Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Situationism and the Individualization of Responsibility in War
Benjamin Valentino
Dartmouth College
June 5, 2016
THIS PAPER IS A DRAFT. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION.
1
In recent years, a growing number of philosophers of war and scholars of international law have
endeavored to conceive of ethical principles and legal institutions that privilege the rights and
responsibilities of individuals during times of war. This effort has been motivated in large part by the
desire to develop ethics and laws of war that are more consistent with our ethics and laws governing
violence in other contexts. Outside of war, we almost always conceive of rights and duties as inhering in
individuals. Indeed, efforts to expunge the vestiges of collective responsibly from our legal and ethical
doctrines can be credited with an important part in the evolution in law and morality in Western
societies over the last several centuries.1
In contemporary debates about the laws and ethics of war, proponents of individualization are
often associated with the “revisionist” camp of just war scholarship, while collectivists are associated
with “traditionalism.”2 Traditionalist critics of the individualization of war have forwarded both
normative and practical objections to individualist revisionists. Normatively, some traditionalists
contend that collective entities such as states or cultures have special significance and intrinsic value
that cannot be reduced entirely to the interests of their individual members.3 Arguing from a practical
standpoint, others have objected that meaningful individualization of the laws of armed conflict would
be nearly impossible to realize and, given the lack of an objective arbiter in international politics capable
of adjudicating rival claims and enforcing verdicts, could actually lead to less moral conduct in war.4
A related, but potentially larger practical concern with the individualization of war, however, has
not received as much attention from scholars. Beginning in the 1960s, a robust body of psychological
research has accumulated establishing that human beings tend to overestimate the power of stable
personal character traits and other differences between individuals and underestimate the effects of
our external environment and context (“situations”) in determining our own and others’ behaviors. This
perspective on human behavior has come to be known as situationism.
1 Joel Feinberg, “Collective Responsibility,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 21 (1968), pp. 674-688. 2 As Seth Lazar notes, however, that correspondence is not perfect. Seth Lazar, “Just War Theory: Revisionists Vs Traditionalists,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 20 (2007), pp. 37-54. 3 Michael Walzer, “Terrorism and Just War,” Philosophia, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2006), pp. 3-12. 4 Henry Shue, “Do we need a ‘Morality of War’?” In Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 87-111; and Dan Zupan, “A Presumption of the Moral Equality of Combatants: A Citizen-Soldier’s perspective.” In Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 214-225. Some revisionists also acknowledge these practical issues and admit that they may limit how deeply international law may be individualized, at least in current circumstances. See Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 108; and David Rodin, “The Moral Inequality of Soldiers.” In Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 58-59.
2
Situations have been demonstrated to exert potent effects on individuals – including motivating
participation in extreme harming behaviors. A wide range of historians, sociologists and political
scientists who study war, genocide and military organizations have found this research valuable in
understanding the behavior of soldiers and perpetrators of mass atrocities. The situation of war, in
other words, appears to exert a powerful collectivizing effect on individual behavior in ways that do not
always have clear analogs in the domestic criminal contexts in which individual responsibility for harm is
usually adjudicated. If the situationist interpretation is correct, therefore, this ought to have profound
consequences for how we think about individual responsibility, liability and justice in times of war.
In this paper, I argue that an appreciation of situationism ought to inform the ways we attempt
to apply individualization to war in the real world. To be clear, I do not argue that situationism and
individualism are incompatible. Most versions of situationism leave ample room for notions of
individual responsibility, liability and accountability. Situationism does, however, suggest that powerful,
collective forces acting outside of the control of individuals have more influence on individual behavior
than is widely appreciated. In practice, therefore, an individualist approach to war that takes
situationism seriously might not lead to dramatically different judgements about participants in war
than traditional, “collectivist” perspectives on war – even if it arrives that those judgements through
different logics. If soldiers who participate in unjust wars or even perpetrate war crimes are doing what
almost any other individual in the same situation would have done, it calls into question how morally
liable they are for the unjustified threats they pose to soldiers and civilians on the other side. If citizens
in general tend to enlist when called upon to enlist and soldiers shoot when called upon to shoot, then
whether one fights for a just or an unjust cause could be little more than chance and, therefore, an
unsound basis for depriving those on the unlucky side of their right to defend themselves. Rather,
situationism suggests that the political and military elites who have the power to shape the collective
environments that define war bear much of the responsibility for the actions of the individual soldiers
and civilians who are the agents and underwriters of war’s violence.
Situationism in Psychology
Although it is possible to trace the origins of situationism to the 1920s, situationism garnered
relatively little attention until the late 1960s when experiments in social psychology began to
accumulate increasing evidence that personality traits were not nearly as stable as most people –
3
including most professional psychologists and psychiatrists at the time – believed.5 Many credit the
publication of Walter Mischel’s book, Personality and Assessment, in 1968 as the foundational text of
contemporary situationism.6 Mischel reviewed a wide range of previous studies and his own original
research on individual behaviors, including moral behaviors like cheating among students, and
discovered a surprisingly low level of correlation in individual behavior across disparate situations.
Mischel concluded that the then-dominant view in psychology that individual behavior was governed by
measurable personality traits that remained largely stable across time and context was “untenable.”
