and mutilated the bodies at the bridge in Fullujah.

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
The major “sacrifice” our soldiers are making is sacrificing other people. Not that most of them think of Iraqis as people, I’m sure.
[/QUOTE]

And you know this. You are sure of it? Whatever you say, Kreskin.

Now just make sure you pay those taxes so the military can by more bullets and bombs. That way your rants can be hypocritical as well as ridiculous.

45

[QUOTE=magellan01]
Slaughter? SLAUGHTER? Uh, they’re not the ones who behead people and mutilated the bodies at the bridge in Fullujah.
[/QUOTE]
No, we use machine guns and bombs. And torture. I’m sure that makes it all much more civilized. :rolleyes:

46

If you want to know about men at war, watch “The War” on the PBS TV channel. It will be on again Sunday night, it is the most emotionally draining film collection I have ever watched.

Most don’t want to kill, but they also don’t want to be controlled by a dictator. You choose freedom. I was alive during WWII, the big one, 50-60 million dead, another 100 million injured, some so badly they lived only in institutions. America was the luckiest of them all. Is killing moral, hell no, it’s survival.

Quit trying to judge people you know nothing about. I was too young, but I worked everyday for the war effort, everyone did. I saw the men come home, mentally crippled as well as physical. I saluted them. I owe my freedom to them, so do you.

47

[QUOTE=lekatt]
Is killing moral, hell no, it’s survival.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with most of your post. But killing can indeed be moral. It all depends on the circumstances.

48

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
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.
[/QUOTE]
No, it possibly can’t. Nevertheless I would say that each soldiers is indeed burdened with that moral responsibility. I don’t believe we should let people “off the hook” merely because it’s better for everyone that we have a standing army (and I certainly believe it is). If there are moral standards they shouldn’t be changed just because they make things trickier. If having a standing army is undermined by this, well, then it is undermined. A bad outcome, but I don’t see that there’s any choice to be had.

If a soldier is asked to do something they think is bad, then yes, they should quit (or do whatever it is you can do). I’m certain that that would be a very bad situation to be in, but something being tough isn’t a reason to change moral standards either. If you join the armed forces, you are making the choice to take on the possible punishments and the like for refusing to take an order.

49

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
No, we use machine guns and bombs. And torture. I’m sure that makes it all much more civilized. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]

Do you make no disticntion between killing someone and slaughtering them? The later neccesitates the former, but not vice versa. But I guess anything is allowed if it means you can use the most inflammatory language possible, huh?

50

[QUOTE=John Mace]
If the US had no military, we’d be invaded in a nanosecond. Don’t kid yourself-- society would most definitely be harmed and endangered without a military.
[/QUOTE]

Really? By whom? Not the Canadians - they’d have absolutely nothing to gain, and their people would never sit still for it. Nor the Mexicans - again, they’d gain nothing, and the Mexican military is in no way prepared to project force beyond its borders, so far as I know. I suppose you might worry about an influx of illegal immigrants - but the bulk of our border patrol work today is done by, well, the Border Patrol - not the military. And as for other nations staging an invasion - there actually aren’t that many states capable of projecting military power farther than their immediate neighbors, and I can’t think of anyone who’d be capable of transporting enough troops to subdue any sizable part of the United States, let alone keeping those troops supplied. Even a demilitarized US would be a tough nut to crack - widespread gun ownership, armed police, a guaranteed emergence of a partisan movement, and so forth. No one would ever try it.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe we need a military - we do, because our political and economic interests stretch are global in scope. But our geographical isolation and warm relationship with our neighbors render us well-nigh impervious to invasion. And don’t say “Russia or China could do it”, because neither could - the Russian Army is badly broken, and China doesn’t even have the sealift capability to invade Taiwan, let alone cross the Pacific.

51

While I believe that joining the military does not remove the responsibility of making choices based on moral issues, it does change the standard and make the price far, far higher.

All of us face choices every day. Most of us never acknowledge the majority of those choices because we never truly consider them. The price paid for the choice is far too high. Any of us, civilians, can refuse to follow an order given by a boss, and the worst we face is a short spell of unemployment. If a member of the military does so, they face court martial, dishonorable discharge, imprisonment, and even execution.

