The Milgram experiment [1] showed that people who perceived themselves to under the influence of an authority will hurt other people when told to do so. The idea that soldiers are immune to this effect is irrational; in reality, this influence is probably a factor in their training regimes.
Soldiers, at least in our military, are also trained to counter this effect: they take an oath to obey lawful orders, and they know they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. In fact, the modern soldier knows that if he obeys an illegal order, he can be prosecuted for it.
This experiment hasn't been done, to my knowledge, but how do you think milgram would have gone if they had begun the experiment by explaining the difference between ethical and unethical orders, and telling people they could be prosecuted for following the unethical ones?
Most normal people haven't thought that through, and are unprepared to make that kind of decision. But soldiers have. Like a doctor professionally worries about malpractice, a soldier spends his entire career thinking that through.
I think it's present, but not a dominant factor. Depends on culture and training.
What Milgram measured was how inexperienced people react to a new ethical situation. If he had tested people who were familiar with the context--fellow scientists--I very much suspect the results would be different. That's true in many fields. You might be able to intimidate a junior engineer into including a substandard part in a safety-critical area, but a senior engineer will refuse. And then he'll quit. It's not that he has more character; he has more experience.
Soldiers have a lot of experience. If you order them to hurt people immorally, their reactions are more like the senior engineer than the junior one: measures of character, not measures of how quickly they can think about a new situation.
There have always been soldiers who said, at the eventual trial, that they were "just following orders". I think they're generally inexperienced, but I'm sure there are cowards who think that way at the end of a career, too. I'm sure the prevalence depends on culture and training, but that does show that the effect Milgram measured is present.
I do have some evidence that it isn't dominant, though. Historically speaking, conquering armies have behaved in conquered countries pretty much as they pleased--sometimes very badly. But to get a soldier to kill his own countrymen, it has generally been necessary to threaten him or his family with death -- mere orders have not been enough. The soldier has a limit on what he'll do for authority, and he'll quit sooner than Milgram's subjects did.
It takes courage to make a high stakes moral decision correctly; I won't claim that everyone has it. I don't know what the rate is, and I expect it varies widely by culture and training. But I do think that in order to measure it, you need to test professionals. Extrapolating from amateurs isn't good enough. Perhaps a repeat Milgram would be a start: test all the same subjects again a week later, after they've had plenty of time to think about the experience.
Moreover, the Milgram behaviors were pretty much par for what young enlisted men do when left to their own devices on a good day. The senior NCOs know this and make sure they are not left to their own devices.
Not at all. I said that there are already soldiers in the situation where their targets are lights on a screen, and they already treat the situation with the appropriate gravity. I claimed that drones wouldn't change that.
Milgram proves too much. It should prove those soldiers callous as well, and they are not. Heck, it should prove any soldier callous, and they certainly are not. As I explained above, soldiers have training the subjects in milgram didn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment