Great pleasure to welcome Jessica, Wolf and Vail, who is no stranger to CCW, although you would think so in 2006.
Yes, it really is. Years ago that this thing was not just a little bad because, you know, when she was here before.
She is now an assistant professor of philosophy at West Virginia University, although she just gone ten years.
So what's the next stage? She is the author of Torture and the Military Profession,
published in 2007 and co-editor of the book On New Wars and New Soldiers Military Etiquette and Military Ethics in the Contemporary World.
And what she's going to talk about today is her new project, which is on war crimes, courage and responsibility.
Thank you. Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you for inviting me to come speak.
It's a really great opportunity for me. I'm looking forward to your comments.
I have a handout for you. So sort of podcasting it around. It's a big.
The one that's going around. I'll just talk a little bit about what this project is.
So what I'll be talking about today is basically a summary of a book project.
So I'm going to give you a sort of potted version of the essential arguments that myself and my colleague, Dr. Matthew Talbot.
I'm currently working on this book project is about a year in at the still at the early stages of it.
And the project is going to address three central questions.
The first question that we're going to look at in this book project is whether war crimes result
from failures of individual character or whether they are the result of extreme situational forces.
The second question is whether those who commit war crimes should be held legally or more and morally responsible for their actions.
And the final question, which I won't address today, but we could talk about in Question Time,
if people are interested in in the topic, is, is how war crimes could be prevented in the future.
So a central argument consists of two main themes.
First of all, we are going to argue that the situation of the account of war crimes is mistaken.
And I'll explain what that is in a moment. And we will offer an alternative dispositional account of war crimes.
And second, we're going to argue for a theory of responsibility under which soldiers may typically be held morally responsible for war crimes,
regardless of whether situational forces or dispositions influence their behaviour.
And by morally responsible, we mean subject to judgements of price and blame.
Just a side note before I start, I'm not going to talk about defining war crimes in this war.
So something we will of course work on in the book.
But for the purpose of the book, I'm just going to attack war crimes, you know, concevoir as defined in international law.
The examples I will use are sort of, I guess, what you might call paradigm examples of war crimes.
I think they're examples which shouldn't cause a controversy over the definition.
Okay. So what I want to do in the first part of the talk is talk a little bit about the situations to counter of war crimes
and our alternative dispositional account in the second part of the talk and talk about a theory of responsibility.
So situation ism is a view this developed in social psychology over a number of years,
according to which human behaviour is most often explained by seemingly minor situational factors such as being in a hurry,
peer pressure or even perhaps smelling a nice scent.
So there's a wide number, a wide range of experiments in social psychology,
experiments in social psychology that are claimed to provide support for this theory of human behaviour.
So the ones that you might be familiar with are standing there. Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority.
Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo.
Solomon Asha's experiments on conformity and Darlene Benson's Good Samaritan experiments.
They do let me know at least 20, if not really.
All right. So a number of philosophers have believed that these experiments cast doubt on the existence of character traits.
So there's a quite a wide literature in philosophy about whether or not and to what degree these social psychology experiments threaten virtue,
ethics, the existence of virtues in the belief that ethical behaviour derives from the position of virtuous character traits.
Now we are not engaging in that debate just to put it to one side.
So but recently a number of philosophers have believed that these experiments are particularly relevant to war crimes,
to explaining why war crimes occur and why seemingly ordinary military personnel can end up performing at such as torture.
So the account that we look at in some detail in our book is offered by John Dauth and Dominic Murphy.
So Darth and Murphy argue that the situation experiments, particularly the Milgram experiments in the Stanford prison experiment.
Suggests a very plausible way of understanding war crimes.
And according to Dorothy Murphy, a few situational forces both on the battlefield and off the battlefield,
undermine what they refer to as soldiers normative competence.
They define normative competence as is quite a complex capacity, enabling its possessor to appreciate ethical considerations,
ascertain information relevant to particular ethical judgements,
and identify behaviour implementing their ethical judgements so no other
competence should be adopted as a capacity involving not as powers of reflection.
So being able to identify ethical considerations, make ethical judgements, but also powers of self-control,
being able to actually regulate your behaviour by your ethical, by your ethical judgements.
And many philosophers believe that normative competence or something very like it
is necessary for a person to be subject to attributions of moral responsibility,
i.e. in order to be held morally responsible for your actions, you have to behave normally competence or a very similar capacity.
So in Dorothy Murphy's view, since, as I argue, normative competence is undermined by battlefield situational forces,
the conclusion is that soldiers are typically not responsible for war crimes.
Now, talk about the responsibility a bit later in more detail. So what are the relevant situational forces?
Well, first of all, they're what we might call heat of battle pressures or battlefield forces.
These would include stress, extreme fatigue, fear, even exposure to extreme noise.
All these factors which a soldier might encounter on the battlefield impair normative competence by undermining basic cognitive functioning.
So obviously, one of the impacts, one of the effects of, for example, extended sleep deprivation is extremely degraded, basic cognitive functioning.
So if you can't think straight. To put it simply, you can't form complex ethical judgements.
Okay. So you're not going to be able to make an act of sophisticated moral judgements under these situational these battlefield situational forces.
Now, we don't necessarily disagree with that time with some caveats.
It also brought later and I think it might be the case, in fact,
there are some battlefield conditions which seriously do undermine soldier's basic cognitive functioning.
But Dorothea murphy actually intended conclusion to apply to all military personnel, not just those who are involved in heated combat situations.
So they all 17 their conclusion to apply to military personnel who are involved in what we're going to call institutional war crimes.
So by that, I mean war crimes either told ongoing institutional policies and practices.
So institutionalised torture is a good example of what I'm talking about.
These crimes take place far away from the heat of battle, the product of ongoing policies and implementation.
I think many genocidal campaigns would also count as institutional war crimes as well.
So it doesn't really say, well, even though a soldier who or military personnel who are involved in, say, institutionalised torture,
they're not exposed to extreme fear and fatigue or noise, but they have been subject to what they call distal pressures.
So Dawson Murphy defined this pressures of circumstances that may profoundly affect military personnel,
beginning a considerable spatial and temporal distance from the point at which atrocity occurs.
So the examples I discussed in their article include basic aspects of military culture and training,
including individuation which has been linked to war crimes,
which this is a process by which the individual is encouraged to identify with the group rather than with their prior self-conception.
Things like group bonding, training in obedience to authority dehumanisation the killing, all these factors of military culture and training.
So Dawson Murphy impairs soldiers normative competence and it also occurs through being exposed to ideologies.
So in some cases, depending, I guess what where you're being kind of course, you know, as a member of the military,
you might be exposed to dehumanising ideologies that are targeting a particular group.
And that's another kind of distal pressure that Dorothy Murphy believes impair soldiers normative competence.
But clearly, those kinds of processes don't impair normative competence in the same way that, for example, extreme stress and fatigue does.
So many being exposed to, say, dehumanising ideology doesn't undermine your basic cognitive functioning.
You can sort of think straight, right, where if that wouldn't be the case, perhaps that extreme fear and fatigue.
So Dorothy Murphy thinks that these kinds of processes impair normative competence,
not by undermining basic community functioning, but by restricting moral reasoning.
So what I mean that is, is that this kind of processes can lead soldiers to have certain beliefs about what is and is not permissible.
So you can see these processes as external forces that kind of push soldiers and other military personnel into the belief that,
for example, it's permissible to kill members of a certain group regardless of whether they are civilians a lot.
That would just be one example. So basically, this is still a prejudice, according to Dorothy Murphy,
restrict the scope of soldiers moral reasoning to such an extent that they will lack
the ability to understand and recognise and act on alternative moral judgements.
And for example, they'll be unable to recognise the moral status of people who have been dehumanised by a racist ideology.
So I, to quote Dorothy Murphy, if a government paramilitary organisation has a policy of systematic rape backed by pervasive racist ideology,
perhaps ordinary soldiers cannot reasonably be expected to determine that such conduct is illegal.
So the claim is that given the way these pressures operate on soldiers,
it's unreasonable to expect soldiers to be able to recognise certain orders as illegal or moral.
Okay. And does that claim it's unreasonable to hold soldiers responsible for acting on both moral judgements?
Okay. So so Dorothy Murphy's central argument is that since soldiers normative confidence is
impaired or undermined by both factors on the battlefield and by these two pressures,
it makes it very difficult for them to appreciate and recognise relevant ethical considerations.
