Abstract
Since Dan Baum published his interview with Carl Cranston in 2004, I have been reading the following passage to students in my various philosophy classes and asking them to try to interpret it:
“We killed a lot of people,” he said as we ate. Later, Carl and his men had to establish roadblocks, which was notoriously dangerous duty. “We started out being nice,” Carl said. “We had little talking cards to help us communicate. We’d put up signs in Arabic saying ‘Stop.’ We’d say, ‘Ishta, ishta,’ which means ‘Go away.’” But people would approach with white flags in their hands and then whip out AK-47s or rocket-propelled grenades. So Carl’s group adopted a play-it-safe policy: if a driver ignored the signs and the warnings and came within thirty metres of a roadblock, the Americans opened fire. “That’s why nobody in our whole company got killed,” he said. … “You’re not supposed to fire warning shots, but we did,” Carl said. “And still some people wouldn’t stop.” He went on, “A couple of times — more than a couple — it was women and children in the car. I don’t know why they didn’t stop.” Carl’s squad didn’t tow away the cars containing dead people. “You can’t go near it,” he said. “It might be full of explosives. You just leave it.” He and his men would remain at their posts along side the carnage. “Nothing else you can do,” he said.1
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Notes
See Jeff McMahan, “Torture and Methodology in Moral Philosophy,” in Scott Anderson and Martha Nussbaum (eds), Torture, Law, and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), currently available at http://www.jeffersonmc-mahan.com/publications/, accessed June 28, 2013, p. 3: “The main reason I mention this inaugural appearance of the case is to call attention to its impeccable pedigree. Walzer is notoriously averse to the use of unrealistic hypothetical examples in philosophy. The subtitle of his classic work on just war theory is ‘A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations.’”
On the “practice of prosecuting animals,” which “was not confined to any individual country but was widespread, and persisted until as late as 1906 in one Swiss case,” see Simon Brooman and Debbie Legge, Law Relating to Animals (London: Cavendish Publishing Limited, 1997), pp. 34–38.
On “alterity relations,” or how our “quasi-love relationship [with technology] reveals its quasi-hate underside as well,” see Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 97–108.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2001), pp. 3e-4e: “The chil dren are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others. […] But if the ostensive teaching has this effect, — am I to say that it effects an understanding of the word? Don’t you understand the call ‘Slab!’ if you act upon it in such-and- such a way? — Doubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; but only together with a particular training. With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding. […] And the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of much of the use of words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language- game.’”
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23–24 [1103a-1104a]: “… virtue of character (ēthos) is a result of habituation (ethos), for which reason it has acquired its name through a slight variation on ‘ethos.’ From this it is clear that none of the virtues of character arises in us by nature. For nothing natural can be made to behave differently by habituation. […] So virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation. […] In a word, then, like states arise from like activities. This is why we must give a certain character to our activities, since it is on the differences between them that the resulting states depend.
So it is not unimportant how we are habituated from our early days; indeed it makes a huge difference — or rather all the difference.” See also M. F. Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 74–75.
Martin Cook, The Moral Warrior: Ethics and Service in the U. S. Military (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 64.
See Anthony Hartle, Moral Issues in Military Decision Making (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989), pp. 2–3.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009), p. 153.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1962), pp. 253–254.
See for example Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Nadelson describes his own wartime experiences as well as those of the many veterans he treated while serving as a psychiatrist at a veterans’ hospital. This book is meant to be more than a contribution to the literature of military psychiatry, it is also intended to help the public understand what war (specifically the Vietnam War) has done to veterans and help veterans to be better understood by the public they left behind and are now trying to rejoin. A major recurring theme throughout this work is that of the difficulty veterans had in dealing with the pleasure that they experienced during war. While for some this became an addiction that drove them to seek out new ways — such as going back into the military, starting fights, or using drugs — to experience that pleasure once more, for others this became a source of guilt.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), p. 93: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
Though Derrida has a different understanding of the phrase than how I am using it here, see Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 111.
J. Glenn Gray, “Understanding Violence Philosophically,” in On Understanding Violence Philosophically and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970), p. 17.
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Gertz, N. (2014). A World Without Responsibility. In: The Philosophy of War and Exile. Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137351227_3
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