Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1983116
R. Herbert
ABSTRACT Before they can commit their states to war, leaders who believe that war is necessary must first secure public commitment to collective action and sacrifice. The chief instrument for achieving this is propaganda, an activity generally understood as morally problematic. Yet if we concede that some wars are morally permissible or even morally required, must we not also concede that propaganda campaigns orchestrated to marshal the public will to fight those wars are likewise morally permissible or required? Focusing on the content of presidential speeches and the strategic context in which they were delivered, I seek to isolate the morally blameworthy aspects of propaganda in two campaigns: the George W. Bush administration’s effort to marshal public support for the Iraq War and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s attempt to draw the US into the Second World War. I conclude by offering a sketch of conditions under which propaganda may be understood as morally permissible.
在将国家投入战争之前，相信战争是必要的领导人必须首先确保公众对集体行动和牺牲的承诺。实现这一目标的主要手段是宣传，这种活动通常被认为是道德上有问题的。然而，如果我们承认某些战争在道德上是允许的，甚至在道德上是必要的，我们难道不也必须承认，精心策划的宣传运动，以调动公众参加这些战争的意愿，同样在道德上是允许的或必要的吗?我把重点放在总统演讲的内容和发表演讲的战略背景上，试图孤立出两场竞选活动中宣传在道德上应受谴责的方面:乔治•w•布什(George W. Bush)政府动员公众支持伊拉克战争的努力，以及富兰克林•d•罗斯福(Franklin D. Roosevelt)政府将美国卷入二战的努力。最后，我提供了一个条件概要，在这些条件下，宣传可能被理解为道德上允许的。
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1975773
E. Patterson
{"title":"The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury","authors":"E. Patterson","doi":"10.1080/15027570.2021.1975773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2021.1975773","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39180,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Military Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"158 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44784399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1973721
Eva M. van Baarle, T. Molendijk
ABSTRACT Over the last decade, moral injury in the armed forces has captured the attention of mental health care providers, policy makers and the general public. Military organizations endeavor to prevent and reduce moral injury among their personnel to minimize the tremendous costs incurred on military readiness, government budgets and the well-being of soldiers. This is reflected in training programs that promise to deliver mental readiness and mitigate risks of mental health problems. Our concern is that by focusing on “resilience” as positive policy language, the complexities of situations, including “negative” emotions such as sorrow or fear and the values underlying these emotions, are disregarded. An overly optimistic focus on resilience while overlooking these complications may be counterproductive, and may actually do soldiers harm.
{"title":"Resilience as the Road to Mental Readiness? Reflections from an Ethics-of-care Perspective","authors":"Eva M. van Baarle, T. Molendijk","doi":"10.1080/15027570.2021.1973721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2021.1973721","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Over the last decade, moral injury in the armed forces has captured the attention of mental health care providers, policy makers and the general public. Military organizations endeavor to prevent and reduce moral injury among their personnel to minimize the tremendous costs incurred on military readiness, government budgets and the well-being of soldiers. This is reflected in training programs that promise to deliver mental readiness and mitigate risks of mental health problems. Our concern is that by focusing on “resilience” as positive policy language, the complexities of situations, including “negative” emotions such as sorrow or fear and the values underlying these emotions, are disregarded. An overly optimistic focus on resilience while overlooking these complications may be counterproductive, and may actually do soldiers harm.","PeriodicalId":39180,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Military Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"129 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48541855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1939925
L. Lengbeyer
ABSTRACT Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One such depicts military “sheepdogs” protecting ordinary-citizen “sheep” from predator “wolves.” But simple analogies of this kind combine surface appeal with ideological implications that make them hazardous. The sheepdog analogy's simplistic trichotomy is liable to undermine warfighters' battlefield restraint, both in how they fight and whom they fight. They may improperly expand the realm of “wolves” to be attacked, and exert less self-control in attacking. Worse, they may develop a sense of moral superiority and chafe resentfully and contemptuously under civilian control. Despite the sheepdog analogy's superficial attractions, it could end up undermining respect for democratic processes and constraints, civil liberties, and the Constitutional system that soldiers are sworn to defend. Nor can it be saved by well-intentioned revisions. Hence, it ought to be eliminated from circulation to the extent possible. Furthermore, a broader consideration of the conditions required for any acceptable warfighter analogy recommends avoidance of all beguilingly evocative simple tropes for soldier identity. Their intended constructive messages and effects are ever liable to be overtaken by unintended ones that subvert soldiers' rightful understandings of their relationships to other human beings and to the body politic.
