Cry me a river. Don’t lie and I won’t call you a liar. Suck it up like a big boy.
This is fascinating - another instance of Scylla asserting rights to have contempt for others because a relative engaged in selfless acts of heroism. Please, Scylla, have contempt or don’t have contempt, but stop trying to justify it or provide legitimacy for your beliefs because of the heroism of your ancestors.
My father fought in WWII, being sent in as a replacement just before the Battle of the Bulge. He was awarded the Bronze Star. He never really spoke of what he did there, except to say that he won that particular award for getting his pants caught on barbed wire. He also respected rights to free speech and to protest. May I have contempt for those who have contempt for protesters? Does my dad’s heroism outweigh yours? (I won’t even go into my grandfather’s views on race.)
As to the OP, I respect that any American soldier is fighting for his country, and in that sense, for me and my rights. That is to say, I believe wholeheartedly that any individual’s personal justifications for their actions in war would include primarily issues of protecting and defending American ideals. Yet, I also believe that all military actions do not necessarily serve to advance or maintain my rights, and in some cases actually serve to undermine my rights. Perhaps my distinction is illusory; nevertheless I have a great respect for those who serve their country in the military.
“You wear a peace button and write ‘Born to Kill’ on your helmet? Is that supposed to be some kind of sick joke?”
[b/]
You build good strawman. This is not what I’ve said or argued.
**
Well shit Hentor, you’re free to believe what you want, and have contempt or not as you see fit. I can’t recall suggesting otherwise. I don’t recall arguing against free speech or the right to protest either.
As I’ve said several times I have no problem with people’s protesting or dissent. I can respect a man who stands up for what he believes in, who shows the courage and seriousness of his convictions and is willing to go to jail or otherwise pay the price for them.
I find the man who lies and who runs from his responsibilities and the consequences of his beliefs contemptible in any regard. A man who says "I will not fight, and goes to jail for it does not deserve contempt for the strength of his beleifs. One who simply lies and cheats to dodge his responsibilities without consequence does whether they are a draft dodger, a deadbeat dad, or simply a common thief.
Fair enough.
I have not lied once in this thread, nor do I intend to. You have used the accusation, among others, as a cover for your poor reading and reasoning skills.
There is a remote possibility that I misunderstood you – that while you consider it ethical for a person to fight in a war she considers unjust, you would consider it unethical for her to follow orders in that war that are likely to result in the deaths of people she considers innocent. I don’t understand how one would accomplish such feats of ethical contortionism, but maybe you have a way a person could do so, and I misunderstood you.
But given your contemptible recourse to insults rather than explanations, I’m not inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Daniel
**
Well then I apologize. I was under the impression that saying people said something that they didn’t in order to make them look bad was a lie.
Obviously I don’t understand these things, because I am also confused as to how those who lie and shirk their obligations with the consequence that otehr people not so dishonest must fight and die in their place is an ethical choice.
I guess I’m just not very good at believing in these sophisticated rationalizations.
**
I would hope that if you were going to backpedal and concede something you’d do it in a straightforward manner rather than playing games.
Here’s how it works. The war can be unjust. The soldier fighting in it doesn’t have to be. By the same token being on the side of right doesn’t excuse unethical behavior.
A defense attorney may not believe in the innocence of his client, nevertheless he may comport himself ethically and properly and wield the best defense possible because he believes in the process and his role in it.
There are many cases of people comporting themselves ethically in situations which themselves may seem unethical from a larger perspective. In fact, this is largely the way that life works from top to bottom.
There are jut and unjust things going on all around us, and we are involved in them. What we can hope to do is to control the only thing that we can control, ourselves.
I’m extremely surprised that I have to be making this argument. Do you really have a problem with this? Not everything is black and white, you know? What I’m saying is not exactly a novel idea.
We are truly only responsible for those things that we can control. And the only thing we truly control is our own behavior.
I hear you. I understand that you are offended I called you a liar. I called you a liar because you falsely attributed an argument to me that I did not make. As long as you continue to state that your misattribution is a fair restatement of my argument, I will consider you to be lying. Especially as your rationalization above to justify it is simply absurd. After I pointed out that you had lied, I got over it and moved on.
**
Well then I apologize. I was under the impression that saying people said something that they didn’t in order to make them look bad was a lie.
Obviously I don’t understand these things, because I am also confused as to how those who lie and shirk their obligations with the consequence that otehr people not so dishonest must fight and die in their place is an ethical choice.
