Grossman and Ethics

Hey everybody,

So we will be talking about the many interesting things that Grossman has to say about the difficulties and issues of training people to kill. I don't think we will need much prompting for discussion, but I wanted to list some of the main points that make for good back and forth. If you do not have the reading yet, email me and I will get it to you.

Grossman starts his book On Killing by asking why we do not think about the subject of killing. Not talking about it leads us into "The Myth of the Easy Kill": we think that bad guys kill people because they like it and it comes naturally and good guys kill bad guys and feel completely justified in doing so. Unfortunately for both the "bad guys" and "good guys", killing leaves terrible psychological problems in its wake even when we would agree it is justified. Thus, while there are people who kill for kicks and people who kill for good reasons it is not easy for either sort of person in the long run. One is left with the understanding that one has killed and this is in contradiction with one's own wanting to live and preserve life (even if one only cares about one's own life).

He argues that our media does not cause people to kill in itself, but we are "taking the safety off" to a relative degree when we show people movies that portray types of people as simply killers or we play video games. For the rest of the book, he talks about specific factors that in a particular situation help a human mind over the great resistances to killing.

We can see in animals as well as in human cultures that fighting does often result in deaths, but in fact fighting is about posturing and domination. The point is to make the enemy submit, not to kill them off completely (there is a good connection here to Hegel's master/slave dialectic). This means that human beings are much more prone to dominate than to kill. Killing is most often in the service of domination, and not the other way around. We kill in order to dominate, we do not dominate in order to kill.

The history of warfare can be seen as "a history of increasingly more effective mechanisms for enabling and conditioning men to overcome their innate resistance to killing their fellow human beings" (p 13). Grossman details many aspects of this practice.

It is surprising to hear that there are more psychological casualties of war than there are physical casualties, more psychic injury than physical injury. The exhilaration of killing lasts a very short time, but the rationalization and wrestling with the self is often endless. Even in situations where individuals are very well justified in killing, they often hold their psychological wounds to themselves painfully for years. Grossman is an expert at working with such individuals and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

An interesting example and evidence of this is the records that show people who are being bombed by the enemy do not have the level of psychological problems that soldiers do. Soldiers know that they have killed or helped to kill, whereas the population being bombed can always say "I did nothing to deserve this". The one who has killed has a burden that seems to compliment and identify with the enemy's mindset. The most extreme situation is killing the enemy behind enemy lines, where one knows that reasonable human beings would kill you to prevent further killing. This is the most traumatic of situations for the soldier, and so modern combat forces take steps to make this easier and more sustainable.

The "real killers" that one sees as the bad guys in a movie are in fact the 2% of the 2%. 2% of any human population have psychopathic tendencies, and 2% of THAT 2% are hard core killers. We are naive if we think that only the bad guys use these guys. The 2% of the 2% are the "spearhead" soldiers who do the real tough killing, the kind that gives people serious problems. Even this small group have problems, but they can "handle it" much more than the rest of the population. This is a very heart warming thing if you look at it the right way and compare it to what we see in typical action movie plots.

In order to make killing in wartime have less of a psychological impact on soldiers, there are many techniques that modern armies employ. One is the separation of officers (those who order the killing) from the soldiers (those who do the killing). This is a particularly important point to think about considering our theme of Ethics and institutions. Officers are distanced from the humans who are killed by several levels of the chain of command. Soldiers who kill can always say, "I was just following orders". Interestingly, this is similar to how we think of a hand not being guilty for stabbing but the "intention" in the mind being the guilty party.

The farther away one is from a group, the easier it is to kill. The more one identifies with a group, the harder it is to kill its members. Thus, both physical distance (like being in a bomber thousands of feet up) and social distance (like racism) are enabling for killing.

There is much more here, but let us start with this!

Kant vs. Mill on Ethics

Our meeting is two days away, so I wanted to post the basics of Kant and Mill on Ethics. It is a good set of dueling concepts that immediately presents us with the problem of institutions and our reliance on them for our understandings.

