The Wrongs of Human Suffering in Wartime
Ethics leader Gordon Haist led the program with a topic paper that was followed throughout his talk.
Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. --Emmanuel Levinas
Comments:
Morality depends on certain givens, such as to never lie. Yet it can be hard to understand ethical principles.
What is the foundation of morality? Morality and ethics are more tense than we think. We carve out our own morality.
War is hell, as Michael Walzer says. The war convention licenses soldiers killing enemy soldiers. But one sordid aspect of it is the suffering it creates, not only among combatants but also among civilians. Soldiers suffer because they lose their right to life. Citizens suffer the “double effect” modern war invariably creates because so much of it relies on long-range firepower.
What is a just war?
Audience responses:
All is relative. There are no absolutes. :
Morality and ethics are the same. One comes from Greek and one from Latin.
Morality is subjective. A place for war is to defend themselves. It’s just and necessary.
War is hell but there are ways to conduct it. (Walzer)
In Vietnam “cleansing” a village could prevent carnage.
In WW2 showed justifiable behavior. War is hell but we can conduct a just war.
Walzer defines the double effect of modern war as follows:
Killing noncombatants can be justified if and only if:
The act is a legitimate act of war (i.e., good in itself)
The direct effect is morally acceptable (destroying supplies or killing soldiers)
The actor intends only the acceptable effect, not the evil end that results Actions need to be pure of mind. Soldiers must follow the rules of war.
The good effect compensates for the evil effect (The effects are proportional)
Walzer refines the third claim, giving it moral depth:
The intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims narrowly at the acceptable effect; the evil effect is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends, and aware of the evil involved, he seeks to minimize it, accepting costs to himself. (Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars Fifth Edition (Basic Books, 2015), pp 153 and 156. )
War is hell not only because it involves civilian casualties but also because of the wrecked lives it creates due to physical, mental, emotional, even financial distress. One central issue here is the question of human rights. If it is wrong to kill, how can it be justified in war? Does military necessity — doing what it takes to force the enemy into submission with the least risk of loss — justify not only the killing, but also the human wreckage that takes place?
Comments:
Who said it is wrong to kill? It is wrong to murder, but if killing is a military necessity it is justified.
It is not always wrong to kill. There is a right to defend yourself and if other guy dies, too bad. It is not legal if you could have avoided doing it.
Soldiers kill for guy next to him, not necessarily for their country.
It is usually wrong to kill but sometimes ok to kill.
Killing can be necessary but not right. Sometimes it is to save one’s own life. Morality can be a problem since we are polarized.
We must have understanding in differences of others. His culture ends where my rights begin.
An example was given in the AIDS crisis, where it was believed the way to stop the spread was for an infected man to have sex with an infant. We can’t always see the other side.
There is no such thing as absolute values. Something that is just or unjust, moral or unmoral doesn’t make sense. People are wired differently.
We must respect those who are wired differently.
Ethics should guide our actions
Differences are not always opposites.
Pacifism’s answer is “no” even at the expense of country while Activism’s answer is “yes” at the expense of the rights of victims. Before siding with one position or the other, consider the nature of this military necessity. It is the necessity of winning and it is based on strategy not rights. During war human rights are vulnerable and subject to likelihoods rather than absolutes, the probabilities of winning and not the purity of reason.
My opening quote from Emmanuel Levinas is the opening line of his most influential work, Totality and Infinity. Levinas (1906-1995) was a Lithuanian Jew who in 1939 became a naturalized citizen of France and who joined the French army as a translator when it declared war on Germany. Along with his unit, he was captured and became a prisoner of war, which saved him from transfer to a concentration camp.
Ethics, on the other hand, goes beyond the view of reality that treats it as a totality. Levinas juxtaposes infinity over totality and argues that it is not morality, but ethics, that opens us to infinity. Why? Because at a minimum ethics requires openness to others, not as hostages to our will but as strangers beyond the perimeter of our self-made beliefs and history. Most importantly, morality classifies actions as good or bad; ethics, on the other hand, consists of the imperative to respond to the other as other. This results in a rejection of instrumental or practical reasoning insofar as such reasoning is designed to fit others and their actions into one’s grand plan of reality.
Others are not me. Subjectively they are different and that difference can be intuited but it cannot be fathomed. The infinite in Levinas is a reminder that differences are not opposites, just as character is not uniform. Morality speaks the language of polarity; ethics speaks of the possible infinitude of differences. Morality totalizes subjects by treating them and their actions as the same. But the ethical benefit of recognizing differences is that it “invests” its heteronomy with freedom. Levinas writes:
The essence of reason consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and in inviting him to justice. (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 88)
Levinas holds that seeing difference in the face of the other can release us ethically from the looming totality of war:
The Other, whose exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him in which I stand, marks the end of powers. If I can no longer have power over him it is because he overflows absolutely every idea I can have of him. (Levinas, p. 87.)
According to this view, wartime suffering is the wrong produced by the morality of totalization. That morality justifies killing just as it justifies power. Much guerilla fighting and terrorizing are resorts to power resulting from disproportionate resources and standards of living and believing which are no longer invisible in our world. The guerilla and the terrorist, too, reduce the enemy to sameness and kill enemies indiscriminately. These strategies are based on the assumption of sameness: what would terrorize the terrorist is what the terrorist uses to terrorize others. For Levinas, difference is more fundamentally ethical than the presupposition that we are the same. For one thing, its spirit of mutuality founds communities rather than accumulates killing power.
Comment:
Individuals don’t demand war. Those in high ranks do and soldiers lose their right to life.
The reality of suffering leaves its marks: scarred bodies and lost limbs, PTSD, suicidal behavior, hatred, and despair. To own up to the wrongs committed is one matter, to witness the auto-destruction of so many lives is another. Often it is out of the anguish of the latter that future revolutions can develop. How do we address such suffering in order not to unleash future wars? Can we recognize in suffering that others exist beyond the overflow of one’s ideas of them and relate ethically to them, beyond the trappings of power and control?
How do we deal with suffering? Ignore it?
Comments:
Shake it off.
One must go through mourning and work through it.
Discussion - Election 2024
Our discussion then went off our agenda and turned to the election the day before.
Comments:
This was a significant event-election. Things that are important to the speaker means he can’t talk to others about them. Are we in jeopardy of not being able to express our morality and ethics? He was surprised how few voted.
Some wouldn’t vote due to bad candidates. It was so convoluted!
Some did not vote to avoid having responsibility for the outcome.
One was in mourning and concerned about what will happen with Ukraine.
Some didn’t vote because they have lost faith in democracy.
Democracy re-invents itself every 4 years.
First time we’ve elected a convicted criminal for president.
We must have hope and the hope is that Trump will be concerned with country and not himself.
The problem was Biden. He should have resigned two years ago.
We need to understand who Trump’s base is. Trump is a salesman.
We can’t figure out why people voted for Trump. The vote is not analytical.
What happens to our side?
We had these problem 8 and 4 years ago.