Anti-Climacus

WELL: So I've spent a lot of time thinking about the argument on placing morality for governmental actions with individuals who support those actions (of which much below). It looks like an entailment of believing that no one is morally responsible for a decision they make where there is no could've-done-otherwise is that, well, no one can ever be responsible for an action their government undertakes. This seems to undercut the "not in our name" idea quite a bit.

I've done a lot of thinking, and I've concluded: you couldn't possibly tenably hold people morally responsible for the actions of their government. It's just incoherent as a concept.

Follow me here: let's use the extreme example: Nazi Germany. Am I contending, in other words, that's it's foolish to hold the German people responsible for, say, the Holocaust? Yes and no. It's foolish insomuch as the people who made the decisions and carried out the actions were probably not the bulk of the people (I'm not saying, in other words, that Hitler, Eichmann, the army or the people who rounded up the Jews are off the hook--they're on for the straightforward could've-done-otherwise reason). You might think they were still on the hook morally (for not resisting as fully as they might, for attending rallies, for passively accepting what was going on), but they're on the hook because of their own actions, not those of the government they happened to be under*.

In the Iraq case, you might think that people are on the hook, morally, for certain aspects of their decision-making (supporting Bush, hating the UN, whatever), but certainly you don't hold them responsible for the decisions the government itself makes, any more than you hold the average person responsible for other decisions the government makes (setting the prime interest rate, opening a new office, declaring today to be "national blogs are great" day). The fact that this particular decision has a moral character to it doesn't (in this case) make it any different from any other decision.

*It did, in a sense, define the options for action they had available, but, well, our options for action are always determined from an outside source. The particular nature of it is no exception.