War Resistance And Moral Experience.

Abstract

This study examines resistance to the Vietnam War as an arena for moral experience. It presents portraits of five war resisters drawn from extensive open-ended interviews and then discusses the common themes which emerged from these interviews concerning the participants' moral experience. The first theme is that of participants' revulsion to immoral acts--their personal involvement in immorality. This involvement occurred: (1) as a result of empathic identification with the victims of the war; and (2) when participants perceived themselves responsible for immoral acts. A second theme discussed is the relative absence of philosophical reflection regarding the moral justification for the actions participants were taking. A final theme is the importance of participants' self-definition as moral agents who could not commit wrongdoing. The study concludes that moral experience must be considered in terms of individuals' self-definitions as moral agents and the affective response which occurred when they thought of violating those definitions. Moral experience seems fundamentally unrelated to the model proposed by cognitive-developmentalists such as Lawrence Kohlberg. The ability to conceptualize abstract moral principles, and reason about impersonal moral dilemmas is only tangentially--if at all--related to lived moral experience. What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. . . . What does he mean by saying no? He means, for example, that this has been going on too long, up to this point yes, beyond it no, you are going too far, or again, there is a limit beyond which you shall not go. In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline . . . the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel's mind, is more precisely the impression that he has the right to . . . Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no simultaneously. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects--and wishes to preserve--the existence of certain things on this side of the borderline. (From The Rebel by Albert Camus)