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A more charitable reading is that military organizations are structured so that everyone but the very top leadership follow 'duty', i.e. orders, without thinkin

A more charitable reading is that military organizations are structured so that everyone but the very top leadership follow 'duty', i.e. orders, without thinking about the morality of their orders (I know that in principle they're supposed to refuse unlawful orders. In practice, we have fairly mixed results on that front. Not to mention the fact that a great deal of barbarism can be perfectly lawful in war.). But as anyone who's been in an organization of more than ten people can attest, what the leadership says it's doing, what the leadership thinks it's doing, and what the organization is actually doing are three very different things. In most organizations the mismatch usually just ends up in money leaking everywhere and stupid things being build. In militaries, all sorts of atrocities can happen, and this is amplified because the boots on the ground and the cogs in the machine are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. So I think that quote is a perfectly reasonable take on the matter.

killjoywashere 8y ago
> are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. My experience has been that a great many officers think very hard about the ethics of their actions. War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses.
- mda 8y ago
  Apparently they think about it yet execute the orders regardless. Just judging by the atrocities of all wars.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Do you think you shouldn't steal things from other people? Of course. I mean I think we'd agree that everybody, more or less, feels this way, right? Yet each year there are more than 8 million thefts per year in the USA alone. It seems that the latter fact there contradicts the former, but it doesn't. You can't compare things to a baseline of 0. You need to compare them to what things would be like if our proposition was true. For instance if most people believed that it was okay to steal things from people then there would not be 8 million thefts per year, there'd be billions. 8 million thefts is actually very strong evidence that most people believe you should not steal from other people. And so too for atrocities in war. The non-zero number of atrocities in no way suggests that people just blindly follow orders, as a matter of fact. You need to compare these numbers to what would happen if people gave no consideration to morality whatsoever in their execution of orders. And what are those numbers? I'm not sure, but I expect vastly higher than the relatively few atrocities we can reference.
    - mda 8y ago
      I understand what you mean, but I am just pointing out that because of its nature no matter how hard people in the organisation think about morals they are the hand that do the atrocities, and these happen a bit too often considering. I have experience with military as well and the tone of "oh they think so hard about morality, consequences" argument just makes my blood boil.
      - quaice 8y ago
        Then I would put forth that you don't have much experience with military leadership. In practice, morality, as well as cause and effect, are a constant discussion among military leadership. To add to this: It's the lower echelons of leadership that are more about numbers and efficiency and even lower is where it's about "getting it done". The disconnect, I believe, is what one considers duty another may consider blind faith. There is a vast amount of room for ambiguity here.
      - killjoywashere 8y ago
        Look at it from a machine learning perspective: moral hazard is the most poorly labeled dataset of all. Adding as much synthetic data to the mix as possible is the best you can do. We all acknowledge it's insufficient. But reading authoritative texts, writing as best you can, and most importantly, practicing are the only things you can do. What exactly do you want? No war? That's a political issue. No atrocities? As grandparent said, to err is human. Let he without sin cast the first stone.
    - rtpg 8y ago
      There's a more subtle argument, that the military as a whole views the word "atrocity" much differently than the rest of society. Though lots of society now agree with a sort of self-referential notion that our institutions and structures define what is an atrocity, so that whatever we do cannot possibly be an atrocity, if the rules are followed. We see this sort of attitude when it comes to discussions of police brutality. Many police officers view the use of lethal force through the lens of self-defense in high stakes scenarios. Others view the use of lethal force through the lens of "police are not judge, jury, and executioner". When people get shot as they run away from the police, even if each side of the debate might be rational in their own world-view, the conclusions are completely opposed.
  - all2 8y ago
    War is, by its nature, atrocious. Any activity that places death as the solution to problems is atrocious. There is a point at which we have to consider whether war is worth the atrocity. What is so important that entire civilizations would condone the slaughter of their 'enemies'? I have some of my own opinions on the above question, I only ask because I think the question should be considered carefully.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses. Hardly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 > On the third day I was there, this guy who had picked me up in the Jeep, a corporal who I was ultimately going to replace, he and I were in the battalion intelligence section, we were sent down to the tractor park, the amphibious tractor park to meet a bunch of detainees. It was our responsibility to take care prisoners, and detainees were a classification of civilians, they were not combatants; they could be detained for questioning, which is why they were called detainees. > And Jimmy and I went down to the tractor park and two tractors came in, they had a whole bunch of Vietnamese up on top high flat-topped vehicles about eight or nine feet tall, and as the tractors wheeled into the park the Marines up on top immediately began hurling these people off, and they were bound hand and foot, so they had no way of breaking their falls, and they were old men, women, children, no young men, and I couldn't believe these guys were treating these people this way, and I turned to Jimmy and said, I grabbed him by the arm and said "What are those guys doing? We're supposed to be helping these people." And Jimmy turned to me and he looked at my hands on his arm, I sort of took them off, and he said "Ehrhart, you better keep the mouth shut until you know what's going on around here." I think it was at that point that I realized things were not quite what I was expecting. > [..] > None of that distilled itself into the clear kind of expression that I'm presenting now. What I began to understand within days and which became patently clear within months was that what was going on here was not what I had been told, what was going on here was nuts, and I wanted to get out. I knew if I was still alive on March the 5th 1968 they'd stick me on an airplane in Danang we used to call it the freedom bird and I could fly away and forget the whole thing. Turned out not to be quite so easy to forget it, but that was the notion, and certainly my last eight to nine months I ceased to think, I quite literally ceased to think about why I was there, or what I was doing. The sole purpose for my being in Vietnam at that point was to stay alive until I could get out. > And the reason for that is, you know, the kinds of questions that began to present themselves were just.. the questions themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers. It's like banging on a door, you knock on a door, and the door opens slightly and behind that door it's dark and there's loud noises coming like there's wild animals in there or something. And you peer into the darknees and you can't see what's there but you can all this ugly stuff.. do you want to step into that room? No way, you just sorta back out quietly, pull the door shut behind you, and walk away from it. And that's what was going on, those questions, the questions themselves were too ugly to even ask, let alone try to deal with the answers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

killjoywashere 8y ago

> are trained to not think too hard about the ethics of their actions. My experience has been that a great many officers think very hard about the ethics of their actions. War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses.

