From my Lai to Abu Ghraib: The moral psychology of atrocity

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 25-55

  Doris, John M ^a   Murphy, Dominic ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049499956     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2007.00149.x     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. An archive of documents relating to the Mahmudiya case can be found at http://www.militarydefense.com/military-legal-news.php (accessed Nov. 20, 2006).
2. For accusations of ill-treatment of prisoners, see "3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine," New York Times, Al. Sep. 24, 2005.
3. For British investigations, see "British Soldier Admits War Crime," available at http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/uk/5360432.stm (accessed Sep. 19, 2006).
4. Seymour Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, May 10, 2004.
5. Throughout, we have in mind something like Thomson's (Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Self-Defense," Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 [1991]: 283-310) distinction between an action's being permissible and its being excusable. On our view, actors may sometimes be excused for impermissible actions.
6. The approach we adopt bears affinities to Rosen's "Skepticism about Moral Responsibility," Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 295-313. Roughly put, Rosen argues from the pervasiveness of nonculpable ignorance to a general skepticism about moral responsibility, and while we do not here endorse a general skepticism, our argument appeals to related considerations.
7. See John M. Doris, Lack of Character. Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
8. and John M. Doris and Stephen P. Stich, "As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics," in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114-52.
9. Thomas Nagel argues that if the U.S. should not have been in Vietnam then the conflict "is incapable of providing a justification for any measures taken in its pursuit" ("War and Massacre," in Mortal Questions, ed. T. Nagel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 54).
10. Jeff McMahan, in "The Ethics of Killing in War," Ethics 114 (2004): 695-733, also denies that one may nonculpably participate in an unjust war, as the just war tradition has historically affirmed. We suspect this view endangers a sensible moral distinction between "routine" combat tactics and atrocities, and threatens to make the moral status of ordinary soldiers unacceptably dependent on the competence and moral probity of their superiors, but the issues are largely distinct from our primary concerns, and we will not join this part of the argument here.
11. Examples of this sort are often called "tracing cases." See John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49-50.
12. The statute governing the International Criminal Court lets a defendant assert intoxication as a defense if it destroys his capacity to distinguish right from wrong or control his conduct, "but not if he became voluntarily intoxicated and knew or disregarded the risk that he would then commit the crime" (Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law, 2nd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 140).
13. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 28-29;
14. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 95-96.
15. Unsurprisingly, those concerned to identify a moral obligation for conscientious objection in unjustified conflicts have attacked this position; for example, David R. Mapel, "Coerced Moral Agents? Individual Responsibility for Military Service," Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 171-89.
16. E.g., Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 55.
17. See Gary Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme," in Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, ed. J. M. Fischer and M. Ravizza (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119-49;
18. R. J. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1994), 118.
19. The general approach is due to Peter F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment", in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982 [originally published 1962]), 59-81, although our account is somewhat different.
20. Our operative conception of responsible agency, and hence, of excusing conditions, is close to that defended by Manuel Vargas, in John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Dirk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will: A Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), chap. 4.
21. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, 226.
22. See also the "reasonsresponsiveness" account of Fischer and Ravizza's Responsibility and Control, 36-37.
23. American Psychiatric Association, "Statement on the Insanity Defense," American Journal of Psychiatry 140 (1983): 681-88, at 685.
24. Rather loosely following Susan Wolf in Freedom Within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 121, 124, 129.
25. Cf. Watson ("Responsibility and the Limits," 126-27) on "moral understanding." Watson ("Reasons and Responsibility," Ethics 111 [2001]: 374-94) presents puzzle cases concerning the subversion and repair of normative competence.
26. For instance, claims of "ordinary perpetrators" are commonplace in literature on the Holocaust. See Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992);
27. Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 195;
28. Zigmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 19-23;
29. F E. Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 10;
30. Primo Levi, "Afterword," in The Reawakening, trans S. Woolf (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), 228;
31. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 121 ff.
32. Perhaps the most famous example is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1964).
33. as was Isaiah Berlin (see Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life [New York: Owl Books, 1999], 253).
34. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/05/20040505-2. html
35. Quoted in Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1992), 364.
36. A friend of Lynddie England, who was convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib, said England did not have "a malicious bone in her body" (quoted in the New York Times, May 7, 2004).
37. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 338-43.
38. D. Lester, "The Association Between Involvement in War and Rates of Suicide and Homicide," Journal of Social Psychology 131 (1991): 893-95.
39. For clinically rich histories of combat trauma, see Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000)
40. and Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
41. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 307.
42. S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (New York, William Morrow, 1947).
43. William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 54-59.
44. P. Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston and New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 124.
45. James Waller, in Becoming Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 7, has argued that members of a group committing may initially be conflicted or reluctant, but will typically resolve these conflicts in favor of identification with the group, and hence, become more enthusiastic participants. Also relevant in this context are our discussions, below, of military socialization, the importance of primary groups, and "moral drift."
