| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Policemen’s and Soldiers’ Morality
At the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war-criminals, it was correctly decided that “I was just doing my job” is not a legitimiate excuse for committing immoral acts. Yet this is the exact same excuse that soliders and police officers all over the world use to justify their actions. “Our job is not to make or question the law, our job is to enforce the law!” say cops. True, they are in the business of law-enforcement. Meaning, they are required to abandon their morals so they can blindly, slavishly enforce whatever laws politicians pass, no matter irrational, immoral, idiotic, or non-sensical those laws happen to be.
If a police officer pulls over a vehicle and discovers a pound of marijuana in the trunk of the car, the officer will probably arrest the driver. The officer knows perfectly well that the person he’s arresting will likely spend years in prison with rapists, armed robbers, murderers, gang members, and other violent felons where he’ll likely get stabbed, beaten, or raped. The officer makes the arrest anyway and mentally defends it with “I’m just doing my job, I’m following orders. We are a nation of laws and he broke the law. If he doesn’t want to go to prison, then he shouldn’t have broken the law!”
Where does it end? What if politicians pass a law that bans the stimulant drug caffeine? Such a law would ban coffee and chocolate since both contain caffeine. This means M&Ms would be illegal as well as yogurt-covered coffee beans. Would police officers arrest people with bags of M&Ms, knowing full well these people will likely serve years of prison time? “Hey, you broke the law. If you don’t want to go to prison, don’t break the law!” the police officer says.
Suppose politicians ban cholesterol-laden foods on the grounds that such foods lead to heart disease which causes thousands of deaths annually. Will police officers start arresting people who’ve bought ice cream and pizza?
At what point will an officer say to himself “You know what, this law is stupid and dumb and unfair and I am NOT going to enforce it. I am not going to arrest this law-breaker. He did nothing immoral. He just broke a stupid, dumb law that shouldn’t even be a law in the first place.”
The image below shows what unquestioning obedience to authority can lead to. The Nazi soldier in the picture is only doing what police officers and soldiers all over the world are doing: Just following orders.
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/11/policemens-and-soldiers-morality/
