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Supreme Political Emergency: A #CivMil Hypothetical

The views expressed here are those of the author alone. And its a crazy hypothetical that analytic philosophers love. So there is that.

In his seminal Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer proposes the “Supreme Emergency” argument wherein a nation or other political community suspends its observance of the War Convention (the rules of war/jus in bello roughly speaking) when the future survival of the political community faces a truly existential threat. (Just and Unjust Wars, 1977 Chapter 16) This suspension must come with the proviso that those who break the War Convention are doing so on behalf of the political community (Dirty Hands theory style) and must also be punished for their actions afterwards. Rather than the standard utilitarian approach of saying that the suspension of the War Convention is morally justified on the grounds that the survival of the political community is a greater good, this argument acknowledges the wrongness, the immorality of the act while also acknowledging the necessity of the acts to the survival of the political community – which for Walzer is the beginning point of all the arguments about Just War. Without the political community, there is nothing to discuss or debate in a real sense.

Is there an analogous argument with in the #CivMil community for suspending the non-partisan norms within the military (especially for commissioned officers) in a political Supreme Emergency? The standard view is that members of the military ought to stay neutral on partisan political matters to preserve the Huntingdon-esque notion of objective control (the military is given autonomy to use its expertise to win wars, provided they leave political policy matters to the civilian political leaders), a bedrock principle and norm of civilian/military relations over the last half century.

However, a colleague (who I will not throw under the bus here!) has raised (on several occasions) the very valid question about whether neutrality by senior military leaders in certain circumstances is viewed not as non-partisan, but as complicity and tactic agreement with certain civilian political authorities. The salient point here is not that this is the intention of these senior military leaders, but rather how their actions are interpreted by the public, whose trust they need to perform effectively in their Profession.

Ought members of the military, in the event of an existential threat to the political community they are sworn to serve, consider a suspension of this civ/mil norm along the lines of Walzer’s Supreme Emergency? Are they to be viewed as the option of Last Resort here? What are the long term impacts of a suspension of this norm, even if those who suspend it are punished for it?

And what about the civilian role in this Supreme Emergency? Why is the military on the hook here?

DISCUSS. Hate mail and marriage proposals to Mac, my agent, please.

Is Honor Necessarily a Moral Concept?

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As a philosopher, I like to begin at the beginning with definitions but the first thing that one runs across in thinking about honor broadly and Military Honor more specifically is the question of what role morality plays in the concept and definition of honor. To be clear, I am an ethicist and a philosopher so I am less interested in what might be called the anthropology of honor – that is descriptions of how specific historical and contemporary cultures and groups have practiced honor (although that can be interesting and give some conceptual clues) – and more interested in an analytic definition of honor. What is it that all the discussions and instances of what we term honor have in common, what is the conceptual overlap without which we do not have honor (and have something else)?

Starting with a few more general definitions of honor, we do see that an honor group (a small Community of Practice, to borrow Alastair MacIntyre’s term which I have used extensively in my work) – a small group with shared norms, moral commitments, identity and practices – seems central to the definitions. Kwame Appiah defines honor in terms of the giving and receiving of respect (Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010, Norton NYC), xix), while William

Military honor accounts prior to Shannon French’s Code of the Warrior which I think is a seminal account of warrior codes and military, tended to focus on Military Honor either from a virtue perspective (a collection of traits and dispositions that one thought marked out Military Honor as distinctive) or more commonly, from a Kantian, universal rule based orientation. Sidney Axinn’s A Moral Military starts from this Kantian standpoint and Anthony Hartle’s book Moral Issues in Military Decision Making focuses a bit on the virtues, but more on the undergirding rules and principles that he thinks make up something like Military Honor. Axinn specifically uses the honor language, Hartle seems to be implying something like it as the conceptual basis for military ethics.

Moral Injury and Anger: Is it all bad?

In his seminal book, Achilles in Vietmam, Jonathan Shay coined the term ‘moral injury’ which he identifies as a betrayal by someone in authority around a significant issue which has moral import. (It is important to note that moral injury is different than guilt or regret in war – I think of this as moral pain, affront, bruising or harm depending upon the author.) The emotion that Shay identifies most closely with moral injury is not guilt or even shame but rage and anger. He uses the Rage of Achilles from Homer’s Iliad as the paradigm for his discussion of moral injury, which I see as a serious injury to one’s moral agency including the capacity to see oneself and others as moral beings.

