Abstract
Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive behavior. In part one, I discuss Abu Ghraib. In two, I examine social psychological explanations of how ordinary, apparently decent people are able to commit atrocities. In three, I address a series of questions: why should we turn to ethics for help with these problems, and why, in particular, to Stoicism instead of other ethical theories, such as utilitarianism or Kantianism? Given the power of situations in influencing behavior, is a turn to character ethics a viable response to problems such as those at Abu Ghraib? I argue in part four that character formation drawing on Stoic values can provide soldiers with the inner resilience to resist the situational factors that press them to unwarranted aggression.
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Notes
Bandura (1998, pp. 163ff) uses the term ‘justification’ to describe a perpetrator’s portrayal of destructive acts as serving moral purposes. However, what Bandura describes seems closer to what philosophers would call ‘rationalization’ than to what they would call ‘justification.’
I leave aside both religious ethics and non-western ethical theories. Due to the separation of church and state in the United States, it would be problematic for the U. S. military to advocate religious ethics. In addition, given the plurality of religious beliefs that soldiers might have, the military’s advocacy of values from any one religious tradition could be deeply alienating and unhelpful to soldiers of other faiths. I also believe the adoption of non-western ethics would be problematic, since those traditions, though valuable, are sometimes at odds with military aims and values (e.g., Gandhian non-violence and Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion) and are sometimes difficult for westerners to understand and absorb.
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Acknowledgements
I thank my audience at the Conference for the Tenth Anniversary of the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 22–23, 2008, and an anonymous referee for this journal.
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Snow, N.E. How Ethical Theory Can Improve Practice: Lessons from Abu Ghraib. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 555–568 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9180-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9180-8