General Discussion

And I spent many years studying that war. It opens up some very deep questions about the moral expectations we have about fellow people (and ourselves) and the concept of responsibility and self defence.

We generally accept that people have a right to step outside the bounds of normal law and behavior to protect themselves, and we make exceptions including the right to kill to protect your own safety. When this is extended out to a longer period though, we rarely except the same arguments, and its difficult to morally justify that contradiction.

To use the example you gave, if a man was forced on threat of death to serve in the German army, and was assigned (again without any choice) to stand in a concentration camp watchtower, and as in your example never hurt anyone directly, is that person morally culpable? Should someone sacrifice their own life for a futile gesture against a larger evil? We tend to expand that out to a larger scale and say things like 'if everyone had stood up and opposed then it couldn't have happened', but it still requires individuals to basically commit suicide to achieve a later goal they would never see.

Would you? Would I? It's easy to think we would, but then again history shows us that most people won't when placed in a life or death situation. As a result, I think its unfair to judge when we have never faced the same decision ourselves.