There is, of course, much work on MI beyond Shay’s, but my own scholarship, thinking and teaching on the topic is still heavily influenced by Shay’s thinking, especially this focus on anger. Emotions, sentiments (in David Hume’s terms), and morality is a running interest for me beginning with my own work on David Hume, and more current work on moral emotions in Stoic thought and influences of these ideas for Ethics of Care accounts. Through these lenses, I have wondered if anger (whether in the context of MI or more generally) is about vulnerability and loss of control, or something else more complicated. Vulnerability and loss of control are viewed negatively the the masculine cultures that have dominated thinking about war, ethics and philosophy as a discipline; in combat, the argument goes, those things can get you and your comrades killed, lead to war crimes (its really more complicated than that but…) and are just unseemly for warriors and military professionals.

Martha Nussbaum’s also seminal book on anger and its basis for justice, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity and Justice gives us some interesting things to think about, even though her topic is the law and not necessarily MI. She argues in the case of Medea that her anger, “…is a way of sealing the self, not really mourning or accepting vulnerability.” (127) One of the categories of anger that she discusses is called ‘transition anger’ which she sees not as the backward looking emotion oriented around revenge and retribution for harms caused by others, but a more forward looking emotion focused on the unjustness/inappropriateness of the harms (and involves a judgment to this effect follow the Stoics) and what might be done to move through the anger in terms of position action steps. It is this ‘transition anger’ that she identifies as the beginning of true justice in the law and a productive moral emotion that can resolve the harms and subsequent anger. We might think of this as righteous anger aimed at making injustices better.

Of particular interest for the MI discussion is her account of self-anger and its implications for guilt and shame, particular the desire for payback or retribution. (128-9) Again, the Rage of Achilles comes to mind. We might think that Achilles’ rage is directed at Agamemnon and the rest of the army more generally (which it is to some degree), but it seems deeper than that. It seems that there is guilt and shame of Achilles self – around his self-conception, honor (a moral concept) and ultimately his own moral agency as a warrior, which might explain his refusal to fight until he is able to come to some degree of resolution of these matters. The resolution is imperfect, and the rest of the Iliad bears this out.

For Nussbaum, and contra her earlier work, guilt is not needed for moral development or good moral character as a corrective to wrong actions; she argues for accountability through a truth and reconciliation lens. Clearly the same would be true for shame, which seems to be more the emotion at play with MI (as opposed to other category of moral impact which seem to connect more with guilt as “I did something bad” not “I am morally bad or immoral, incapable of morality.”) My reading of the issue here is that guilt may not lead to the transitional anger which can be forward looking and work towards redress (shame even more so), and what is needed is accountability through a truth and reconciliation approach. This sounds much more like an Ethics of Care reading that centers relationality, empathy and care (including self oriented) as the basis for our shared moral life; it also echoes Stoicism and Hume’s focus on moral emotions as necessary for this moral life. (More on these connections here – https://modernstoicism.com/stoicisms-emotions-and-community-rethinking-and-reimagining-with-a-little-help-from-stoic-friends-by-pauline-shanks-kaurin/)

So what? If my reading is right, might Nussbaum’s transition anger concept be helpful in thinking about MI and what repair and reconciliation (whether with community, others, adversaries or self) might look like? Much discussion in Stoicism and ethics more generally discusses anger as problematic (and this is not always wrong!), but might there be aspects or kinds of anger that can be productive, especially in response to injustices or inappropriate harms? (Seneca obviously would dispute this claim.) What are we to make of cases of moral injury where the action was deemed as moral or justified, but the person themselves thinks that they acted against their own or other moral standard? (Nancy Sherman discusses these kinds of examples in her work, and I think they are important to include as well.)

Review: Post-Traumatic Jesus by David W. Peters

To say that David (along with Rachel Held Evans RIP, Nadia Bolz Weber and others who engage on social media, especially during the Festive Times of the pandemic) have kept my faith going through a long difficult season, would be an understatement. I originally met David Peters through his presence on social media, attended his prayer services through the pandemic and shared some of my own story over the years. So I was honored when he asked me to read this new book. I was also blown away when I did so.

This book is personal, empathetic (not merely sympathetic), compassionate, philosophical, theological and deeply engages the lived experience of trauma and what that means for faith and encountering the Divine (in this case in the person of Jesus.) While it is written for an audience who has experienced and is living with trauma (and includes some good caveats and guidance on that), it is a book that is worthy of a much broader audience of anyone who has experienced challenges and seasons of struggle in their faith. (If we are honest, I think that is most of us! That is, a feature, not a bug in my view of faith.)

