Last year, I took a course on the "Philosophy of Law." This was not so much a philosophy course as it was a course on criminal law. In this class, I studied a particular case of a man who decades ago "defected" from the United States Army while he was stationed abroad. By "defected" I mean that he was captured first as a Prisoner of War and then remained as a pawn of the enemy of his own volition, once given the opportunity to leave. Once captured, this man was extensively tortured - but only psychologically. He was brainwashed by his captors. Once the brainwashing process had ceased, he chose to remain with his captors and to help them negatively propagandize the United States. Those who knew him in his native country and had some contact with him appealed to him to return home and to abandon his traitorous cause. He refused, saying that he was pleased with and dedicated to his mission in his new country. He eventually did return home and was tried for treason against the United States of America.
Some in the United States, who heard his case after he eventually returned called him weak and a traitor to his oath of loyalty to his country. But...was he responsible for his actions? Formal laws aside, was anything that this man did morally wrong? Is propagandizing an action, or just the extension of a will? Kant might argue that his will was bad, and that therefore his choice was also bad and thus immoral. But what would Mill think?
His motive was not selfishness. He exercised what even the U.S. might acknowledge as his right to the freedoms of speech and press. In fact, to execute the propaganda techniques that he employed, he must have exercised some degree of mental cultivation, which Mill calls good. Perhaps of the core of the question at hand is this: Whose happiness was being promoted? If the person in question was stationed in China, would not his cause be in promotion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since there are far more people in China than there are in the U.S.?
Propaganda to me seems to be the extension of a country’s will. To speak and publicize such propaganda is an act and one which requires volition. The prisoner had to believe what he was speaking was truth in order to act in the way he did and this is where in the government’s eyes he committed his crime. He spoke out in the belief that what his government was doing was wrong and evil and by the standards of the time, the government punished him for it. Kant would argue that since his will was evil, as he intended to cause chaos, conflict, and discord with is speech, the action he committed was evil. However from Mill’s perspective the consequences could have been good or ill and depending on how events unfolded, this would determine the inherent goodness or wrongness of these actions. When it comes to the “good” in propaganda, often times the only way to rationally determine the good is to take the propaganda out of the equation and closely examine what each side stands for. Only then can you determine whether or not propanda is a “justified evil” and then know who is in the “good”.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to what Harper says, I think that it would all depend on the situation of the propaganda. If the propaganda bettered society and made more people happy, he would arguably support it even if it meant lying to a large portion of the population. I do wonder if nationalities pay role in his thinking because in pure utilitarian thought it should just be happiness for the greatest number of people, whoever those people may be.
ReplyDeleteAhh good old Philosophy of Law - this was one of my favorite cases so I'm glad you brought it up to look at from this lens. First off, I don't think Kant would hold the former POW morally accountable for actions for which he was so obviously coerced and forced (you'll remember all the evidence mentioned that supported the claims that identity reconstruction was a real phenomenon). Essentially, since the will being carried out was not the soldier's will at all, it was not necessarily up to him whether or not to carry it out. I also think Mill would find the soldier himself to be absolved of any moral judgment, but both would harshly judge the captors that twisted another's will to their own ends, causing happiness for a small number of people at the cost of great misery to many others.
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