And so soldiers should be typically be excused for war crimes.
They talk about Abu Ghraib, in particular as one example,
where they think the soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib and the abuse should be excused for their actions.
Okay. So we think there are a number of problems with the situation, this account.
Firstly, it fails to explain the great variation in perpetrators motivations and attitudes to their own actions.
So research on perpetrators of war crimes shows a huge variation in both how they explain what they do,
how they justify it, and indeed in the sort of level of degree of enthusiasm they bring to their actions.
Yet on the situation account, it's hard to see how that could be possible.
So if we're all trying to the same way we all get sent to the same deployed to the same combat zone, we're all subject to the same pressures.
And the situations that count would lead us to think that you would all buy roughly the same work.
But that just doesn't seem to be true if you actually look at perpetrator accounts.
So one psychologist and I've just drawing a blank on his name,
unfortunately referred to this as a sort of this small fact that there are some perpetrators who really seem to enjoy what they do and some who don't,
who seem to actually commit their actions with a degree of almost disgust or regret.
So, again, this huge individual differences that's difficult to explain under the situation.
This account and the account fails to explain the manner in which military culture and training actually cultivate dispositions.
And by that I mean sets of beliefs,
attitudes and behaviours that all the how soldiers perceive their actions in response to situations and interpret their own roles within the military.
So for these reasons, we want to offer an alternative account of war crimes, which will describe dispositional accounts or character accounts.
Now we are defining character traits of dispositions in the following manner sets of behaviour and forming dispositions that a set of beliefs,
desires and actions that are stable over time. So in not using so, our definition of character is not the same as in virtue.
It's not. It's not normal in that sense.
Nor is it the view that character is a stable, broad based disposition that's totally independent from the situations in which a person acts.
That will become clear in a moment. Okay. So what we're drawing on is a social cognitive account of personality that was developed by the
psychologist Walter Mitchell and has found support in a number of other work by social psychologist,
including me Ross and Richard Nisbett, as well as philosophers such as Nancy Snow and Daniel Russel.
And this particular social cognitive account is called the Cap Theory of Cognitive Affective Personality System.
So let's give you a very, very brief overview of this theory.
We're not going to be able to do it justice here, but I think [INAUDIBLE] give you the main idea.
So in the cap theory of personality traits, who dispositions are cognitive affective units, okay?
So they involve an interconnected set of beliefs, emotions, behaviours and judgements.
That is a quote from Nancy Snow activated in response to situational variables or internal stimuli and repeated activation
of these sort of interconnected set leads to relatively stable behavioural patterns across different situations.
So I want to give you an example of a particular trait that should make this clear.
This is an example that comes from Nancy Snow's discussion of this theory.
So let's take a try to irritability. So like other couples try it.
So try to be irritability consists in part thoughts, effects and representations of plans, strategies and values.
It stands online and on core, ready to be activated through external stimuli or even through internal stimuli, such as thought through imaginings.
So when the irritable person, for example,
is exposed to certain stimuli is a positive bumped into by someone walking down the street that activates certain kinds of symptoms of belief beliefs.
People also talk left, right, certain kinds of emotions such as annoyance and frustration and also certain kinds of plans.
I'm going to avoid these traits in the future.
This is a very simplistic example, but the basic structure would apply to much more complex traits as well.
And what this happens is that that process of the activating the beliefs and it connects to future plans and goals and certain emotions,
is that that gets activated over different situations so that it might happen, for example, on public transport or in a crowded movie theatre.
So even those are objectively different situations. From the perspective of the irritable person, they're all relevantly similar, right?
They're construing the irritable person, construe those situations as relevant to her, try to be irritability.
Okay, so I hope that gives you some rough idea of what the cut throat is.
But the essential idea is that to understand a person's behaviour, we have to understand how they are interpreting the situation they are in.
It's not enough for us to say, Oh, that's a situation that's relevant to the try to say quality.
We have to ask ourselves, does the person in that situation construe that situation as relevant to, for example, the traffic policy?
So finding the change on a table, we might think, Oh, well,
we'll see whether someone steals the money that's relevant to seeing whether they're out of person.
But to really know that, we need to know whether that person themselves sees that situation that's relevant to the traffic on a stick.