I used this book for my Lenten reflection, reading one of the short (less than 5 pages) chapters each day as a devotional. Part sermon (in the best way as witness and application of faith by engaging Jesus through the texts of Scripture), part philosophical reflection and all practical application and implications, the chapters engage many of the most difficult parts of faith and trauma, read through the post-traumatic lens and experience. There is important historical and social context that Peters brings into conversation with personal experiences, the literature and writing on trauma and contemporary events and experiences (especially war and its aftermath) in a way that feels natural and easy to digest, while being thought-provoking.

Having been born into the faith and married (and now divorced from) to a Lutheran pastor for over 20 years, many of these texts about Jesus are very familiar and I have heard MANY sermons and reflections on them. However, the way in which the elements of each short chapter are woven together really did make them fresh for me. The lens of trauma is one that so many are familiar with, but robust engagement with the role of trauma in Jesus, the texts about him and the community that he gave birth to are less familiar and common. We are told that God through person of Jesus, understands our pain and has experienced the human condition, but Peters book goes much deeper into that basic tenet and asks us to consider what that means in a deep experiential way that is neither clean, nor simple. This is the gift of the book.

This book reflects some of the stories that I know about Rev. Peters and many others that I did not, so it is a highly personal reflection on trauma and faith. However, in dealing with issues of trauma (and I very much appreciate the guidance, reflection on the some of the literature around trauma and empathy that is infused in every word), this is also a reflective book that is accessible and relevant for those who have been spared trauma but might struggle with their faith for other reasons or those that just want a deeper reflection.

This is a wonderful, meaningful and challenging journal and I cannot recommend it highly enough especially to my friends who have experienced and are living with trauma. It is also important for those in faith communities and traditions who do not consider themselves as having experienced trauma, to understand and engage the reality of these experiences for our brothers, sisters and friends in faith. My recommendation is to read it a chapter at a time and take time for each chapter to sit and work with you. There is much to consider, feel, think about and engage.

Why Military Honor?

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When I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, I discovered a four chapter manuscript that I had at some point written on the topic of military honor. (Old school hard copy and I cannot find the disks or files now…) Reading through it, it was not really that bad! So I started thinking that this might provide the core for a book project that I could use to procrastinate on my Broicism, Stoicism and Emotion book project.

But why? Why would one want to write about or think about military honor in the context of military ethics? This topic was quite a popular way to approach military ethics post Vietnam in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, especially by military authors. In 2004, my colleague and friend Dr. Shannon French published her influential Code of the Warrior https://www.amazon.com/Code-Warrior-Exploring-Values-Present/dp/0847697576 which examined warrior codes across time and cultures and argued that the code was essential to the moral identity and function of the warrior and also could provide protection against moral injury. This is still an excellent book and it was also ahead of its time in focusing on the links between morality, ethics and moral injury in military ethics. So the whole military honor thing seems to have been done and done well in Dr. French’s case!

Since 2004 there has been much more work on military ethics, especially focusing on debates in Just War Thinking and energetic arguments about the moral and ethical concerns with the idea of the warrior, not to mention a large and emerging literature on moral injury. The literature on military ethics, in my reading, falls out along some familiar (at least to ethicists) lines: virtue ethics (within which discussions of the warrior, the Profession and my ‘Guardian’ archetype could fit), universal rule or principle based conceptions and various utilitarian approaches, with treatments of Just War Thinking (including Revisionist critiques of the standard views) often figuring prominently.

But one might wonder if something is missing? In my view, the warrior versus Profession debate and the Revisionist versus Walzerian Just War Thinking discussions are a reflective of a larger issue that ethicists are trying to work out about identity in military ethics and then how those questions might relate (or not) to different accounts of moral agency – individual, collective and/or hybrid. In addition, the terrorism, counter-insurgency, humanitarian intervention and jus ad vim discussions and geopolitical events since 2004 have raised the question about the role of violence in military ethics and whether it ought to be the sole or primary focus of moral and ethical questions. During this time, a focus on civil/military relations, politicization and polarization in political philosophies and orientations as a part of military culture has emerged and is now raising ethical questions about nature of the military, the Profession, and its function and identity.

In my own work, I started more in the warrior discourse camp (following French), shifted to discussions of the Profession, made an argument that a ‘Guardian’ view is a better frame for thinking about military ethics generally and specifically with reference to jus in bello questions in asymmetric conflicts. More recently, I argued that Alasdair MacIntyre’s community of practice notion could be helpful in adding depth to my arguments about the Profession and military ethics if paired with some concepts from Just War Thinking. I also continued to get pulled (more by events than my own will) into discussions of civilian/military relations and events really pushed me to think about the link of ethics to CMR.