mda 8y ago
Apparently they think about it yet execute the orders regardless. Just judging by the atrocities of all wars.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Do you think you shouldn't steal things from other people? Of course. I mean I think we'd agree that everybody, more or less, feels this way, right? Yet each year there are more than 8 million thefts per year in the USA alone. It seems that the latter fact there contradicts the former, but it doesn't. You can't compare things to a baseline of 0. You need to compare them to what things would be like if our proposition was true. For instance if most people believed that it was okay to steal things from people then there would not be 8 million thefts per year, there'd be billions. 8 million thefts is actually very strong evidence that most people believe you should not steal from other people. And so too for atrocities in war. The non-zero number of atrocities in no way suggests that people just blindly follow orders, as a matter of fact. You need to compare these numbers to what would happen if people gave no consideration to morality whatsoever in their execution of orders. And what are those numbers? I'm not sure, but I expect vastly higher than the relatively few atrocities we can reference.
  - mda 8y ago
    I understand what you mean, but I am just pointing out that because of its nature no matter how hard people in the organisation think about morals they are the hand that do the atrocities, and these happen a bit too often considering. I have experience with military as well and the tone of "oh they think so hard about morality, consequences" argument just makes my blood boil.
    - quaice 8y ago
      Then I would put forth that you don't have much experience with military leadership. In practice, morality, as well as cause and effect, are a constant discussion among military leadership. To add to this: It's the lower echelons of leadership that are more about numbers and efficiency and even lower is where it's about "getting it done". The disconnect, I believe, is what one considers duty another may consider blind faith. There is a vast amount of room for ambiguity here.
    - killjoywashere 8y ago
      Look at it from a machine learning perspective: moral hazard is the most poorly labeled dataset of all. Adding as much synthetic data to the mix as possible is the best you can do. We all acknowledge it's insufficient. But reading authoritative texts, writing as best you can, and most importantly, practicing are the only things you can do. What exactly do you want? No war? That's a political issue. No atrocities? As grandparent said, to err is human. Let he without sin cast the first stone.
  - rtpg 8y ago
    There's a more subtle argument, that the military as a whole views the word "atrocity" much differently than the rest of society. Though lots of society now agree with a sort of self-referential notion that our institutions and structures define what is an atrocity, so that whatever we do cannot possibly be an atrocity, if the rules are followed. We see this sort of attitude when it comes to discussions of police brutality. Many police officers view the use of lethal force through the lens of self-defense in high stakes scenarios. Others view the use of lethal force through the lens of "police are not judge, jury, and executioner". When people get shot as they run away from the police, even if each side of the debate might be rational in their own world-view, the conclusions are completely opposed.
- all2 8y ago
  War is, by its nature, atrocious. Any activity that places death as the solution to problems is atrocious. There is a point at which we have to consider whether war is worth the atrocity. What is so important that entire civilizations would condone the slaughter of their 'enemies'? I have some of my own opinions on the above question, I only ask because I think the question should be considered carefully.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> War is mainly vast expanses of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. And thinking is about the only thing left to do in those vast expanses. Hardly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 > On the third day I was there, this guy who had picked me up in the Jeep, a corporal who I was ultimately going to replace, he and I were in the battalion intelligence section, we were sent down to the tractor park, the amphibious tractor park to meet a bunch of detainees. It was our responsibility to take care prisoners, and detainees were a classification of civilians, they were not combatants; they could be detained for questioning, which is why they were called detainees. > And Jimmy and I went down to the tractor park and two tractors came in, they had a whole bunch of Vietnamese up on top high flat-topped vehicles about eight or nine feet tall, and as the tractors wheeled into the park the Marines up on top immediately began hurling these people off, and they were bound hand and foot, so they had no way of breaking their falls, and they were old men, women, children, no young men, and I couldn't believe these guys were treating these people this way, and I turned to Jimmy and said, I grabbed him by the arm and said "What are those guys doing? We're supposed to be helping these people." And Jimmy turned to me and he looked at my hands on his arm, I sort of took them off, and he said "Ehrhart, you better keep the mouth shut until you know what's going on around here." I think it was at that point that I realized things were not quite what I was expecting. > [..] > None of that distilled itself into the clear kind of expression that I'm presenting now. What I began to understand within days and which became patently clear within months was that what was going on here was not what I had been told, what was going on here was nuts, and I wanted to get out. I knew if I was still alive on March the 5th 1968 they'd stick me on an airplane in Danang we used to call it the freedom bird and I could fly away and forget the whole thing. Turned out not to be quite so easy to forget it, but that was the notion, and certainly my last eight to nine months I ceased to think, I quite literally ceased to think about why I was there, or what I was doing. The sole purpose for my being in Vietnam at that point was to stay alive until I could get out. > And the reason for that is, you know, the kinds of questions that began to present themselves were just.. the questions themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers. It's like banging on a door, you knock on a door, and the door opens slightly and behind that door it's dark and there's loud noises coming like there's wild animals in there or something. And you peer into the darknees and you can't see what's there but you can all this ugly stuff.. do you want to step into that room? No way, you just sorta back out quietly, pull the door shut behind you, and walk away from it. And that's what was going on, those questions, the questions themselves were too ugly to even ask, let alone try to deal with the answers.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]