Originally posted by
Bogus argument.
It's the individual that performs the act.
Are we talking legal or are we talking moral?
I'm an attorney. Don't give me your legal arguments.
It's individual responsibility, or am I wrong?
It's a moral and ethical argument, not a legal argument.
There were many war crimes that occured in VietNam (look up
'Tiger force' for example); the fact there were very few
prosecutions/ instances of discipline was a consequence of the
interests and sympathies of those who had the power to make
such decisons- most war crimes involved both acts of commission
and acts of ommission by various parties to the events.
Legally, responsibility is described by the chain of command, but
there is a caveat: it is recognized that the chain of command can
err in the lawfulness of the orders it decides to disseminate;
In this case, the individual is held to a 'fundamental'
standard and is expected to recognize when a duly recieved order
is in fact 'unlawful'...
The moral implications of these circumstances do not seem as clear.
As far as the 'individual' performing the act, the following must be
pondered: Is the person acting on the basis of 'free will';
Is the person's free will 'individual', or are they in fact internally
conflicted, having inconsistent, even mutually exclusive, ideas,
desires, or impulses? The question of responsibility, then, relates
to the question of agency? Is the person acting as an agent? Reacting?
The soldier's experience is a very good example of shades-of-grey;
I would assume you could find examples where the individual has almost
total conscious control over the causes-to-effects relationship of
events and is the primary agent and architect of outcomes. I assume
there are also readily available examples of soldiers who cannot be
held responsible for acts they physically carried out where their
agency is much diminished- sometimes this is incidental (fatigue, altered
mental state, trauma),
sometimes it is intentionally orchestrated (training, control of access
to information, misinformation).