Kant believed that Ethics is and should be about principles. The famous example is the "guy with the knife" thought experiment. Let us say that, like Kant, we believe that lying is ALWAYS wrong. Thus, our Ethical principle would be: Never Lie. Let us then say that your doorbell rings, you open the door and your friend runs past you and down into your basement without a word...and then minutes later an angry guy with a knife rings your doorbell and asks if you have seen your friend lately. Kant would argue that one should never lie in any circumstance or Ethics becomes meaningless and relative. According to this view, one should not tell the guy with the knife a lie to misdirect him. You are not obligated to say anything at all (maybe you could just act really scared and shut the door) but you SHOULD NOT say "he went down the street that way" to buy your friend time. Needless to say most people find this view extreme but Kant would argue that Ethics is about principles and standing by them or Ethics becomes meaningless and does not stand in particular for anything at all. Let us call this the rule-based view of Ethics.

Mill believed that Ethics is about maximizing happiness and minimizing pain. He believed that all principles are devices merely to serve this purpose, and so one should follow the principles that work best in a given situation. Thus, for Mill, there are possible circumstances in which one should lie because it results in the best outcome. Many people find this view insufficient for Ethics because one would have no Ethical system at all, though Mill would argue that any Ethical system is for the purpose of making people happy and doing good in the real world. Let us call this the use-based principle of Ethics.

Notice that Kant believes in anchoring Ethics in good beginnings, and Mill believes in anchoring Ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must have correct beginning (principles and good intentions) to be Ethical, regardless of the outcomes. Mill believes that one must have good ends (results and consequences) to be Ethical, regardless of the causes.

Now notice this: many powerful institutions exist in our lives that prescribe rules and describe outcomes. While we should all be people who are reasoning and taking responsibility for our own ideas, we live in a large and complex world and so we take our rules from experts in institutions (science, religion, politics) and we get our descriptions of the outcomes from experts in institutions (media, politics etc). I have seen both sides argue, "but if you are right, then we are at the mercy of institutions". Rule-based Ethics, siding with Kant, worries that institutions will simply tell us what made people happy to suit their own purposes. Use-based Ethics, siding with Mill, worries that institutions will set up rules that suit their own purposes.

So, what do the people think? Which side do you find yourself on, and how does your position reflect your position to particular institutions in your life?

(fight! fight! fight!)

We have our theme and topics after the 2nd Meeting

Our second meeting was nicely productive.

Our theme for the semester will be Ethics and Institutions. At our next meeting we will be discussing dominant viewpoints of Ethics (Nov 6th), including principles (Kant) vs. use (Mill). At the following meeting, we will be discussing institutions and bias (Nov 20th). The topics the group raised all seemed to circle these two themes.

I have opened up the ability to add comments so that anyone can post.

Proposed Topics for Discussion

Here is the run down on the topics proposed. Hopefully at our next meeting we can nail down what issue we will do each week. We can leave some topics for next semester.

Topics for Discussion

Psychology (Child Development & Piaget & Freud, How we think, relationships, mind/body problem)

Culture (Pop Culture, Afrocentrism, Institutions & trustable knowledge, law, the big thinkers of today, Art, Language, putting ideas into action)

Religion (Existence of God, Proofs of God, Asian Religion/Philosophy, Modern Society, Necessary, Good/Bad, meaning of life & existence, Spinoza)

Ethics (Free Will, Freedom of Speech, Utilitarianism, Race Gender & Class, Suicide & Euthanasia)

How much work?

No writing, not a lot of work

Read a few articles (2 or 3) per topic

Move chairs into a circle for better discussion

Our First Meeting

So we have had our first meeting (Friday, October 9th) and discussed what topics and issues we want to examine this semester. Our meetings will be every other Friday at 4 pm in room 315 of Berkeley City College.

The meeting schedule is:

October 23rd
November 6th
November 20th
December 4th
December 18th

I will post scheduled topics for each meeting once this is ironed out with the club at the next meeting (Oct 23).