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While the issue of formally charging individuals with war crimes is a fairly new one, brought about in an age of powerful court systems, world government, and the slow abolishment of the infallible monarchies of history, people have long passed moral judgment in and out of wars upon the people involved in their creation and fighting. As shown by Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, these moral judgments are largely universal and should be applied to a common war convention/legal structure, and once they are, the moral views regarding responsibility for war crimes become codified and examinable. The purpose of this paper is to break the notion of war crimes down into near ideal situation for passing judgment, then proceed to examine and analyze the process of such.

The basic outlay of this ideal situation is that the average soldier who commits war crimes is, outside of the context of war, perfectly sane and moral, and both before and after war, this soldier lives a perfectly moral life. However, once exposed to the various circumstances that war brings to the picture (Duress, fear, stress, excitement, disorder, etc.), this individual becomes twenty times more likely to commit war crimes, and moreover, goes on to do so. This begs the question: who is ultimately responsible for this crime?

To answer this, an examination of responsibility is first required. According to Walzer, responsibility (except in cases of a direct threat to one's life being the cause of criminal behavior) can be distributed but not divided. I would answer that, at least in the case of civilian criminal law, this is not always the case. Often, a person may be subject to the will of another for other reasons (money, ignorance, previous commitment, etc.) that, in extraordinary circumstances, may partially exonerate the willed individual and increase the moral blameworthiness of the more actor in command of the situation. For instance, taking advantage of a traveler's ignorance of obscure local laws to enlist this foreigner in the execution of some criminal act does not clearly excuse the traveler (He has broken the law, in the end), but I daresay that many courts would be reluctant to attempt to seek the maximum sentence for this individual, while they likely would with the originator of the scheme. Such legal judgments are accompanied by similar moral pronouncements regarding the guilt of the two criminals, as per arguments put forth in Hart's discussion of Mill and Stephen. If nothing else, it

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