Witt on Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" @JohnFabianWitt

John Fabian Witt, Yale University Law School, has published Two Humanitarianisms in Ambrose Bierce's 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge'. Here is the abstract.

The oft-anthologized short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Union Army veteran Ambrose Bierce — long a staple of high school curricula and the subject of music videos, television, and film — is not typically thought of as a study in the dilemmas of humanitarian law. But it is. It depicts an execution for violation of the laws of war. Even better, the text embodies a central tension in the laws of war, one that emerged in Bierce’s time and persists today. On the one hand stands a sentimental humanitarianism that aims to minimize the human suffering of war; Henri Dunant’s book, A Memory of Solferino popularized this stance and helped establish the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. On the other hand, a righteous humanitarianism chafes at the constraints that sentimental humanitarianism places on the pursuit of justice. Romantic nationalists like the Prussian-American political thinker Francis Lieber, whose code of rules for the Union Army was published a year after Dunant’s book, embrace the righteous justice of particular causes. Bierce’s “Owl Creek” straddles the two planks of the modern laws of war, conveying the power of both views.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.