The main purpose of a machine is to obey and follow orders. Whether the machine is to kill or to produce a good, the machine’s job is to follow orders. Like machines, people also have duties that they must accomplish in their lives. People receive these duties and jobs because they have a purpose. Whether the purpose is to make money or to gain respect, the person trying to reach their goal must complete the duties they are given. No matter how brutal and how horrifying the after effects will be, people will have to carry on their duties to achieve their goals. The environment of war is no acceptation. In a state of war, every soldier has one common goal, to win. No matter how brutal the duties are, the soldiers complete the duties to be one step closer to their goal. When accomplishing these duties, personal principles cannot exist. If such principles go before their goal, they will never accomplish their goal. As a result, it would be impossible for personal principles or personal morals to exist in such an environment.
The book “Guests of the Nation” clarifies the fact that morals is not in present in such an environment. No matter how close the relationship of the soldiers and the prisoners had grown, they both had a goal to accomplish. Because of the death of the soldier’s allies, killing the prisoners symbolized revenge. Without revenge, the morale of a battalion would decrease. In the state of war, this could mean the difference of a win or lose. As a result, the soldiers are faced with a dilemma: follow their duties to achieve their goal or follow their morals risking the achievement of the goal. To accomplish the goal of winning the war, all soldiers must put aside their morals and fulfill their duties.
In the story ...
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...se of the squad’s failure. If morals were not an aspect in this war like environment, the soldier would have chosen to not jeopardize his squad and the mission and kill the innocent people.
Morals and personal principles are something that does not belong in a war like environment. People in war have a common goal and morals usually become an obstacle for people that want to reach their common goal. If people want to accomplish their goal, even though it is not in a war like environment, they would have to put aside their morals and focus on the duties that they are given.
Works Cited
Lone Survivor. Dir. Peter Berg. Perf. Mark Wahlberg. Universal Pictures, 2013. Film.
O'Connor, Frank. Guests of the Nation. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Print.
Wanted. Dir. Timur Bekmambetov. Perf. Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, and Morgan
Freeman. Universal Pictures, 2008. Film.
When political leaders frame an unjust war as a morally just war, though, these same soldiers might have second thoughts about their decision to become part of a military machine that is prosecuting an unjust war because their leaders lacked the authority to absolve them from their personal accountability. In this regard, McMahan makes the interesting point that, “What unjust combatants are commanded to do as agents of the state – fight, in an unjust war – is not something that their state, or its leaders, have a claim right to do, or to delegate to others”
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
The United States Army, in its current state, is a profession of arms. In order to be considered a profession, the organization must have an ethical code rooted in values, strong trust with its clients, and be comprised of experts within the trade. These experts are constantly developing the trade for the present and the future and hold the same shared view of their trade culture. The Army currently has an ethical code embodied in the Army Values, which provides guidance to the individual and the organization. These values are universal across the Army, regardless of an individual’s personal background or religious morals.
Each soldier carries many things, both physically and mentally, during times of war and strife. For the war, the United States implements a draft in which young men are drafted and forced to go into the military for the war. Many of these soldiers are young, immature, and escaping adulthood, yet there is one phase of life that cannot be avoided: death. Cross felt responsible for the younger kids’ death because he felt it was his job to protect the innocent.
One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not a book about a superhuman. It is not a story about someone who is weaker and more desperate than everyone else. It is not a tale of greatness, nor is it about extraordinary faults. Instead, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn chose to center his story around Ivan denisovich Shukhov, an average, unnoticeable Russian prisoner.
He attempts to justify his reasoning by saying, “There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—just evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it” (TTTC, 126). Nonetheless, even then, the guilt does not rid itself from his thoughts, and this is the type of realization, ending someone’s life, and witnessing all the gore, is what continually haunts soldier. This is also one of the concepts that overly patriotic people who have never been to war yet indulge themselves in political affairs fail or refuse to
the change in moral of the volunteers and the civilians under pressure after the Tet
In the movie, Saving Private Ryan, directed by Steven Spielberg, we follow a group of men during the D-Day invasion. After their dreadful expedition up Omaha Beach they are glad to even be alive, then they get a mission straight from the top of the Army military chain to risk all of their lives to save one random guy name James Francis Ryan (who's three other brothers have been killed during the D-Day invasion). Even though they think the mission is foobar, their captain tells them, “maybe saving Private Ryan is the one decent thing we'd pull of this whole god-awful mess.” Which in turn helps change their mind set on their journey to save Private Ryan although a couple of their men die in the process. Saving Private Ryan, has lots of meaningful morals such as the important bond between you and your war brothers, standing up as one to fight an evil force, but the most valuable, which stood out the most is no matter what horrible situation you are in, if you could do one action which could change another's whole life for the better, then do it no matter what even if it seems hopeless. The message of helpi...
