Kantian Thinking about Military Ethics

J. Carl Ficarrotta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754679929
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317109655
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History

Kantian-inspired approaches to ethics are a hugely important part of the philosophical landscape in the 21st century, yet the lion's share of the work done in service of these approaches has been at the theoretical level. Moreover, when we survey writing in which Kantian-inspired thinkers address practical ethical problems, we do not often enough find sustained attention being paid to issues in military ethics. This collection presents a sampling of how an ethicist who takes Kantian commitments seriously addresses controversial questions in the profession of arms. It examines some of the less frequently studied topics within military ethics such as women in combat, military careerism, homosexuality, teaching bad ethics, immoral wars, collateral damage and just war theory. Presenting philosophical thinking in an easy to understand style, the volume has much to offer to a military audience.

Chapter 1
Are Military Professionals Bound by a Higher Moral Standard? Functionalism and Its Limits

Morals began with the noblest attribute of human nature, the development and cultivation of which promised the greatest utility, and it ended in—fanaticism

(Kant 1788, 170).

[Some] philosophers … have instituted moral fanaticism instead of a sober but wise moral discipline. … [T]he moral teaching of the Gospel … through the purity of its moral principle and at the same time through the suitability of its principle to the limitations of finite beings, … does not permit [man] to indulge in fancies of moral perfections; and … it sets limits of humility on self-conceit

(Kant 1788, 89–90).

It is commonly believed that, in some sense, military professionals are bound by a higher moral standard. This belief is especially prevalent inside the military. Even though there are occasional (perhaps inevitable) moral failures, there are nevertheless numerous internally promulgated codes and public espousals that enunciate such a belief.1 Many commanders exhort their troops to moral goodness and chastise them when they fall short.2 Military education frequently includes courses on the demands of professional ethics.3 Indeed, from the top down, part of the background noise of professional military life are these higher expectations, and a belief that somehow, this line of work is one with a special moral status, special moral problems, and special moral demands.

In this chapter, I want critically to address, at least generally, what this higher moral standard might amount to. I want briefly to offer a more concrete interpretation of what we might mean by a higher standard. I will then explore what reasons there might be for believing military professionals are bound by one. While my posture is a skeptical one, I still think there are arguments that make a partial case for some unique and especially strict military obligations. But I do not think we will be able fully to justify a more robust (and I think more commonly held) conception of higher demands on military behavior and character.

What Might We Mean by a Higher Moral Standard?

There are at least two ways we might elucidate the idea of a higher moral standard for the military. First, we could mean there are unique moral obligations for military professionals that most other people simply do not have. For example, we might think military professionals (but not people in general) are morally obligated to follow the orders of their superiors or be courageous in the face of physical danger. Call this the “uniqueness” interpretation. Second, we could mean military people have good reasons for being bound more strictly to the moral standards that apply to everyone. Here, we would ask military professionals more insistently to be moral, and would find them more blameworthy should they fail. Along these lines, we might say honesty is something we want from everyone, but that it is especially important for military people to be honest. Call this the “strictness” interpretation.

Having offered these two meanings for consideration, a few preliminary remarks are in order to head off possible confusion. First, these two meanings are not mutually exclusive (so we might mean some combination of both), nor am I claiming them to be exhaustive of the possibilities (so there might be other meanings of the phrase I am not addressing). Second, I think these two meanings might apply just as well either to what counts as moral behavior or what counts as a morally good character. Obviously, character and behavior are tightly interrelated, but moral theorists sometimes disagree about the place and role each of these properly occupies in the structure of our moral thinking. It is a disagreement I think we can fruitfully bracket for my purposes: higher standards, if we find them, might bind in terms of either behavior or character or both. And as it turns out, the arguments for higher standards I will be examining move freely (without suffering) between these two objects of moral evaluation. Last, keep in mind that I will be addressing moral standards for the military professional as opposed to standards of some other type (e.g., legal standards, standards of etiquette, standards of prudence, etc.).4

There are several lines of argument that might lend some support to claims that military professionals are bound by one or both of these understandings (uniqueness and strictness) of a higher moral standard: arguments that start with unique military situations, arguments that pay attention to the military function as such, and arguments that concentrate on the role of the military and its relationship to the larger society. These lines of argument, while distinct, share a good deal in common and overlap somewhat in both their approaches and their conclusions.

Unique Situations, Contexts and Problems

This much seems to me uncontroversial. The military profession, and the conducting of military operations, puts people in unique situations and contexts that pose unique and particularly pressing moral problems. Anyone taking the moral point of view will immediately notice them. To varying degrees, this is true of many—maybe even most—lines of work. Doctors, lawyers, clergy, businesswomen, whatever, find themselves faced with unique situations and contexts that create moral problems which simply would not come up very often in other endeavors.

Keeping this in mind gives us one possible way to make sense of how and why the military professional is bound by a higher moral standard. We could examine all the special situations, contexts and problems we encounter in the military, and try to puzzle out the right way, morally speaking, to think about them. For instance, in a military operation, we no doubt judge it a moral obligation to do whatever we can to avoid hurting innocents. Or we might judge that because military officers have extraordinary authority over their subordinates, they ought to take extraordinary care in looking out for their subordinates’ welfare when issuing orders. This way of thinking lends some support to the “uniqueness” interpretation, and could lead us to suppose that the higher moral standard is merely an enumeration of the unique moral demands placed on military professionals because of the unique situations, contexts and moral problems they face in their work.