So crucial to the idea of caps trades is the agent's own understanding of what
the situation is and how that situation relates to pre-existing beliefs,
values and goals. Now we think this is the most promising framework to understand why individuals become involved in war crimes.
Okay.
So we believe, for example, that military training and culture shouldn't be seen as being this set of external forces pushing on military personnel,
forcing them into certain kinds of beliefs, which is sort of doctrine, work with you.
Instead, we think military training and culture actually lead to the development of
cutthroats that are really related specifically to military goals and endeavours.
So at the most general level of military training, this is going to be true of pretty much most military forces.
Military training in culture aims to develop certain beliefs in soldiers or military personnel, such as the belief that a particular war is justified.
Or the belief that obedience and loyalty are central to being a good soldier.
Right.
So what military training does is actually engage with the pre-existing beliefs and attitudes of military personnel to develop these kinds of traits.
And the intention is to lead to stable and predictable behavioural patterns in response to specific situations.
Now in relation to war crimes,
we think this approach provides very important insights into how crimes such as torture can come to be construed or understood by military personnel,
not just as permissible, but actually is consistent with military objectives, the central values of the military profession.
So, you know, I've done a lot of research of torture in my career,
and it's quite often that military torturers say what they do is actually part of their role as a good soldier in some cases.
So that's, you know, that incorporating the act of torture into the individual's self-conception is a very important
part of understanding how individuals can come to be involved in something like torture.
So research on the causes of war crimes has found that the war crimes are likely to occur when a number of the following conditions apply.
And I'm drawing here on the work of psychologists and also the International Committee of the Red Cross.
So a specific active policy, such as the policy of torture, has been authorised in Russian law for military personnel authorities.
Those carrying out the policy see their role as requiring obedience to authority.
So they construe their role as requiring that particular phrase.
The intended subject of the policy have been dehumanised.
Their practice has been sanitised so referred to by euphemistic terms such as special treatment,
for example, and the responsibility of those carrying out the practice has been displaced onto others.
So this combination of factors can lead to what Bender calls moral disengagement, where, quote,
those involved disengage their ordinary processes of moral judgement and reflection from the actions they are performing.
So they no longer see those actions as wrong and or they no longer see themselves as responsible for any wrongdoing that might be occurring.
So this is a process of cognitive restructuring with the inventor of the phrase,
and he sees it as one of the most powerful set of psychological mechanisms for disengaging moral control.
Now, what's relevant to us, of course, is that these factors that I've described above all involve cultivating specific beliefs,
attitudes and emotions regarding this specific practice being authorised.
So, you know, I think we can't understand perpetrator behaviour without reference to perpetrators beliefs, goals and self conceptions.
And that's something that we miss out on if we apply the fairly simplistic situationist approach that Dawson Murphy described.
And what this insight can provide us is the recognition that perpetrators aim to reconciling their behaviour
with their particular pre-existing goals and values and self-conception and that of the individual.
Perpetrating Hepatitis Y of integrating their behaviour with their self-conception then informs how they carry out their actions.
So I have a quote here, which I think illustrates it quite nicely.
So a Brazilian torturer interviewed, interviewed by the sociologist Martha Huggins explained his actions as follows.
He said, I don't use violence outside the standard of my conscience as a human being.
I'm a conscientious professional. I know what to do and when to do it.
Now, this quote suggests we don't have a lot of information about this man.
But it suggests that this particular perpetrator construed his actions as being a legitimate exercise of his professional duty,
as was part of his role as a good soldier and is consistent with his self-conception as a decent man, a good person, like a good professional.
So that good self-conception no doubt influenced how he actually carried out his role in the torture.
In contrast to, for example, perhaps a torture, he viewed torture as being a form of punishment for people who were scum.
So that second torturer, who's always hypothetical in this case,
would probably carry out his duties in a very different way than a professional torturer.
So perpetrators of war crimes are what, like all of us, really, what the anthropologist Alexander Hinton called meaning makers who,
quote, comprehend and construct meaning out of their social lives.
So we ignore this fact.
This will lead to a failure to understand the differences in the motivations and attitudes that kind of explain at least partially,
how and why individuals become perpetrators of war crimes. So what I want to do now is turn to the question of responsibility.
So there are actually at least two arguments for excusing war criminals.
So the first argument is the argument that Dawson Murphy put forward, which is what I'm going to call the impaired moral capacity of you.
