[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[david buchanan]

[Arlo asked] (edited slightly)
Has there been any order from a commanding officer that an American soldier 
should not have obeyed?

[Platt replied]
In battle, no.

[Ben asked]
...Platt if I might ask you to weigh in on whether you consider some 
historical military orders were moral.  I ask about these examples--all of 
which are sore spots in American history--not because I hate America, but 
because I think they're difficult/interesting to assess...

[dmb butts in]
Am I the only one who notices the 800 pound gorrilla in this room? I mean 
the Bush worked with Senate Republicans all last week to work out a deal on 
torture legislation. If the House goes along with the deal, the President 
will be allowed to "interpret" the Geneva conventions as he sees fit and he 
will be immune to prosecution in any such cases. Does anyone remember the 
photos of naked prisioners stacked in pyramids? Does anyone remember that a 
number of prisioners have been tortured to death, that captured soldiers 
have had fragile glass objects shoved up their...

I mean, I hardly think we need to invent hypothetical scenarios or draw 
examples from the wars of history. Let's see if Platt would defend the 
orders that led to these current horrors. Let's ask him if its moral to 
order an interrogator to penetrate a man or stack of bunch of them for 
photos. Let's ask him it he'd follow such an order. I realize this all 
sounds hyperbolic, but I'm not making this stuff up.

Does anybody think such behavior is acceptable? Isn't it true that Saddam's 
torture chambers were cited repeatedly in the march to war against him? And 
isn't it true that a recent UN report said that there is more torture going 
on there now than before the war? If we're gonna talk about the morality of 
military orders and the problem of blind obedience, today's headlines 
provide the perfect example, don't you think?

[Arlo said]
Blind obedience to social structures invariably leads to immoral behavior

[Ben replied]
This is still in my mind the meat of this discussion.  I find myself 
disagreeing with this position. ...What it does is add one additional step 
(ie one extra independent thinker) into every decision-making process. ...

[dmb chimes in]
The only problem I have with Arlo's assertion is that the word "invariably" 
leaves no room for exceptions. Its possible for such a blindly obedient 
person to be fortunate enough to get perfectly moral orders, for example. 
But I really don't see how anyone can disagree with the idea that we ought 
not obey immoral orders. Isn't that a slam-dunk no-brainer? Isn't that the 
central lesson of the Nuremburg trials? I'm absolutely horrified by people 
who think its okay to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. (130,000 in 
Iraq so far and they continue to die at the rate of 3,000 per month.) I'm 
totally creeped out that Arlo's assertions on this topic have been met with 
anything other than various degrees of agreement. As I see it, the USA's 
main problem right now can be measured by the number of citizens who are 
willing to go along with the NeoCon death cult that currently occupies Iraq 
and the White House.

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