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.

> 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.

Apparently they think about it yet execute the orders regardless. Just judging by the atrocities of all wars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This appears to base the arguement comparing to the worst case scenario, we don't need genocidal numbers of casualities to determine if morality has gone out the window. And that's another thing; numbers. The obsession with numbers, body counts, injuries, all to justify the reason we are there. In vietnam the US was fighting guerrilla warfare, in the middle-east it's called terror.

None of this will be declassified for years, it's technically still not over yet, we'll be waiting a long time to know some of the things we still don't know now.

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.

> 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

> 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.

I've been to war...9 months of patrols punctuated by cleaning the shitter and the occasional mortar round or sniper's bullet sent in your general direction. 0/10 would not go back.

David Hoffman's YT channel is pure gold

How does this refute the sentence you quoted?

Thinking about what one is doing is not the only thing that is possible. It's perfectly possible to think about it in ways that further remove oneself from ones actions (scapegoats, rationalizations, etc.), and it's possible to not think about it at all.

That in turn does away with the implied claim that we can "trust" people to think about what they're doing, because there it's the only thing they can even do.

It's like saying the only thing you can do when you're in a gang is to consider your actions and discuss them with others, so just from first principles (we pulled from thin air) we can make this deduction about gang life.

I mean, the context of this is taking issue with the statement that a person doesn't "completely trust" military organizations, that's bad enough. But the claim that being bored a lot between periods of terror means people genuinely reflect, that's stunning.

you should watch the clip and you'll understand

> the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself.

Do you have any data backing up this claim? To me, it sounds like wishful thinking. The detailed and well studied cases that I can think of, eg: Mylai Massacre, the murder and subsequent coverup of Patrick Tillman, the murder of Laveena Johnson, indicate that the people who lead military organzitions, and the systemic structures within these organizations typically have a very questionable (if any) sense of morality.

> Do you have any data backing up this claim?

The last 24 years of my life and the great many excellent enlisted and officer members of the armed services I have worked alongside.

We study My lai, and Abu Ghraib, the Vincenes, and other failures of leadership. I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule. We also study failures of civil and business leadership, but those are so plentiful they occupy every newspaper every day.

I could never understand why Abu Ghraib was a huge story in the west. It seemed such a tiny thing compared to the grand invasion/slaughter of Iraq going on at the time. Uncountable thousands killed. Yet somehow Abu Ghraib was the thing that troubled Americans. (That and how the French wouldn't join the slaughter.) Astounding.

The February protests in western countries¹ against the upcoming invasion were much larger than any reaction against Abu Ghraib; they were some of the largest anti-war rallies in known history.

¹I realize they were worldwide, but we're talking about the west

Sure, I was a part of the huge Sydney protest, carrying a poster listing the names of about a dozen chemical weapons the US had sold to Iraq, under the title "Where did Saddam get his weapons?"

I was talking about size of the story. (e.g. If the US kills 3,000 people in a far-off country, no biggie. However, 9/11 was a huge story.) The Australian media was largely, as usual around those times the US is preparing to invade somewhere or mid-doing it, echoing mainstream US TV opinion. Well, a lot of those US shows are shown here too. There was a lot of soul searching in the US about the extremely troubling Abu Ghraib scandal, which went on for some time, and left some kind of permanent mark. The protests were covered when they happened, but I don't think they produced the same moral....pseudo-crisis at all, and quickly disappeared. They could be ignored.

Abu Ghraib and My Lai were, as the parent said, "failure of leadership" - whether the failure involved troops not being disciplined or simply the troops indiscipline becoming known to the public. The invasive and the Vietnam War were policies. Leadership decided on these and if the death and destruction involved had remained entirely under leadership's control, no further problems would have been perceived.

That the excesses of war, rather than war itself, can considered the problem is a success for policy since it allows a wedge to be driven once the public sours on war. "No more Vietnam Wars", a slogan the vast majority embraced after Vietnam, was a slogan that could morph to "no more unsuccessful wars fought with conscripts who discipline breaks down, next time we'll do it right!".

Ok thanks. Note that the subject has moved from the initial questioning of the claim that military leaders "have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions. It is the nature of the business, when sending people to die, to question everything about yourself." Killjoywashere was asked "Do you have any data backing up this claim?"