All of these scholarly meanderings also intersected with trying to bring Care Ethics into Professional Military Education as a fourth perspective to the standard three in military ethics discussed above. This also got me rethinking my ‘Guardian’ arguments from my first book to make more explicit what I think I had in the back of my mind – that Care Ethics could help us with identity and nature of the military discussions. However, Care Ethics also brings relationality and moral emotion into the discussion (part of the inheritance from the Stoics via David Hume, I have argued.) The move to thinking more seriously about Care Ethics and military ethics oddly enough brought me back to thinking about what the role of military honor might be in military ethics. In particular, I now wonder how military honor fits (or fails to fit) in the military ethics landscape sketched (in a vastly oversimplified way) here.

Is it possible that military honor, or some revised notion of military honor, might help bridge some of the gaps and tensions, or a least provide light to, in the current discussions within military ethics as both an academic discipline and ethical practice? I am tempted to say yes.

What do you think? What is military honor for you? What place does it have in military ethics? I really want to know.

#MEF Moral and Ethical Failure – Defining Terms 2/x

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After putting together the course and getting students to enroll (discussed in last week’s post), the first order of business was to set up some definitional structure to bring some semblance of order to our discussions. David Hume famously notes that morality provides a common language for us to discuss, make sense of and assign meaning to our moral experiences, sentiments and perspectives. I have found over the years that this is a key part of teaching ethics – giving people a common lectionary with which to engage one another. This is NOT to say that we never disagree about terms, but definitions can be a shared starting point and if we disagree with the definitions, re-defining and providing our own definitions and articulations for those definitions is an important part of the discussions.

Two of the key terms for the course are Moral Failure and Ethical Failure. These terms are often ill-defined and used interchangeably, but my philosophical intuition was that they were different and that exploring the definitions would be interesting. In teaching a course on Military Ethics and International Law for Case Western Reserve University last spring, I used Lisa Tessman’s book on Moral Failure https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Failure-Impossible-Demands-Morality/dp/0199396140 which while a dense and sophisticated read had a clear definition of Moral Failure and also was asking important questions about to what degree morality is even possible in certain contexts. The second piece seemed to match well with the discourse about Moral Injury in military ethics, although she does not make that link nor mention the MI literature even though I think (her topics are the Holocaust/Shoah and communities experiencing systemic oppression, racism, sexism and marginalization) she is describing that very phenomenon at a more communal level.

Tessman argues that moral failure is experienced by a moral agent when they are faced with a ‘choice’ between two non-negotiable moral obligations; that is, no matter which moral obligation they fulfill, they will be violating another one and as such, violating morality and acting immorally. There is no choice which is moral. Sophie’s choice kinds of decisions in the context of the Shoah are the paradigm that she has in mind here; there is no way to do the right thing. In fact, we also might see these situations as ones where the person acting does not have any meaningful moral agency, but still feels responsible and as if they have done something immoral because of the strength of the moral obligations (which often are about care and relationship, rather than rule or virtue oriented.)

Working through her account gave us a good definition to use later and also gave the students an experience of reading some difficult and dense philosophical argumentation (a good thing to experience!) and trying to make sense of it in community. The students did a great job with this and Tessman’s definition was something referenced each week. I also stressed that they need not to agree with her definition, but that we would need an alternative definition of Moral Failure with articulation as to why that definition and how that definition is different from Ethical Failure. Working through this account also surfaced race, gender, oppression, violence, individual and collective moral agency, Ethics of Care and Moral Injury early in the course; these are all themes that we came back to in the various cases so it was important to develop some practice at engaging with these issues together.

As it turns out, there are not very many things that are Moral Failure according to this definition, but some of our cases did seem to fit this definition. These cases of Moral Failure are also important to think about the implications of morality and what we can expect from people in these kinds of situations, in particular the narratives that we (others) place on these situations for our own moral comfort (evasive listening and meaning making.) This last issue has implications for military ethics and civilian military relations especially as we think about the moral and ethical gravity of warfighting.

The second major term is Ethical Failure. In this case, I provided the definition with 8-10 criteria (I kept adding as we went on) that are loosely based on Aristotelian and Humean virtue ethics; again I stressed that students were free to disagree with this definition, but we would need that alternative account with articulation. The elements of Ethical Failure that I posted at the beginning of the term: 1) Inexperienced or bad prudence (judgment and discretion) including problematic assumptions, beliefs, inferences; 2) akrasia (weakness of will); 3) Lacking character or having bad character; 4) Ignorance; 5) Vice – willful and intentional immorality; 6) apathy relative to morality (including delusion and denial); 7) moral disengagement (which includes a whole host of specific identifiable bias like statements); intemperance (bad desire); 9) failure to act; 10) failure of articulation especially of reasons and motives.

