Forthcoming in Christian Miller (ed), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015) Draft only - please do not cite without permission War Crimes: Causes, Excuses, and Blame Matthew Talbert & Jessica Wolfendale Abstract: Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that military personnel typically aren't responsible for war crimes because situational factors such as battlefield stress and military training undermine their capacity to recognize morally relevant features of their environment, and thus they should be excused for their wrongdoing. In this chapter we challenge this conclusion and demonstrate that this account is inadequate as an explanation of war crimes and a theory of responsibility. Drawing on social cognitivist accounts of personality, we show how military training instills values, beliefs, and emotions in soldiers that inform their uses of violence in ways that can contribute to war crimes. Even though military personnel can't fully control the dispositions they develop through military training, we argue that perpetrators of war crimes are responsible for their behavior if their actions express morally objectionable attitudes that justify their victims in blaming them. Our account of responsibility thereby respects the perspective of victims' perspective in a way neglected by many competing accounts of responsibility. Key words: war crimes, responsibility, character, situationism, blame Introduction In this chapter we address the following questions: Do war crimes result primarily from failures of character or from situational influences, and are those who commit war crimes morally responsible for their actions? In response to the first question, we argue that a certain type of situationist account of war crimes is mistaken, and we offer an alternative dispositional account of war crimes. In response to the second question, we argue in favor of a theory of 1
Forthcoming in Christian Miller (ed), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015) Draft only - please do not cite without permission responsibility under which military personnel may be held morally responsible for war crimes in most cases regardless of whether situational forces or dispositions influenced their behavior. 1. Situationism, War Crimes, and Responsibility A large body of experimental research in social psychology is thought to support situationism:2 the view that human behavior is explained to a surprising extent by the situational factors to which an agent is exposed, rather than by the agent's pre-existing temporally stable and cross-situationally consistent character traits. One of the striking findings of these experiments is that seemingly minor situational factors appear to disproportionately influence behavior in situations where we would expect even weak character traits to have a much stronger influence. For example, in Stanley Milgram's famous experiments on destructive obedience, the experimenters were able to persuade normal adults to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful shocks to another person even when that person demanded to be released from the experiment.3 In another famous experiment, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues placed willing, "normal, healthy American college students" (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo 1973, 89) in a simulated prison