I guess I’m just not very good at believing in these sophisticated rationalizations.
**
I would hope that if you were going to backpedal and concede something you’d do it in a straightforward manner rather than playing games.
Here’s how it works. The war can be unjust. The soldier fighting in it doesn’t have to be. By the same token being on the side of right doesn’t excuse unethical behavior.
A defense attorney may not believe in the innocence of his client, nevertheless he may comport himself ethically and properly and wield the best defense possible because he believes in the process and his role in it.
There are many cases of people comporting themselves ethically in situations which themselves may seem unethical from a larger perspective. In fact, this is largely the way that life works from top to bottom.
There are jut and unjust things going on all around us, and we are involved in them. What we can hope to do is to control the only thing that we can control, ourselves.
I’m extremely surprised that I have to be making this argument. Do you really have a problem with this? Not everything is black and white, you know? What I’m saying is not exactly a novel idea.
We are truly only responsible for those things that we can control. And the only thing we truly control is our own behavior.
I hear you. I understand that you are offended I called you a liar. I called you a liar because you falsely attributed an argument to me that I did not make. As long as you continue to state that your misattribution is a fair restatement of my argument, I will consider you to be lying. Especially as your rationalization above to justify it is simply absurd. After I pointed out that you had lied, I got over it and moved on.
Scylla I’m not following your reasoning.
On the one hand you say that there are no moral/ethical obligations but to ourselves.
Then you turn around and say that is ethical to obey orders from a government, while you don’t believe those orders to be ethical or morally just. Or rather; un-ethical to disobey.
So what is the ethical thing to do?
Do you avoid/fight things you consider unjust or obey orders like a good citizen?
So, should he disobey an order that is unjust?
Disobeying an order is not very ethical, according to you, is it?
Should he burn the village?
Scylla, there’s some sort of big irony in the wind. You snark about my “sophisticated rationalizations,” and then turn around and tell me that I’m seeing everything too much in black and white, and say that a war can be unjust but a soldier in the war can be just?
I honestly have no idea what you mean by that. I wonder if you and I have fundamentally different ideas of what an unjust war means.
I don’t believe that there has ever been a war in which innocent people didn’t die. AFAIK, that’s a fact of war. And those innocent people die because soldiers kill them, and soldiers kill them because they’re following orders.
With me so far?
In the case of a just war, we can argue that the deaths of those innocent people were tragic necessities – that the war’s ultimate goal is so important that it outweighs the deaths of these specific innocents. Obviously, you want to minimize innocent death in a just war, but you can’t avoid it entirely.
But in an unjust war, the war’s ultimate goal doesn’t outweigh the deaths of those innocent people. That’s damn near the definition of an unjust war.
How, then, can an ethical person fight in a war he chooses to be unjust? Once a soldier agrees to join the army, he gives up much of his own decisionmaking: he agrees to turn that over to his military superiors. That means that, since it’s an unjust war, there’s a good chance that he’ll be given orders that will result in the unjustified deaths of innocent people.
Still with me?
Are you suggesting that a soldier may ethically fight in an unjust war, but may not ethically obey orders that might result in the unjustified deaths of innocent people?
Other than that possibility, I really can see no possibility beyond that you believe a soldier may ethically fight in an unjust war, and may ethically obey orders that might result in the unjustified deaths of innocent people.
And if you believe that, then we can tighten the phrasing: a soldier may ethically kill innocent people in an unjust war.
I’m not lying about you, any more than December was lying when he suggested I’d said America deserved to be attacked by terrorists. At worst, I’m not seeing some sophisticated rationale you’re using to justify the soldier’s actions.
Daniel
Dan:
I have to confess to some sincere disbelief that you’re still having trouble with this.
Of course.
Everything our country does isn’t just Dan. Yet, you still pay your taxes, and therefore you contribute to the good and the bad. Does that make you unjust?
Because some of what our country does isn’t just does that free you from your obligation to pay taxes?
No. Innocent people dying isn’t a result of soldiers following orders in a war. Certainly sometimes it can be, but you’re attempting to make a rule out of the exception.
This is getting silly. Say for the sake of argument 52,000 innocent people died in the Vietnamese conflict. So before a soldier goes to war, he is somehow supposed to calculate the amount of innocent casualties that are going to occur. and then decide whether the war is worth fighting or not? And, if he decides it’s not, it’s ok to lie and cheat or whatever to get out of fighting?
