Table Of Content

War Crimes War Crimes Causes, Excuses, and Blame Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Talbert, Matthew, author. Title: War crimes : causes, excuses, and blame / Matthew Talbert & Jessica Wolfendale. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008363 (print) | LCCN 2018034386 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190675882 (updf) | ISBN 9780190675899 (epub) | ISBN 9780190675905 (online content) | ISBN 9780190675875 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: War and crime. | War crimes. Classification: LCC HV6189 (ebook) | LCC HV6189 .T35 2018 (print) | DDC 364.1/38—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008363 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America This book is dedicated to our mentors and friends, John Martin Fischer, Jeanette Kennett, and Gary Watson. CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi A Note on Authorship xiii Introduction 1 1. What are war crimes? 2 2. Outline 3 CHAPTER 1 Explaining Behavior: The Person or the Situation? 9 1. The situationist experimental tradition 11 1.1 Solomon Asch 11 1.2 Stanley Milgram 12 1.3 John Darley and Daniel Batson 14 2. Philosophical situationism 16 3. Responses to philosophical situationism 19 4. The principle of construal 22 5. Conclusion 24 CHAPTER 2 Situationism and War Crimes 25 1. Situationist accounts of war crimes 26 1.1 Paul Roth’s situationist explanation of the Holocaust 27 1.2 Philip Zimbardo’s situationism 30 1.3 John Doris and Dominic Murphy’s account 33 1.3.1 Situational pressures on the battlefield 35 1.3.2 Distal pressures 37 1.3.3 Distal pressures, military training, and military culture 38 1.3.3.A Obedience to authority and learning to kill 38 1.3.3.B Group bonding 41 1.3.3.C Ideology 41 2. Applying the situationist account 42 2.1 My Lai 43 2.2 Abu Ghraib 44 2.3 Haditha 45 3. Conclusion 46 CHAPTER 3 A Dispositional Account of War Crimes 49 1. What’s wrong with the situationist account? 51 2. A dispositional account of war crimes 53 2.1 Morality as socially articulated 55 2.2 The creation of war crimes: ideology and social narratives 59 2.3 CAPS theory: understanding individual perpetrators 60 2.4 Character traits in CAPS theory 61 2.5 Comparing CAPS and situationism 63 2.6 Explaining perpetrator behavior 65 3. Conclusion 67 CHAPTER 4 Excusing Perpetrators 69 1. What is moral responsibility? 71 2. Situationism and moral responsibility 73 3. Normative competence and moral responsibility 75 4. Normative competence and war crimes 77 5. Circumstantial and constitutive moral luck 81 6. Conclusion 87 CHAPTER 5 Blaming Perpetrators 89 1. Excuses 91 2. Ignorance as an excuse for war crimes 92 3. War crimes and moral justifications 94 4. War crimes and exemptions 98 5. Ill will and excuses 101 viii | Contents 6. Moral luck 103 7. The victim’s perspective 105 8. Conclusion 109 CHAPTER 6 Hard Cases 111 1. Child soldiers 112 1.1 International law and policy 112 1.2 Characteristics of the child soldier 113 1.3 The passive victim model 115 1.4 Child soldiers’ capacity for agency and moral responsibility 117 1.5 Concluding thoughts on child soldiers 122 2. Causally complex cases 124 2.1 Remote weaponry 124 2.2 Causal contributions and outcomes 128 2.3 Kutz’s account of responsibility and collective action 129 2.4 The Dresden case 130 2.5 The supply chain 134 3. Conclusion 136 CHAPTER 7 Punishing and Preventing War Crimes 139 1. The superior orders defense 140 1.1 The duress interpretation 142 1.2 The “reasonable mistake” interpretation 143 1.3 The motive argument 146 2. Preventing war crimes 149 2.1 Current approaches to military ethics training 149 2.2 A new approach to preventing war crimes 151 Bibliography 155 Index 165 Contents | ix