A Meditation of the Nuremberg Trials and its Implications on Free Will

 The Context:

The Nuremberg defense is based on the moral argument that an individual may not be found guilty if he acted unlawfully only according to orders from superiors or the Government. However, the counterargument to this is that an individual is not relieved from moral responsibility if a moral choice was possible, and that there is a set of universal morals that make possible for an individual, regardless of nationality, to discriminate between good and evil actions.

Understanding the Arguments:

The former argument relies on the following logic: Individuals can only be responsible for actions which they directly decided to enact; soldiers acting under orders are not themselves acting out of their own decisions, they are following a set of determined orders by their superiors, and may face dire consequences if they do not, meaning that they do not really have a choice; therefore, soldiers committing crimes by following orders are not themselves guilty of these crimes.

The second claim of the previous argument relies on the assumption that individual decisions are largely determined by the institutions that compose the world in which they develop. In other words: While free will might exist, it is possible to diminish it to an undetectable state, therefore freeing a person of moral responsibility while free will is in this state.

The counterargument relies on the following reasoning: Individuals can only be responsible for actions which they directly decided to enact -claim that shares with the previous argument; there is a set of universal morals which are shared between all individuals; soldiers are individuals, thus possessing the ability to make moral decisions based on the universal morals, regardless of the institutions in which they developed; the fact that a moral choice has dire consequences does not mean that there is no choice, it only means that it is a difficult choice; therefore, soldiers committing crimes by following orders may be found guilty of these crimes if there was a possible choice to be made.

The previous argument can only survive by assuming there exists a set of universal morals, because these soldiers may escape moral responsibility if the only morals they have are those passed to them by their culture. Because if a person’s morals are dependent on the institutions in which they developed, his actions may be justified in their culture, even if it is not justified in another’s.

Understanding the Judgment:

The defense would not justify those individuals judged in the Nuremberg Trial, provided they were high-ranking officials capable of making a moral decision. Notwithstanding, I cannot, with all my ignorance, make a conclusion about their culpability. I can only assume that they were found guilty in this trial because they were indeed capable to decide, but failed to act morally. Moreover, I can only assume that this trial found the assumption of a universal system of morals to be correct, thus allowing these people to be judged based on it, rather than being judged by their own personal or cultural morality.

Moral Conscience and Moral Responsibility:

This trial based itself on the assumption of a universal moral system; therefore, it seems to illustrate the existence of a fundamental moral truth, thus making the individual not the creator of morals, but an observer of it. It is through this assumption in which soldiers, although virtuous in their loyalty and obedience, can still be responsible for immoral acts originating from external orders, provided they had a possible choice.

The Determinist Contradiction and Free Will as a Precondition for Individual Responsibility

This case directly contradicts determinism because it begins with the assumption that there is free will in both arguments. In fact, these arguments coincide in the fundamental assumption of free will, and they only debate whether soldiers were capable of exercising choice or not. If one replaces the free will element by a deterministic one, both arguments lose their logic, and it should be concluded that these Nazis were only acting out the sequential consequences of the Universe, and that not even Hitler was morally responsible of anything. By the same reasoning, one may end up excusing all types of murderers, rapists, and torturers. This conclusion cannot be accepted, and is not accepted in modern society.

In other words, even if the universe is purely deterministic, it is impossible for human beings to act as if it is. The fact that free will is a necessary assumption for so many important human systems may suggest two possibilities: One, the universe is deterministic, but it is impossible to act as if it was, and we must rather act as if free will is real; or two, there is a determined element present in the universe, but free will exists regardless, the problem is that it is such a complex existence that human beings have not been able to fully understand it. Therefore, my conclusion is that the former is a tangled argument that desperately tries to rescue the idea of determinism, while the latter is simpler and more practical when explaining the world we live in.

As a final note, the assumption of a universal moral system remains unexplored in this text, and its possible existence shall be discussed in future meditations.