They take an oath when they join, and part of that oath is to follow all legal orders. Any of them, at any time, can choose to break that oath, but the price to personal freedom, and more, to personal honor is far too high to consider, except under the most extraordinary circumstances.

I would say that while a person in the military should consider disobeying a legal yet immoral order, those of us who are civilians have a much, much stronger obligation to see that they aren’t placed in that situation.

We are cheating our military members. We require an oath from them, and we have put them in an untenable position following that oath and doing something immoral or breaking that oath to keep from doing something immoral. They are doing their duty. We are not.

Worse than that, we are not even taking care of our military when their time in Iraq is done. Bad enough that we sent them there. Now we are not even meeting their needs when they come home. That is not an indictment of the soldiers, but of us.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

52

Of course U.S. soldiers are raping and killing Iraqi civilians. They’ve been put in an impossible situation. That’s what occuping armies do when they’re in a hopeless counter insurgency – there’s an attack, they know the whole neighborhood was in on it, they crack, and they go house to house and start shooting people. It’s not their fault. If you want to know the appropriate agents to blame, I’d start with the POTUS and work your way down the civilian authority, move over to Congress, and then start in the Pentagon, the State Department, etc.

53

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
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.
[/quote]

Whoa, pretty big strawman there, buddy.

My answer is, yes, soldiers are absolutely responsible for what they do, and “following orders” does not absolve them of moral responsibility.

Note what I say. They have the MORAL responsibility. Maybe under the law they are bnot LEGALLY responsibile, but that’s a different debate. I don’t claim that it is legally wrong, or that it ought to be, just that each soldier is morally responsible for the actions he takes.

But as for your statement that they ought to quit, no I don’t think that at all. What I think is, they set aside personal morality at the moment they enlisted. It is the fact that they volunteered that makes them responsible.
The way I see it, there are essentially three types of soldier.

The first is the conscript, forced into military through threats, he will be put in prison or shot if he refuses. Of the three, this is the only one who can claim that he doesn’t want to be there. Only the conscript is not responsible. (though even then, some people refuse to be drafted on moral principles and accept the consequences)

The second type is the volunteer. His country goes to war, he joins up because he thinks the cause is a just and necessary one. He fights a cause he has chosen, and when his tour of duty finishes, or when the war ends, he goes home

And the third type is the professional. Someone who sees the army as a career. Someone who will fight for a just cause, or an unjust one. someone who will go anywhere they are sent, fight anyone they are ordered to fight, and not mind if the cause is right or wrong.

There are no conscripts the US or British forces. Every single one of them is there, either because they want to be there, or because they are willing to go anywhere.

Here’s a fact that everyone knows. Sometimes, America gets involved in pointless and stupid wars. This has been obvious ever since Viet Nam, at least. Every single professional who has volunteered has known that it is possible they will be participating in such. And all of them are fundamentally willing for that to happen.

None of them can say “I don’t want to be here.” If they didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t have enlisted.

*Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own. *
*King Henry V. Act iv. Sc. 1. *

54

Trooper shoot those civvies .
No boss fuck off.

Trooper torture that P.O.W.
No boss go fuck yourself .

Trooper go and loot everything you can from those houses .
I think not oh Rupert of the ages.
Now lets try the other vantage point .

OK lads we’re going in tomorrow to attack the Corned Beeftiniagins.

Well I’m sorry sir I’m not sure that me and the lads can do that.

Oh really ?ones sorry !why is that ?

Well me and the lads just happened to be browsing through the 1822 treaty of Omyhangovier and we couldn’t help but noticing that in clause 19736b there was some dispute about the connotations of the earlier treaty between the Lushans and the Getinbeduns of 1631about the consequences of paragraph 91622 so that we think legally ,much as we’d like to carry out your orders squire ,we cant legally do it !

Soldiers aren’t cunts neither are they lawyers.

If you really think that it is so easy to entertain legal nitpicks
(Oh of course he could have been taking the Det cord home to use as a washing line ,how will we ever know !)

While in a life or death,that is YOUR life or death situation,then why dont you put your theory to the test ,enlist and then start theorising about the guilt or innocence of somebody whos just picked up bomb making equipment knowing that within HOURS it could be used on you or your fellow liberals

Who was it who said that theres nothing like the knowledge that you are going to be killed in the morning to concentrate the mind .(Not verbatim)

55

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

  • Dr. Samuel Johnson.
56

You know I’d be a lot more convinced the military were morally neutral if there weren’t screeds of the US military posting all over the internet the real reasons why they have to be in Iraq.