46. See also John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape 1976), 46-51.
47. Note that our exposition relies heavily on combatants' testimony. Caution is in order: there is good reason to doubt both the reliability of eyewitness reports (summarized by E. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979])
48. and the accuracy of "self-reports," concerning behavior and psychological states (see L. A. Pervin, "Personality: A View of the Future Based on a Look at the Past," Journal of Research in Personality 30 [1996]: 309-18, at 315). Nevertheless, we believe we have sampled the literature carefully enough to present a representative picture of what people experience in combat, and little turns on the details of specific incidents, for which skepticism about testimony is most apt. The alternative to relying on eyewitness accounts is a phenomenologically impoverished account of the issues, and this carries a greater risk of distortion than do the vagaries of testimony.
49. For reviews of this experimental tradition, see Doris, Lack of Character, and Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991). We do not deny that individual experiments may be subject to legitimate skepticism. But, as the literature surveys attest, the results reflect well-established trends in a long-running research tradition. A compelling general skepticism about the tradition is, we think, difficult to motivate.
50. A. M. Isen and P. F. Levin, "Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384-88.
51. J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables In Helping Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100-108.
52. K. E. Mathews and L. K. Cannon, "Environmental Noise Level as a Determinant of Helping Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975): 571-77.
53. C. Haney, W. Banks, and P. Zimbardo, "Interpersonal Dynamics of a Simulated Prison," International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69-97.
54. S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
55. See American Law Institute, Model Penal Code: Proposed Official Draft (Philadelphia, PA: American Law Institute, 1962),
56. Marshall, Men against Fire, 47.
57. See B. Latané and J. M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander:Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 124;
58. R. D. Clark and L. E. Word, "Why Don't Bystanders Help? Because of Ambiguity? "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 392-400;
59. and R.D. Clark and L.E. Word, "Where Is the Apathetic Bystander? Situational Characteristics of the Emergency," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29 (1974): 279-87;
60. W DeJong, S. Marber, and R. Shaver, "Crime Intervention: The Role of a Victim's Behavior in Reducing Situational Ambiguity," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 6 (1980): 113-18;
61. R. L. Shotland and W D. Heinhold, "Bystander Response to Arterial Bleeding: Helping Skills, the Decision-Making Process, and Differentiating the Helping Response," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (1985): 347-56.
62. Darley and Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho," 107-8.
63. B. Latané and S. Nida, "Ten Years of Research on Group Size and Helping," Psychological Bulletin 89 (1981): 308-24.
64. As in Keegan, The Face of Battle, 142-43.
65. P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
66. Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 92.
67. cf. H. G. Moore and J. L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once and Young: Ia Drang - The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 247.
68. R. A. Baron, "The Sweet Smell of .. . Helping: Effects of Pleasant Ambient Fragrance on Prosocial Behavior in Shopping Malls," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (1997): 498-503.
69. Cf. R. A. Baron and M. I. Bronfen, "A Whiff of Reality: Empirical Evidence Concerning the Effects of Pleasant Fragrances on Work-Related Behavior," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24 (1994): 1179-203.
70. J. J. Weingartner, Crossroads of Death: The Story of the Malmedy Massacre and Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 62.
71. Quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 151.
72. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th éd., rev. (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 599-602.
73. R. Weigley, Eisenhower's Lieutenants (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 29.
74. See also Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 133.
75. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 281.
76. Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 2.
77. H. C. Kelman and V. L. Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 3;
78. Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, 83-85.
79. Reports indicate that the unit involved at Haditha may have taken losses beforehand (See http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1559495,00. html?cnn=yes).
80. See J. Sabini and M. Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 78,
81. and Doris, Lack of Character, chap. 3.
82. We focus on negative behaviors, but an analogous argument may conclude that soldiers are often not responsible for their good deeds in combat. However, as Susan Wolf points out, praise appears less closely associated with responsibility attribution than is condemnation (S. Wolf, "Asymmetrical Freedom," Journal of Philosophy 77 [1980]: 151-66), and this asymmetry may block the application of our argument to praiseworthy behavior in combat.
83. See Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, chaps 3 and 6. Thomas Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Scribner, 1997) depicts U.S. Marine Corps recruits being coercively initiated into a culture that is self-consciously alienated from American civilian life. John Kekes, The Roots of Evil (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chap. 6, discusses the code of honor that disfigured the moral judgment of the Argentinean officer corps in the "dirty war" of the 1970s.
84. The theory of "deliberative democracy" most insistently argues for the importance of open-minded reasoning about preferences among citizens (see, e.g., A. Gutmann and D. Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004]).
85. But on almost any understanding of democracy, armies have (and need) an undemocratic culture, in the sense that the institution is designed to see to it that preferences from below do not influence conduct above (see Jon Elster, "The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory," in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. J. Bohmann and W. Rehg [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997], 18-38).
86. Quoted in Fussell, Wartime, 179.
87. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001), chaps 3 and 4.
88. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
89. Pieter Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 218.
90. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1995), 294.
91. Paul Fussell, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," in Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 26.
92. Quoted in Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, 30;
93. cf. S. Hersh, My Lai 4 (New York: Random House, 1970), 10.