I think my system, which happens to be the system we live under, makes a lot more sense. That system is that we are nothing if we are divided, yet everybody has a voice. We elect representatives by exercising our proportional power when we vote. Those representatives and leaders then provide a consensus to which we are all obligated.
In the case where personal beliefs are so strong that we cannot abide the consensus we are obligated to open civil disobedience to correct the system.
We just don’t get to take the parts we like and ignor the ones we don’t.
I can’t think of any cause that justified the deaths of innocent people. I think it’s insane to look at it in those terms. Are you actually going to say “freedom in Somalia is worth 20,000 deaths, but not 25,000?”
Was stopping Hitler worth the millions dead? I don’t think so. You don’t commit war because you can afford the price, or you think it’s worth it. You do it because you have to, because it’s the only choice, not because it makes some kind of perverted sense from the standpoint of the moral economics of dead innocents.
No. that defense didn’t work at Nuremberg, and it doesn’t work here. Being a soldier doesn’t absolve you from personal responsibility. Any human being and especially a soldier in the US armed forces has not just the right responsibility or duty, but the legal obligation to disobey a direct order that violates the rules of engagement or the Geneva convention. He can and will be held accountable for violating this conduct.
“Shoot the defenseless women and children!” is not an order that a soldier can legally follow regardless of the “justness” of his cause.
Will innocent people sometimes die as a result of a properly given and legal order during warfare? Of course.
Of course. That’s the way our armed services work. That’s why there are rules of engagement, codes of conduct, a Geneva convention, etc. It goes even farther than that. A soldier is not just obligated to disobey an order that results in the unjustified deaths of innocents. He is responsible to prevent that order from being carried out, by anybody, period. Just standing by is not enough. A soldier has the positive duty to protect the innocent, and stop their needless slaughter.
Being a soldier has very clear ethical duties. You should check out the armed services code of conduct, the US rules of engagement and and refamiliarize yourself with the Geneva convention.
Unfortunately whether or not a war is just or worthwhile is often just a political argument, a judgement call, or open to semantics. Personal conduct is not.
Scylla, you’re simply wrong. That’s all there is to it. Partly it’s because you’re oversimplifying the issue.
There are three, not two, possible situations we need to look at:
- A soldier is given an order in which innocent people are not at all likely to die (“Shoot down that fighter plane!”)
- A soldier is given an order in which innocent people are very likely to die (“Shoot those villagers!”)
- A soldier is given an order in which innocent people may die (“Bomb that munitions factory next to the hospital!”)
I hear you addressing situations 1 and 2: a soldier ethically must obey the first, and must disobey the second. But what about the third?
My contention is that in an unjust war, a person must disobey the third order, whether or not they’re a soldier.
Your claim that a just war is one which you fight “because you have to, because it’s the only choice, not because it makes some kind of perverted sense from the standpoint of the moral economics of dead innocents” is nonsense. There’s no such thing as war being “the only choice”: there’s always other choices, and you fight a just war because you believe it’s the best choice amongst many. Other choices may be engaging in mass nonviolent resistance, utilizing sanctions, assassinating leaders, acquiescing to tyranny, bribing a tyrant into cooperation, and so forth. Not necessarily good choices, but they’re choices you have to weigh against the deaths of innocents.
Once more, all soldiers should of course seek to minimize the deaths of innocents, but innocents DO die in wars. You’re either lying or being unintentionally obtuse when you say
I am saying that it’s a rule that innocent people do die in wars. If I’m wrong, please name some wars in which innocent people didn’t die. I am NOT saying that every order a soldier follows results in the deaths of innocent people, but I AM saying that “collateral damage” is a fact of warfare, and it often results from soldiers following orders. Note that this is different from saying that soldiers’ following orders often results in collateral damage, and that the distinction is far from academic.
So it comes back to this: if a soldier is given an order that MIGHT result in the deaths of innocents (“Bomb that munitions factory next to the hospital!”), how should she respond? Does this change depending on whether she believes the war to be just or unjust?
As for another question you asked: I have abslute respect for war tax resisters, folks who delete from their taxes the amount used to fund the military and give that amount instead to a peace-activist organization. Ethics isn’t a package deal: when you’re born into a society, you don’t choose to follow all its edicts or leave the society. You evaluate every decision you must make in that society ethically, and when the society asks you to do something unethical, you are obligated to disobey.
Daniel
One more note: if you think the Geneva Convention prohibits killing innocent people, you need to reread it. They explicitly allow for killing civilians, AS LONG AS THE CIVILIANS AREN’T THE TARGET. In other words, if you blow up a munitions factory (a legitimate target), and it happens to destroy the hospital next door (an illegitimate target), you’re not in violation of the Convention.