This is quite a list, so in many cases there were some elements and not others. In addition, this is quite different from Moral Failure. Here there is something that goes wrong in the process of ethics and ethical reflection (that is, the process of moral deliberation, decision, action and assessment of the action afterwards that I put into a slide called Moral Deliberation process.) There are certainly more ways that things can go wrong and also, the students thought and I agree, more ways that things can be corrected or one’s moral agency can be improved. There is much you can do about Ethical Failure, much less about Moral Failure, as a moral agent.

One question that I was interested in is this: what is the relationship (if any) between Moral Failure and Ethical Failure? At first, it seemed like they were really separate phenomena. This was helpful as we looked at each case and asked whether it was a case of Moral Failure or Ethical Failure, both, neither? Over the course of the term, especially as we moved away from the individually focused case, it seemed that Ethical Failure (especially multiple Ethical Failures over time) could produce Moral Failure AND if one could address Ethical Failures early enough one might avert Moral Failure and the attendant Moral Injury. The students kept coming back to this idea (which was theirs, it had not actually occurred to me!) late in the term with the Fat Leonard, Ft. Hood report, the Afghanistan withdrawal and even Eddie Gallagher (which is on the cusp between the individual and collective agency portions of the course.)

So these were the provisional working definitions that we would use in the course. They actually worked quite well because the MF definition is very binary and allowed identification of moral obligation, while the EF definition gave us lots of elements to think about in detail. That said, students did eventually start pushing back (yay!) about whether the definitions matched what they thought MF and EF were in their own minds. (We did a brainstorming activity on the first day to try and get at what their intuitional definitions for each were so we could track how those ideas played out in the course. I SHOULD have come back to that at the end of the term, but we ran out of time because their Final Project presentations and discussion were SO SO fabulous!)

Next week, I will tackle the Narrative Case study approach that I used in the course. In a word, the messier the better.

#MEF Moral and Ethical Failure: Origin Story 1/?

(Since this is a blog, I am more interested in getting material out and less with editing. If that bothers you, please apply mind altering substances before continuing.)

It started, as things do, on Twitter. I was musing about the fact that we do not teach the Fat Leonard scandal. As a military ethicist, this seems incomprehensible to me, but it seemed to come down to two (mostly unstated or only stated in whispers) issues: 1) why focus on the negative stories? We should focus on stories and narratives of people acting in an ethical manner, or it will encourage bad behavior and 2) we know people involved and they were ‘good guys.’

Both of these reasons actually get right at the issue: we want very clear bad stories (My Lai, we would NEVER do that, “don’t commit war crimes” although you should see what happened when we actually DID teach My Lai as a case…), happy stories that do not challenge us and make us feel good because we want to think of ourselves as morally and ethically good. The problem here is that you cannot address or fix what you are unwilling to name, face and examine and most of us would prefer NOT dwell on the unethical behavior, especially if it involves looking in the mirror for any length of time or in any deep, sustained and analytical way. But that is not fun or comfortable because it requires a deep dive into the muck, moving around in it, digging deep and asking hard questions that challenge assumptions, values (both moral and non-moral), identity – both individual and collective, including organizational – and culture. Happy stories and shared delusion are much more comfortable and do ask us to change anything. We want to appear to be moral, to be seen to be moral, but doing the work to actually BE moral? Yeah no.

As usual, I decided to take it all on and that I was going to teach Fat Leonard. I had done some thinking about it and media interviews, and its seemed a nice messy case. But there are also other nice, messy cases and I have some scholarship and teaching practice using my narrative case study method (based upon Tim O’Brien’s “How To Tell A True War Story” and detailed in my first book https://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Military-Ethics-Contemporary-Warfare/dp/1409465365. So I pondered, why not teach a course on Moral and Ethical Failure? We could explore definitions (as a philosopher I LOVE this!) since those are terms used without much intellectual care and lots of emotive punch, look at cases, think about the role of individual and collective agency (as well as hybrid ideas of agency) and have the students reflect upon their own moral and ethical failures.

