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 legitimate excuse for
committing immoral
acts. Yet this is the excuse that
soldiers 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 how 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 "This law is irrational and
unfair, and I am
not going to enforce it. I am not going to arrest this
law-breaker because he did nothing wrong. He broke a
ridiculous 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.