"Just following orders"
- Thread starter SkellgrimOrDave
- Start date
Fuck that shit, if someone gave me the means to kill someone else, ordered me to do so against my will and/or code of morals and ethics under the threat of KILLING ME for failure to comply, I'd just go AWOL, or, if the person giving the order is nearby, turn my weapons on them.XMark said:
If I get killed in the process, well, no big loss. I was bound to die of old age eventually, and at least this way I don't have to suffer through years of incontinence and senility.
Why are we fighting when we have perfectly good test results? How many times in your life had you made actions you didnt even think about, like putting a leg after the other?
Milgram's experiment is an example that should seal this argument, and Im surprised it even erupted in the first place. You hardly think when you are told to do something. You just do it. After you run for half a year and follow the officers orders, get training in firearma and realize your new job, you just do your job most of the time. Your job being doing what your superiors tell you, though there are exceptions when you are expected to refuae. Only you can identify those instances.
Milgram's experiment is an example that should seal this argument, and Im surprised it even erupted in the first place. You hardly think when you are told to do something. You just do it. After you run for half a year and follow the officers orders, get training in firearma and realize your new job, you just do your job most of the time. Your job being doing what your superiors tell you, though there are exceptions when you are expected to refuae. Only you can identify those instances.
"I've been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again."
Everyone needs to take responsibility for their actions: the ones being ordered and the ones doing the ordering. Now, I'm not saying that everyone will, and I fully understand that sometimes those being ordered are being misled (whether by omission or willfully), but that doesn't remove the fact that someone did something; it does however mitigate it some and throw more blame on the order-er, but in the end it's far too easy for orders to come in and all blame to be dispersed by the words of whoever happened the be the schlub who was the final destination of the order and any kind of punishment to be lost in the gloom of back-tracking where orders came from.
On the other hand I can understand the idea behind it since nobody asks questions or tries to understand reasons for things. Example time: Ex-Soldier wants to get a job, but has to put on his resume or application or whatever that he received a dishonorable discharge for insubordination or dereliction of duties or some such (don't bother me with the exact details of what can constitute a dishonorable discharge in your or any military because you are not omniscient and I'm sure it happens in some ways you don't think it can happen somewhere anyways). Next to nobody's gonna ask the specifics of it from him and those that bother to call up his old superior in the military aren't likely to get an exact answer unless it is something like, "Mr. Ex-Soldier was a douche and was always lazing around, not following orders." This doesn't matter if he wasn't painting rocks while on General Detail or whatever, or if he didn't shoot someone holding a hostage when ordered because he didn't think he avoid the hostage.
Honestly I find it more important that both the order giver and taker assess beforehand what they should do, "Is this order the right thing to do?" If the answer is no to any of those then the order giver is essentially evil and the order taker is sociopathic or desensitized to the point of ethical numbness. Which, sadly, is frequently a relatively desirable quality in militaries (another being able to hide that).
This is all philosophical and academic anyways since none of that kind of garbage is going to change anyways.
Everyone needs to take responsibility for their actions: the ones being ordered and the ones doing the ordering. Now, I'm not saying that everyone will, and I fully understand that sometimes those being ordered are being misled (whether by omission or willfully), but that doesn't remove the fact that someone did something; it does however mitigate it some and throw more blame on the order-er, but in the end it's far too easy for orders to come in and all blame to be dispersed by the words of whoever happened the be the schlub who was the final destination of the order and any kind of punishment to be lost in the gloom of back-tracking where orders came from.
On the other hand I can understand the idea behind it since nobody asks questions or tries to understand reasons for things. Example time: Ex-Soldier wants to get a job, but has to put on his resume or application or whatever that he received a dishonorable discharge for insubordination or dereliction of duties or some such (don't bother me with the exact details of what can constitute a dishonorable discharge in your or any military because you are not omniscient and I'm sure it happens in some ways you don't think it can happen somewhere anyways). Next to nobody's gonna ask the specifics of it from him and those that bother to call up his old superior in the military aren't likely to get an exact answer unless it is something like, "Mr. Ex-Soldier was a douche and was always lazing around, not following orders." This doesn't matter if he wasn't painting rocks while on General Detail or whatever, or if he didn't shoot someone holding a hostage when ordered because he didn't think he avoid the hostage.
Honestly I find it more important that both the order giver and taker assess beforehand what they should do, "Is this order the right thing to do?" If the answer is no to any of those then the order giver is essentially evil and the order taker is sociopathic or desensitized to the point of ethical numbness. Which, sadly, is frequently a relatively desirable quality in militaries (another being able to hide that).
