Ethics of War and Peace

We started off my Ethics of War and Peace class with a bang.  We started a discussion on whether Hitler’s generals were war criminals or prisoners of war.  Oh boy.  That opened a can of worms, to say the least.  We had to define the difference and then look at each case individually.  Some people said no matter what they were all war criminals, some people said no matter what they were all prisoners of war, and some looked at the cases individually and disagreed with everyone else.  We also looked back at Thucydides presentation of the Athenian generals confronting the city council of the island city-state of Melios.