Instead, Mischel was surprised to find that “the behaviors which are often construed as stable
personality trait indicators actually are highly specific and depend on the details of the evoking
situations.”7
Other researchers quickly built upon Mischel’s work with a series of what would become some
of the most famous experiments in psychology. Arguably, the most prominent among these are the
series of “obedience experiments” conducted by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram. Although the
original experiments were conducted between 1961 and 1962, it was not until the publication of his
book, Obedience to Authority, in 1974, that Milgram explored the broader implications of this research
and connected it to the ongoing debates about personality and situation. Milgram’s experiments
showed that more than two-thirds of subjects would deliver what they believed were dangerous
electrical shocks to an innocent stranger when directed to do so by a scientist. Although Milgram
believed that there must be personality traits or other individual level characteristics that explained why
some subjects obeyed authority and others did not, he was ultimately unable to identify any robust
determinants of variation in obedience. He acknowledged that his “overall reaction was to wonder at
how few correlates there were of obedience and disobedience and how weakly they are related to the
observed behavior.”8 Rather, changes in the structure of the experimental situation (e.g., the physical
proximity of the victim or the presence of “peers” who disobeyed the experimenter’s instructions) had a
much more profound effect on behavior than any of the individual traits Milgram had measured. Today,
many psychologists see the experiments as powerful confirmation of the situationist perspective.9 As
Lee Ross concludes,
5 For an early “situationist” perspective see Hugh Hartshorn and Mark A. May, Studies in the Nature of Character I: Studies in Deceit, (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928). 6 Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968). 7 Walter Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), p. 146. 8 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 208. 9 See Lee D. Ross, “Situationist Perspectives on the Obedience Experiments,” Contemporary Psychology Vol. 33, No. 2 (1988): pp. 101-104; Lee Ross and Richard Nisbet, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social
4
the importance of [Milgram’s] research clearly does not lie in the demonstration that subjects obey authority figures or that conformity pressures excited by peers have an impact. That would be dull, obvious, and scientifically unproductive. Rather, they demonstrate that these variables are important relative to other personal and situational influences that most of us had previously thought to be far more important determinants of behavior.10
The situationist perspective was bolstered by an experiment conducted at Stanford University in
1971 by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo randomly selected psychologically normal, college-age men to play
the roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison that Zimbardo had constructed in the basement of
the psychology department building to study the psychological effects of imprisonment. Although
Zimbardo did not tell the guards how to behave, and physical violence was forbidden, they quickly
began to abuse the prisoners – humiliating them verbally, stripping them naked, forcing them to do
strenuous exercises and exiling them to solitary confinement. The guards’ behavior became so extreme
that Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment after only six of a planned 14 days. Zimbardo
concluded that the simulation had demonstrated “the relative ease with which sadistic behavior could
be elicited from normal non-sadistic people. . . . [T]he pathology observed in this study cannot be
attributed to any pre-existing personality differences of the subjects. Rather, their abnormal social and
personal relations were a product of their transaction with an environment whose norms and
contingencies supported the production of behavior which would be pathological in other settings, but
were ‘appropriate’ in this prison.”11
A third situationist experiment, conducted by John Darley and Daniel Batson in 1971 at
Princeton Theological Seminary, explored the effects of situational pressures on bystanders rather than
perpetrators.12 On the pretext of studying religious education and vocations, Darley and Batson asked
seminary students to walk to a building across campus to record a short lecture. One third of the
students were told that they were running very late and that they would need to hurry to make it to the
Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 52-58; and Phillip Zimbardo, “The Psychology of Evil: A Situationist Perspective on Recruiting Good People to Engage in Anti-Social Acts,” Research in Social Psychology Vol. 11, No. 2 (1995), pp. 125-133. 10 Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 10 (1977), p. 213. 11 Philip Zimbardo et al., “The Psychology of Imprisonment: Privation, Power and Pathology,” in Theory and Research in Abnormal Psychology, edited by David L. Rosenhan and Perry London, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 270-287. 12 John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 27, No. 1 (1973), pp. 100–118.
5
building. One third were told that they were right on time. The final third were told that they were
ahead of schedule but that they should leave immediately anyway and that they could wait a few
minutes once they arrived at their destination. Along the way, Darley and Batson arranged for the
students to pass an actor-confederate slumped over in a hallway in obvious respiratory distress. 63% of
the students who were early for their appointment stopped to help. Only 45% of those who were on
time stopped, however, and just 10% of those who were told they were late stopped. Many students in
the “late” condition literally stepped over the victim in order to pass by. None of the individual
measures of personality or religiosity that Darley and Batson collected proved significant determinates
of helping. Indeed, even subjects who were asked to read the parable of the Good Samaritan to prepare
for their lecture were no more likely to provide help than those who had read a passage on the kinds of
jobs that seminary students might enjoy.