This is all philosophical and academic anyways since none of that kind of garbage is going to change anyways.
I disagree. The choice was completely logical, reasonable and moral at the time - but now that youre no longer drunk, or now that youre in nurnburg being tried for war crimes, you dont see it the same way with the beer vision, or nazi vision, turned off.DVS BSTrD said:
Well, you could look at it this way. If you're ordered to kill someone, and the importance of the order, for any reason, outweighs the life of the other person, then that explanation could be valid. It's not a good explanation, mind you, but it is an applicable one. It can also be used to justify doing something heinous (With a feeling of remorse, if you didn't care, you jut don't care), but I'd save it for a situation in which one just didn't care.
I disagree. The choice was completely logical, reasonable and moral at the time - but now that youre no longer drunk, or now that youre in nurnburg being tried for war crimes, you dont see it the same way with the beer vision, or nazi vision, turned off.DVS BSTrD said:
No you haven't. You think you have, but until you are actually put in those circumstances, you will have no idea what kind of pressure is on you, how your thoughts and fears will affect your cognitive ability, or how the very fact of actually being faced with the circumstances in question will change the way you think about it. Any number of freshmen in philosophy class faced with the question of smothering a baby to save the rest of the family in Nazi Germany will view their answer as self-evident and a no-brainer. But to be actually faced with that is radically different experience than simply being faced with the dillema in class. You can conceptualize smothering that baby easily enough and justify it as for the greater good, and it is similarly easy to imagine your refusal to cross that line and keep the baby alive so you don't become the monster you're hiding from, but imagination alone does not put the gravity of the situation in proper perspective. You are not faced with the fear of discovery, nor the pleading glances of your terrified kin, nor are you faced with the actuality of being the one who has to end the life of a helpless child.DVS BSTrD said:
It's easy enough to presuppose your actions, but it's folly to believe that there is no difference between concept and practice. Until you thoroughly understand the situation in question, you cannot say that you know how you'll react. You may hold true to your original position, or the reality of the situation may well paralyze you in a state of indecision, or force you to act contrary to your original thoughts. Your decision is not made until you are actually faced with it. Until such a time, all you have is how you hope you'll have the conviction to act.
I think the only time 'I was following orders' isn't an acceptable excuse ever is when the orders followed are so clearly heinous/war crimes (the only time I can really think of when this was the case is the Nazis during the Nuremberg Trials. I can't remember if this applied to all Nazis, or just the high ranking officers [I'm inclined to say it's the latter]).BOOM headshot65 said:
Otherwise, I think it's usually acceptable, since it's follow orders or face trial and possible dishonorable discharge (In the book Generation Kill they had a fine example of this. A lieutenant disobeyed orders from a Captain that would have killed several men, and as a result was put under investigation and faced a possible trial, even though he saved the lives of many men [I'm a little sketchy on the finer details, been a while since I last read it]).
To put it simply, its pretty much like your boss asking you to come in on Sunday which was your schedueled day off. Its hard to say "no" because you need the money.
I always saw this as something used by cops or military personel and its no different. A cop or person in the military need money and need to do their job, their bosses give them a objective and they do it. They need the money, similar to the person above who would have liked to have sunday off but agreed since he needs money.
"I'm just doing my job" is just another excuse, and, if anything, it is the equal of "I need to do my job, sir, so move aside."
I always saw this as something used by cops or military personel and its no different. A cop or person in the military need money and need to do their job, their bosses give them a objective and they do it. They need the money, similar to the person above who would have liked to have sunday off but agreed since he needs money.
"I'm just doing my job" is just another excuse, and, if anything, it is the equal of "I need to do my job, sir, so move aside."
A captured German SS commander a man named Hoess was tried and asked why he commited genocide. After the war the man realized what his actions where. When asked if he thought they deserved it he replied, "Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occured to us- and besides, it was something already taken for granted that the jews were to blame for everything ..... we just never heard anything else. it was not just newspapers like the Stuermer but it was everything we ever heard. Even our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect germany from the jews.... it only started to occur to me after the collapse that maybe it was not quite right, after i heard what everybody was saying..... We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking about that never the thought of disobeying an order would simply never occured to anybody and somebody else would have done just as well if i hadn't.... You can be sure that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and the smell of continual burning- but Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the neccssity and i really never gave it much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necesity." He was later tried and executed in a polish court in 1947
In fact even the higer ups of germany's war machine were horrified by what they saw. I quote from the book, "According to Hoess they were all struck by the horror of it. 'Some who had previously spoken the most loudly about the neccesity for this extermination fell silent once they actually seen the' final solution of the jewish question.' I was repeatedly asked how i and my men could go on watching these operations and how i and my men could stand it."
