Are Modern Soldiers Morally Responsible in Unjust Wars?
It has been argued that soldiers are not morally culpable for fighting in unjust wars. Soldiers were once considered ignorant due to a lack of education and an in ability to acquire information on the reasons for a war. With modern technology and the requirements for entering the military service, much of the information about wars is available to the public and soldiers are no longer uneducated. This has led people to question if soldiers should be held morally accountable for their actions in a war that is believed to be unjust.
When considering if soldiers should be held accountable for their actions in war several factors play a key role. In Sola’s The Enlightened Grunt? (2009),
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However, Sola (2009) notes that most just war scholars ignore Vitoria’s criteria for establishing guilt. The first two types of ignorance, Spiritual and Doctrinal, are both antiquated forms of ignorance. Spiritual Ignorance refers to a lack of knowledge in Christianity and Doctrinal Ignorance refers to the Catholic doctrine on just war. Neither of these types of ignorance factor into modern warfare. Formal Ignorance is also outdated in the respect that it applies to a lack of education in soldiers. In modern western nations, soldiers are required to have a certain degree of education to serve. The remaining six forms of ignorance can be applied to modern soldiers to some degree. Factual Ignorance refers to the inability of soldiers to obtain objective facts about they wars in which they fight. This can be related to Ignorance with Right Intentions. Ignorance with Right Intentions is considered if soldiers believe that their cause is just. In both situations, the soldiers may have misleading or false information given to them, which protects them under invincible ignorance. Vitoria also exudes that if the leadership believes the war is just, the soldiers’ ignorance is protected due to the ability to passively trust their superiors. The trust of superiors ties to three other types of ignorance, Submissive, Willful, and Structurally Imposed. Submissive Ignorance started as the submissive role a soldier has in a feudal state, but has been compared to the relationship soldiers have with their political leaders. Sola (2009) describes Willful Ignorance as “deliberately shunning any concrete moral reflection about the justice of a war, because one has elected to follow a higher rule of obedience to a political authority” (p. 59). Structurally Imposed Ignorance is similar to Willful Ignorance in
Laws exist to protect life and property; however, they are only as effective as the forces that uphold them. War is a void that exists beyond the grasps of any law enforcing agency and It exemplifies humankind's most desperate situation. It is an ethical wilderness exempt from civilized practices. In all respects, war is a primitive extension of man. Caputo describes the ethical wilderness of Vietnam as a place "lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state." Without boundaries, there is only a biological moral c...
Comparative Analysis The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;
Throughout history, war has been the catalyst that has compelled otherwise-ordinary people to discard, at least for its duration, their longstanding beliefs about the immorality of killing their fellow human beings. In sum, during periods of war, people’s views about killing others are fundamentally transformed from abhorrence to glorification due in large part to the decisions that are made by their political leaders. In this regard, McMahan points out that, “As soon as conditions arise to which the word ‘war’ can be applied, our scruples vanish and killing people no longer seems a horrifying crime but becomes instead a glorious achievement” (vii). Therefore, McMahan argues that the transformation of mainstream views about the morality of killing during times of war are misguided and flawed since they have been based on the traditional view that different moral principles somehow apply in these circumstances. This traditional view about a just war presupposes the morality of the decision to go to war on the part of political leaders in the first place and the need to suspend traditional views about the morality of killing based on this
...e who sent the soldiers to war are just as responsible as the soldiers for any acts of war they committed.
It is very reasonable to say that American soldiers entering the Vietnam were not disciplined enough. The average age of a soldier in Vietnam was eighteen. Nobody found it necessary to train these kids to handle all the problems they run into. The service ruined their late childhood and they had to grow up early! If anything went wrong, they would simply blame the officer in charge. Tim O'Brien illustrated this nicely in his story In The Field. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt guilty for Kiowa's death. He blamed himself for not thinking about his troops even though he did what he was supposed to do. Couple of soldiers were pissed off about Kiowa's death. They blamed it all on Lieutenant even though they knew it was not his fault. Then they let their emotions out and the situation turned to be out of control. O'Brien describes it syntactically. He is trying to persuade us that all the soldiers knew Jimmy was not guilty, but some soldiers just had to blame it on somebody.
War has always been an essential ingredient in the development of the human race. As a result of the battles fought in ancient times, up until modern warfare, millions of innocent lives have ended as a result of war crimes committed. In the article, “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” Herbert C. Kelman and V.Lee Hamilton shows examples of moral decisions taken by people involved with war-related murders. This article details one of the worse atrocities committed during the Vietnam War in 1968 by the U.S. military: the My Lai Massacre. Through this incident, the question that really calls for psychological analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate , participate in, and condone policies that call for the mass killings of defenseless civilians such as the atrocities committed during the My Lai massacre. What influences these soldiers by applying different psychological theories that have been developed on human behavior.