{"title":"Rhetoric Matters: Inviting Military Overreach with the Sheepdog Analogy","authors":"L. Lengbeyer","doi":"10.1080/15027570.2021.1939925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2021.1939925","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Military personnel encounter analogies meant to help them understand their role and tasks. One such depicts military “sheepdogs” protecting ordinary-citizen “sheep” from predator “wolves.” But simple analogies of this kind combine surface appeal with ideological implications that make them hazardous. The sheepdog analogy's simplistic trichotomy is liable to undermine warfighters' battlefield restraint, both in how they fight and whom they fight. They may improperly expand the realm of “wolves” to be attacked, and exert less self-control in attacking. Worse, they may develop a sense of moral superiority and chafe resentfully and contemptuously under civilian control. Despite the sheepdog analogy's superficial attractions, it could end up undermining respect for democratic processes and constraints, civil liberties, and the Constitutional system that soldiers are sworn to defend. Nor can it be saved by well-intentioned revisions. Hence, it ought to be eliminated from circulation to the extent possible. Furthermore, a broader consideration of the conditions required for any acceptable warfighter analogy recommends avoidance of all beguilingly evocative simple tropes for soldier identity. Their intended constructive messages and effects are ever liable to be overtaken by unintended ones that subvert soldiers' rightful understandings of their relationships to other human beings and to the body politic.","PeriodicalId":39180,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Military Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"21 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15027570.2021.1939925","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47536384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1949782
Blake Hereth
ABSTRACT Are field medics morally permitted to treat unjust combatants? I distinguish between two kinds of enemy combatants: reactivated ones who will rejoin the fight, and deactivated ones who will not rejoin the fight. Helen Frowe has argued that field medics are not permitted to treat reactivated combatants but is silent about deactivated ones. First, I argue that Frowe’s account plausibly extends to a moral prohibition on treating deactivated combatants in addition to reactivated ones. Second, I argue that the best argument for treating deactivated enemy soldiers extends also to reactivated ones but holds only for groups, which undermines Frowe’s general position. I thus defend the mainstream view, enshrined in the Geneva Convention, that the treatment of deactivated unjust combatants (and maybe, in some cases, reactivated unjust combatants) by partisan or nonpartisan field medics is often all-things-considered morally obligatory.
{"title":"Health Justice for Unjust Combatants","authors":"Blake Hereth","doi":"10.1080/15027570.2021.1949782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2021.1949782","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Are field medics morally permitted to treat unjust combatants? I distinguish between two kinds of enemy combatants: reactivated ones who will rejoin the fight, and deactivated ones who will not rejoin the fight. Helen Frowe has argued that field medics are not permitted to treat reactivated combatants but is silent about deactivated ones. First, I argue that Frowe’s account plausibly extends to a moral prohibition on treating deactivated combatants in addition to reactivated ones. Second, I argue that the best argument for treating deactivated enemy soldiers extends also to reactivated ones but holds only for groups, which undermines Frowe’s general position. I thus defend the mainstream view, enshrined in the Geneva Convention, that the treatment of deactivated unjust combatants (and maybe, in some cases, reactivated unjust combatants) by partisan or nonpartisan field medics is often all-things-considered morally obligatory.","PeriodicalId":39180,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Military Ethics","volume":"20 1","pages":"67 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15027570.2021.1949782","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45648385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1949783
Brian Smith
ABSTRACT Of the two purposes of this article, the first is to show that the prohibition against intentionally targeting civilians is poorly suited to the current techno-rational landscape of warfare. Sophisticated targeting procedures, precision strike capability, and automated systems have undermined the role intention plays as a moral basis for international law. With these new tools, and by systematizing and proceduralizing the targeting process, the US military has created an operational environment that rationalizes the killing of noncombatants. In effect, most noncombatants can be killed unintentionally. The second purpose is to understand how this rationalization functions. This article will employ a line of criticism that Hannah Arendt used against the strategists behind the US policy in Vietnam. What she found so troubling about these policymakers was the degree to which they allowed themselves to become mere appendages of the simulations, models, and machines from which targeting decisions are derived. Their hypothetical posits about the world surreptitiously transformed into facts. The virtually unconscious conflation of posits to facts led to a kind of self-deception and a tendency to misrepresent the very effects of the targeting decision under question.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1920686
Steven Umbrello
A product of over two decades of service in the United States Navy SEALs, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual is the brainchild of the now retired Lieutenant commander of SEAL Team 3, Joc...
