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War and Ethics
Has idealism any role to play in the bloody reality of combat?
“War is hell” is a phrase supposedly uttered by General William Sherman during the US civil war, and anyone who’s been in combat will almost certainly accept the definition. And yet there have often been rules-based or tacit exceptions that have enabled some combatants to escape the worst consequences of our innate desire to slaughter each other for the sake of imaginary totems such as honor, religion, or nation. During the supposed “age of chivalry” nobility rarely suffered much even as peasants massacred each other at their command. When two knights fought, the loser could expect not dismemberment but a pleasant stay at some well-appointed dwelling while his family gathered up the funds necessary to ransom him. While kings could occasionally be killed in battle, the rest of the nobility tended to experience a far gentler fate.
Today we don’t have a tacit gentlemen’s agreement to spare nobility; instead we have a more wordy framework: international law. Like most laws, this began locally and over the years has expanded substantially. In 1863 the Lieber Code was created with the intent of reducing the hellish aspect of the US civil war by codifying certain rules that were supposedly more humane than the anything-goes slaughter of wholly unregulated warfare.
