Morality of Total War

[Qwerty 42]

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I've dug through the archives, and I haven't been able to find anything regarding the subject of the morality of the practice of total war. I have a paper coming up regarding President Lincoln and morality, and a few points of contention exist, but I thought to bring up this one for discussion. Either this discussion has yet to take place or the solution is blindingly obvious, in which case I would still like to hear it.

In 1864 General Sherman burnt Atlanta, Georgia to the ground, and shortly thereafter began a campaign of total war that would carry him from Atlanta to Savannah, and then from there through South Carolina. The question that I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on is whether this (or, indirectly, any total war) can be considered an acceptable action during wartime.

One post that I did find in the archives was Darth Wong commenting that war is by nature immoral, and that actions in war are simply more or less immoral. While I believe this to be true, I could not think of a topic title that would fit better.

[Xisiqomelir]

I think it depends on the value that you attach to the lives of the enemy. If you see them as humans, the same as yourself, then you will restrict your hostilities towards their combatants and their infrastructure. If you don't see them as human like yourself, you will then see NBC weapons, genocide etc as ethical.

[CmdrWilkens]

Total War, in general, is difficult to rationalize as acceptable even within the framework of death and destruciton that is war. However I would add these points in defense of why it may be used.

1) War, in general, is justifiable only in the sense that the desired outcome results in some greater good than not fighting would have produced. As a more modern for instance few would argue that not fighting Hitler was unjustified, at the very least the ending of the Holocaust and the raping of Russian would tell us that some greater positive came from fighting than from sitting back and accepting his aggressive actions.

2) As a clarification one needs the above to engage in offensive warfare. Fighting solely to defend yourself is related to the idea of self defense and so long as it remains strictly defensive in all aspects (i.e. not bombing your neighbor to keep him from attacking you) but is solely limited to repelling actual attacks then the justificaiton from point 1) isn't as neccessarry. Therefore what I should more properly have said is that offensive war is only justified when some greater good can be done or some greater evil prevented by actively engaging one's opponent.

3) Once we accept that both war is justified and that it is evil we come to one simple conclusion; every effort should be made to ensure it is as bloodless as possible. Despite all else homes and farms can be rebuilt but human life once taken cannot be. Also the caveat would apply to the point that actions which destroy property can still destroy people's lives if the shock is too great for them to recover.

4) The addendum to point 3 is that only those actively engaging in resistance should be harmed if at all possible. Killing those who do not actively engage you is very much in the same category as murder even within the confines of war.

Now with the four caveats above there is a case ( I don't know whether weak or strong) to be made for total war in the circumstance of the American Civil War. With regards to points 1 and 2 the preservation of functioning democracy is an iffy issue at best as the South did attempt some form of this governance even if it remained much more restrictive than the North and less viable for a myriad of reasons, still outright rebellion against legal authority must have justificaiton and the South lacks much here. That said a much stronger case merges if one is to state the ending of human slavery in the south is the goal (and mroeover the enfranchisement of those individuals). From a moral standpoint I find little distance between rape and slavery in the sense that in both cases a person with power owns the body of another against their will. Slavery reamins almost more offensive in that it is perpetuated across generational lines while rape, horrid as it is, remains a singular act.

Thus we have justification for the war as a mroal crusade how then can wwe possibly justify total war? The answer lies with time and blood. By 1864 it was clear that nothing short of total defeat would render the more rebelious Southern states amenable to an end to fighting. Total War presented Sherman and Lincoln with the option to, as quickly as possible, terminate the war. Their reasoning as is mine here remains that the longer the war proceeded and fighting continued the death toll would turn progressively more gruesome. The only way to avoid this was to shorten the conflict by any means available. Sherman proposed his actions with the idea of breaking the back of the Cnfederacy and thus ensuring a swifter close of events (and moreover one which did not result in years of partisan fighting afterwards as the total defeat would render opposition mute). It isn't much but its something.

[AdmiralKanos]

As per Cmdrwilkens' post above, a utilitarian ethics argument would involve showing that the amount of harm produced by "total war" is less than the amount of harm produced by other possible courses of action.

