Well yes Sweden has a reasonable track record. I could join that army reasonably safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be used as a tool to subject smaller weaker nations.
Of course there are armies around the world where they join just to, you know, DEFEND your country.
The US army? not so much.
Two justified wars do not excuse a string of bad ones.
So you think it would be immoral to join the US military no matter what. How then is it possible to wage even a justified war, as in Afghanistan or WWII?
Regards,
Shodan
Your position is well stated, but you’ve yet to support it logically. Simply asserting something over and over won’t give it any more weight. Though I doubt this will get through, I’ll post a few simple rebuttals and catches to your argument and see what you come up with.
Invading another country is wrong. Really? Every time? There is NEVER any moral justification for intervention? If that is true, then you are supposing a few things automatically along with that position. The right to sovereignty trumps the *generally * recognized human right to life, that no genocide, no internationally illegal weapons production, no condition so hostile to human dignity exists that there is never moral justification for the use of force.
However, you seem to only take issue with what you deem immoral, so in your world, everyone should stop working or participating as soon as they deem the situation to be ethically suspect. There are inherent problems with that action that you are either unable,(or far more likely), unwilling to acknowledge.
a. A military is dependent upon all of the positions acting in concert as much as possible. The soldiers on the ground depend upon the doctors, mechanics, pilots, loadmasters, cargo guys, computer techs, and the vast number of other support personnel who make their various missions possible. If even a few of these people decide to abandon their duty, the whole thing can grind to a dangerous halt. Their moral action directly endangers the rest of their countrymen, is that itself not an immoral action? Surely you are not arguing that their participation in an ethically suspect mission is deserving of a sentence of abandonment and (likely) death in a foreign land.
b. Assuming you agree that endangering others is also immoral, how do we determine which action is the least immoral?
c. It has been pointed out to you that military does not act on it’s own but at the behest of our elected officials whose job it is to represent OUR interests. You still have not replied even remotely adequately to this point. It isn’t an issue of personal responsibility to one’s ethics, it is a valid question of simple political mechanics. A country has to have a military to defend it’s interests. You’ve agreed as much earlier. Who does the military have to take orders from? if it’s only accountable to itself then it is no longer serving the country, it is nothing more than a heavily armed group of thugs enforcing THEIR ethical view by force. Which brings us back full circle to determining HOW we know when an action is justified.
Show your work.
Okay Robert163.
If we grant that a volunteer serviceman, following the legal orders of his lawful superiors (who are also acting upon the direction of the duly constituted civilian authorities) can still be performing immoral acts, my follow-up question is “So?”
Are you proposing a punishment, or do you just want them to feel bad?
Robert163: in the other thread (which I just looked through, oy vey) you listed military actions that you consider moral or immoral. However, that’s a very abbreviated list of instances of the use of the military. Perhaps you could comment on these recent uses of the armed forces? Moral or immoral?
You seem to be under the impression that it is common for the US military to go out and be violent imperialists. I think these examples of the use of the miltiary show you don’t seem to understand how the military is most commonly used.
Also, is it still immoral to be a soldier if one conducts oneself within the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, Hague Conventions, and all other sources of international humanitarian law?
I think it’s pretty well understood that the electorate’s will is supreme.
Well I guess that’s where we differ then. I don’t think I’m ‘uncynical’ (so to speak) either.
I do think there are major systemic faults with modern democracies related to their sheer size and the complexity of government that means that the will of the people isn’t always immediately apparent. But I also think that this is something that is impossible to avoid. It can only be mitigated, not eliminated.
Nonetheless, in Britain and America that parties that led them into war were re-elected in subsequent elections which were free and fair, therefore the electorate clearly felt some consent for them.
Fair enough, but nobody is making you join the Army. You clearly don’t appear to be of the type to really belong there!
They are meant to. Please think for a second of what a world would be like where the Army was free to overrule the elected government. Even one as imperfectly composed as the ones we live under is preferable to one chosen by the government.
We’re not Turkey or Pakistan or Burma.
WWII is an iffy claim.
The US didn’t just join the war because you were ‘suddenly and cowardly attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor’.
Nor is Afghanistan that clear cut.
You weren’t attacked by Afghanistan nor the Taliban but by people inside Afghanistan. A hard punitative expedition would have been a viable alternative.
The mucking about that has been going on for some 12 years now leaves one wondering what intentions were.
Not soldier material, ey? You think, ey?
I was indeed rather thinking of something like Brigadier-General or up.
Please. We’re not talking Cesear bringing the Gauls back into line, I think it was a bit different.
This bit aside, Malden hits it on the head with, “Please think for a second of what a world would be like where the Army was free to overrule the elected government. Even one as imperfectly composed as the ones we live under is preferable to one chosen by the government.”
This nails it. Your desire to enlist aside, do you really want a military that can (and all of them technically can) refuse the orders of it’s government. Can you really not see the problems this brings with it?
In what way does that make US involvement in WWII unjustified?
Regards,
Shodan
1 – it’s the Soldier’s duty to refuse unlawful orders, in the U.S. military this is taught very early on. I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me.
2 – yes we understand that soldiers today choose to join the military.
The soldier. People are not robots. Or even knives.
130,000 US troops have the moral responsibility for the fiasco of invading Iraq for the wrong reasons.
Nope, doesn’t pass the laugh test.
What makes an act immoral? Seems like one person’s opinion would not make an act immoral. There would have to be a general consensus among humanity for something to become generally immoral.
I’m sure that we could all list acts that we all would generally agree are immoral. But the OP’s assertion that enlisting in the US military is immoral because he thinks it is…doesn’t cut it in my book. He has failed completely in that assertion. Invading weaker smaller nations is not immoral. Prove to me that it is.
‘The fiasco of invading for the wrong reasons’ Is that your personal euphimism for the word ‘crime’.
Then it’s a crime everyone in the US is guilty of, being free citizens who voted and debated before the war broke out, and who re-elected Congress and President in ensuing elections. Do you propose prosecuting everyone in the US, or just those who put their own lives in danger exercising the will of the elected government and doing what the US thought was right at the time?
No, but that’s your strawman version of what I said. The soldier - each soldier - takes the moral responsibility for every time they pull a trigger. They can’t get away from moral responsibility for that action by claiming they were ordered to do it, because they are not automatons.
As for the other moral responsibility, you commit the fallacy of thinking that there’s only one bit of moral blame to be assigned. Yes, the liars, the politicians and the generals have a moral responsibility. So does every soldier who doesn’t refuse to participate in the unjust war. Not nearly as much moral responsibility as, say, Bush or Powell, but it is a non-zero amount, and every US serviceman in that war has some.
I feel very much the same way about police officers. It’s a tough job, it’s necessary, because it’s tough I hold suspect most peoples motives for choosing it as an occupation. There are certainly a few that were just born into a family that pushes them towards it, there are some who go to sleep at night hoping for the chance to give a kid back his stolen bicycle. But taken as a whole it’s a ‘tough guy’ thing, on the playground they were either bullies or the victims of bullying and want to be respected now. And that guy has no business wielding the power he does.
Well, not everyone (of voting age). Only those who didn’t object. But it’s a small amount of moral blame. I think I characterised it in the past as nano-Hitlers, at best. Pico-Hitlers more likely. Even Bush and his team are only on the Milli-Hitler scale. Maybe centi-Hitlers.