moral quandry

Alright, let me try to summarize what your asking first, because I am not too sure if I got it right.
What you basically want to know is the good old "Who is to blame for the deaths caused by war" question and you separate it into 3 groups:
a) the ones producing the weapons
b) the persons giving the orders
c) the people executing the orders / using the weapons.

Now, incase I got your question right, let me put it like this:
There is no thumb rule to it, otherwise the world would be a much better place already. Now to the reason: First of all, the ones producing the weapons and selling them to "dangerous" areas where conflict is highly possible are following the old saying: "If the chinese write crisis, they do so with two letters. One for danger, one for opportunity." - They are endangering many people, but they are in a grey zone, due to the fact that they might be able to support a country, region, people or the like against a political regime - dictatorship or similar.

The ones giving the orders are to blame and not to blame at the same time. You have to outweigh the consequences of your actions and balance it out with the result you want to achieve. What exactly do I mean by that? Let me explain. First of all let's imagine a scenario of trying to rescue political hostages. You have to outweigh your own men, the lives of the maybe uninvolved people inside and the lives of the hostages. Now if you place the lives of the uninvolved people and hostages first, it means that you risk losing a lot more of your own people than if you'd just bomb the place and pray that the hostages are safe, however you would have a high casualty rate of innocents and most likely also hostages. If we apply that to larger scale operations it still holds true. Basically it is all a dangerous balancing act on a wire where you are gambling with your own and the lifes of others as you try to hold the balance.

The ones executing orders are responsible aswell. Just saying "my superior officer ordered me to kill those civilians" won't make the fact go away that he / she still killed them. It is just a sharing of consequences and guilt. The ones executing orders have the responsibility to outweigh the orders of their superiors with their own morality - and to take or not to take actions corresponding to that balance.

To answer your last question - you can never just follow orders - to be a "responsible" human means you need to be aware of your actions and need to have made peace with it, it is your duty as a human to do so, not as a soldier - buisnessman, politician. To put it into a known latin phrase: "cognito ergo sum"

You cannot shed the responsibility for torture, murder, and so on; all those guilty must be punished according to the severity of their crime.

For example:

An officer orders the murder of one person, and a soldier shoots the guy, both are to be punished for one count of murder.

If said officer orders the murder of 1000 people, and each of his one thousand soldiers kills one of these 1000 people, each soldier is to be persecuted for one count of murder, and the officer for 1000 counts of murder.

This principle is to be applied to the entire chain of command, according to the degree of involvement in any crime.

There is no one person (commander, officer, weapon distributor) to be blamed for the deaths that occur because of wars; it's a collaborative effort between all of them.

The weapon distributor sells dangerous supplies to people that he knows will use them to kill. If he stopped then there would be less chance for death, but he doesn't because he makes a profit.

The commander issues the orders to kill (or endanger) civilians to his soldiers. He could just as easily tell his men not to let any civilians be put in harm's way, but this can keep him from reaching his objective.

And lastly the soldier who carries out the commands. These people can say they're not responsible because they were ordered to, but they have their own minds and consciousness. Many also plead that they had to follow orders or they would be killed, but they are still able to choose if they should kill a civilian or not. The soldiers are probably put in the most difficult position since they are threatened/ordered, but still it's up to them whether or not to kill innocents.



Gibbous has it right with this, everyone gets punished for just what they do.

I've heard that the "I was just following orders" defense won't hold when it's something big, like mass genocide. That makes sense, but at the same time, what if you were going to be killed if you didn't follow the orders? What if you and your entire family were going to be killed? I don't know that I could easily disobey horrible orders in such a situation.

Response to earlier comments: Depends, in places like Rwanda, for as far as i know, for soldiers it is generally a decision of follow the damned orders or get shot yourself. Most of the time people will weigh their own lives heavier than that of some random villager they happen across.
Sure, it's murder, but in that situation they are not left with much of a moral choice whatsoever, it becomes survival.

This.
If you live in a fucked up country with a fucked up situation, morals don't matter.
It's all caused by the higher-ups, civilians and soldiers alike are just dragged into the mess. You can't hate soldiers for killing people, they're being paid for it. But only for defending the country. If there are other reasons/motives, then it's a crime.

Watch me.