Although each of the three famous experiments described above has attracted significant
criticism, they have been replicated repeatedly in countries around the world (the Milgram experiment
was most recently replicated in 2015 in Poland).13 Dozens of related experiments reaching comparable
conclusions about power of situational pressures have been conducted in subsequent years. Perhaps
even more compellingly, disconcertingly similar events have been documented outside of the
laboratory. In one particularly dismaying example, between 1995 and 2004, police determined that a
man made over 70 phone calls to fast food restaurants around the United States, impersonating a police
officer and asking managers to strip search and sometimes sexually assault employees on the pretext
that they had stolen goods.14 Dozens of managers complied with the voice on the phone. Interviewed
about the crimes later, Philp Zimbardo said the perpetrator “was very skilled in human psychology – he
may have even read about Milgram.”15
13 See Dariusz Doliński et al., “Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? Obedience in the Experimental Paradigm Developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 Years Following the Original Studies,” Social Psychology and Personality Science, Vol. 8 No. 8 (2017), pp. 927-933; Jerry M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist Vol. 64, No. 1 (2009), pp. 1–11; Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science (New York: Praeger, 1986), esp. pp. 67-87; Alan Elms, “Obedience in Retrospect,” Journal of Social Issues Vol. 51, No. 3 (fall 1995; W. H. J. Meeus and Q. A. W. Raaijmakers, “Obedience in Modern Society: The Utrecht Studies,” Journal of Social Issues Vol. 52, No. 3 (1995), pp. 155-175; Kenneth Ring, Kenneth A. Wallston, and Michael Cory, “Mode of Debriefing as a Factor Affecting Subjective Reactions to a Milgram-Type Experiment: An Ethical Inquiry,” Representative Research in Social Psychology Vol. 1 (1970), 67-85; and S. H. Lovibond, M. Adams, and W. G. Adams, “The Effects of Three Experimental Prison Environments on the Behavior of Nonconflict Volunteer Subjects,” Australian Psychologist, Vol. 14 (1979), pp. 273-285. 14 Andrew Wolfson, “A Hoax Most Cruel,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 9, 2005. 15 Andrew Wolfson, “A Hoax Most Cruel,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 9, 2005.
6
Today, the dominant school of thought in psychology is “interactionism,” which, sensibly, sees
behavior as a product of the interaction between individual traits and the external environment. Few
psychologists, however, deny the fundamental insights of these early situationist experiments, which
demonstrated that situations are often stronger predictors of behavior than personality traits. Despite
the mounting evidence of the power of situations to determine behavior, psychologists find that most
people strongly believe in consistent personality traits like honesty, trustworthiness and kindness – and
remain unaware of the powerful effects that situations exert on their own and others’ actions and
attitudes.16 Even when presented with indisputable evidence of the power of situational forces, people
seem to cling to dispositional explanations. In a series of famous experiments, for example, Edward
Jones found that subjects tended to infer that essay writers genuinely believed in the arguments they
forwarded in their essays – even when subjects were told explicitly that the writer’s position had been
assigned randomly by the experimenter.17 In some cases, subjects were just as likely to assume that the
writer believed what he had written when subjects were told the argument has been randomly assigned
as when subjects were explicitly told the writer has been free to choose his or her position.
Most people, in other words, are unswerving “dispositionists.” Indeed, the tendency to
privilege dispositional explanations for behavior is so powerful that psychologists have termed it the
“fundamental attribution error.”18 As a result, people regularly misattribute responsibility for their own
and others’ actions and they make poor predictions about how they and others are likely to behave –
especially in stressful and unfamiliar situations infused with strong social expectations. War is clearly
one such situation.
Situationism in the Study of War and Wartime Atrocities
Can situationism help us understand the behavior of soldiers during war and the perpetrators of
wartime atrocities? Unsurprisingly, the situations facing individuals in times of war are much more
complex and ambiguous than those facing subjects in experiments like Milgram’s, Zimbardo’s or Darley
and Batson’s. Some aspects of wartime situations almost certainly make compliance or by-standing less
likely. Unlike the subjects of Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments, for example, soldiers in war
16 Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, “Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes,” Psychological Review, Vol. 84 No. 3 (1977), pp. 231-259. 17 Edward Jones, American Psychologist, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1979), pp. 107-117 18 Lee Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 10 (1977), pp. 173-220.
7
sometimes must engage in, or at least witness, extreme levels of violence, sometimes at very close
range, with all the blood and terror that entails. And bystanders in war sometimes refuse to help not
just a stranger suffering in a hallway, but look on as friends and neighbors are killed or dragged away for
forced relocation.
Yet, it is easy to overstate these countervailing forces. Even in times of war, most soldiers in war
will never fire their weapon at another human being.19 Increasingly, those who do employ long-range
weapons such as artillery, aircraft, and missiles that separate the shooter from his target such that he
will never witness the true effects of his weapon on his targets. The vast majority of civilians in most
societies at war will never witness any of its violence directly.
Conversely, war generates a number of powerful situational pressures not present in the
psychological experiments described above. These pressures seem likely to supersede individual traits
that might dispose some people to refuse to participate in war or atrocities, let alone to take active
measures to resist war and protect its innocent victims.
First, unlike both soldiers and civilians in times of war, none of the subjects in the situationists’
experiments had any reason to believe they might be entering a situation that might involve harming
another person (or helping a person avoid harm). As participants in what they believed to be routine
academic studies, they were surprised and wholly unprepared for what they encountered. Soldiers, by
contrast, are expressly trained to kill and inured to violence by military organizations that draw on
techniques that have been perfected over thousands of years to ensure compliance with orders.20
Second, although both Milgram and Zimbardo explored the effects of peer pressure, the “peers”
in their studies were actually complete strangers to the subject (sometimes confederates of the
experiment) who just happened to find themselves in the same situation as the subjects. These peers
are manifestly weak facsimiles of the close friends and family members that young men and women
must confront when deciding whether to fight in war and how to conduct themselves if they do.
Third, subjects in the situationists’ experiments understood that the disturbing and stressful
situations into which they had been thrown also were created by strangers whose only authority
stemmed from their positions in respected academic institutions. In war, on the other hand, individuals
know that the decision to go to war is decided upon by national leaders who frequently enjoy
widespread respect and legitimacy by virtue of their high positions. Likewise, orders regarding conduct
19 David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (London: Back Bay Books, 1995). 20 Gwynne Dyer, War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), pp. 102-129.
