Abstract
I explore the role of affect (rages and panics) and pre-cognitive reflexes in enabling killing in infantry combat. I examine Vietnam-era infantry training, which constructed a practical agent of killing which operated at an emergent group level, using the trained reflexes of individual soldiers as its components. I show that individual soldiers sometimes retrospectively took guilt upon themselves (a responsibility that is traditionally reserved for acts of individual conscious intention) even though the practical agent was the group activating the non-subjective reflexes of the individual soldiers. To explain this phenomenon, I explore proto-empathetic identification, which produces psychological trauma at the sight of the blood and guts of the killed enemy, despite the common practice of dehumanization of the enemy. I also examine cutting-edge digital and video simulator training for urban warfare of the “shoot/no shoot” type, which produces a very quick decision upon recognition of key traits of the situation—an act that is close to reflexive, but a bit more cognitively sophisticated. The same proto-empathetic identification and individual guilt assumption is in play in this training regime, even as the use of real-time communication technology forms ever more distributed group cognition.
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Notes
As the anonymous reviewer of the paper reminded us, the standard evolutionary explanation for the adoption of signaling rather than fighting among non-human animal conspecifics does not involve empathetic identification but rather an instinctually embedded cost-benefit analysis. For example, the risk of harm from a fight outweighs the benefits of mating, so that it is better to accept defeat and wait to find another opportunity later.
Here we use computer metaphors about which we have to be very careful not to let them imply any stance on cognition as computation of discrete symbols.
With thanks for research help to Jane Richardson, and for comments and questions to many attendees of the “Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended” conference organized by Shaun Gallagher at the University of Central Florida, October 20–24, 2007.
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This article would not have reached this stage without Roger Pippin (Communication, University of South Florida) who was co-author of the first draft. As the paper has developed, however, we have decided it would be best for Protevi to assume authorship of this article and for us to pursue our joint project in another publication.
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Protevi, J. Affect, agency and responsibility: The act of killing in the age of cyborgs. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 405–413 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9097-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9097-z