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
The Civil War split the nation in half. It tore apart families, and Union soldiers against Confederate soldiers for four miserable years. From the first shots fired at Fort Sumter 1861, and ending with a unanimous Confederate victory in 1865. All in all 630,000 people died and many thousands wounded. The deaths in the Civil War totally surpassed the death totals from any other war (1). For those managed to survive the up hill battle just began, they faced many unknowns in a world moving in an uncertain direction. With the north beating the succeeded south in the war, politicians faced a hard task of reuniting the divided country. With reconstruction now in affect, both northern workers, and southern farmers now face many new obstacles and uncertainties about their jobs. The southern farmers had it bad, they lost the war, lost their slaves, and were forced to move west in order to find new farmland and continue to make a manageable living. However the north and south would find out that they would need each other in order to move the country forward.
On March 16, 1968, in the Quang Ngai region of Vietnam, specifically My Lai, the United States military was involved in an appalling slaughter of approximately 500 Vietnamese civilians. There are numerous arguments as to why this incident even had the capacity to occur. Although some of the arguments seem valid, can one really make excuses for the slaughter of innocent people? The company that was responsible for the My Lai incident was the Charlie Company and throughout the company there were many different accounts of what happened that reprehensible day. Therefore there are a few contradictions about what had occurred, such as what the commanding officers exact instructions for the soldiers were. Even with these contradictions the results are obvious. The question that must be posed is whether these results make the American soldiers involved that day “guilty”. There is the fact that the environment of the Vietnam War made it very confusing to the soldiers exactly who the enemy was, as well as providing a pent up frustration due to the inability to even engage in real combat with the enemy. If this is the case though, why did some soldiers with the same frustrations refuse the orders and sit out on the action, why did some cry while firing, and why then did one man go so far as to place himself between the Vietnamese and the firing soldiers? If these men who did not see the sense in killing innocents were right with their actions, then how come the ones who did partake were all found not guilty in court? The questions can keep going back and forth on this issue, but first what happened that day must be examined.
Millions of men were called to serve in the Vietnam War. Sometimes, the men were drafted and did not have a choice. Unlike the gift-wrapped ideals of the war that were displayed to the United States, many soldiers would find that the military life would involve far more than “real man-sized action.” To the general public, soldiers were being drafted to be heroes, but once they were forced into war, less than heroic things occurred, and no one would be able to object. The law...
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” As depicted in the quote by Ernest Hemingway war is a difficult situation in which the traditional boundaries of moral ethics are tested. History is filled with unjust wars and for centuries war was not though in terms of morality. Saint Augustine, however, offered a theory detailing when war is morally permissible. The theory offers moral justifications for war as expressed in jus ad bellum (conditions for going to war) and in jus in bello (conditions within warfare).The theory places restrictions on the causes of war as well as the actions permitted throughout. Within early Christianity, the theory was used to validate crusades as morally permissible avoiding conflict with religious views. Based on the qualifications of the Just War Theory few wars have been deemed as morally acceptable, but none have notably met all the requirements. Throughout the paper I will apply Just War Theory in terms of World War II as well as other wars that depict the ideals presented by Saint Augustine.
...e a better place if everyone would stop and think before making a decision base on their theories and image. Misperception may be coincidental to-rather than determinative of-the occurrence of war, because war can be an equilibrium outcome that results from specific configurations of actor preferences. Even if misperception does sometimes play a causal role in the outbreak of war, its impact is situational circumscribed.
Of course, There is a lot of things that get blown off when you hear about war.But you really never think of what that person is thinking while in field and they have killed a man. There is no help to those who have been in the war and they see a guy they killed. Tim said in his book “ In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell
” I am convinced that had more time been spent studying the tactical situation, a different effect or combination of effects could have achieved the military objective without incurring as many civilian casualties or as much damage to surrounding infrastructure, as opposed to the false dichotomy between the one-ton and quarter-ton munitions implied in the documentary. But like all armchair strategists, my hindsight is 20/20. Perhaps there were factors of time that prevented the necessary analysis from being conducted, or risk of asset exposure that prevented additional intelligence from being gathered. At the end of the day, when military professionals are face with ethical dilemmas, we must fall back on the Kantian appeal to motive to justify our actions, though it offers scant comfort when faced with the enormity and gravity of the tasks we undertake in the performance of our
“Ignorance is bliss”. The line from Thomas Gray’s poem, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, published in 1747, has lasted throughout the ages due to its omnipresent applicableness. This is especially seen in the public’s view on war before World War II. Before pictures and news reports from the World Wars were publicized, the United States home front did not see a problem with going to war. All they had heard from the war was propagandize