No, the reason the military gives for being is Iraq is to protect the US from the threat of WMD attacks by terrorists supported by Saddam Hussein. The factual base of that is not something for the morally neutral military to judge. They follow orders and those were them. Anytime they voice support beyond that, the line is crossed. They are thereby cursed with the dishonor and cowardice of the entire Iraqi venture.

57

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
You know I’d be a lot more convinced the military were morally neutral if there weren’t screeds of the US military posting all over the internet the real reasons why they have to be in Iraq.
[/QUOTE]
Can you explain in more detail what you’re saying here? What real reasons are soldiers posting? And where on the interent? Blogs?

58

[QUOTE=Bear_Nenno]
Can you explain in more detail what you’re saying here? What real reasons are soldiers posting? And where on the interent? Blogs?
[/QUOTE]

Perhaps he can’t, but I think I can. After all, soldiers are spouting off on a multitude of subjects - as is their right subject to normal military discipline.

Morality, as noted above, is pretty subjective a thing to judge. I was critical of a certain Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp recently because I thought his actions served to fuck over his buddies. Others thought he was something akin to a national hero. You’ll have this.

I think what we have to do in these cases, though, is to separate what the soldiers say and do as private citizens and what we order them to do through their chain of command. Not always an easy thing to do, I understand, especially as the military is a volunteer one. Still, thinking people like us can make distinctions between their official and private acts.

Some of the most decent people I ever met were in the Navy, serving alongside me. Sadly, I can say the same about some of the most worthless degenerates I’ve known. I think most people here with that experience can say the same thing.

So is a soldier inherently moral? Nope. But he isn’t inherently immoral either. He is moral or immoral in rough equivalence to the society at large, really. The military does undertake to correct some character defects, and will discharge or imprison some who clearly can’t cut the mustard, so the military population might be by and large better than the overall society for these age groups. That hardly eliminates petty theft, sexual harassment, substance abuse, child neglect and abuse, and many other moral failings from the military population.

So those “screeds”? Well, perhaps they ought to be judged on their content, and not necessarily by who wrote them. Just like when I went drinking with my buddies in Norfolk - I sure weren’t friends with them because they were sailors. They were just a nice bunch of guys. And there were sure some sailors we knew who weren’t welcome to drink with us, and some civilians (and, horrors, even Marines) who were welcome.

Again, this isn’t rocket science, and I wonder if people overanalyze it too much.

59

[QUOTE=Peter Morris]
Whoa, pretty big strawman there, buddy.

[/quote]

How so? It was pretty clear over there that a number of people were equating the ‘evil’ of the current war (as they perceive it) with the evilness of soldiers participating in said war. Not everybody said that, but that argument is the basis for this one.
I like that Henry V quote, but an important implication of it is this (at least as I read it); man’s ‘soul’ is not for other men to judge. It is a personal thing that each man alone must struggle with.

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Garbage. Given that we have nukes, no one is going to invade us no matter how dispirited our military is. Not that it would stay that way long if some was stupid enough to try, which is one reason why no one will.

Only in the fever dreams of the Right has America been in danger of invasion since WWII, and even then anything other than Hawaii was unlikley to be invaded.
[/QUOTE]

So the advent of nuclear weapons makes armies obsolete? The Great Peace has arrived?

It wasn’t my intention to start this thread and then disappear (busy weekend).

My question after all of this conversation (which mostly is a polite version of stuff that has happened in the pit), and which people seem to mostly have ignored, is this:

How would you maintain an army where you allowed soldiers to make their own moral choices? What kind of institution would that look like? How would you ensure that you would have the soldiers and support for actions deemed ‘moral’ by the general public?

It just seems very easy to say, “if it’s not moral, don’t do it,” but how to you maintain and field an army if you let soldiers make that choice?

60

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
So the advent of nuclear weapons makes armies obsolete? The Great Peace has arrived?
[/quote]

It makes the necessity of a standing army to prevent invasion obsolete. The only reason to have a large standing military now is to go somewhere else and use it, not at home. Nobody with nukes is going to be invaded any time soon.

You don’t. You’re definitely correct to say that it’s not possible.