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!