Make us your home page!
Authors, sign in!Last year Army 1st Lieutenant, Ehrin Watada, refused an order to deploy to Iraq because he believes that the U.S. war effort there is "illegal and immoral". He has no shortage of vocal supporters and critics. However, his case raises important problems that are not yet getting the public attention they deserve. I will say something about two of them, one in this blog and one in the next.
The first problem is a moral problem. Was it wrong for Watada to have volunteered for military service in the first place? If so, who else shouldn't volunteer?
Watada's critics blame him for violating the terms of his service, terms he accepted voluntarily. One of them, an editor at the Seattle Times, puts their case like this:
"Soldiers have to go where they are ordered. That is the rule here and everywhere, and for reasons of military necessity. Watada was a volunteer, and knew that when he signed up."
(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2003515393_watadaed09.html)
Suppose that we agree with the editor. Should we conclude that it would have been okay for Watada to go kill people while firmly believing that he was wrongly killing them? Of course not. But if Watada was wrong to violate the terms of his service, and he would have been wrong to go kill people in Iraq, then he must have been wrong to join in the first place. I can think of ways to resist this conclusion, but they all strike me as evasive or unreasonable.
What is it about Watada that made it wrong for him to sign up? Was it that he was the sort of person who wouldn't kill against his conscience? That seems like a minimum condition for being a morally responsible person. Was it that it was possible to doubt the justice of a U.S. war? That seems like another minimum condition for being a morally responsible person: we hung Germans at Nuremberg for failing to doubt the justice of their country's war. If you've followed me this far, then you begin to see the importance of the Watada case. Apparently, Watada was wrong to sign up; yet there is no easy way to say why without also proving that it would be morally irresponsible for anyone with a conscience to sign up.
Signing up would be much less morally problematic if there was a legal "out" for volunteers who learn that their moral convictions are wholly against a particular war that they find themselves ordered to fight. There is currently such an "out" for volunteers who learn that they are religious pacifists: they can win conscientious objector status, which entitles them to be assigned only non-combatant duties. We should consider giving volunteers who object only to some wars a similar right.
twitter
facebook
Technorati
digg
BuzzFlash
StumbleUpon
newsvine
del.icio.us
reddit
Google
Yahoo
Comments (1)
Peter, thank you for laying this out, and thanks for joining us here.
I think I'm going to be thinking about this all day now. It really isn't easy to sort out is it? On the one hand, at some level, despite being primarily a pacifist myself, I would have nodded in agreement with the Seattle Times. One can imagine the worst if soldiers or sailors are allowed to make up their individual minds once they've enlisted. What if the US sailors off Okinawa had mutinied once the Kamikazes arrived?
Then, on the other hand, we do hold soldiers accountable for higher standard. Germans at Nuremberg as one example. What about the US soldiers at the My Lai (sp) massacre? I guess (I hope) we teach our soldiers that it's their moral responsibility to refuse an order if they believe it is morally wrong or if it violates Geneva conventions. Wasn't this the problem with the Abu Garaib? So, if we expect such refusal from a soldier to regarding orders from a captain or a colonel, why can't they refuse orders from a President? Of course we want them to have consciences.
What I'm left with here is such angst about the predicament we put our fighting men and women in. They all must be confronting these same issues, some to greater and lesser degrees. We ask so much of them, don't we?
Posted by Nora Thomason
|
March 4, 2007 9:10 AM
Posted on March 4, 2007 09:10