I believe that in an unjust war, you’re still ethically a murderer.
Daniel
You are misreading it, Daniel. It doesn’t “explicitily allow” that. What it does is not make it a criminal act.
As for your last comment: that’s an opinion, and I would like to see some valid support for it.
“Explicitly allow” may be stating it a bit strongly. I’m under the impresion that it explicitly exempts such acts from being criminal acts, however; is this correct? If so, is there any functional equivalent between that and explicitly allowing it?
As for my last statement, I recognize that it’s an opinion, but I think I’ve spent three pages giving my reasons for it. The only clarification that may be necessary is that I’m using “ethically a murderer” to mean, “one who knowingly engages in an act that is likely to, and does, result in killing a person unethically.”
Daniel
Dan:
I’m not taking your word for it.
Ok. Why would it be worth obeying in a “just war?” While we’re at it, why don’t we define “just war” objectively.
Don’t people die inadvertently as a result of all sorts of actions? Why is this unforgivable only in an unjust war?
Hypothetical:
The war is unjust (whatever that means.) However, in a localized battle the enemy is committing grave atrocities. Let’s say they are torturing captured soldiers and slaying civilians in a wanton fashion.
Your commander gives you the order to take out their C&C complex which is adjacent to a village which is harboring the genocidal commander. You know the explosion will likely kill several innocent bystanders. You also strongly beleive that executing the order will save many many lives.
Should you execute the order or not?
Technically you are correct. There are always other choices. For example, if your enemy is seeking to wipe you off the face of the earth, you could choose not to fight, and simply die. What I meant was that it was the only choice that made sense anymore.
It’s not soldiers following orders that makes innocent people die, Dan.
Which is a lot different than saying that innocent people die because soldiers have been ordered to kill them.
I’m uncertain as to what the objective definition of a “just” or “unjust” war is. A munitions factory is a legitimate target. The soldier needs to obey the order, putting his life at risk if necessary to do his best to eliminate or minimize the damage to the hospital and it’s occupants.
But, it doesn’t work that way. That tax withholding results in a general shortfall not one specific to the military. By what logic do you beleive the government will look at the shortfall and reduce the amount given to the military? In fact, it is the softer social programs that are most likely to be the recipients of the cut.
DanielWithrow, you’ve been harping on Scylla for his alleged “holier-than-thou attitude”, then you turn around and say this?
Besides, you’re wrong. Vietnam was a just war. It had a just cause. People who oppose that war, or who call it unjust, are simply unwise. You’re not depicting yourself any wiser than they.
See? I can go and state my opinions as fact too, and state it in a smug, “holier-than-thou attitude” as well, and like you, it doesn’t make me right.
Unless you’re deliberately misinterpreting me, this statement makes no sense at all. Soldiers follow “legitimate” orders all the time that result in the deaths of innocent people: the munitions factory is just one example.
In a just war, a soldier might reasonably conclude (as you assume in your C&C example) that the deaths of the innocent people are outweighed by the good accomplished by a specific act. Even, I admit, in an unjust war, there may be specific circumstances under which this perverse calculation holds true. And in those cases, I believe a soldier may ethically follow orders.
But here’s my objection. That same soldier may later be asked to bomb, say, a pwer station. The soldier may reasonably believe that the power station provides the only source of heat to many elderly residents in a nearby town; he mayalso know that the military brass want it gone because it’ll disrupt communication channels. If the soldier believes the war is unjust (and more specifically believes that the removal of communication channels does not outweigh the deaths of elderly residents in a nearby town), I do not believe he can ethically obey this order.
Of course, this is not a calculation that soldier can make in the middle of battle: he won’t have all the facts, and the pressure on him to obey the order, despite its apparent unethicality, will be immense.
For that reason, I think that a person ordered to fight in an unjust war may not ethically accept that order to begin with.
Daniel
Dan:
The concept of “just war” seems to be central to your thesis. I therefore suggest that it is your responsibility to define it objectively, so I’ll ask you again:
Can you please objectively define “just/unjust war.”
As for the power station thing, suppose that the war is just yet the disruption of communications is unnecessary, as the war is basically won. The disruption is simply a matter of convenience to make mopping up easier, rather than a military necessity for victory. As such, it’s probably not worth the lives of the elderly people who will die, is it?
In this circumstance, should a soldier execute an unjust order in a just war? Is the death of innocents excused by the justness of the cause if not the necessity.
