Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Jessica Wolfendale (2008). Performance-Enhancing Technologies and Moral Responsibility in the Military. American Journal of Bioethics 8 (2):28 – 38.New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible agents, and moral responsibility is necessary for integrity and the moral emotions of guilt and remorse, both of which are important for moral growth and psychological well-being. Enhancements that undermined combatants' moral responsibility would therefore undermine the military's moral standing and would harm combatants' well-being. A genuine commitment to maintaining the military's ethical standards and the well-being of combatants therefore requires a careful analysis of performance-enhancing technologies before they are implemented.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library 
Similar books and articles
This essay offers a proposal for the missing constructs and language with which we can more precisely think about and examine the Army's Professional Military ...
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The work is divided into three main parts that focus on some of the theoretical puzzles inherent in the combination of military ethics and moral values; assess ...
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The article begins with an overview of the historic moment of ?the end of the Cold War?, and of the paradoxically deepening moral, social, and environmental problems posed by the military system. It demonstrates that historical and contemporary analyses of defence and war have dogmatically presupposed the military paradigm, and have therefore failed to recognize the self?reproducing structure of covert premisses and inferences upon which it rests. In laying bare this underlying system of unreason, the analysis demonstrates that the military paradigm's ultimately self?contradictory concepts of ?security? and ?defence? repose on unstated interests of social and political rule. Proposing new distinctions between pathological and life?enabling forms of war, and between guilty and innocent combatants, the argument develops alternative, non?military principles of war to guide rational and moral agency.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The purpose of this commentary is to address an ethical issue introduced by Walter Glannon regarding whether responsibility can be affected by the use of performance enhancing drugs. Glannon uses the example of a surgeon taking drugs to enhance her capacities. I explore whether conducting surgeries while under the influence of performance enhancing drugs will affect the surgeon’s responsibility for performing more surgeries ‘and’ the surgeon’s responsibility for assuming the consequences of performing these surgeries. Here, the ‘and’ is cumulative: one is responsible for performing ‘and’ one is responsible for having taken performance enhancing drugs. Given that such accumulation could be interpreted as “more responsible”, this might challenge Glannon’s conclusion and impact the normative practices associated with enhancement drugs.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this new edition of the classic book on the moral conduct of war, Sidney Axinn provides a full-length treatment of the military conventions from a ...
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The military claims to be an honourable profession, yet military torture is widespread. Why is the military violating its own values? Jessica Wolfendale argues that the prevalence of military torture is linked to military training methods that cultivate the psychological dispositions connected to crimes of obedience. While these methods are used, the military has no credible claim to professional status. Combating torture requires that we radically rethink the nature of the military profession and military training.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Abstract This article furnishes a philosophical background for the current debate about responsibility and culpability for war crimes by referring to ideas from three important just war thinkers: Augustine, Francisco de Vitoria, and Michael Walzer. It combines lessons from these three thinkers with perspectives on current problems in the ethics of war, distinguishes between legal culpability, moral culpability, and moral responsibility, and stresses that even lower-ranking soldiers must in many cases assume moral responsibility for their acts, even though they are part of a military hierarchy and act under orders. The questions addressed in this article are arguably among the hardest and most muddled in military ethics and deserve close philosophical analysis and scrutiny.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Responding to increasing global anxiety over the ethics education of military personnel, this volume illustrates the depth, rigour and critical acuity of ...
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Neither M. Walzer's collectivist conception of the "moral equality" of combatants, nor its antithetical individualist conceptions of responsibility are compatible with the ethos of military professionalism and its conception(s) of the responsibility of military professionals for service in an unjust war.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: informaworld.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Jessica Wolfendale, Performance-enhancing technologies and moral responsibility in the military
 Back
All discussions
Start a new thread
|
There are no threads in this forum |
Nothing in this forum yet.