8
on the battlefield are usually conveyed by commanders who are known personally to soldiers, with
whom they have lived and trained for extended periods, and on whom they depend for their survival in
combat.
Fourth, whereas the subjects of the situationists’ experiments received little or no justification
for their participation beyond the requirements of the experimental exercise, civilians and soldiers in
times of war usually have been subject to years or even generations of implicit or explicit propaganda
and indoctrination designed to reinforce the justness of their own cause, the greatness and value of
their nation, the honor of military service, and the depravity of their adversaries.21
Finally, the strongest sanctions for noncompliance with which Milgram could threaten his
subjects were a series of simple verbal commands that “the experiment requires that you continue” or
“you have no choice, you must go on.”22 Neither Zimbardo nor Darley and Batson gave their subjects
any orders at all. In times of war, of course, orders are ubiquitous and citizens who refuse to serve are
threatened with prison (or worse) and soldiers who refuse to follow orders on the battlefield are
routinely shot.
Given the potent mix of situational forces that defines war, it is not surprising that many
scholars of war and mass atrocities have found that situationist research provides important insights
into the behavior of the soldiers who fight wars and the civilians who finance and support them.
Stanley Milgram’s research took place as America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was just
beginning. While over 60% supported the war in 1965, by 1971 61% were opposed.23 In his 1974 book,
Milgram could not help but wonder why so many young men had been willing to kill and be killed in
such a war. His research, he concluded, implied that motivating participation in war was easier than
many believed. “A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man
with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty.”24 The history of warfare suggests that
Milgram was largely correct. War resistance is exceedingly rare, even in relatively unpopular wars and
even when the penalties for evading service are mild. During the Vietnam War, for example, only 4% of
the 27 million draft age males in the United States are estimated to have been deserters, draft violators
or resistors.25 This was the highest rate of resistance in the history of any U.S. war. Less than 9,000 men
21 Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 22 Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 8. 23 http://news.gallup.com/poll/28099/latest-poll-shows-high-point-opposition-iraq-war.aspx 24 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 6. 25 Lawrence Baskir and William Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation, (New York: Vintage Books,1978), p. ??.
9
were ultimately convicted of draft evasion, but only 3,250 served any time in prison.26 Prison sentences
for those who did serve time ranged from an average of 37 months in 1968 to 17. 5 months in 1973.27
Even deserters typically received just 6 months in prison and a dishonorable discharge.28
In Israel, a movement called “Courage to Refuse” has been collecting the signatures of Israeli
soldiers who are willing to serve in the IDF, but refuse to fight in the occupied territories in a conflict
that they believe have “nothing to do with the security of our country” and serves “the sole purpose of
perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.”29 Although recent polls show that approximately
a third of Israeli Jews believe that settlements in the occupied territories actually hurt Israel’s security
only 623 soldiers have signed the letter between 2002 and 2018 – a fraction of one percent of IDF
membership over that time.30 Again, the penalties for refusing to serve are surprisingly light. Only 280
of the signatories have served any time in prison – with a maximum sentence of only 35 days.31
Most scholars who have studied combat motivation generally agree that, once individuals have
been integrated into military organizations, they are driven more powerfully by small-group dynamics,
primarily the desires to protect fellow soldiers, conform to group expectations, and avoid the
appearance of cowardliness, than by a carefully considered commitment to the justice of the war or its
conduct.32 In their book exploring human motivations for violence, Alan Fiske and Tage Rai argue that,
“on the battlefield soldiers are killing to protect each other – they feel intensely morally committed to
do so, even if they die looking out for each other.”33 Similarly, Gwynne Dyer’s study of men in combat
concludes that although many soldiers “do feel the need for some patriotic or ideological justification
for what they do . . . which nation, which ideology, does not matter: men will fight as well and die as
26 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/vietnam-war-draft-protests.html 27 Ford Foundation, “Amnesty - Ford Foundation Study of Effects of Vietnam on Veterans, Deserters and Evaders,” (1974), p. II-10. https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0067/1562799.pdf 28 Ford Foundation, “Amnesty - Ford Foundation Study of Effects of Vietnam on Veterans, Deserters and Evaders,” (1974), p. II-13. https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0067/1562799.pdf 29 http://www.seruv.org.il/english/combatants_letter.asp 30 In 2013 35% of Israeli Jews said the settlements hurt Israel’s security, while 31% said it helped in 2015 42% said it helped and 30% said it hurt, Pew Research Center, “Israel’s Religiously Divided Society” (March 8, 2016) http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2016/03/Israel-Survey-Full-Report.pdf, p. 185; http://www.seruv.org.il/english/movement.asp 31 http://www.seruv.org.il/english/movement.asp 32 See Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 270-359; Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston: Kluwer, 1982), pp. 167-213; Laqueur, Guerrilla, pp. 272-273; E. A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1948), pp. 280-315; and S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1947). 33 Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 102.
