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10/07/2004 01:36:00 AM | Timothy Israeli Soldiers and Disobeying Orders I said nothing when John Stevenson first made this comment on the Dartmouth Observer. Now that he has repeated himself on RockyBlog, I feel like commenting. Stevenson says this about a possible forced evacuation of settlers in the occupied territories: “Such an action raises a whole host of questions, the foremost being: when ordered to do so should a soldier act against a fellow citizen? If we learned anything from witnessing the universally condemned horrors of the Nazi regime, or of the totalitarian terror inside the Soviet Union (with whom a number of academics sympathized at the time), it should be this: soldiers, when asked by superior officers to execute an order against a non-combatant, especially a fellow-citizen, has a moral obligation to disobey.”Huh? Stevenson seems to be saying that soldiers should NEVER execute ANY order against ANY non-combatant. We are in danger of trivializing the horrors of the Third Reich and the USSR if we reduce its lessons to such flat and overstated banalities. One lesson from Nuremberg is that the ‘just following orders’ is not an excuse. But judgment works both ways. If we say that soldiers can be held accountable for their own actions, then we are saying they are capable of exercising that independent moral judgment. And then we should not reduce the moral complexity of what a soldier faces to such simplistic rules like the one Stevenson proclaims. Force can be used unjustly, but surely sometimes force can be used to protect persons, and remedy injustice. Stevenson himself seems to also think that there no "reasonable" person thinks that the settlements in the West Bank are indefensible and there is only one "side" to the issue. There is some moral complexity here, but I do not think Stevenson has captured it. perma link |
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