Ethics and Wargaming

The last post on the blog managed to obtain some reaction, so it is probably worth pondering a bit further. I suppose I need to clarify some of my own thinking on the subject and attempt not to set up any straw men for reasoning about wargame period, army, or action choice. I suppose, first up, I should say I am not questioning anyone’s choice of wargame, as I hope the following might suggest.

Firstly, it is worth saying plainly that I do not think that there is a particular ethical problem with choosing any particular wargame project. I cannot see how anyone could have an objection to wargaming any particular historical period or army. History shows, after all, that any country, tribe, or whatever engaging in combat is liable to have to make some moral judgment, and some of those are going to be dubious. Burleigh’s Moral Combat, reviewed here, makes such a point. In the Second World War the Allies, with limited resources, had to decide where to deploy them. On the whole, they stuck to plans that would bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. They may not have always succeeded, of course, but that was, in Burleigh’s view, an entirely laudable aim. Bombing railway lines to disrupt transport to Auschwitz would have diverted resources and lengthened the war costing more lives, and probably would not have particularly slowed down the Nazi slaughter of Jewish people. After all, Auschwitz was not the only way they had developed of exterminating people.

In some moral philosophy, there are rights and duties, which are fine and dandy until they start to bump into each other. If the Allies had the duty to finish the war as quickly as possible, and the Jews had a right to protection from the enemies of the Third Reich, with a concomitant duty on the Allies to execute that protection, then in a resource-limited world the two demands are in conflict and one has to be chosen. It is no wonder that the consumption of alcohol and cigarettes by the leaders of the Allied powers increased radically during the war.

Not that WW2 is the only arena where moral issues come to the fore, of course. Similar considerations reverberate through history, at least for as long as leaders have attempted to justify their actions to their people or some sort of nebulously defined ‘world opinion’. The bottom line is, more or less, that the leaders have to have a degree of support from their aristocracy and those lower down the social order in order to get anything done at all, let alone declare war.

With respect to wargaming, however, we do not have any of these ethical concerns around us. We can place a 1943 German army on the battlefield happily without particularly worrying about what it was they were defending. Similarly, with such warfare as that between the Wallachians and Ottomans in the 14^th Century (or so, I forget the exact dates of Vlad Tepes). The game is the thing: impaling captives on sharpened logs and watching them die slowly is not part of any wargame I know, or would wish to be a part of.

It gets a bit more tricky with Science Fiction games and their ilk. As someone mentioned, players of these games often take a stance that suggests in historical games someone has to play the ‘bad’ guy, while in their games, as they are fictional, there is no moral problem at all. To some extent that is correct, of course, but it also is not bombproof. Science Fiction, often, is based on our current reality. Thus an SF game based around fascist states warring with each other is, in my view anyway, no better than Germany v Russia in WW2. The former, however, might be slightly more worrying to the neutral observer.

Still, overall, I do not detect an ethical problem here. I do detect, as I have said before, a matter of taste. Working backward, I do detect a lack of taste in some SF RPGs I have played – this is often disguised as ‘darkly humorous’ but can disguise, at least, tastelessness. It is not, however, unethical to play such games, I think.

Thus, the Russian Front in WW2 is also not unethical, although it might upset some people worried that such a wargame disguises the murderous nature of the regimes involved. The point is surely that history happened and it cannot be undone. As a side issue, of course, the current concerns about slavery and colonialism run into similar problems: they happened. It is what we do with the facts of the happening today that counts. History is never, it seems, wholly a matter of the past.

Sidestepping into the present, the original question was posed about current events in Ukraine and Gaza, and whether it would be ethical to wargame them. I am not sure about the ethics of wargaming present wars: as with history, the events have happened, even if we do not like them. On the other hand, I can quite see how some people would regard such games as being in very poor taste.

Taste is a funny thing, however. Imagine you are on a crowded bus, a few stops from your destination. The people around you start to engage in various unpleasant activities: urinating, defecating, engaging in sexual activity, and so on. Suppose that these activities slowly get more unpleasant, and ask yourself: at what point would I get off the bus and walk?

The point here is that offensive activities, such as those engaged in by the other passengers, do not actually cause us harm. Similarly, a wargame based around Ukraine is not actually going to cause anyone harm, but it might cause some people offence and, hence, by those people, be classified as tasteless. As with the bus example, is this just a case of deciding where to get off and walk? Or is there a deeper issue about representing current events?

I’m not sure I know the answer, but I’ll stick to pre-1745 wargames just to be on the safe side.