My point, which I think is becoming pretty clear, is that the ethics an individual soldier displays in a conflict are not changed in quality by the justness/unjustness of the cause he fights for.
Since the justness of the cause is moot in terms of the soldiers ethical behavior, and a soldier can and is obligated to fight ethically in an unjust conflict, it is not a valid excuse.
A man cannot dodge the draft by lying under the ethical pretense that if he submits we will be forced into unethical behavior. It is simply not true.
I’ll use most of this definition of a just war. I’m not sure I agree with the second criterion, but since that criterion is immaterial to our discussion, I’ll stipulate it for now.
You’ll note that in that definition, “Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.” Therefore, if a soldier is given an order in which the deaths of civilians are both probable and unnecessary, the war is not a just war – although it may have been just up to that point. So your example of the soldier ordered to bomb a power plant during the mopping-up phase would be not be fighting in a just war if he followed the order.
(You may read this clause more loosely than I do – you may believe that such an order wouldn’t violate this definition. But I’m explaining how I approach the issue here, and it would be violating the principles that I consider to define a just war.)
The justness of the cause is by no means moot: it’s central to the issue. Soldiers in just wars and unjust wars might both be ordered to engage in actions which have a reasonable likelihood of killing civilians. In just wars, those deaths are unavoidable. In an unjust war, they are not. Complying with the orders in the first case is a tragic necessity; complying with the orders in the second case is highly unethical.
I believe everyone has a positive ethical duty of the highest order to avoid fighting in an unjust war.
Daniel
Which now brings us to some interesting questions:
-
Was Vietnam actually a war?
-
If it wasn’t, is there some different criteria for a police action?
-
If it was how does Vietnam violate the criteria?
On a more interesting point, again, from discussion with my father.
Everybody in the armed Services did not fight in Vietnam.
At the time of the Vietnam conflict, military service was mandatory. You had the obligation to serve at the age of 18 absent a legitimate deferral or exemption.
This obligation was an ethical one incurred by the individual as a member of the society from which he derives benefits.
Whether or not an individual ethically believes Vietnam was a just war, he still is encumbered by the very valid ethical obligation of military service.
If he has dodged the draft dishonestly he was shirked that valid ethical obligation.
Even while fighting a supposedly unjust war, our country still needs a valid reserve and defense. We need soldiers at hand in case we are attacked unjustly. We need soldiers that we can use in just causes. For example, we needed to have a vast military presence available to deploy during the Cuban missile crisis. The fact that we did, clearly played a part in averting war. hat cause could be juster?
We maintain a military capable of fighting on several different fronts and serving several different purposes at the same time, and we need to have a military capacity available to use when just cause calls upon us to do so.
A person who was 18 in the 60s and 70s had an obligtion to fulfill this role in the military.
Simply because he personally believes that one of the many roles that the military was fulfilling at the time was arguably unjust, has no bearing on the many other just roles that the military was providing at the time.
It does not excuse his obligation to those just roles, nor does it excuse his military obligation in general.
It certainly does not justify lying, or shirking one’s responsible.
As I’ve said before, I do not believe that there is a positive ethical duty to comply with an order to join the military. My more recent posts have been outlining my belief that there is a positive ethical duty NOT to fight in an unjust war, and not to put oneself in a position where one will be forced to fight in an unjust war. If you want to go back to talking about the purported positive ethical duty to follow an order to join the military, that’s fine.
As for your “interesting questions,” I don’t really believe they’re that interesting. Of course the Vietnam War was a war. There’s an old riddle that informs my philosophy:
Q. How many legs does a sheep have, if you call its tail a leg?
A. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
The government may have used the term “police action” for obfuscatory reasons, but that doesn’t make it any less of a war.
I do not believe that Vietnam was a just war, but discussing the reasons for that belief may take us even farther afield from the central point. Lemme know if you think this is the place for that discussion.
Now I’ve got a question for you. If I understand you, there are two ethical choices a person has: they may fight in a war (whether or not they believe it to be just), or they may go to prison to protest the war. What about people who asked for, and obtained, conscientious objector status? Did they behave ethically?
And what about people who would have obtained CO status if they lived in, say, NYC (where CO status was treated as a legitimate outcome) versus somebody who lived in, say, Charlotte, NC (where the draft board explicitly said that they didn’t believe in CO status and denied it almost across the board)? If they maneuvered so that they’d be considered under NYC’s draft board, would they be behaving ethically?
Daniel