Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics

George Lucas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317801764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics is a comprehensive reference work that addresses concerns held in common by the military services of many nations. It attempts to discern both moral dilemmas and clusters of moral principles held in common by all practitioners of this profession, regardless of nation or culture.

Comprising essays by contributors drawn from the four service branches (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine corps) as well as civilian academics specializing in this field, this handbook discusses the relationship of "ethics" in the military setting to applied and professional ethics generally. Leading scholars and senior military practitioners from countries including the US, UK, France, China, Australia and Japan, discuss various national cultural views of the moral dimensions of military service. With reference to the responsibilities of professional orientation and education, as well as the challenges posed by recent technological developments, this handbook examines the difficulties underpinning the fundamental framework of military service.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war theory, ethics philosophy, sociology, war and conflict studies, and security studies.

Part I
The Moral Foundations of the Military Profession

1
Military Ethics

A Discipline in Crisis¹

Alasdair C. MacIntyre

Crises are recurrent and inescapable in the history of ethics, both in political and moral practice and in theoretical reflection on that practice. Why so?

No matter how well established and well functioning some mode of moral life is, from time to time the social context within which it has been functioning will undergo significant change. New issues arise, new questions are posed, and in the course of attempting to grasp and formulate those questions agents may have to recognize a need for new resources, resources that it may be difficult to provide. So it has been with the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition at earlier stages in its long history.

So it is now in military ethics. What I have to say regarding this particular crisis falls into four parts. In the first, I discuss in traditional terms what it is that makes courage a virtue, the professional virtue of soldiers, although not only that. In the second, I consider the conception of war that was generally taken for granted in the era immediately preceding our own, in the legal, moral, and philosophical discussions of military ethics in the period that runs from the American Civil War to the end of the Cold War. I then identify the consequences of changes in that concept that have resulted from changes in the politics and the technology of armed conflict, changes that find expression in unfortunate metaphors that allow us to speak of a war on drugs and a war on terror.

The third part begins from an episode in the recent war in Iraq, which exemplifies what is distinctive in the contemporary exercise of the military virtues. From it, I draw morals both about those virtues and about the new questions that we should be asking, now that the concept of war has become dangerously ill-defined. In the fourth and final part, I return to the discussion of the virtues, reconsidering the relationship between prudence and justice in the light of my overall argument, and justifying my claim that military ethics is in crisis.

I. Courage as a (Military) Virtue

Some early Confucian thinkers are thought, perhaps mistakenly, to have excluded courage from the catalogue of the virtues, arguing that a would-be thief or murderer who was courageous is a more effective wrongdoer and a worse human being than a would-be thief or murderer who was cowardly. There are examples that may incline us to agree with them. When, in 1944, the Red Army was advancing toward Germany’s frontiers, Hitler ordered the battalions of the Waffen SS to stand firm, not to give up an inch of ground, but instead to die where they stood. To a man, they did. They endured magnificently in the service of evil. As Peter Geach remarked, either this was not courage or courage is not a virtue.² My claim is that this was not courage. Why not?

To be courageous is not only for an agent to risk or to endure dangers and harms, but to do so in a way and to an extent that is proportionate to the goods at stake in that agent’s situation. If I am attacked by someone stronger and better armed than I am, and if the only way in which I can save myself is by running away, and if that is all that matters in that situation, it is not in the least cowardly to run away. But, if I am accompanied by a small child, and the only way in which I can have a chance of saving that small child from serious harm is by putting my own life at risk by standing and fighting, then courage requires me to stand and fight. If, in fighting a just war, nothing militarily will be gained by assaulting an enemy position, then to risk loss of life by assaulting it is not courage, but rashness. But, if the taking of that position is crucial to avoiding the frustration of one’s objectives in fighting such a war, then courage may require risk-taking of a high order.

Everything turns on what goods are at stake. By this standard, the traits of mindless obedience exhibited by the Waffen SS were not courage. But, if this is so, then one cannot be courageous unless one has, and exercises, the ability to identify the goods at stake in particular situations.

What is true of courage is true also of temperateness, justice, and all other virtues. No set of dispositions is a virtue unless agents so disposed act so as to achieve the goods at stake in each particular situation. It is not required of them that they are able to make explicit those judgments about goods that are presupposed by their decisions and actions, let alone that they should have a theoretical grasp of what is involved. We do not become virtuous by attending lectures on ethical theory or, worse still, going to conferences on ethics, but by being educated into the relevant habits of thought and action in the life of everyday practice. To say all this is to say that we cannot have the virtue of courage, or the virtues of temperateness and justice, without also having the kind of practical intelligence that Aristotle called phronesis and Aquinas prudentia. It is perhaps to the point that Confucians generally do not recognize prudence as a virtue either.

A different and more radical objection to the thesis that courage is a virtue is advanced by those social psychologists and their philosophical allies who claim that there are no virtues, that the belief that agents exhibit one and the same set of moral traits through time in very different situations, so that their judgments and actions consistently exemplify those traits, is an illusion. What agents do is to respond to salient features of the situations in which they find themselves, so that their actions are the outcome of conjunctions of such salient features and agents’ responses, exhibiting nothing like the consistency that is ascribed when we ascribe the virtues. The papers in which social psychologists report the findings on which they base such claims go back as far as J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson’s famous paper of 1973, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Dispositional and Situational Variables in Helping Behavior.”³ Their most important claim is that we can understand moral judgments and actions only in terms of the local contexts in which they occur. The conception of a virtue as one and the same trait that informs an agent’s judgments and actions in indefinitely many and various situations lacks application. To think otherwise is to commit an attribution error. The moral philosophers who have relied on those findings include Gilbert Harman and John Doris.⁴ There have been more than adequate replies to them by, among others, Christian Miller.⁵ So let me make only two points here.