And in answer was given these 'failures of leadership', which seem to be PR disasters (the problem was not that they happened but that people found out about them - "simply the troops indiscipline becoming known to the public" - things that couldn't possibly be spun as the greatest country on Earth doing God's work) or people not doing their duty.

The moral dimension has entirely disappeared, which rather supports garyhunt's suspicions. Maybe questioning everything about your country is more important than 'questioning everything about yourself'. More important for the hundreds of thousands that were killed, at least.

> I'd count those as the exceptions that prove the rule.

Could you give a few examples where our military leadership took an action that backs up your claim of exhibiting a strong sense of morality?

You're asking for something that doesn't make news. There's multiple classes of this.

The untold hours NCOs and officers spend sweating details to reduce moral ambiguity in operations.

If you want is to see men take bullets for innocents, there are plenty of them but, unfortunately, there aren't many people around to tell those stories. A few have made it out, and you can find some of them in the Medal of Honor citations (1)

General Dean's delaying action at the outbreak of the Korean war (2).

More subtly, General Shinseki testifying to Congress against administration dogma on the number of troops needed in Iraq, and sticking to that despite intense pressure.

Admiral McRaven's life in general.

(1) https://smile.amazon.com/Americas-congressional-recipients-o...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Dean

(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/washington/12shinseki.htm...

For a discussion about morality and, arguably, lack of morality at an extreme level (strategic nuclear war plans) - worth considering the discussion between Marine General David Shoup and Air Force General Power:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/3/22/314933/-

"any plan that kills millions of Chinese when it isn't even their war is not a good plan. This is not the American way."

I don't think that is a reasonable question.

To use an extreme example: I can ask for a examples where someone has committed murder, but it would be unreasonable to ask for examples where someone hasn't committed murder.

There's an asymmetry to showing morality or immorality. Exhibiting a sense of morality is the standard case, and it's hard to show it. Being immoral, however, can be trivially shown by pointing out the mos or law being broken by a specific behavior.

I think the question is very reasonable, your example is flawed because question is not about examples of someone not doing something, he is asking if someone actively worked against or seriously questioned of a murder he/she is ordered to commit. Parent is sceptical because of priori contrary evidence that military actions and morals conflict frequently.

> he is asking if someone actively worked against or seriously questioned of a murder he/she is ordered to commit

How could one reasonably produce publicly available documentation where someone refused to execute an unlawful order? Why would someone issue such an order in the first place?

Think about what could possibly motivate a soldier's action: the consequences of questioning an order are far less severe than the consequences of executing an unlawful order. "I was only following orders" has long been discredited as a legal defense.

> Parent is sceptical because of priori contrary evidence that military actions and morals conflict frequently.

Morals are not universal. To which morals are you referring specifically? Some people are morally opposed to violence in principle, the military obviously is not.

[Edit]

I'm still in disagreement as to the logic of the question, but I am beginning to think that the mere existence of court martials in the interest of upholding military law (ie, codified morals of the military) should be sufficient proof that a military body can exhibit a strong sense of morality.

So the "leadership" seems to fail again and again although they thought really hard about their moral positions.

This "citation needed" is misplaced IMO. And if I'm not mistaken, all of your examples have nothing to do with "people who lead military organizations"?

> if I'm not mistaken, all of your examples have nothing to do with "people who lead military organizations"?

If anything, that doesn't make these examples moot, but the red herring of how military leaders supposedly think long and hard about stuff.

You might find a few example of military officers counseling against war in history, mainly in liberal democracies, but you'll probably find a lot more the other way round. Even then the council is usually more about when, where and how rather than whether to do it at all.

Not all militaries are meaningfully accountable to political leadership, and not all political leadership cares about morality anyway (cough Russia cough). In free democracies yes, the military is at least to some extent held accountable to the government and the people, but we still end up with atrocities only a few of which are ever held to account, such as the Balkans war. Or in places like Chechnya or eastern Ukraine (so far) nobody is ever held to account. A few is a heck of a lot better than none, because it can act as a deterrent and an encouragement to the organisation to do better next time though, of course.