Uhh sorry didn't get what you mean. And if you only quote that one sentence, it turns wrong obviously >_>

I think he means to say he does hate them, regardless of you saying he cant. A question to you, though. Would you hold by what you just said if one of those soldier killed all your family? Would you still say "Ah, I cant really hate them, they just happen to be soldiers instead of salesmen" ?

It really depends. If some random soldier or person flips out and starts on a killing rampage, then of course, due process of law and all that jazz. But during war, lines like that get blurred all too easily. This is more prevalent today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is still a viable example for WWII and so on. (Allow me to say now, I don't give a damn your views if the US should be in Iraq or not. This is purely an example.)

It's hard to distinguish between non combatants and those with weapons. It leads to another moral quandary. Do you give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and have the chance of them whipping out a weapon and gunning down your friend, or do you shoot everyone on sight whom you believe is someone who may hurt you or one of your fellow soldiers?

90% of the time, they choose a middle ground, and give a line of no return. They have many signs, and vocal warnings that tell you not to go past a certain point. If they continue anyway. they get lit up. But regardless of how well trained and disciplined a military force is. Accidents will happen. Civilians will die, and it won't have been because of malicious intent. Simply, perhaps his buddy had just been shot and killed, naturally that soldier would be on edge, and be far more wary of anyone he saw than before.

It's hard to tell where murder and accident start to be defined different. But that's why they have military courts and such.

If anything, a person who kills anyone else because they're being paid to do so is pretty disgusting.



Soldiers don't have the luxury of deciding which orders are to defend the country and which are not. As a bit of devil advocacy on this topic, soldiers are trained to obey orders, since if they have to weigh which orders are moral or not, that would likely get them killed in the battlefield. They are trained to point, pull the trigger, and kill a target, not to differentiate which is a unarmed civilian and which isn't unless told specifically to do so.

Not to say I don't want soldiers who commit genocide (or even just a single murder of a civilian) to go scot-free, though. They do(usually) have to the option _not_ to join the military in the first place. As far as I'm concerned "just following orders" is a bullshit defense.

This is one of those subjects in which both parties end up looking like assholes no matter what.

Soldures have their famillies to think of, being drafted and not going can not only harm you but your family as well. Would you prefer to kill other random forigners or your mother? The leaders are to blaim. They are the ones who are not forced into making a moral decision.

EDIT: on second thought, it's not that long.

Responsibility lies with everyone, just as gibbous said. However it's important to note that in wars your fighting for not only yourself but for everyone who lives in your country. If acts of cruelty are deemed necessary by the commanding officers to protect their country then I'm sure that's what they'll do. The problem then becomes that they're paying for a crime that if they hadn't committed their country might have been invaded/destroyed. So it's more complicated then regular murder.

Not really. The "for everyone who lives in your country" - "to protect their country" - "their country might have" - parts are just rhetorical dress-up to excuse wanton violence; and as you so kindly demonstrated, it works.

You would rather they act humanly even if it meant losing?

That is highly unlikely. I don't see how acting inhumanly gives you any advantage over the enemy. If anything, rather the opposite - clementia caesaris, anyone?

That aside, I'm simply pointing out how this rhetorical hogwash has lost all its credibility by now. Human history is one long agonic series of people "just defending themselves". If you look at it, there's never been a war of aggression in history, ever, from the dawn of time to to-day:
The Egyptians just "defended" themselves when they crushed Nubia; both the Roman Republic and Carthage just "defended themselves" when they clashed - no aggressor in this conflict either; Charlemagne was just doing it "for everyone who lived in his country" when he massacred the Saxons; Mongolia "might have been invaded/destroyed" if the Mongols hadn't laid waste to enormous parts of Asia; Germany was just "protecting its country" - first from the entente, then from "Judeo-Bolshevism" - when it launched two world wars and mauled umpteen millions; Japan was merely "acting in defence" when it massacred over ten million Chinese civilians; and so on.

No, Sir, all this has become quite risible and useless, and can no longer pose as a valid excuse. In any case, they ought to be persecuted as any other common scoundrel would for the very same crimes. Swinging around the quite dilapidated flag of patriotism does not get you out of jail free

So would you say there are no circumstances under which armed conflict is justified? And more on topic I would say the blame lies with any involved, those who give orders but also the man on the ground. Soldiers can always refuse to do something, although they may be deprived of their freedom or their life. It's a question of whether you value your well being or your morals more.