A short anecdote.
I once met an elderly gentleman from England, who confessed to me that he had once murdered a man. I heard his story, and thought he had done a good thing.
He told me the story in November of 1992. We had a long conversation in the Amtrak station (train station) in St. Louis. The murder occurred in December of 1937, a few years before Japan and England were at war. He and his friend had found a drunken Japanese soldier alone in an isolated place, and so he and his friend had killed the soldier.
The murderer, of whose murder I approved, was in Nanjing. I forget if he was attached to a British consulate, or a merchant marine whose ship was in Nanjing, or why he was there, but there he was. A witness to the Rape of Najing (the Nanjing Massacre). So, I thought his murder justified and just, and not an evil deed.
I wish I could remember whether he told me that he “never regretted it” or whether he said he “sometimes regretted it”. His act didn’t have the moral ambiguity of murders perpetrated by Americans who killed some guards they caught at the Nazi death camps, since those guards had surrendered, and murdering them was clearly wrong, although understandable. Were any prosecuted for war crimes after summarily executing Nazi concentration camp guards?
There was another sort of ambiguity, since England was not at war with Japan, and the man was not a soldier with any “lawful right” to deal out justice as a vigilante or enemy combatant. Also, the man he described as his victim was drunk, and not an immediate threat to anyone. And, I do not think he had personally witnessed his victim murdering citizens of Nanjing, although perhaps he did see such things. But, there must have been some Japanese soldiers who did not participate in the murder and mayhem and plunder. As he described to me, the English murderer said it was worse than anyone can imagine; a horror beyond the worst horror a human mind could conceive.
I've met other people who have told me they murdered others. In doing research, I have asked people whether they had seriously hurt others or killed others, and on a couple occasions the answer was “yes” to the “ever killed someone” question, although there were no follow-up questions and I never learned more. And I know many persons who have killed persons in wartime. And, at least one of them told me of accidentally killing a family by throwing a grenade into a basement during house-to-house combat. I have met men who flow bombing missions over Germany in World War II, and must have been responsible for some civilian deaths. But, only one person ever told me a story about his act of murder. He did not brag of it as a good deed. He just mentioned it in the context of telling us that he loved Chinese persons (my wife was with me—she is Taiwanese), and elaborating on his time spent in China in the 1930s.
It was an odd conversation. I sometimes think of it when I consider ethical problems and the contexts in which things may be good or evil or otherwise.