Realistically, the decisions about what weapons the military should have, how they should be designed and what safeguards should be in place are all political decisions. Only how they are employed in war is really in the hands of the military, and in liberal democracies even that is sometimes a political decision (e.g. using a submarine to sink the Belgrano in the Falklands War.)

The difference between military and civilian decision making is this:

Civilians can be politically active, convince other and refuse to work, or quit on case by case basis without criminal penalties.

In military you can only refuse to follow obviously illegal orders and even then it's a huge personal risk. Refusing to follow morally wrong but technically legal orders will lead to criminal punishment.

For example. Targeting civilians is illegal. If every male above 16 years of age is considered combatant, then it's legal to kill unarmed children from the sky. Refusing on the principle will lead to military court. Military court is extremely unlikely to rule that refusing to follow orders was the right action.

'Enemy combatants' is a horror built into the system. IME, most people have forgotten that is how collateral damage was hidden.

  in most cases

I doubt the current American commander in chief has thought long and hard about his moral positions. That being said, the authoritarian regimes of the world will undoubtedly not hesitate to use AI in their military, so some form of deterrence will presumably be required.

It seems to me that it is your view of reality that might be distorted if you can and have inferred that the parent has an irrational hatred of the current president of the United States from that particular sentence.

I'm perfectly willing to entertain that notion.

Explain to me how the parent could come to that conclusion by other means?

Consider that this president has consistently used teddy roosevelt tactics to deescelate tensions in areas the cultural elites have deemed impossible (e.g., north Korea, China, Russia, EU, Canada).

I do not want this to sound ironic, but the explanation that seems most intuitive to me is that the parent has been informed of some number of the president's actions (likely through the media and/or aquaintances) and came to the conclusion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. While the parent may indeed have an irrational hatred of the president (I do not immediately see any evidence for it, but you may not prove a negative), it is not a hard requirement in order to maintain the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. Does that seem plausible?

On an unrelated note, I do not hate the president, but also believe that either he does not think long and hard about his moral positions, or simply does not actually share them with the public. In my case, I believe this because he appears to rapidly shift his opinions, attitudes, and words in a way that makes it difficult to infer what he believes, or even what he wants people to believe that he believes.

Then you have to explain why he didn't want to bomb random Muslims but the democratic party, their propaganda outlets, and their commisars did.

Can you explain that? That's the part that makes your statment seem like neither of you have actually thought about this.

I do not understand what "the democratic party, their propaganda outlets, and their commisars" have to do with whether or not the president has thought long and hard about his moral positions. I explained why I think that he does not, but even if that reason were not provided, it does not follow that someone with the position that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions would need to have an irrational hatred of him. To briefly reduce your position to a strawman:

>Person X believes that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions -> Person X has an irrational hatred of the president

My issue is with that deduction. There is a logical jump somewhere in here that I am not able to follow. You reference multiple third parties and contrast them to the president as if to suggest that whatever differences that they may have means that it is clear that this hypothetical Person X has an irrational hatred of the president, or that a particular decision that the president has made proves this, but these are not obvious conclusions to me. As for why "he didn't want to bomb random Muslims but the democratic party, their propaganda outlets, and their commisars did", I actually do not have to explain that. The reason that I have given is in no way refuted by or related to this claim.

Instead, could you explain why the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions is sufficient evidence that the holder of that opinion irrationally hates the president?

Because it has no basis in reality, as evidenced by the fact that, in the examples provided, he's demonstrated more morality than anyone else in politics.

I'm not really sure why this is confusing. If you think he doesn't think things through, you have to explain the counter examples.

Otherwise you're just ignoring reality and cherry picking facts.

Would you say that your argument is essentially "This person is wrong in such a way that would not be possible without irrationally hating the president"? If that were the case, I would argue that people can be wrong for any reason(s), which seems like a truism to me.

As for the counter-examples, you have not provided any. You are arguing that the president is the most moral politician (which, while an extraordinary claim, has not been disagreed with by anyone in the thread as far as I can tell), while I am arguing that someone's lack of belief that the president thinks long and hard about his moral positions is not sufficient evidence that such a person has an irrational hatred of the president. I would normally have left it there since we may not even be talking about the same thing, but it seems like your argument is for a unified theory that not only is the president moral, but he is moral to the extent that the belief earlier expressed is evidence that the person holding it both hates the president, and does so irrationally. I was wholly incredulous of that claim, but was seeing if there were some obvious part of it that I missed. That is the confusing part. Does statement actually make sense to you without 5 or 6 extra assumptions in between?