One of my colleagues and co-conspirators was encouraging (he always is when I have loopy ideas) and I mapped the whole thing out on a couple sheets of old paper in the truck while I waited for my son to get done with karate. It still seemed really loopy though. I did have some conceptual readings, structure for the course, too many cases and ideas for some assignments, but would any one sign up to be depressed, shocked and horrified for 10 weeks? There are so many lovely electives from wonderful scholars and I was pretty skeptical about student response, but I do love constructing courses and syllabi (my favorite part of teaching except for engaging with students) so what the heck! Let’s do it.

The course would start with some conceptual material on moral failure (Lisa Tessman) and ethical failure (using mostly Aristotelian and Humean ideas, as well as some current moral psychology) because I wanted this to be a philosophy centric course. This is not a course designed to give purely descriptive accounts of failure from a social science perspective (while that is important, that is not my lane nor my scholarship), but rather to think through these issues from a philosophical and ethical standpoint. We would then apply those concepts to nine cases to see if they were moral failure, ethical failure, both or neither. I also wanted cases from a variety of contexts, historical periods and to explicitly engage cases people did not want to talk about that engaged moral injury, race and gender. We started with Enron, read Antigone and Things Fall Apart, discussed Eddie Gallagher, the Ft. Hood report, the Afghanistan withdrawal, First Peoples/Nations genocide in the US and of course, Fat Leonard. We would look first at the individual level, then individuals acting collaboratively and then at collective action or action within communities of practice.

The assignments would be a mix of philosophical analysis, my Emotive Analysis process that I have used teaching difficult issues for years, personal reflection on a specific personal narrative students would start the course with and revisit each week in light of the course material and a Final Project where they would choose their own topic to present on. And of course, lots of seminar discussion with messy mapping of things on the white board, working with assumptions and being willing to ‘go there’ every week and keep it as real as possible.

That was the plan. Would anyone show up? Would it work? How many people might get pissed off in the process? (This is why academic freedom matters!)

In Part 2 of this series, I will share some of what happened, what we did and why and my conclusions about teaching ethics.

Thucydides does Tragic Ethics

Warning: I am not a classicist. I am not a specialist in IR ( though I have studied it.) These are my reflections from reading and teaching Thucydides at the undergraduate and senior PME levels as a philosopher and ethicist. If you are a realist, you likely want to stop NOW. Also I repent of any missed grammatical etc sins.

In a former life, I taught an undergraduate honors course called Experience of War where the second book (after our friend Uncle Carl vC) was Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. This was an interdisciplinary class that included ethics of war, art (including paintings, music, film, poetry) and literature, Sun Tzu and Uncle Carl, journalistic accounts of My Lai, a philosophical reflection on the nature of war and warriors, and of course, historical accounts of specific conflicts. What always struck me about Thucydides was the attention to speeches rooted in the role of rhetoric and, not surprisingly as an ethicist, the moral erosion and tragedy of war. In particular, the ways in which Athens failed to live up the values one might have expected always struck me and resonated with my students – both military and civilians.

Right about now my realist friends are observing, “Thank goodness she went to teach at the War College so she can be disabused of such sloppy, emotional thinking!” Well, sort of. (And we need to talk about the role of proper, moral emotion but I digress.) I did teach Strategy and Policy (properly supervised by a very good Navy helicopter pilot) where Thucydides is taught as a core theorist and in properly realist fashion. Despite their best efforts, I cannot get down. In good academic fashion, I wanted to think about why. So here are three options I thought about in terms of reading Thucydides – and my realist friends may well want to stop reading and go have a nice Scotch or Rye.

Option A: ‘Classical’ realism – Thucydides is describing how Athens and Sparta (and their cheeky allies and other actors) behaved. The characters here followed Fear, Honor, Interest, which then can that be extrapolated to a more general claim about how states and other related actors behave. This is how states just DO operate and so if you are going to be successful you need to understand this descriptive fact. Just how it is. This seems the most common way of reading our friend, and certainly the one that was threaded through the course. Now I think the real blame for this view is to be laid at the feet of Machiavelli and especially Hobbes, but that is another blog post.

Option B: With apologies to the field of realism in international relations for making up my own definition here and likely misusing a term, I will label this normative realism: Thucydides is arguing how based on Athens’ and Sparta’s experiences, states ought to act to be successful; so Fear, Honor and Interest are norms to be observed in international relations. My students seemed to slide between this view and Option A quite a bit and I would be interested to see if this view is, in fact, held by any scholars in IR. (I am guessing it is, but I am philosopher….) This seems really weird to me since many of the outcomes were arguably bad, unless you are Persia or one of the cheeky allies. But I think even that is a stretch. Like, where is the happy ending?