10
bravely for the Khmer Rouge as for ‘God, King, and Country.’ Soldiers are the instruments of politicians
and priests, ideologues and strategists, who may have high moral purposes in mind, but the men down
in the trenches fight for more basic motives.”34
Unfortunately, many of the same situational pressures that seem to motivate soldiers in combat
also appear to motivate their participation in war crimes and mass atrocities. Indeed, scholars who have
studied war crimes frequently refer explicitly to the situationist literature in psychology to help make
sense of the behavior of the perpetrators of these atrocities.35 In Arthur Miller’s review of studies on
the perpetrators of the Holocaust, for example, he observes “a remarkable degree of consensus
regarding the generalizability of the obedience experiments. Clearly they are viewed by many
commentators from a diversity of disciplines and orientations as convincing and meaningful to an
understanding of the Holocaust, and of other instances of what is often referred to as ‘social evil.’”36
Likewise, the historian Donald Bloxham concludes that “the very existence of mass participation in most
genocides shows that the context is generally more important than the disposition and beliefs of the
individual perpetrator, since in the ‘right’ situation so many people of demonstrably different characters
and values participate . . .”37 Although most people find it difficult to accept (precisely as the
fundamental attribution error expects them to), the excuse so often proffered by those of accused of
war crimes – “I was just following orders” – may, in fact, be an valid construal of the motivations of
many perpetrators of mass atrocities.
One of the most compelling applications of situationism to the study of war can be found in the
historian Christopher Browning’s celebrated history of the German “Order Police,” the military police
units tasked with carrying out the extermination of Polish Jews in the early months of the Holocaust,
before the death camps had been constructed. Browning concludes that “Zimbardo’s spectrum of guard
behaviors bears an uncanny resemblance” to the units he studied and that “many of Milgram’s insights
find graphic confirmation in the behavior and testimony of the men” who participated in the killings.38
34 Dyer, War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1985), pp. 104. 35 For a review of studies of perpetrators of mass atrocities see Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 30-65. 36 Arthur G. Miller, The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science (New York: Praeger, 1986), p. 203. 37 D. Bloxham, “The organisation of genocide: perpetration in comparative perspective,” in Jensen and Szejnmann (eds) Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: The Holocaust and its Contexts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p 187. 38 Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 174.
11
Although soldiers in the units he studied were offered the option of not participating in the executions,
Browning found that
80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them – at least initially – were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot. Why? First of all, by breaking ranks, non-shooters were leaving the “dirty work” to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one’s share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one’s comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism – a very uncomfortable prospect within the framework of a tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population, so that the individual had nowhere else to turn for support and social contact.39
Scholars studying the perpetrators of mass atrocities in other cases have reached similar
conclusions. To cite just one example, David Chandler’s history of the Toul Sleng (also known as S-21)
prison where nearly 14,000 Cambodians were tortured and killed under the Khmer Rouge, also
references Milgram and Zimbardo to understand the behavior of the prison guards and interrogators.40
According to Chandler, “what we know about the workers at S-21 points in most cases… to their
ordinariness and banality. Bonded with people like themselves and abjectly respectful of those in
charge, the workers at S-21, like the prisoners, were trapped inside a merciless place and a pitiless
scenario.”41 “Explanations that place the blame for evil entirely on ‘evil people,’” Chandler concludes,
“fail to consider that what all of us share with perpetrators of evil is not a culture, a doctrine, or an
innate tendency to kill but our similarity as human beings and, in particular, our tendencies toward
acculturation and obedience… The implication is that what is permitted, or commanded, however awful,
is usually what occurs; resistance is rarer than compliance and immorality… is often socially
conditioned.”42
Implications of Situationism for the Individualization of War in Ethics and Law
39 Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 184-186. For a further argument stressing the power of situational factors over anti-Semitism, see Jürgen Matthäus, “What about the ‘Ordinary Men’? The German Order Police and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1996), pp. 134-150. 40 David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 147-149. 41 David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 147. 42 David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 155.
12
It was not until the early 1990s that philosophers began to grapple explicitly with the
implications of situationism for ethics.43 The most important early contributions to this conversation
were registered by Gilbert Harman and John Doris.44 Both Harman and Doris argued that insights from
situationist social psychology severely undermined the conception of moral character or moral virtues,
which traces its roots back at least to Aristotle. As Doris put it, “If we took situationism to heart in our
ethical practice, we would revise certain habits of moral-psychological assessment – we would hesitate
to evaluate persons by reference to robust traits or evaluatively consistent personality structures, on the
grounds that these are unreasonable standards to expect actual persons to approximate.”45
In his 2004 book, Doris speculated on how this conclusion might affect our judgments of
individual behavior in times of war. “Despite familiar convictions to the effect that the moral quality of
our lives is somehow ‘up to us’,” he argued, “people’s moral status may to a disquieting degree be
hostage to the vagaries of fortune… Had I lived in Nazi Germany or Rwanda… I might have led a life that
was morally reprehensible, despite the fact that the life I lead now is perhaps no worse than morally
mediocre. There, but for the grace of God, do I.”46 Doris rejects the idea that situationism makes moral
evaluation impossible. However, he argues that situationism does imply that “high intensity situations”
may constitute “excusing conditions” for otherwise seemingly immoral behavior and that we ought to
pay special attention to situations in which the vast majority of people behave similarly – since this may
reflect the influence of powerful but subtle situational forces.47 As I have tried to demonstrate above,
war would seem to be one such situation. Indeed, in a subsequent article on the perpetrators of
wartime atrocities (written with Dominic Murphy) Doris advanced what he acknowledged was an
“unsettling” conclusion. “Perpetrators of atrocity” Doris and Murphy claimed, “typically occupy
excusing conditions and are therefore not morally responsible for their conduct. While nothing justifies
43 For a review of philosophical debates about the implications of situationism see Candace L. Upton, “Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology: The Situationism Debate,” The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 13 (2009), pp. 103–115. 44 Gilbert Harman, “Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 99, No. 1 (1999), pp. 315–331; John M. Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Nous, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1998), pp. 504-530. See also Peter Vranas, “The indeterminacy paradox: Character evaluations and human psychology,” Nous, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1-42. For rebuttals to the situationist critique of virtue ethics see Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,” Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 458–491; and John Sabini and Maury Silver, “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued,” Ethics 115 (2005), pp. 535–562. 45 John M. Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics,” Nous, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1998), pp. 513-514. 46 John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 117. 47 John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 137-138.
