Forthcoming in George R. Lucas, Jr. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (Routledge). Draft only - please do not cite without permission Military Culture and War Crimes. Jessica Wolfendale West Virginia University The problem of understanding why war crimes continue to occur and how they might be prevented has long seemed intractable.1 With the development of the field of social psychology over the last 60 years and the resulting debates about the relationship between character, situational influences, and human behavior, a number of theories about why war crimes occur have emerged, along with proposals as to how such crimes might be prevented in the future. In this chapter I discuss a number of recent approaches to war crimes in the field of military ethics, and argue that these approaches are based on fundamental misunderstandings about the causes of war crimes and how they might be prevented. Many of the most common views on war crimes fail to recognize the role that military culture and training play in cultivating the moral framework within which war crimes can come to be seen as not just permissible, but in fact required by military virtues such as duty and honor. Thus approaches to war crimes that emphasize additional character development training, ethics classes, or training in moral deliberation miss the mark because they fail to address the fact that war crimes occur in a context in which such crimes are given meaning by both individual perpetrators and by the social and cultural frameworks within which perpetrators act. In this chapter I will propose an account of war crimes that draws on work in social psychology, anthropology, and moral psychology to elucidate the links between the commission of war crimes, the social- 1
Forthcoming in George R. Lucas, Jr. (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics (Routledge). Draft only - please do not cite without permission cultural framework of military culture and service, and the dispositions of military personnel. This analysis of war crimes raises important questions regarding how military training and culture could be modified to prevent or minimize the occurrence of war crimes. I. Recent Theories of War Crimes In response to a large body of research in social psychology that seems to show that human behavior is explained to a surprising extent by the external situational factors (such as stress, peer pressure, or orders from authority figures) to which an agent is exposed, rather than by the agent's pre-existing stable character traits,2 a number of authors have argued that situationism can explain the continued occurrence of war crimes.3 One consequence of adopting this situationist account of war crimes is that character development classes in military training (which are both common and very popular in military training academies) will be viewed as inefficacious in preventing war crimes since, according to the situationist account, the behavior of military personnel is a product of numerous situational forces (such as combat stress, exposure to dehumanizing ideologies, and obedience to authority) and not the result of a failure