But what about a counter-argument? (In true S and P/philosophy form, I must.) Maybe the relevant norm is interest, not so much the other two? States ought to follow their interests. This seems plausible since as we shall see in a minute, Fear and Honor really seem to be the trouble makers in this trinity.

Option C: At the end of the day, I kept coming back to another option: Thucydides is an ‘ethicist’ (one who reflections upon moral claims and ideas) in the tradition of Greek tragedy arguing that if states follow Fear, Honor and Interest as Athens and Sparta did, what follows is the fall thanks to hubris. This may well mean that Athens and Sparta are the analogues to the tragic hero/heroine who suffer from hubris and their downfall is a result of this. The Melian Dialogue would then be seen as a condemnation of Athenian hubris (with the Melians as the chorus), followed by moral erosion, war crimes, loss of empire and their own identity as a result (not mention all the deaths, property destruction and political and social chaos.) Arguably (and I am not a scholar on ancient Greece here – which I suppose I ought to have qualified earlier!) Sparta didn’t do so well either.

So where does this leave us? It might seem that this above reading is consistent with the realist who wants to argue that one ought to follow interest. But its more complicated that than. First, the problem here is that Fear (as Thucydides makes clear) tends to cause miscalculations about interests, what they really are and to what degree one can achieve them. It may cause over or under estimations about risk, it may cause one to take allies’ problems as more or less serious than they are or ought to be and it can cause your own people to freak out in ways that obscure true interest and make (or pressure you as the leader to make) bad decisions. This seems a really obvious point, but its also important for Just War Thinking because neither fear nor interest on their own necessarily constitute a Just Cause (and there are other criteria to fulfill for good reason!)

Second, Honor is really problematic – how problematic depends on how you see what honor is and to what extent moral values and/or identity/reputation/prestige are part of it. With honor, it seems we have a much more existential virtue (or trait for those who persist in arguing that morality has no place in international affairs – y’all know where I sit on that…) where it is very hard negotiate with or come to terms on; it creates impasses rooted in reputation, emotion, prestige, vanity, moral commitments and hubris….see Antigone. Interests seem like the kind of things that one could compromise or negotiate on without trading away who you are or what you are morally committed to; honor seems like a different kind of beast. (A point that Shakespeare seems to keep coming back to…)

The above two points and the ways in which Fear and Honor seem to play out (against Interest and sometimes against good phronesis/prudence) keep pushing me toward Thucydides and the lesson for the ages of his book being thus: DON’T act this way! Or you will end up like Athens and Sparta! The message of tragedy is not to go beyond the bounds of human reason, not to usurp the place and power of the gods – to avoid hubris.

In conclusion, I still do find Thucydides interesting (particularly so for my War College students) for the attention he pays to moral questions and the role of morality in war, especially relative to how it erodes over time and how we can turn brutal to other human beings. And to ourselves. DON’T act this way!

Reading Ethics: Professional Development

Ethical Development Reading List

DRAFT

Aim of this list –

First, organization of the list according to rank/training and is very much a work in progress.

Second, the idea is not that you would read everything at each level, rather that you might select a couple things that interest you.

Third, mix of genres, time periods and authors with attention to inclusivity of a variety of kinds.

Junior Enlisted/Cadets

Antonia Fraser: Warrior Queens (historical treatment of women leading in war)

Tim O’Brien: The Things They Carried (short stories on Vietnam conflict)

Epictetus: Enchiridion/Handbook (Stoicism, short aphorisms)

Basic moral theory selections from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, J.S. Mill

Christian Miller: Character Gap: How Good Are We?

Christopher Browning: Ordinary Men (Holocaust studies on German soldiers’ participation in atrocities)

Sophocles: Antigone (classical Greek play on obedience to the State)

Bilton and Sim: Four Hours at My Lai (journalistic account of My Lai massacre in Vietnam conflict)

Shannon French: The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present (discussion and analysis of historic and contemporary warrior cultures)

Brian Orend, On War (philosophical dialogue on ethics and war)

James B. Stockdale, The Warrior’s Triad

Nancy Sherman, Stoic Wisdom (accessible introduction to Stoic thought with good historical and philosophical context.)