13
atrocity, many perpetrators manifest cognitive impairments [most notably, “cognitively degrading
circumstances”] that profoundly degrade their capacity for moral judgment, and such impairments, we
shall argue, preclude the attribution of moral responsibility.”48
Coincidentally, it was not long after moral philosophers like Doris and Harman began to explore
the implications of situationism for ethics that a different group of philosophers reignited an ancient
debate about the ethics and laws of war. These scholars would come to be known as the just war
theory revisionists. Revisionists leveled many critiques against traditional interpretations of just war
theory, but much of the debate has centered on the traditional principle of the moral equality of
combatants. Traditional interpretations of just war theory hold that judgements about the justice of a
war’s cause should remain separate from the conduct of those who fight it. Thus, the theory maintains
that it is possible to wage an unjust war justly and to wage a just war unjustly. Even soldiers who
knowingly volunteer for an unjust war are entitled to the presumption of moral equality as long as they
uphold the jus in bello rules of war. As Michael Walzer, the most prominent proponent of the
traditionalist interpretation of just war theory puts it, “The rules of war apply with equal force to
aggressors and their adversaries… Soldiers fighting for an aggressor state are not themselves criminals:
hence their rights are the same as those of their opponents. Soldiers fighting against an aggressor state
have no license to become criminals: hence they are subject to the same restraints as their
opponents.”49
Revisionists object that this approach to the ethics of war contradicts the ways we think about
violence in contexts outside of war, without a convincing justification for drawing this distinction. As
revisionist scholar Jeff McMahon writes, the moral equality of combatants “has no plausibility outside
the context of war. In contexts other than war, the morality of conflict is almost invariable asymmetric.
Those who are in the right may be permitted to use force and violence but those who are in the wrong
are not.”50 An armed robber, for example, is not permitted the right of self-defense against a
shopkeeper who tries to protect himself and his business from the robber’s use of force.
More importantly, in contexts outside of war, judgements about moral liability to harm are
almost always rendered at the level of the individual, whereas traditional just war theory and much of
the international laws of war define the liability of both soldiers and civilians collectively. In Walzer’s
view, war is a “coercively collectivizing enterprise… it overrides individuality, and it makes the kind of
48 John Doris and Dominic Murphy, “From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007), pp. 26. 49 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977), p. 136. 50 Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 3.
14
attention that we would like to pay to each person’s moral standing impossible…”51 For Walzer (1977,
39), therefore, a soldier “is not a member of a robber band, a willful wrongdoer, but a loyal and
obedient subject and citizen, acting sometimes at great personal risk in a way he thinks is right.”52 Thus,
in traditional just war theory and in the laws of armed conflict, all soldiers on both sides of the war are
deemed liable to attack, regardless of their personal motives or their individual contributions to the war.
Conversely, civilians on both sides are held immune from attack, regardless of whether they play a
major role inciting their nation to initiate the war or organize a protest against it. According to
McMahon,
individual morality has principles that govern the conduct of individuals in their roles as members of collectives and it is a person’s guilt or innocence relative to these principles that is largely determinative of his or her liability for actions taken by the collective. If this is right, then it cannot simply be irrelevant to how an unjust combatant may be treated whether he is morally innocent or guilty for his individual action, even if he acts as an agent of the collective. Similarly, civilian noncombatants may also contribute to the war-related acts of the collective and may not be absolved of all liability for those acts simply by virtue of their noncombatant status.
The insights of situationism clearly reinforce Walzer’s claim that war is a “collectivizing
enterprise.” As we have seen, the pressures of war force most individuals to behave similarly regardless
of their character, their intentions or most other morally relevant individual attributes. This does not
mean, however, that situationism is incompatible with the individualization of war. In principle, it ought
to be possible to examine the moral responsibility of individual soldiers and civilians while still giving due
consideration to the specific situational forces each person experienced during war. It should also be
possible to evaluate whether certain individuals were morally culpable for voluntarily entering into
situations they should have known would generate irresistible pressures to behave unjustly. In practice,
making these kind of evaluations undoubtedly would be difficult, and sometimes probably impossible,
because the effects of situations so often depend on subtle and unforeseen features of the
environment. The situationist experiments are compelling in large part because of their ability to
control away the complexity of the real-world and reveal the dramatic effects that relatively small
variations in the structure of situations exert on human behavior. It is difficult to imagine how these
kinds of considerations could be adequately weighed in a courtroom, let alone in the heat of battle
when many of the most fateful moral decisions in war must be made.
51 Michael Walzer, “Response to McMahan’s Paper,” Philosophia, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2006), pp. 43-45. 52 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977), p. 39.