If a person who has impaired moral capacity undermine confidence, commits an action, it's unreasonable to hold them morally responsible.
But even if we don't agree with Dawson in every situation with the character,
even if we think we take a dispositional view of war crimes, which is we argue for that doesn't actually necessarily mean that.
DAWSON If you're wrong in terms of soldiers moral responsibility,
and this is because another argument for excusing war criminals is based on lack of control over character.
So this view would hold that look, even if the disposition of you is correct, you know,
military personnel can't control really the disposition going to develop through military training.
And so it seems unfair, unreasonable to blame them for actions that result from dispositions cultivated in a way over which they had no control.
So the problem with these two accounts are as follows.
The problem with the lack of control over character account is that it's going to
have much broader implications and merely the question of sorts of war crimes.
Most of us have very little control over the kind of dispositions we develop in our lives.
So dispositions might be affected by our upbringing, by our family, by our culture, by many things that are outside our control.
So if we can't be held responsible for actions that result from character traits over which we couldn't control,
then it's going to mean that most of us are not responsible most of the time.
The problem with the impaired capacity account is that while we actually agree that
in some cases impaired cognitive degradation can act as an excusing condition,
we disagree with Dawson Murphy's view that restricted moral reasoning acts as an excuse and condition.
And one reason why we disagree with it is that it would have implication that we really
have to excuse pretty much most people who believe what they're doing is right.
So that's not just going to be against cases that I've talked about,
but also many of the senior Nazis genuinely believe that what they were doing was right.
And perhaps, according to Dawson Murphy,
it's unreasonable for us to expect them to have formed alternative moral beliefs given the circumstances in which they acted.
So we're going to have to excuse that. We're going to have to excuse committed racists, in some cases being brought up in Alabama in the 1930s.
You know, as a white person, you probably would unavoidably come to believe very racist beliefs and make very racist moral judgements.
So under this view, we can't blame you because there was no way for you to form alternative moral judgements.
The other reason why we think it's problematic is that it has implications for the kind of attitudes that victims of war crimes can reasonably hold.
So both these arguments for excusing war criminals have, as a result,
the claim that victims of war crimes cannot reasonably blame or feel resentful towards those people who harm them.
So the victims perspective is something that we want to bring back into the question about responsibility.
Okay. So what we want to offer as an alternative account is what is sometimes being called a quality or a real account.
That's a little bit misleading, but it'll take to the moment. So.
Our approach to assessing more responsibility focuses on when and under what conditions.
It is reasonable to be right to blame or praise agents for their actions.
So an agent is praiseworthy or blameworthy if she is an appropriate target of a variety for a variety of moral responses,
such as you might be familiar with Dawson's work and reactive attitudes.
The idea here that you are responsible if it's reasonable for me to feel certain kind of attitudes towards you, so perhaps to feel gratitude,
that would be the case in which you are praiseworthy or to feel resentment if you've done something bad for me, to me.
So in the context of war crimes, we're interested in whether perpetrators are responsible in the sense of being open
or legitimate subject to negative responses from them on the part of victims.
Responses that constitute moral blame. So is it reasonable for the victim to blame the perpetrator?
That's the central question we're asking here.
And we think the kind of soldiers that Darren Murphy talk about who have been subjected to distil pressures and so forth.
Soldiers who commit atrocities but regard their behaviours permissible.
We think they are morally responsible in that sense, regardless of how they came to hold the particular moral beliefs that they hold.
So, you know, in our view a wrongdoer who unavoidably regards her behaviour as permissible
so who couldn't reasonably have formed any kind of alternative moral belief.
Is not for that reason, an illegitimate target of emotions like resentment that characterised what it is to blame someone.
So one way to think about this is to look at some cases where we do think someone should be excused from responsibility or from moral blame.
So some central varieties of moral excuse work will operate by showing that the agent
didn't have an objectionable quality of will toward those affected by her actions.
So cases were her actions were not, for example, motivated by malice.
Contempt would be through God. So is it a war crime example?
Suppose a soldier who's fighting an unjust war just simply the circumstance about, you know, just what an unjust war sold to thwarting unjust war.
He inadvertently targeted the civilians, but he mistakenly believes that the civilian is a lawful target and is not to blame for that mistake.
