soldiers' abuses and societal accountability

One of the main moral critiques that has been brought up about torture is the dehumanizing effect it has on the victim as well as on the torturer. Torture purposively treats human beings as if they are not human beings, and in doing so disregards the fundamental human dignity implied in any recognition of universal human rights. If dehumanization is at its core a violation of human rights though, it seems like torture is just one of many actions that accomplish this, while the scope of responsibility for these actions should be examined as well.

The military seems to have an ever increasing list of abuses that fit the description of disrespecting the human dignity of other human beings. At the same time, though, it is important to consider where the responsibility for these abuses rest, and how far back it goes. For example, in having a standing, professional military we as a society at least tacitly accept the fact that there are citizens in our country who we pay to kill other human beings. Furthermore, after training and equipping this military, these soldiers are sent out protect the interests of the U.S. by sending them into situations and conditions where they may come to disregard the basic human dignity and well-being of others with whom they interact. When soldiers do snap, mistreating, torturing, or killing the innocent populations that they are among, it is often portrayed as the isolated and abusive tendencies of specific individuals. We want to punish these individuals for what they have done to innocent human beings, acting as if they were individually responsible. After allowing, and in some cases even demanding, soldiers’ involvement in the necessarily dehumanizing conditions of war, though, it seems a shallow appreciation of responsibility to argue that those soldiers who disregard the human dignity of others are the sole persons at fault. Taking this stance disregards the fact that it is in part the fault of society for putting them in these situations, and consequently perhaps part the fault of society for choosing to subject its own citizens to conditions where their appreciation of human dignity has been so worn down as to allow dehumanizing crimes at their hands to happen in the first place.

As a result, after seeing pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, reading accounts of soldiers throwing frozen water bottles at children, or hearing about the illegal detentions and illegal killings of innocent civilians, one response should be sorrow for the people who have been harmed in this way by soldiers, another should be sadness or anger that U.S. soldiers could treat other humans in these ways, while still another should be pity and guilt that the soldiers have been trained in such as way, and put in such conditions, that these types of actions would even be considered possible. They not only deal out dehumanizing actions by disrespecting the dignity of other human beings, but also have been put into situations where they have themselves suffered dehumanization, put into states lacking the characteristic empathy and respect for others that we consider normal. While they may be individually responsible for their actions, it should be a disconcerting question for the rest of the civilian population as to what extent soldiers have been conditioned to conduct these abuses due to the conditions they have been required to live and fight in.

We train and pay our military to kill other people, an action that is certain to have dehumanizing effects both in the way that soldiers treat their opponents, in the way that soldiers see themselves, and their ability to reintegrate into society upon returning. Just blaming soldiers for their abuses, seems to be a serious throwing off of societal responsibility, as it does not recognize the fact that we as a society are responsible for the decision to train fellow citizens to fight in wars that are dehumanizing, and that might lead normal citizens and human beings to treat others in morally unjustifiable ways. While we should feel sorrow for the abused, I think that sorrow should also be felt for the abusers when it is in part the responsibility of society for placing them in situations that numb their respect for human dignity and allow for abuses to happen in the first place. The extent to which that society labels the atrocities committed at soldiers hands as merely the fault of individuals and not as perhaps indicative of larger problems with the dehumanizing nature of the conflicts or of their training, is the extent to which society rejects the responsibility it has to respect the basic human dignity of its own citizens and soldiers.