Military Ethics

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

Recently criticisms against autonomous weapons were presented in a video in which an AI-powered drone kills a person. However, some said that this video is a distraction from the real risk of AI—the risk of unlimitedly self-improving AI systems. In this article, we analyze arguments from both sides and turn them into conditions. The following conditions are identified as leading to autonomous weapons becoming a global catastrophic risk: 1) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) development is delayed relative to progress in narrow (...) AI and manufacturing. 2) The potential for very cheap manufacture of drones, with prices below 1 USD each. 3) Anti-drone defense capabilities lagging offensive development. 4) Special global military posture encouraging development of drone swarms as a strategic offensive weapon, able to kill civilians. We conclude that while it is unlikely that drone swarms alone will become existential risk, lethal autonomous weapons could contribute to civilizational collapse in case of new world war. (shrink)

in Scott Gates and Simon Reich, eds., Building Knowledge About Children in Armed Conflict (forthcoming in the University of Pittsburgh’s Ridgway/Ford security studies series).

This small volume from Claudia Hauer results from an interesting and important intersection of her professional experiences. Trained in Classics, Hauer has spent most of her career at St. John’s Co...

I offer eight arguments against the Doctrine of Double Effect, a normative principle according to which in pursuing the good it is sometimes morally permissible to bring about some evil as a side-effect or merely foreseen consequence: the same evil would not be morally justified as an intended means or end.

What proper role should considerations of risk, particularly to research subjects, play when it comes to conducting research on human enhancement in the military context? We introduce the currently visible military enhancement techniques (1) and the standard discussion of risk for these (2), in particular what we refer to as the ‘Assumption’, which states that the demands for risk-avoidance are higher for enhancement than for therapy. We challenge the Assumption through the introduction of three categories of enhancements (3): therapeutic, preventive, (...) and pure enhancements. This demands a revision of the Assumption (4), alongside which we propose some further general principles bearing on how to balance risks and benefits in the context of military enhancement research. We identify a particular type of therapeutic enhancements as providing a more responsible path to human trials of the relevant interventions than pure enhancement applications. Finally, we discuss some possible objections to our line of thought (5). While acknowledging their potential insights, we ultimately find them to be unpersuasive, at least provided that our proposal is understood as fully non-coercive towards the candidates for such therapeutic enhancement trials. (shrink)

George Lucas, an internationally renowned authority on military ethics, passionately and persuasively submits the argument in his latest book that military strategy must surpass the outdated Clause...

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 won’t rejoin the fight. Helen Frowe has argued that field medics aren’t 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. (shrink)

Cian O’Driscoll’s Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Just War covers a vast range of materials, discussing the idea of victory and its relationship to just war theory. The idea of victory raises s...

Until recently most militaries tended to see moral issues through the lens of rules and regulations. Today, however, many armed forces consider teaching virtues to be an important complement to imposing rules and codes from above. A closer look reveals that it is mainly established military virtues such as honour, courage and loyalty that dominate both the lists of virtues and values of most militaries and the growing body of literature on military virtues. Although there is evidently still a role (...) for these traditional martial virtues, it is equally evident that they are not particularly relevant to, for instance, military personnel operating drones. This chapter looks into the ethics of unmanned warfare from the perspective of military virtues and military ethics education, and addresses the question of what we need to solve that just-mentioned misalignment: 1) a new set of virtues; 2) a different interpretation of the existing virtues; or 3) a different approach altogether, that is, an alternative to teaching virtues? That we have to think about such questions is at least partly because unmanned systems bring risk asymmetry in war to a new level, making warlike virtues such as physical courage by and large obsolete. The last section of this chapter therefore addresses the question: to what extent does the possibility of riskless warfare makes drone use ‘virtue-less’? (shrink)

Advances in AI are powering increasingly precise and widespread computational propaganda, posing serious threats to national security. The military and intelligence communities are starting to discuss ways to engage in this space, but the path forward is still unclear. These developments raise pressing ethical questions, about which existing ethics frameworks are silent. Understanding these challenges through the lens of “cognitive security,” we argue, offers a promising approach.

The international debate on the ethics and legality of autonomous weapon systems (AWS), along with the call for a ban, primarily focus on the nebulous concept of fully autonomous AWS. These are AWS capable of target selection and engagement absent human supervision or control. This paper argues that such a conception of autonomy is divorced from both military planning and decision-making operations; it also ignores the design requirements that govern AWS engineering and the subsequent tracking and tracing of moral responsibility. (...) To show how military operations can be coupled with design ethics, this paper marries two different kinds of meaningful human control (MHC) termed levels of abstraction. Under this two-tiered understanding of MHC, the contentious notion of ‘full’ autonomy becomes unproblematic. (shrink)

A new book by Jocko Willink, "Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual", is reviewed. Leadership Strategy and Tactics explore the nature of leadership styles and strategies in both narrative forms as the author discusses past experiences in the military, as well as in real-world applications beyond the military domain. The author provides timely, yet timeless advice for aspiring leaders in an easily digestible form, with quick reference chapters and simple tactical points.

