I think the soldiers come back haunted because deep down they don’t think the war was really a last resort, and they didn’t suffer consequences themselves.
One thing is for instance living on prehistoric times, a rival tribe kills all the wifes of another tribe, i bet one wouldn’t have problems engaging in wars, because they were responsible for really massive losses. But on Iraq for instance, they just went there because they were told to, i suppose they had no personal reasons to kill anyone. No wonder they are haunted, they basicly kill innocent people that didn’t do anything wrong to them.
I think some soldiers come back haunted because we’re hard-wired to dislike being exposed to violence, especially against noncombatants, women, children, or some combination of the three. That’s why you see so many armchair hawks and relatively few outspoken hawks who have seen combat. Sometimes this visceral, evolutionary response changes their political outlook, sometimes they think that war is still worth it sometimes.
As for the OP, that’s a political question. It’s “OK” in the sense that most of the time a nation goes to war it is legal under that countries laws, and thus killing in war is legally different from murder. Another poster also brought up a good point that the soldiers are seen as an extension of society’s will to war, and thus are not responsible for the killing to the extent it is a legal war.
I do not buy that view fully, however. There are always shades of grey. At one extreme, a drafted person fighting another country’s army in a just war under pain of death for deserters is different than an enlisted person voluntarily reenlisting to fight in a pointless but legal war, despite the fact that the former soldier might be trying to kill many people who under different circumstances would be quite pacifistic. You can’t fully escape moral culpability for your actions (to the extent that it is possible to assign moral values to them,) but extenuating circumstance do lessen the culpability.
Actually I meant it’s never right, morally or anyway. We have not created life, we have no right to take it. But we do on occasion kill, in self-defence, or in war as ordered by officers. That don’t make it right. In the spirit world whatever pain you have caused others will be returned to you, but accidental, and in defense killing are taken into consideration.
You have it the other way around. Knights tended to be better trained and armored than peasant levies, which meant that it was less likely they’d be killed. Also, one of the major ways that soldiers made money during medieval battles was by capturing the enemy and holding them for ransom. Since knights and nobles tended to have money to pay ransoms, the enemy usually tried to keep them alive if possible. The peasant levies, on the other hand, tended to be slaughtered if they tried to surrender because it wasn’t worth anything to take them prisoner.
That’s why Henry V’s slaughter of the French prisoners at Agincourt was so noteworthy, and why his soldiers objected to it and at first refused to do it…it wasn’t because of a moral objection to killing prioners, it was because they didn’t want to give up their ransoms.
On the contrary, if someone is attempting to kill my family (or complete strangers for that matter) and I intervene and kill them, I am doing a moral act. While it would be nice to avoid situations where it is necessary, life isn’t always so tidy.
Oh say like Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne prior to WW I…not the band)?
That actual reason is that it isn’t all that easy to just go and decapitate a government (ie the war in Iraq). Heads of state tend to be protected by large amounts of security and even if you are successful, there’s no gurantee that you would effect a change in policy. You might actually make things worse as the next in line for succession would use the assassination as a rallying point and the assassinated head as a martyr.
I don’t mention an “ideal, democratic” etc society because it exists. I mention it only to conduct a thought experiment: even if you control for class, and lack of democracy etc by positing such an ideal society, in my estimation people would still dislike assassination over execution because one is societally sanctioned and one is not. You may be right that upper classes deride assassination while condoning execution because the former affects them more than the latter.
But there is another obvious reason why the broader population might prefer the former over the latter anyway: the vast majority of people approve of punishment of serious wrongdoers. A large proportion of those approve of capital punishment for the most serious wrongdoers. This has nothing to do with class and everything to do with people’s ideas about retribution and getting rid of wrongdoers permanently.
Similarly, in a democracy people like to feel that they get to appoint their leader (whether that is true or not is irrelevant). An assassin deprives people of that feeling, because someone (potentially a completely lone wolf, acting regardless of popularity) can simply kill the chosen person, cutting the people’s will off at the knees. People don’t like that.