What does it mean to be your own person? In every aspect of life, people have their own morals and values, but what if the rest of society does not have mutual feelings? Does that mean staying on your own path or choosing the path that society has chosen? When conforming to society, there are always consequences, but when following morals of your own, there are also prices to be paid. The play, A Few Good Men, perfectly demonstrates how following the rest of the society can ruin a person, but it also displays how when one has their own morals, the consequences are foul. The play is about two military men who are being accused of murdering a fellow marine, after being told not to touch him. These two marines go to court, and their lawyers, Kaffee, Jo, and Sam, must hash it out with the military jurors and judge to find out what really happened. It turns out that they were fooled by the head honcho Colonel Jessep. These two marines, Dawson and Downey, were only following their orders, but what if they had not? Would their lives be any better? Probably not, but at least they would have been doing what was moral. In the military, it is especially important to follow orders like a robot, if necessary, but this leads to the demolition of the careers of two stepford marines. In a Few Good Men, conforming to society can ruin your career and honor; having different morals can result in great burdens. However, when a character knows what they believe in, honor will never be lost.
War has always been an essential ingredient in the development of the human race. As a result of the battles fought in ancient times, up until modern warfare, millions of innocent lives have ended as a result of war crimes committed. In the article, “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” Herbert C. Kelman and V.Lee Hamilton shows examples of moral decisions taken by people involved with war-related murders. This article details one of the worse atrocities committed during the Vietnam War in 1968 by the U.S. military: the My Lai Massacre. Through this incident, the question that really calls for psychological analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate , participate in, and condone policies that call for the mass killings of defenseless civilians such as the atrocities committed during the My Lai massacre. What influences these soldiers by applying different psychological theories that have been developed on human behavior.
This work aims to show the ethical issues that surround our justice systems correctional institutions to try and get a better understanding of how moral standards can be brought down in prisons. The issues in this paper will further bring into question the people who guard civilians from the most dangerous and volatile inmates who sit behind bars. The goal here is to determine the underlying issues or morality and justice that seem to be broken within the confines of this prison system. More and more goes into protecting the inmates and the institutions from the employees of the correctional field than ever before. Why is it that correctional officials drop morals and break ethical codes? This paper will focus on the deviance that officers commit, as well as, the deontological and utilitarian side of the actions taken. A look into what can be done to put an end to ethical issues will be assessed also.
...th intense compassion and love for the enemy and wait for the enemy to shoot him down. My contention is that war is impossible when every one follows the principle of “Love they neighbor…” and “service before self”. However, my ethical system does not propagate relinquishing one’s duty. It is possible to imagine a soldier fighting a war as a part of his duty, slaying his enemies even as he continues to love them. This was what Krishna preached in Bhagwadgita to his disciple Arjuna who was horrified at the sight of his kinsmen fighting on the enemy’s side.
Behind every war there is supposed to be a moral—some reason for fighting. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. O’Brien relays to the readers the truth of the Vietnam War through the graphic descriptions of the man that he killed. After killing the man O’Brien was supposed to feel relief, even victory, but instead he feels grief of killing a man that was not what he had expected. O’Brien is supposed to be the winner, but ends up feeling like the loser. Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is vague and illogical because it forces humans into extreme situations that have no obvious solutions.
War affects people differently, depending on the person’s morals and their position in the war, whether it be a soldier, family member, or a civilian. Robert Jordan was not necessarily eager to enter the Spanish Civil War in For Whom The Bell Tolls but he knew that he was needed
...not applicable in reality. This a problem that Jake, in The Sun Also Rises, faces. He does not like his friend group, he is jealous of Cohn and he despises Mike. He stays with them, not out of friendship, but because they share the experience of war. Because of this, the bonds forged have no real value outside of war. In some ways, this brotherhood is detrimental to the soldiers. It follows them for the rest of their life. They can never forget their pain of war. More importantly, they cannot fully accept reality after war because they are surrounded by people stuck in the same absurd world of war. It is hard to extract oneself from this absurd reality if it constantly follows them. The so-called “love” between soldiers allows them to preserve on the battlefield, but it is yet another hypocrisy of war because it maintains the absurd reality that they are trapped in.