Thursday, May 19, 2016
Suppressing Moral Instinct
In the "Good or Evil" documentary that we watched a few weeks ago, there was a section that talked about how marine recruits are trained to kill in a time of war. The challenge in this issue is how to train someone so that their adjustment back to civilian life after a time of war is a smooth transition. Old ways of training involved using hate and a subhuman approach that caused the recruits to view the enemy as crude and animal-like. This was meant to make killing easier. But this causes all ethical rules to be ignored and makes life after war very hard because this is something that works directly against moral instinct. The new method that they talked about tried to work with moral instinct. For humans, this instinct is to protect. The new mentality that was formed as result of this is that killing the enemy is protecting and defending life. The also talked about training being very repetitive so that killing motions become ingrained into muscle memory. I understand the motivation behind wanting to have ex-marines be able to function in society after a time of war and I get why they would use this type of approach, but I just don't think it would work. I think that especially in a one on one situation this mindset of protecting life wouldn't work because it would just be considered self defense since there is only oneself to protect. Bottom line, killing is killing and it takes a little bit of moral instinct out of people when they kill. So would these "ethical warriors" be more effective killers and ultimately stay human after a time of war, or is this just another failed approach? Any other thoughts?
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I can understand your points, but there is so much more. In times of war soldiers can kill because they were trained to do that, but after the war is when the soldiers start to develop PTSD and unnatural responses to normal things, such as taking cover when hearing a car backfire. It can take an extreme emotional and mental toll on soldiers to perform in heat of battle and to go through all the training before hand. It can be very difficult for them to retain their human-ness after long periods of war.
ReplyDeleteI believe we are still a far way out from properly incorporating soldiers back into everyday life, since, as you mentioned, it is against our moral instincts to kill. Once that is breached, then it'll be easier for other morals to slide, which can build up in a person. Regarding the protection approach, while this may work on the battlefield, it could cloud judgement of good and back when returning to society, leading to many poor choices.
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