Other ethical systems would frown on such practices. Most religious ethical systems nominally condemn such behaviour nowadays, although they did not always do so (look at the Old Testament). Character-based ethics systems (in which the morality of an action depends on what it says about the character of the person committing it) would also most likely frown on such behaviour. Pure human rights-based ethics systems really allow no room for such tactics.

[Lord Woodlouse]

I think it boils down largely to whether it actually works or not. There have been mixed results throughout history, sometimes unrestricted warfare has beaten groups into submission with arguably less loss of life if they had not. Other times such attempts have only garnered a stronger sense of resistance.

I'd say mostly you can't tell if it's more or less ethical until after the fact, when you pick up the pieces and see what the consequences of your actions are, and even then it might be impossible to know how things would have gone had actions been more or less restricted otherwise.

Of course there's also the intent thing that got me into so much trouble last time (I personally regard a General who destroys a city in hopes of gaining a surrender from the nation that owns that city, aiming to prevent further loss of life is more ethical than one who destroys a city simply because he hates the people who live in it. Though again, that does not make either action inherently good and the other bad, I think it's more a matter of shades of bad).

[Darth Wong]

Of course there's also the intent thing that got me into so much trouble last time (I personally regard a General who destroys a city in hopes of gaining a surrender from the nation that owns that city, aiming to prevent further loss of life is more ethical than one who destroys a city simply because he hates the people who live in it. Though again, that does not make either action inherently good and the other bad, I think it's more a matter of shades of bad).

That's also a misrepresentation of the argument that got you in trouble last time, where you argued that the general who killed ten times as many innocent people might be less morally bad if his long-term "intent" was good and you ignore how he planned to get there.

[Elfdart]

In 1864 General Sherman burnt Atlanta, Georgia to the ground, and shortly thereafter began a campaign of total war that would carry him from Atlanta to Savannah, and then from there through South Carolina. The question that I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on is whether this (or, indirectly, any total war) can be considered an acceptable action during wartime.

Atlanta, like most confederate cities that were burned, was put to the torch by the retreating Confederate Army to deny its use to the Union, especially the ammunition stores and warehouses full of cotton. The Rebels made sure to burn anything that might be of use to the Union Army that couldn't be carried away along every path of advance they could. That's why so many places were burned even though the Union Army didn't go to those places until after they were torched.

[Lord Woodlouse]

Of course there's also the intent thing that got me into so much trouble last time (I personally regard a General who destroys a city in hopes of gaining a surrender from the nation that owns that city, aiming to prevent further loss of life is more ethical than one who destroys a city simply because he hates the people who live in it. Though again, that does not make either action inherently good and the other bad, I think it's more a matter of shades of bad).

That's also a misrepresentation of the argument that got you in trouble last time, where you argued that the general who killed ten times as many innocent people might be less morally bad if his long-term "intent" was good and you ignore how he planned to get there.

I would an appreciate a quote of myself where I said as much, because I honestly don't recollect doing so.

[Darth Wong]

Of course there's also the intent thing that got me into so much trouble last time (I personally regard a General who destroys a city in hopes of gaining a surrender from the nation that owns that city, aiming to prevent further loss of life is more ethical than one who destroys a city simply because he hates the people who live in it. Though again, that does not make either action inherently good and the other bad, I think it's more a matter of shades of bad).

That's also a misrepresentation of the argument that got you in trouble last time, where you argued that the general who killed ten times as many innocent people might be less morally bad if his long-term "intent" was good and you ignore how he planned to get there.

I would an appreciate a quote of myself where I said as much, because I honestly don't recollect doing so.

Ah, so you decided to totally ignore the thread subject, which did involve a 10x casualty ratio? Do I need to remind you that it was about the Lebanon situation?

[Lord Woodlouse]

Ah, so you decided to totally ignore the thread subject, which did involve a 10x casualty ratio? Do I need to remind you that it was about the Lebanon situation?

The thread subject was Is It Right To Ever Support Terrorism?

My response to you that started the whole thing made no specific mention of the Lebanon situation, and the Lebanon situation was at no point on my mind while in debate.