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That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems t

• pkinsky 11y ago
  The Nuremberg trials established that 'just obeying orders' is no excuse, that acting as the tool of another does not absolve a person. That doesn't mean the person giving the orders isn't at least as guilty as the person who carries them out.
  • darkerside 11y ago
    That's right, but it does mean there is a totally valid distinction between "authorizing" killings, and carrying them out yourself. The top level comment is blurring lines that shouldn't need to be blurred.
    • PavlovsCat 11y ago
      A leader ordering murder is both a murderer and someone ordering murderer. Someone fulfilling that order is a murderer. Usually, the general use of language tries to hide this. Presidents "order killings", and people "pull the trigger, but the orders come from elsewhere". Nobody involved feels like a murderer, opposed to all of them.
• jrometty 11y ago
  Testing susceptibility to peer pressure in an individual mind is very a interesting idea. Unfortunately, we can't accurately test it _yet_. A huge amount of data and tests -along with massive improvements in the understanding of the human brain- would be required to make a complete snapshot, without which testing isn't possible. We can't eve be sure this theoretical test is possible. This alone wouldn't prove that their hands are clean, just that they wouldn't be as much to blame as someone who didn't succumb to social pressures and had more of a choice in the matter.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > This alone wouldn't prove that their hands are clean, just that they wouldn't be as much to blame as someone who didn't succumb to social pressures and had more of a choice in the matter. I don't think this is the real deal behind that decision. We've established that people are generally pretty susceptible to authority and peer pressure. Moreover, military training exists primarily to increase it. But the effect that legal clause has is that it counteracts this susceptibility by removing any doubt you could have that you'll be on the hook if you follow orders telling you to commit atrocities. It reduces the effect of peer pressure.
• Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  If you hire a hitman to kill your spouse, both you and the hitman are guilty of murder.
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    > If you hire a hitman to kill your spouse, both you and the hitman are guilty of murder. That's generally because of laws which explicitly make procuring, soliciting, etc., a crime that is actually committed an offense for which the perpetrator can be punished as a principal of the solicited, procured, etc., offense; that is, the law recognizes that the acts involved is meaningfully distinct, but assigns the same culpability to those distinct acts. So, the analogy to law sort of undermines the idea posited upthread that it doesn't make sense to distinguish the act of authorizing from the act of performing what has been authorized.
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      The law isn't an intelligent being that makes its own choices. It is an artifact created by humans, who have a reason for making it such. Humans have considered, in the US, that hiring a hitman to kill a target is murder, so they have ensured the law reflects such. Since an entire rewrite of the law isn't possible for every change, it sometimes means that the law will have to have less than perfect patches applied. But to suggest that the way it is reasoned about in law is the way it is meant to be makes as much sense as looking as a kludge and saying that the kludge is what was wanted, ignoring all the factors that lead to the genesis of a kludge.