15
Ironically, even if we could surmount these practical problems, an individualist approach to the
ethics of war that took situationism seriously would probably end up judging most soldiers and civilians
not very differently than if they were judged collectively. If the main reasons why some people fight in
wars and others do not, or why some soldiers perpetrate war crimes and others do not, comes down to
powerful situational factors outside the control of individual soldiers, there would seem to be little basis
for using these behavior to draw important moral distinctions between soldiers. McMahan seems to
recognize this, acknowledging that for “most people it may be more a matter of luck than anything else
that they have not fought in an unjust war. Had they been ordered to by their government, most would
have readily followed their country into an unjust war, as others have done throughout history…”53 But
McMahon concludes that “part of the explanation for this lies in an idea that we share… with most
people in most cultures at all times in history. This is the idea that one does no wrong, or acts
impermissibly, merely by fighting in a war that turns out to be unjust.”54
The situationist perspective, however, suggests that the problem runs much deeper than
McMahon suggests. If situationism is correct, simply convincing people that it is wrong to fight in a war
they believe to be unjust would do relatively little to change behavior. One of the most powerful effects
of the situations that surround war, after all, is to convince people that their participation is, in fact,
moral, or at least that any moral wrong that results is not their fault. As noted above, in most societies
nationalism generates powerful incentives for citizens to believe that their countries are inherently
valuable – and often morally superior to other countries. Combined with the inculcated belief that their
national leaders are legitimate and just, few soldiers seem to question the justice of their cause. As
Fiske and Rai conclude, “people in most cultures and subcultures deem it a moral duty to kill the enemy
– and in many cases soldiers feel that they should kill, enslave, torture, rape, or starve enemy captives or
civilians. Philosophers and religious leaders often exhort men… to fight, extolling the noble virtues of
warfare…”55
Even in those relatively rare instances in which soldiers become convinced that a war is unjust,
other powerful situational pressures apply that encourage compliance. It is important to note that in
the Milgram experiments, most subjects appear to have understood that they were participating in an
unjust act. As Milgram observed, “Many of the people studied in the experiment were in some sense
against what they did to the learner, and many protested even while they obeyed. . . . Some were totally
53 Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 3. 54 Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 3. 55 Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 93. Emphasis original.
16
convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing but could not bring themselves to make an open
break with authority.”56 Fisk and Rai contend that “the foundational morality of organized armies
throughout history and across cultures is simply, ‘Kill whoever you are ordered to kill whenever you are
ordered to kill them, even if you must die trying.’… Soldiers must not make their own private moral
decisions… the duty to obey superiors is military morality.”57
The same mentality is apparent in many participants in war and mass atrocity.58 One Jewish
Holocaust survivor, who worked and lived with German soldiers while serving as an interpreter (under a
disguised identity) for German forces during the invasion of the Soviet Union recalled: “I think that the
whole business of anti-Jewish moves, the business of Jewish extermination, they considered unclean.
The operations against the partisans were not in the same category. For them a confrontation with the
partisans was a battle, a military move. But a move against the Jews was something they might have
experienced as ‘dirty.’”59
To counteract the situational pressures to fight when called upon, therefore, would almost
certainly require much more than simply discrediting the idea that a soldier does no wrong by agreeing
to fight in an unjust war. Rather, it would require dismantling the deep social scaffolding that supports
not only compliance with political and military leaders in times of war, but many other social structures
and institutions that depend on at least some level of moral “outsourcing” and obedience to authority.
Although one aim of the individualization of war is to make the ethics and laws of war more
consistent with the ways that we think about the use of force in contexts outside of war, it is apparent
that the implications of situationism have not been fully incorporated even in those other contexts. As
David Rodin writes, although many have argued that soldiers in unjust wars
are excused by reason of duress or of non-culpable ignorance… these claims do not cohere with our normal standards of liability in criminal law or interpersonal ethics. Although soldiers at war do face tremendous coercive pressures of various kinds, in many cases this pressure falls short of the threat of execution for those who refuse to fight. Even in cases in which a soldier faces death if he or she does not fight, this may not furnish an excuse of wrongful killing because
56 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p.10. Lee D. Ross, “Situationist Perspectives on the Obedience Experiments,” Contemporary Psychology Vol. 33, No. 2 (1988), p. 103. 57 Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 101-102. Emphasis original. 58 Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 59 Quoted in Jürgen Matthäus, “What about the ‘Ordinary Men’? The German Order Police and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (fall 1996), p. 144.
17
duress has not traditionally been recognized as an excuse for wrongful homicide in most jurisdictions.”60
As we have seen, Rodin is correct that most soldiers do comply with orders to fight and kill, even
when the punishments for refusing are much less severe than execution. While Rodin takes this to
mean that there is something wrong with the way we currently judge soldiers in times of wars,
situationism suggests that we have once again underestimated the power of situations and, therefore,
that something may instead be wrong with the way we judge individuals – even in domestic contexts.
The question of how situationism should influence the ways we judge and punish individuals
who engage in unjust wars or atrocities is a difficult one. At one extreme, situationism might seem to
lead to the conclusion that no one – whether in war or in any other context – ought to be held liable for
any of their actions, no matter how abhorrent, since whether or not any particular person engaged in
those activities is only a matter of unlucky circumstances. As noted above, however, most psychologists
today do not content that individual traits have no power over behavior at all. Even among soldiers in
the same units, we often observe a spectrum of behavior, with some soldiers carrying out their orders
reluctantly and shirking whenever possible, while others seem to seek opportunities to engage in
violence and invent new cruelties for their victims.61 Milgram and Zimbardo observed the same
spectrum of behaviors in their experiments. A more moderate interpretation of situationism, therefore,
would simply caution us to take the power of situations seriously when evaluating individual moral
responsibility and avoid the involuntary, but potent tendency to commit the fundamental attribution
error.