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood soldiers, (...) it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)

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 offi...

Senior service colleges provide professional education to prepare military and government civilians for public service at the senior levels of strategy and policy. Inclusive in the program of study...

While there is a budding literature on media ethics in the light of characteristic sub-Saharan moral values, there is virtually nothing on wartime reporting more specifically. Furthermore, the literature insofar as it has a bearing on wartime reporting suggests that embedded journalism and patriotic journalism are ethically justified during war. In this essay, I sketch a prima facie attractive African moral theory, grounded on a certain interpretation of the value of communal relationship, and bring out what it entails for the (...) ways journalists should report on war. My aims are the normative ones of showing how this Afro-communal ethic can provide a unitary foundation for a wide array of plausible conclusions about reporting on war, and, in particular, can avoid objectionable implications such as support for embedded and patriotic journalism. (shrink)

This article constitutes an attempt to demonstrate the complexity of factors affecting the legitimate acquisition and reasonable exercise by a political community of the right to war as specified i...

A hundred years ago, in mid-August 1920, a decisive battle took place in Central Europe between two sizable armies waging fierce combat operations in the region for more than a year. In the immedia...

Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 267-268.

A few years ago, this page of the Journal of Military Ethics offered Martin Cook’s and Henrik Syse’s penetrating essay about the nature of military ethics. That piece continues...

Polish roles in the First World War take center stage in a special section of this issue of JME. Although not a nation on maps of the time, many Poles considered themselves united as a people even...

Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 353-353.

Volume 19, Issue 1, April-May 2020, Page 76-76.

This small volume from Claudia Hauer results from an interesting and important intersection of her professional experiences. Trained in Classics, Hauer has spent most of her career at St. John’s Co...

Volume 19, Issue 2, July - August 2020, Page 163-164.

Is it coherent to defend nuclear deterrence from an ethical and just-war point of view, given the likely devastating effects of an actual nuclear exchange? This article holds that the salutary effe...

Is Currency Warfare defined as, the use of monetary or military force directed against an enemy’s monetary power as part of a military campaign, a just way to fight a war? This article explores the...

The legal equality of combatants is a fixture of international law and just war theory. Both scholars who embrace and those who reject the moral equality of combatants seem committed to the l...

This article elaborates on Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics, exploring the plausibility of his claim that each praxis has its own appropriate set of virtues. The exploration will be applied to wh...

The legitimate authority principle has become reduced to the issue of state authority. In its current formulation, the state has the sole authority to wage war, and because non-state actors, by the...

George Lucas, an internationally renowned authority on military ethics, passionately and persuasively submits the argument in his latest book that military strategy must surpass the outdated Clause...

Warfare is becoming increasingly automated, from automatic missile defense systems to micro-UAVs that can maneuver through urban environments with ease, and each advance brings with it ethi...

The mass killings, large-scale gang rape and large-scale expulsion of the Rohingyas from Myanmar constitute one of the most repugnant world events in recent years. This article addresses the question of whether armed humanitarian intervention would have been morally permissible to protect the Rohingyas. It approaches the question from the perspective of the jus ad bellum criteria of just war theory. This approach does not yield a definitive answer because knowing whether certain jus ad bellum conditions might have been satisfied (...) is difficult to judge without detailed knowledge of military intelligence assessments. Nevertheless, I argue that there was just cause for intervention according to both liberal and communitarian perspectives; that legitimate authority in the form of United Nations Security Council authorization would not have been morally necessary; that it is doubtful whether permissible intervention would have required humanitarian intent; that in late August 2017, intervention might well have been a last resort, but that morally relevant facts suggest intervention might have been disproportionate and lacked a reasonable chance of success, such that, all things considered, it would have perhaps been impermissible. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical problem of just and unjust memory. There is a general consensus about commemorating fallen soldiers and killed civilians. But, unfor...

This article uses paradigms developed in the ethics of war debate, primarily jus in bello, and academic theories developed for the study of religion: the dialectic of the sacr...

This article presents a novel theory of noncombatant immunity that can serve as a practical guide for soldiers in the field. It improves on existing theories by justifying why and when an innocent...

Cyber attack against Critical National Infrastructure is a developing capability in state arsenals. The onset of this new instrument in national security has implications for conflict thresholds an...