Historical Parallels

"I was just following orders." Such was the excuse offered by many Nazi military and political underlings later put on trial for their actions during the Second World War. This "Nuremberg defense" was judged then -- and has been repeatedly judged since -- as possessing little if any moral or legal validity; the military academy at West Point, for example, teaches that the obedience necessary to any effective fighting force does NOT mean that an American infantryman must sacrifice his or her own moral code, that soldiers must do whatever their commanders insist, no questions asked. Why should employees of the CIA be held to lesser standards? Yes, those who drafted the policies legitimating waterboarding, prolonged sleep-deprivation, and other practices now deemed immoral, illegal, or both should bear primary culpability for their subsequent implementation. And yes, the fight against terrorism has far more to recommend it -- morally and otherwise -- than an attempt to exterminate an entire people. But to condemn the architects of a given policy while, in effect, condoning the individuals who actually executed that policy seems ethically somewhat dubious: a real-life murderer, after all, may be sentenced to death, while someone who merely plots murder may win many a parlor game centered around killing. If torture is wrong, then anyone who acted as though they believed differently, whether they wielded the thumbscrews themselves or else encouraged others to do so, should be punished. If torture is acceptable (as indeed it may be in certain cases), neither promulgators nor practitioners deserve censure. Unless, of course, like Alfred Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, you believe that the same moral rules need not apply to the same groups of people (e.g., "the leaders" and "the led").