In overwhelmingly intense situations like war, this might mean that all but the most extreme
perpetrators – those whose behavior stands out from their peers in the same situations – would
ultimately be judged relatively lightly. How to determine the appropriate punishment for such
individuals is even more difficult because, as Doris and Murphy argue,
Although they are closely connected, the questions of moral responsibility and criminal liability are detachable, and we believe it is in this context [of wartime atrocities] sometimes necessary to detach them, to allow judicial punishment of the most serious offenders, even where they occupy excusing conditions. Unfortunately, this conclusion might be thought no more appealing than exculpation, for imposing criminal liability on those who lack moral responsibility apparently invokes a doctrine of strict liability, and this doctrine has been widely criticized, and
60 David Rodin, “The Moral Inequality of Soldiers.” In Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 51. 61 Benjamin Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
18
reasonably so, by legal theorists. If our conclusion regarding responsibility for atrocity is established, then, an ugly dilemma emerges: we are driven to embrace either exculpation or strict liability.”62
There is, on the other hand, at least one area in which the reckoning with situationism ought to
make moral and legal judgements simpler. While the civilians and rank and file soldiers who find
themselves trapped in the situation of war may be entitled to at least some excuse for their actions, the
military and political leaders who knowingly create those situations have much less recourse to the
situationist defense. Indeed, it might be justified to hold these leaders responsible in some way for the
actions of all those who were foreseeably influenced by the situations they created. This conclusion
might hold even in cases in which leaders did not order their troops to commit atrocities or violate other
jus in bello principles (just as Zimbardo did not order his guards to abuse the prisoners in his mock
prison). By now, it should be reasonably foreseeable that the situation of war will provoke these kinds
of behaviors unless leaders implement extensive measures (probably more extensive than almost any
military organization implements today) to prevent them. If this is correct, then both traditional just
war theory and revisionism may actually underestimate the moral culpability of war leaders both before
and during times of war.
Conclusions
The individualization of war movement has been spurred to a significant degree by its
proponents’ desires to rectify the perceived injustice of the current ethical and legal principles that
govern war. Under current laws and moral theories, soldiers who fight simply to defend themselves and
their homelands from aggression are just as liable to attack as soldiers who enthusiastically join the war
of aggression on the other side. Meanwhile, civilians who goad others into fighting or even to commit
atrocities receive the same protections from attack as civilians who take to the streets to protest an
unjust war. Situationism, however, cautions that adopting laws and principles of individualization that
do not take the power of situational factors adequately into account could risk trading one kind of
injustice for another.
62 John Doris and Dominic Murphy, “From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007), p. 28. See also Judith Lichtenberg, “How to Judge Soldiers Whose Cause is Unjust,” in Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 112-130.
19
As Harman writes, ordinary moral intuitions, which privilege dispositions over situations, often
have “deplorable results, leading to massive misunderstanding of other people, promoting unnecessary
hostility between individuals and groups, distorting discussions of law and public policy”63 Indeed,
evidence from public opinion polls suggests that the public is highly likely to fall victim to the
fundamental attribution error when evaluating the wartime behavior of soldiers. In a survey experiment
conducted with Scott Sagan, for example, we found that Americans were just as likely to judge the
behavior of soldiers in a hypothetical unjust war as unethical when the soldiers were described as
enthusiastic volunteers as when they were described as reluctant conscripts – even though soldiers on
both sides adhered to jus in bello rules.64 More than 56% of subjects supported prison terms for the
soldiers who had volunteered for the unjust war, as did 48% for the conscripts. Revisionists like
McMahan explicitly reject these kinds of punishments.65 Perhaps more disturbingly, 40% of subjects
approved of executing the volunteer soldiers for their participation in the unjust war, as did 22% even
when the soldiers were described as unenthusiastic conscripts.
The risk of embracing a policy of individualism untempered by situationism is not merely that
society might judge and punish soldiers by unreasonable criteria, but also that soldiers might judge
themselves by the same excessive standards. In her interviews with American soldiers about the ethics
of war, Nancy Sherman found that soldiers do “feel morally accountable not just for how they fight but
what they fight for. They feel accountable for their participation in the collective end that defines a
particular war…. Soldiers actually do struggle hard with their individual accountability for participating in
a war of others’ making.”66 Writing about one veteran of the Vietnam war, Sherman writes “because of
the war he fought, he feels contaminated. His assessment of himself, and how he views others
assessing him, are wrapped up with moral luck and a coerced choice.”67 Situationism suggests that this
soldier’s pain and self-doubt are likely symptoms of the fundamental attribution error and that his
efforts and those of the rest of society to individualize his responsibility for participating in the war may
63 Gilbert Harman, “Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 99, No. 1 (1999), p. 330. 64 Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino, “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants,” Unpublished MS (2018). 65 Jeff McMahan, “Rethinking the ‘Just War,’ Part 2.” New York Times, November 12, 2012. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/rethinking-the-just-war-part-2/ (accessed August 30, 2016) 66 Nancy Sherman, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers (New York: WW Norton, 2010), pp. 41-45. 67 Nancy Sherman, The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of our Soldiers (New York: WW Norton, 2010), p. 53.
20
diminish the effort to hold responsible those military and political leaders who created the morally
overpowering situation with which he still struggles.