The first is that a lack of the virtues, as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas, in the population from which the 20th and 21st century subjects of experiments by American (and not only American) social psychologists are drawn is something that, far from refuting, is entirely consistent with Aristotelian and Thomistic claims. For it is relatively infrequent for members of that population to have received the kind of early moral training and education that Aristotle and Aquinas take to be a prerequisite for the development of the virtues. Where we do find training and education expressly designed to compensate for this lack is at certain points in the military life. Why this is important can be brought out by considering a second and very different kind of reply to the social psychologists.

In 2011, massive fraud by (up to that point) a highly reputed Dutch social psychologist, Diederik Stapel, was uncovered, involving both articles authored or co-authored by him, and doctoral dissertations that he had supervised. That fraud, and the failure to identify it earlier, were investigated by academic committees who discovered an uncomfortably high incidence of bad research practices in their discipline generally. Such practices specifically included a willingness by researchers to go on running an experiment until a result consonant with their favored hypothesis was obtained, as well as a willingness to ignore discrepant findings.

So what had gone wrong? Let me risk committing an attribution error by saying that what mattered about those social psychologists was that no one had inculcated into them the virtue of truthfulness. Truthfulness is the indispensable professional virtue of all academic researchers, as courage is the indispensable professional virtue of soldiers. The problem for social psychologists is that, by and large, they have been recruited from the same population as the subjects whom they study.

When I speak here of indispensable professional virtues, it is important to be careful. Aristotle distinguishes the courage characteristic of the citizen soldier from genuine courage (Nicomachean Ethics III, 1116a15–1116b3). The citizen soldier often acts as the courageous agent would act, but in key part from fear of the consequences of not so acting. And a sufficiently stringent enforcement of penalties on fraudulent researchers might bring it about that social psychologists acted as the genuinely truthful agent would act without having the virtue of truthfulness. But in neither case would this be sufficient. Good soldiers need the virtue of courage (that is, courage informed by prudence and other moral virtues) just as good researchers—and not only in social psychology—need the virtue of truthfulness (that is, truthfulness informed by prudence and other moral virtues).

Why this is so in the case of soldiers I will illustrate later in this chapter. I note, however, that wars have to be fought with the soldiers whom you happen to have at the time. Frederick the Great tried to bring it about that his troops would behave well in battle, because they were more frightened of their own noncommissioned officers than they were of the enemy. It is a mark of his military genius that he could do so well even with soldiers of whom this was true.

II. The Conventional Conception of Warfare

When courage and prudence are exercised by soldiers, it is always in the context of some particular understanding of war. In the second part of this chapter, accordingly, I will be concerned with the conception of war and the understanding of what it is to act rightly or wrongly in war that developed from the 1860s to, say, the 1980s. We may think of it as the age of Francis Lieber (1798/1800–1872) and Jean Henri—or Henry—Dunant (1828–1900), although the conception of war and the conduct of war that their writings presuppose had already been presented in classic form by Clausewitz. Wars, so it was understood, are waged between states with the active engagement of their subjects or citizens, and the central concern of both ethics and law is with the laying down and enforcement of codes governing the conduct of war. So it is with Lieber’s draft of the “Code for the Government of Armies in the Field” in U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s “General Orders #100” of 1863. So it was with the first Geneva Convention of 1864, which resulted from the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross, an event for which Dunant’s influence had been largely responsible. And so it was with the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Wars are to begin with a formal declarative act by some government, either a reasoned declaration of war, or an ultimatum stating conditions that, if unsatisfied by a specific time, will result in a state of war. Wars are to end with another act of government, an acknowledgment of defeat by one of the contending parties and an acceptance of the terms imposed by the victors. Those at war are to discriminate between themselves and their citizens and neutral states and their citizens, and between combatants and noncombatants. There are rules prescribing how prisoners of war are to be treated and forbidding fire directed against anyone raising a white flag or any medical personnel or ambulance bearing a red cross, red crescent, or similar symbol. Wars are to be sharply distinguished from police actions and the treatment of a prisoner of war is to be governed by different rules from those governing the treatment of those apprehended for committing criminal acts. It was these rules that gave new life to the conception of a “just” war: that is, of what provides a justifiable circumstance for declaring war, and what is required if one is to act justly in waging war. These rules provided the discipline of military ethics with a central part of its subject matter.

We need not labor the point that those rules were often violated during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor the even more important point that without the work of Lieber, Dunant, and all those others who contributed to the making of codes of conduct and of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, these wars would have been significantly more destructive and corrupting in their effects than they were. What we do need to note is how many large-scale armed conflicts (sometimes resulting in huge numbers of deaths) were not in this period classified as wars, except in retrospect. What was, from the standpoint of an imperialist power at the time, a rebellion, or a series of criminal acts (as in India in the 1850s, or in Ireland in 1916 and after, or in Kenya in the 1950s) was, or became (from the standpoint of Indians, or Irish, or Kenyans) a war for their independence. But because the imperialist powers were able to classify such wars as unjustified rebellions, they felt free to act without the moral or legal constraints of the laws of war. What was from the standpoint of the Igbo people a war for the independence of Biafra (a war resulting in a million deaths) was from the standpoint of the government of Nigeria (and also from that of the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) an unjustified rebellion.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: On the Very Idea of “Ethics” and a “Military Profession”
• PART I The Moral Foundations of the Military Profession
• PART II Jus Ante Bellum: Preparing the Military Profession for its Moral Obligations
• PART III Military Ethics and Professionalism Across Nations and Cultures
• PART IV Contemporary Issues in Ethics and Military Practice
• PART V Emerging Ethical Challenges for the Military Profession
• Index