If anyone is interested in losing faith in humanityt the book is Weird history 101 by John Richard Stephens.
In fact even the higer ups of germany's war machine were horrified by what they saw. I quote from the book, "According to Hoess they were all struck by the horror of it. 'Some who had previously spoken the most loudly about the neccesity for this extermination fell silent once they actually seen the' final solution of the jewish question.' I was repeatedly asked how i and my men could go on watching these operations and how i and my men could stand it."
If anyone is interested in losing faith in humanityt the book is Weird history 101 by John Richard Stephens.
You have no context in your question. I take this as an invitation to hold you in utter contempt, but I won't treat you as though I am.SkellgrimOrDave said:
In answer to your question, yes, it does hold weight. A man who chooses without prompting to commit an action is obviously more responsible for the consequences of that action than someone who chooses to because they have been directed to by an authority figure. To what degree we hold the man who commits the action on orders less responsible depends on what he has done: The Nazis who committed the crimes we attribute with the camps cannot be given an excuse because of the magnitude of their act. We as a society view the genocide and torture of those peoples victimized by the camps and their wardens as heinous crimes against humanity that any moral being has an obligation to protest always, and prevent when possible. A National Guardsman who has been assigned to block access to a path, redirecting you to one you find less convenient, is following his orders. He may not know why you must be inconvenienced. He may feel your inconvenience is not warranted by anything currently going on. But he has to obey these orders to block this path, because his superiors have informed him that there is a need for it to be blocked. He may know why they require this path blocked, or he may not. He does not need to know. He is standing in the way of your quickest path to the smoking area. He is following orders, as he should.
I despise this phrase. "Just following orders" is a defence used to justify weakness, to shift blame onto someone else. Somewhere along the way YOU decided to obey without questioning, to follow orders that go against your morals, ethics, or wishes. Whether it was done consciously (under duress) or unconsciously (lack of will to do otherwise), it is still your own personal failure. You simply didn't have the strength, the willpower to rise, *think*, and decide.
The weak will always follow the orders of the strong (the perceived "authority"), this is the way of the world. You may spout all you want about equality of all people, but the facts speak for themselves. There will be those who rule, who have the strength of will to follow their own wishes and (moral, ethical, personal) rules and others, who are too weak to resist and are condemned to a pathetic existence of blind obedience. I learned this through personal experience, I was raised as Catholic for the first ten or eleven years of my life, before I told my parents shove that shit where it belongs, so I know what blind obedience means all too well. And my verdict remains: never again.
What I'm basically saying is that anyone who uses the aforementioned phrase to defend his or her actions, should be mericelessly punished. Not exactly for what was done, but for being too weak to act as an independent and intelligent being.
The weak will always follow the orders of the strong (the perceived "authority"), this is the way of the world. You may spout all you want about equality of all people, but the facts speak for themselves. There will be those who rule, who have the strength of will to follow their own wishes and (moral, ethical, personal) rules and others, who are too weak to resist and are condemned to a pathetic existence of blind obedience. I learned this through personal experience, I was raised as Catholic for the first ten or eleven years of my life, before I told my parents shove that shit where it belongs, so I know what blind obedience means all too well. And my verdict remains: never again.
What I'm basically saying is that anyone who uses the aforementioned phrase to defend his or her actions, should be mericelessly punished. Not exactly for what was done, but for being too weak to act as an independent and intelligent being.
It's not a side issue, it directly addresses your statement above about how people choose to become tools.Mortai Gravesend said:
We're discussing a concept, not a specific circumstance.
The fact that it does not relate specifically to what you had in mind is fundamentally irrelevant, given that said absolutely nothing to limit the scope of your statements.
I did however; because I knew that somebody would be so narrow of view as to assume modern day U.S. as the sum and total of everything; they incidentally hold a relative minority in ordering atrocities compared to others.
So what? If it's not a first world issue, it's not a issue?
Made up? The former was the Nazi punishment for treason, as latter... believe it or not the Nazi's are not and were not the worst offenders and executing a family for treason is rather a common traditional punishment. Ancient china's Nine familial exterminations, if you want a specific example.
You'd condemn your family to death to avoid killing some person you don't know? Which won't save them by the way, because the guy next to you will have the sense to pull the trigger.
If, in the unlikely circumstances, you're put in such a position, and manage to maintain your incredibly vocal convection's; the sight of you and your families corpse's hung on a wall will only reinforce my own outlook.