So he's not probably ignorant of the fact that the target is, in fact a civilian.
He genuinely thought it was a soldier, a legitimate target, who had good reason to believe that you can't blame him for getting it wrong.
But he kills a civilian anyway. Now, I think all things being equal,
it's reasonable to think that the soldier's action does not reflect a belief that civilians life is morally insignificant.
So in that case, a soldier's action does not reflect or display contempt or indifference or disregard to the life of the civilian.
And this is because the soldier didn't know he was targeting a civilian.
So in that sense, a soldier is what you might call an unwitting wrongdoer.
And it would be reasonable not to blame Rice.
But if we go back to the torture I quoted from earlier, that torture does not seem to regard what he's doing as being objectionable.
He seems to think that what he's doing is perfectly consistent with being a professional.
So in one sense, and he's also an unwitting wrongdoer because he genuinely believes that he's doing the right thing.
Okay. But in this case, and unlike the soldier who accidentally killed a civilian, not accidentally, but mistakenly killed a civilian,
it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that the torture his behaviour reflects quality of will toward those he tortures,
such as contempt or disregard or indifference to their welfare.
Now, this doesn't mean that the torture is consciously thinking.
I have contempt for my victims or anything like that.
It's sufficient, in our view, that the torturer acted on reasons that he endorsed, that he believed were good reasons.
So, for example, he believes that torture was necessary to protect the state and that his actions reflected an attitude that treats the victim,
the interests of his victims, with the best indifference.
So the attitudes that we're ascribing to this torture are objectionable in a sense that his victims have reason to object to them.
So here, appealing not just to the I mean, a victim of the game, the the family,
the civilian who's mistakenly too about the small molecule, anger and blame toward the soldier of killing.
And we would understand that that's a reasonable response given the emotional distress.
But we would also think on one level that once I understand the circumstances, I should no longer feel those feelings.
Once I understand it was an accident, the soldier who killed a civilian really, genuinely thought it was a legitimate target.
I can't be blind for the ignorance we would expect in that case that the family, that civilians who would,
you know, eventually have to realise that flying was inappropriate in that case.
I mean, it's easy, for example, if someone bumps into you by accident.
You know, at first you might be angry and then you realise it was an accident.
And then you go, okay, well, it's not reasonable for me to blame you anymore.
Right. But under Dawson Murphy's view, the torture of the victim is supposed to be the same thing as the family of the civilian mistakenly killed.
The torture victim is supposed to say, Well, look, of course, you know,
given that you just tortured me, I do feel a bit upset and angry and resentful.
But actually, it's unreasonable for me to hold these beliefs because, you know, your normative competence is impaired.
You're not responsible. And to us, that's totally unacceptable, as you know.
That's I of thinking about the victim's perspective here.
So I do think in that case, it's reasonable for the victim to object to the torture, his behaviour, to say the torture,
his behaviour is being now inconsistent with the status of the person and that would be true even if the
torture victim was so broken down by torture that they're no longer able to feel any kind of emotion at all.
We would think on their behalf that it would be reasonable for the torture victim to feel resentment and to blame the torture.
So, you know, the torturer has mistaken beliefs about the permissibility of what he's doing,
and maybe he's not even responsible for those mistaken beliefs.
But that doesn't undermine his flight worthiness and our account.
It doesn't make attitudes like resentment inappropriate on behalf on the part of the victim.
And, you know, to take the opposing view is to insist that the torture victims will spread blame
because her torture believes that it's permissible to treat her as as as he does.
And that fails to show the victim insufficient respect from all of you.
It requires her to treat her own beliefs about her moral standing that, you know,
her belief that it's wrong for her to be tortured as subservient, subservient to the torture, it's torturous.
So it's as if under oath and murky through and seeming to be used to torture victims in some sense,
adopt the tortured moral perspective and say, yes, okay, you're not to blame.
You know, I can't feel resentment here. And that, again, seems an unacceptable conclusion of our view.
So what that is under argue for more responsibility is not how someone comes to have these particular moral judgements,
whether it's by situational forces or by military training or by dispositions,
but the content of those attitudes and how they're expressed through the agent's behaviour.
Okay. So a wind up, they're always going to talk a little bit about a case study in relation to Haditha, but I think I'll leave it there.
I put the club to the question very much the.