That is correct. You have no concrete examples of immorality, merely gross generalizations. When presented with cases showing that he is more moral than people you defend, you obfuscate and ignore and claim incredulity, because you have no argument.

It’s not merely military organizations. The US president and congress use military force on any target in the world even when there’s no or very little benifit for security of US citizens, even under influence of lobbyists. Think of Vietnam or Iraq 2003, and others.

> Ah, first, a duty flows from a moral position, so perhaps the master misspoke.

I can't speak for them, but I'd say obedience would be a better word here.

> the people who lead military organizations, in most cases, have thought quite long and hard about their moral positions

Then that just proves that there are leaders in military organizations that even after thinking long and hard about something, come up with abysmal results, which they never quite seem to be capable to even own up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g

> except in cases where they believed the operation truly met the standards of jus ad bellum

Oh, so I can trust they believe that, and when it's instead a war of aggression, I'm to be comforted that they believe it's not? And then exactly those people who already can't seem to use their brains responsibily are supposed to be allowed to build machines to make "decisions" and kill autonomously?

All you said is what everybody said, historically. Everybody is either the good guy, or when they fuck up, they're not obedient to evil, they're simpling making "mistakes"... but at least they thought long and hard, it's not always smooth sailing for those who kill others.

As if that perspective is the only one that matters, while ignoring the people who were murdered by militaries through no fault of their own, and any duty a person might have towards them.

You're asking members of a military, that is, the custodians of ultimate state violence, to decide who the enemy is? Are you sure about that?

To whom does the soldier have a greater duty, the government elected by the citizens of his country, or the citizens of some other country?

Let's say I take a 4-star general, and strip him of all rank. Put him in a platoon and tell him to follow the orders of the lieutenant in charge. No matter his geopolitical insights and experience, he is now dependent on the information of the lieutenant. It's no longer theory, now it's specifics. He is told to knock down that door and shoot the first person he sees. How can he possibly make any decision other than to execute the orders he is given? This is the terrible responsiblity of the lieutenant: he is the last source of information and direction the soldier has. Would you want your soldiers to die for a lie? As the result of misdirection? Do you want them to know to kill an innocent?

Merriam Webster puts duty arising from morality third after https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/duty 1 filial duty and 2 obligatory tasks, I believe the usage here was obligatory tasks.

I also think obligatory tasks is unfortunately the way that duty is commonly used in our degraded age.

Hey! It sounds like you know what you're talking about. Could you maybe point me to some sources on where one could read up on how military leaders decide to go to war, what set of morals they need to come up with to be able to send people to war or this "jus ad bellum"-concept (never heard of that before).

I would really appreciate it!

Military leaders don't decide to go to war. That's for elected leaders. Waging war and studying how to wage war are the proper roles of the military. That said, any civilian leader with a clue should ask their military commanders what a war would entail, those critical "how much" questions. And if the numbers don't add up, probably take a pass, look for a diplomatic solution. This is where honest warriors like Shinseki lose their jobs and people like McNamara, Taylor, and Westmoreland end up in charge.

As for reading up on the general principles upon which the Western world built its world order, how to know when a war would be just, the collected works of Plato, starting with The Republic, and the stoics would be a good start. I would advise Irvine's Guide to the Good Life as an introduction to the stoics.

I would also add Errol Morris's The Fog of War, including McNamara's separate 10 lessons (1), and, as counterpoint, Ken Burns' Vietnam series. The two together are an unparalleled view of the entry into war, and its consequences.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#Ten_additional_...

I would also add a very significant figure in Just War Theory (another useful term) is St. Thomas Aquinas (as I'm sure you know but maybe others don't).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory#Jus_ad_bellu...

Thank you!

I actually already read "A Guide to the Good Life" and was planning on re-reading it this winter.

Not quite what you looking for, but I found this source insightful regarding how the military think about leadership. Very progressive I’d say, see for example the Gardener’s approach

http://leadership.au.af.mil/sls-skil.htm

people in the military at least have seen war first hand, but they are not the ones making the big decision of joining one, no?