he is causing to others, who ponders and justifies the motivations and intentions prompting his decisions, who is aware of his position, power, and privilege in relation to others, and who wonders if what he is doing is ultimately making the world a worse or better place. You’ve given all of that ethical work and moral contemplation up. And by doing so, you have become functionally amoral, simply obeying the will of another, causing pain and suffering one day, joy and healing the next—and all through no decision or choice of your own, but merely as one who follows the orders of another. You have willingly opted to take your own inner moral compass and, while perhaps not completely smashing it to pieces, you have plastered a thick portrait of Sergeant Rex across its face, so that you can no longer read its inner needle’s ethical calibrations. All you now read is the will of Sergeant Rex. And that is not being moral.
In fact, it’s just the opposite.
If children defer to a more powerful and more experienced authority for moral guidance, that is all well and good, at least sometimes. Usually, they have no choice, either because they are too young, too inexperienced, or too vulnerable to do anything else. But as adults, if we simply defer to a higher, more powerful authority—be it a boss, a sergeant, a senator, a teacher, a parent, a judge, etc.—when navigating morally precarious situations, then we are irresponsibly relieving ourselves of doing the difficult work of moral deliberation. Taking such a deferential route is a negligent stymieing and snuffing out of the ethical ability that distinguishes human nature and culture. It’s a cowardly flight from figuring out for ourselves what we ought to do. And the consequences of such ethical abdication/moral cowardice can be devastating.
Charlie Company
Hundreds of thousands of nineteen-year-old Americans were in Vietnam in 1968, and some of them ended up in a unit of the Americal Division’s 11th Light Infantry Brigade named Charlie Company. And on March 16, 1968, the men of Charlie Company—who comprised a typical cross-section of American youth—attacked a civilian village and, in the course of about four hours, deliberately murdered around five hundred men, women, and children in cold blood. Many of the adults killed were elderly. Many of the victims—both adults and children—were raped before being shot. Many of the victims were maimed and tormented as well. In short, the American soldiers of Charlie Company engaged in the dictionary definition of immoral, unethical behavior: purposefully brutalizing, assaulting, raping, and killing innocent people.1
Why did they do this? How could they do this? There were multiple background factors at play, to be sure. For instance, the young men of Charlie Company had been rigorously trained to kill; they had internalized ongoing racist tropes that painted the Vietnamese as less than human, they had heard rumors that the Viet Cong used women and children as booby traps, and they had been taught that Communism was an evil that was their job to eradicate. Additionally, in the weeks prior to March 16, the platoon had come under sporadic enemy fire, which resulted in wounded flesh and unnerved bones, and in the days immediately leading up to March 16, firefights with the Viet Cong had resulted in the death of five members of Charlie Company. So the men were on edge, to say the least.
Whether you wish to regard the above details as rationalizations, excuses, or simply explanatory, contextual information is up to you. But above and beyond such matters, and what is relevant for our discussion here, is the fact that the wanton slaughter at My Lai ensued after orders were given to kill. The young men who tortured and massacred entire families were directly ordered to kill by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina. As one member of Charlie Company recalled: “The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village . . . it was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners. The order that was given was to kill everyone in the village . . . it was quite clear that no one was to be spared in that village.”2
Twenty other members of Charlie Company recounted the same thing: that the night before March 16, Captain Medina had gathered them all together and was unambiguous in his commanded expectation: a full slaughter. As Private James Flynn remembered: “Someone asked, ‘Are we supposed to kill women and children?’ and Medina replied, ‘Kill everything that moves.’”3
The following day, the men of Charlie Company complied. They ruthlessly, savagely carried out Medina’s orders. Not all of them, however. A handful refused. For example, Michael Bernhardt, George Garza, and Harry Stanley chose not to participate in the killing; as Harry Stanley explained, “We had orders, but . . . ordering me to shoot down innocent people, that’s not an order—that’s craziness to me, you know. And so I don’t feel like I have to obey that.”4 But these men were the notable exceptions. The humane few. The heroically deviant. Most of the soldiers in Charlie Company killed. Or raped and then killed.
One of the hands-on ringleaders of the massacre at My Lai, Lieutenant William Calley, not only aggressively and repeatedly ordered those below him in rank to kill, but he participated in much of the killing himself; at one point during the hours of carnage, a soldier, Paul Meadlo, was guarding a few dozen cowering villagers when Lieutenant Calley approached him and ordered that he kill them all; when Meadlo hesitated, Calley began shooting the people himself, with Meadlo then joining in. Calley killed many more that day: babies, children, women, the elderly. At his trial, in 1970, Calley—who was pardoned for his crimes by President Nixon—put this forth in his defense:
I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified as the same, and that’s the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.5
What is so remarkable about Calley’s defense is that it stands in direct violation of Nuremberg Principle IV, which states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” This ethical and legal principle—crafted some twenty years prior to the massacre at My Lai, during the post-Holocaust trials of Nazis who had participated in the systematic extermination of millions of Jews—makes clear that “I was just following orders” is not a valid or reasonable defense in the wake of committing any unlawful crime against humanity. These Nuremberg Principles, created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, were promulgated not only to help define and hopefully prevent war crimes and crimes against humanity, but to clearly declare that as humans, we all have the ability and responsibility to determine what it means to cause unnecessary harm to innocent victims, and we all have the ability and responsibility to desist from such actions. In short, merely obeying the commands of an authority figure is no excuse for committing rape and murder. Not legally, and certainly not ethically.
Moral Outsourcing
It all boils down to the unavoidable reality of choice. When someone tells us to do something, we always have a choice as to whether or not to comply. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was emphatic on this point: while we generally do not get to choose the contextual circumstances of our lives—that is, the governments, institutions, people, culture, and laws that we must contend with—we all, nonetheless, are perpetually free, as individuals, to choose how we will respond to the immediate impositions of those contextual circumstances.6 We can say no, we can say yes—whatever our conscience dictates—and then act accordingly. Sure, there will inevitably be consequences to our choices; it’s not as if we are free to choose without repercussions. If we choose to disobey our parents, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our government, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our commanding