94. See, for example, S. Rayment, "SAS Soldier Quits Army in Disgust at 'Illegal' American Tactics in Iraq," Daily Telegraph, Mar. 12, 2006. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid= GTULNH4UIU2RRQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nsasl2.xmlandsSheet=/news/ 2006/03/12/ixhome.html. The authors are grateful for the insights of an anonymous American serviceman who shared some of his experiences working a perimeter security detail at Abu Ghraib.
95. Walzer is critical of the idea of military necessity, but discusses the idea of "supreme emergency," which might license military conduct that would otherwise be inadmissible (Just and Unjust Wars, 144, 149, 240-41, 323-25).
96. In The Law of Peoples (98-99), Rawls argues that the strategic bombing of Germany by the RAF might have been justifiable by appeal to supreme emergency, but only during the period when the British had no other options for carrying the war to the Third Reich. Further discussions of military necessity can be found in Mark J. Osiel, Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline and the Law of War (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 92-93, 133.
97. For examples of the doctrine as a justification of abuses, see Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941-45, 38,
98. and Samuel J. Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chap. 4.
99. Richard A. Wasserstrom, Philosophy and Social Issues: Five Studies (Notre Dame, IN, and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 153-58.
100. Osiel, Obeying Orders, 5.
101. See Ratner and Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities, 136.
102. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 203.
103. and Hersh, My Lai 4, 40-2.
104. See M. D. Sallah and M. Weiss, "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths," Toledo Blade, Oct. 19-22, 2003.
105. cf. Kelman and Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience, 6.
106. Jonathan Glover discusses Thompson in Humanity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 9.
107. For philosophically and legally informed discussion of crimes against humanity, see Larry May, Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (New York: Cambridge, 2005).
108. Time.com, "The Abu Ghraib Scandal You Don't Know," Feb. 14, 2005. Available at http://wwwtime.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1025139,00. html.
109. Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 195, cf. 199.
110. The quotations in this paragraph are drawn from S. Hersh, Chain of Command (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 4 ff.
111. M. P. Scharf, Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes Trial Since Nuremberg (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1997), 52 and 113.
112. See also Thom Shanker, "Sexual Violence," in Roy Gutman and David Rieff (eds.), Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (New York: Norton, 1999), 323-27.
113. Hersh, Chain of Command, 21.
114. The complete report is published in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004).
115. See also Sherman, Stoic Warriors, 172-79.
116. Danner, Torture and Truth, 16.
117. Stephen R. Ratner, "War Crimes, Categories of," in Roy Gutman and David Rieff (eds.), Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (New York: Norton, 1999), 374.
118. The dictum is associated with E. Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: E and R Brooke, 1797), 107.
119. As Posner observes, the criminal law "bases responsibility, most of the time anyway, on culpable mental states." Richard A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 108.
120. Richard Wasserstrom, "The Responsibility of the Individual for War Crimes," in Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs, ed. Virginia Held, Sydney Morgenbesser, and Thomas Nagel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 70.
121. Robinson and Darley make a related case when they argue that public perceptions that the criminal law is morally credible facilitate a consensus regarding, and compliance with, the law (P. H. Robinson and J. M. Darley, "The Utility of Desert," Northwestern University Law Review 91 [1997]: 453-99, esp. 457).
122. Our understanding of strict liability has been aided by Gerald F. Leonard, "Towards a Legal History of American Criminal Theory: Culture and Doctrine from Blackstone to the Model Penal Code," 6 Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 691 (2002).
123. Paul Woodruff, "Justification or Excuse: Saving Soldiers at the Expense of Civilians," Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 13 (1982): 159-74, at 171.
124. On the difficulty of identifying responsible individuals in wrongdoing organizations, see also J. M. Darley, "Social Organization for the Production of Evil," Psychological Inquiry 3 (1992): 199-218.
125. Perhaps progress can be made here: D. P. Tollefson, in "Participant Reactive Attitudes and Collective Responsibility," Philosophical Explorations 6 (2003): 218-34, argues that collectives, much like individuals, are properly subject to the reactive attitudes associated with responsibility attributions.
126. For detailed treatments of collective responsibility, see Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
127. and Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, Collective Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1991).
128. On Fritsch, see Sanford Levinson, "Responsibility for Crimes of War," in War and Moral Responsibility; ed. Marshall Cohen,Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 16-17.
129. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999), 61.
130. Cf. E. Kiss, "Moral Ambition Within and Beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice," in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. R. I. Rotberg and D. Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 72 ff.
131. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, "The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions," in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. R. I. Rotberg and D. Thompson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22-4.
132. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment" remains the classic account of reactive attitudes. For other broadly "reactivist" accounts, see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 44-45,
133. Despite the well-known difficulties, there is here something to be said for a consequentialist "social-regulation" approach to the reactive attitudes. See Manuel Vargas, "Moral Influence, Moral Responsibility," in Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility, ed. N. Trakakis (Cambridge: Scholars Press, forthcoming).