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1950770
Henrik Syse
A recent editorial of mine carried the title of the Bob Dylan album Time Out of Mind, with reference back to the immortal Shakespearian phrase “time out of joint.” It was a reflection focusing on the challenges and tragedies of a drawn-out, seemingly never-ending pandemic. The reference this time around is probably more obscure to most readers, but just as evocative of our strange times: On the Threshold of a Dream, an adventurous 1969 album by the British band The Moody Blues. The threshold at that time was, most especially, the space age. In our context of the early 2020s, the title evokes the steps we are taking into an ever more thoroughly digitalized world. Artificial intelligence, in the form of increasingly self-learning machines with underlying complex algorithms, is already part of our world. However, most specialists in the field insist that we find ourselves only at the very beginning of what can reasonably be called a dream. Whether it is a sweet and hopeful dream or a downright nightmare is one of the defining questions of our time. During the next decades, the nature of warfare and military defense will be increasingly digital, with conflicts – both in training and in real life – taking place in cyber space just as much as on the kinetic battlefield. More than that, we are facing a world where human soldiers will cooperate ever more closely with, and entrust their lives and missions to, machine agents. The speed and computational power of these machines, alongside their possibility of going well beyond their initial programming, means that even the most fateful of life-anddeath decisions could, for all practical purposes, be made by machines. This may help ensure that law and ethics prevail over irrationality, human failure, and destructive emotions, such as hatred and revenge. But it could equally well lead us to a battlefield where humans have little control over the most dramatic of decisions, and where we end up deferring to authorities that have no human superiors. We are indeed on the threshold, if not of a dream, then at least of a new era, one that will possibly be more different from previous eras than we can currently imagine. As co-editor of this journal, I have no doubt that it is ethics, just as much as – or more than – the technology itself, that will decide whether we are facing nightmarish scenarios or a more hopeful future.
我最近的一篇社论以鲍勃·迪伦(Bob Dylan)的专辑《Time Out of Mind》为标题，引用了莎士比亚不朽的短语“Time Out of joint”。它反映了对一场旷日持久、看似永无止境的大流行病所带来的挑战和悲剧的关注。对大多数读者来说，这一次的参考可能更晦涩，但同样唤起了我们这个奇怪的时代:在梦想的门槛上，1969年英国乐队Moody Blues的一张冒险专辑。那个时代的开端，尤其是太空时代。在本世纪20年代初的背景下，这个标题唤起了我们正在迈向一个更加彻底的数字化世界的步伐。人工智能，以越来越多具有复杂算法的自我学习机器的形式，已经成为我们世界的一部分。然而，该领域的大多数专家坚持认为，我们发现自己只是在可以合理地称为梦的最开始。这是一个甜蜜而充满希望的梦，还是一个彻头彻尾的噩梦，这是我们这个时代的决定性问题之一。在接下来的几十年里，战争和军事防御的性质将越来越数字化，无论是训练还是现实生活中的冲突，都将在网络空间发生，就像在动态战场上一样。不仅如此，我们正面临着这样一个世界:人类士兵将与机器特工更加密切地合作，并将他们的生命和任务托付给机器特工。这些机器的速度和计算能力，以及它们远远超出其初始编程的可能性，意味着即使是最重要的生死决定，出于所有实际目的，也可以由机器做出。这可能有助于确保法律和道德战胜非理性、人类的失败以及仇恨和报复等破坏性情绪。但它同样可能把我们带入一个战场，在那里，人类对最戏剧性的决定几乎没有控制权，我们最终会服从没有人类上级的权威。我们确实站在一个新时代的门槛上，如果不是梦想，那么至少是一个新时代的门槛，一个可能比我们目前所能想象的更不同于以往时代的时代。作为本刊的联合编辑，我毫不怀疑，决定我们面临的是噩梦般的场景还是更有希望的未来的，是伦理道德，就像——甚至比——技术本身更重要。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1923339
E. Erwin
A wide-ranging compendium of incisive essays, Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition promises to be an important contribution to the just war dialogue. Writte...
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15027570.2021.1895965
D. Walker, S. Thoma, J. Arthur
ABSTRACT Army Officers face increased moral pressure in modern warfare, where character judgement and ethical judgement are vital. This article reports the results of a study of 242 junior British Army officers using the Army Intermediate Concept Measure, comprising a series of professionally oriented moral dilemmas developed for the UK context. Results are suggestive of appropriate application of Army values to the dilemmas and of ethical reasoning aligning with Army excellence. The sample does slightly less well, however, for justification than for action reasoning, and there are differences following initial training for infantry and artillery officers versus other branches of service. Dilemmas involving anti-torture methods and not covering up soldiers' failings generated best results compared to those requiring balance between compassion and mission, and negotiating personal relationships with military needs. Gender differences favouring women were less than those observed for other professional groups using similar measures. This research further develops a much-needed measure of ethical reasoning among junior Army officers, with potential for use among other ranks. This approach is advocated for other professional groups.
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