Junior Officer/Mid-level Enlisted

J. Glenn Gray: The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (WWII memoir and philosophical reflection on war)

Christopher Coker: The Warrior Ethos (philosophical and political reflection on contemporary warfare)

Basic moral theory (see above), David Hume (empathy), Ethics of Care (moral theory focusing on moral obligation rooted in relationship)

Michael Walzer: Just and Unjust Wars (20^th century classic in secular Just War Thinking)

Sophocles: Ajax (classic Greek play on moral injury)

Brian Orend, Morality of War (2^nd generation contemporary Just War Thinking, after Walzer)

Johnathan Shay: Achilles in Vietnam and/or Odysseus in America (psychology work on moral injury and its moral implications)

Nancy Sherman: After War (philosophical treatment of moral injury)

William Shakespeare: Henry V (classic play including Holy War and Just War themes)

Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace

Chris Walsh: Cowardice (philosophical and historical analysis of courage and cowardice)

Phillip Hallie: Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Holocaust studies and ethical reflection upon ethics of care and religious/moral obligation in war)

August Wilson, Contribution (play on justice and revenge in 1960’s civil rights movement)

N. Finney and T. Mayfield eds: Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (anthology of essays by academics and military practioner on ethics and professionalism)

Martin Cook: The Moral Warrior (contemporary examination of moral and professional issues the modern military)

Jim Frederick: Blackhearts (case study of Iraq, war crimes, leadership)

Pauline Shanks Kaurin, On Obedience: Contrasting Philosophies for Military, Citizenry and Community (Focuses on obedience, discipline and loyalty within the context of Just War Thinking and contemporary military ethics.)

Mid Officer/Senior NCO

Walter Wink ed.: Peace is the Way (anthology of contemporary and historical readings on peace and reconciliation)

Sebastian Junger: The Tribe (essay on belonging and homecoming for veterans, US civilian/military relations)

George Lucas, Ethics of Cyberwarfare

Deane-Peter Baker: Morality and Ethics at War: Bridging the Gap between Soldier and State. (starting with moral injury, argues that the warrior and profession are both problematic ways to think about the modern military.)

Franz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (post-colonial thought and takes up the question of the meaning of violence for the oppressed and marginalized.

Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies (writing on gender, virtue, war and Just War Thinking)

Senior Officer/Flag/General Officer/SES

George Lucas, Ethics and Strategy in the 21^st Century: Moving Beyond Clausewit

James Dubik: Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics and Theory. (Just War Theory considered in the context of strategy and civilian/military relations)

Valerie Morkevicius (apologies for missing accent marks, technical difficulties!): Realist Ethics (considering the intersections between Just War Thinking and realism)

Teaching Ethics in Silence

The highlighted quotes are from my former colleague, Dr. Sergia Hay (Kierkegaard scholar, teacher of ethics, discerner of vocation, and lovely human being that I had the honor to mentor for several years as Philosophy Department Chair) in her new book, Ethical Silence: Kierkegaard, Communication, Education and Humility (Lexington Books, 2020.) As we say on the Twitter, I’ve been saying this to the military for 25 years and she just summarized it beautifully in ONE page!

But then there is this too. “The student of ethics is also required to venture into actuality, a venture that is not without effort and the potential for failure.” (92) This is the quote that I will use to start my Contemporary version of the Stockdale (Foundations of Moral Obligation) course in a few weeks because it captures his vision as well as mine, as I articulate in this Ethics primer. While discussion and conversation, especially articulation is key to ethics and Ethical (as opposed to Moral) Leadership, action matters. Practice matters. Learning from failure matters. Reflection matters. And reflection requires silence.

When asked to ‘teach’ ethics. I am often asked for short, easy hacks that can be distilled into one power point slide or into a one page executive summary, a rubric or easy road map that can be used without much knowledge, background or reflection. To which I usually respond (with some gentle snark), if I had that I would be the wealthiest philosopher ever! Philosophers have been thinking about these things for thousands of years, if it were about a hack I think some enterprising young guru would have churned that out and be making tons of bank.

We all know its not that easy, even as we want it to be.

Its not. And these passages are a good reminder that in order to be able to act (which is the essence of the ethical life) we have to take time and space to reflect and be silent. To go into the self, to quiet the noise, to hear other voices, to discern which voices (including our own) we ought to listen to. To discern what we ought to do and WHY. This discernment is not final however. It is provisional, based upon our best knowledge of a complex world at that moment.

We will act, and the reflect some more as we ask ourselves: how did that go? what did we learn? What went well? What did not go well? What might we think about for next time?

My students (and other senior leaders) often say to me: I do not have time to reflect and be silent. I have too much to do.

I say: You have too much to do NOT to reflect and be silent. Unless you are silent, how will you know what to say? Unless you reflect deeply, how will you know what to do? More importantly, how will you know the right thing to do?

How do you reflect? How do you take time for silence?

Please share!