Importantly, on this view the unique moral demands would bind anyone who happened to be similarly situated. Of course, military professionals are far more likely than other people actually to find themselves in these contexts. But on this account, the reason the military professional is morally required to do this or that is not primarily because of who or what he is. Rather, it is primarily the situations or the contexts in which the military professional finds himself that generate the moral requirements. This or that would be required of any person in the same situation. Likewise, we could make similar arguments for unique and hence higher moral standards in almost any job. A doctor, for example, might be bound by a higher standard of helping the sick. Of course it is plausible that anyone who happens to be able to help a sick person has some (perhaps) limited moral obligation to do so, but the doctor is uniquely situated in that she is most often in a position to help. She is, in this sense we are considering, bound by a higher standard.

So this is one way we could understand and justify a higher moral standard for the military professional. The approach will generate a long list of (general and specific) morally appropriate responses to situations military professionals are likely to face. To follow orders of appropriately appointed superiors, not to kill or injure non-combatants, to attend conscientiously to one’s military duties and the like, would all be part of what binds the military professional more or less uniquely and would hence collectively constitute the higher moral standard.

At least as far as it goes, what this approach establishes must be right. There are unique situations, contexts and problems, and these do generate unique moral demands. Still, this is rather a thin construal of a higher moral standard for military professionals, and is as notable for it what it does not establish as for what it does. To begin, one might be inclined to think that invoking a higher standard for someone means (in some sense anyway) that a person is bound to do more than any similarly situated person would be bound to do. This thin approach—as I have developed it so far—does not establish such a requirement; and this may point up an inadequacy for this way of understanding a higher standard, depending on how important we think the requirement is. But more importantly, a higher moral standard so thinly construed says nothing directly about what the military professional may or may not do outside of the military context. If a military professional fails to pay his taxes, cheats on his wife, lies to his friend, whatever, I may be as disappointed in him as anyone else (for he was bound by the same moral standards that apply to us all). But I may not be especially disappointed in light of the higher standard (so construed and justified), because this standard was generated from and applies only to situations and contexts that are unique to the military.

Maybe, using this general unique situations approach, we could also say something about a higher standard understood in terms of the “strictness” interpretation. We have seen that, at the very least, a military professional is obligated by the same moral standards as everyone else. Morality, in general, always makes its special and insistent claims on each of us, simply in virtue of the fact that we are human beings. But given the morally tough situations that come up in the military, maybe military professionals ought to attend more carefully to these common moral standards, and indeed not succumb to the temptation to comport their behavior and character in accordance with lower standards. Anscombe was exactly right to warn us about the dangers of commonplace “pride, malice and cruelty” and to point out how quickly warfare can become injustice, how easily the military life can become a bad life (Anscombe 1962, 286).

So when we consider the moral dangers and temptations of military service, and survey the extraordinarily bad things that can happen when the military professional is not strict and courageous in upholding moral standards, we may rightly worry. If we are concerned to minimize the immorality that can be, and too often is, found in war, we will see good reasons to be on guard. The military professional, then, ought to be especially strict and morally steadfast, and not yield to the extraordinary stresses that might easily lead him to violate the moral principles that bind us all. Hence we might have a rough argument for binding the military professional in accordance with the “strictness” interpretation of a higher standard.

This way of thinking about things seems to avoid the first difficulty we noticed with the thinner approach (which concentrated only on the “uniqueness” interpretation). That is, it seems to leave room for us to demand more of the military professional than we would of someone else similarly situated. Specifically, since military professionals know well the moral danger they might face, we might think they are bound—on this view—to be stronger, more disciplined, and have more moral courage in facing the temptations to do wrong in wartime. However, none of this addresses the second worry we noticed. Because these demands of strictness come from the special moral dangers present in military situations and contexts, we still are not in a position to say anything directly about the military professional’s conduct and character outside of the military context.

In spite of these worries, I think by starting with the unique situations, contexts and problems faced by the military professional, we get a nice start in sharpening our understanding and justification of being bound by a higher moral standard, for both the “uniqueness” and the “strictness” interpretations. Still, I am sure this way of understanding a higher moral standard for the military fails to capture all, or even most, of what many people are thinking when they invoke such a standard. If we hope to establish more, we must turn to some other ways of approaching the question, ways that might establish a thicker, more demanding version of the standard.

The Functional Line

Hackett has claimed that a bad person “cannot be … a good soldier, or sailor, or airman” (1986, 119). Wakin and others seem to agree with this claim (1986, 191, 208, passim). These thinkers base their conclusion on an argument I will call the functional line. They acknowledge the unique moral situations and demands placed on the military professional, which we just explored. But they furthermore think that there are certain rather general demands on the character and behavior of military professionals, mostly of the strictness variety, that flow directly from the military function itself.5 For example, military units cannot function well, especially in combat environments, if the members of the unit are not scrupulously honest with each other. Also, military folk simply will not be able to do their jobs if they are not, to a certain degree, selfless. Otherwise, they would not be willing to tolerate even the ordinary hardships of military life, much less be willing to risk their lives. Similar arguments can be made for the virtues of courage, obedience, loyalty, and conscientiousness. Hence if one thinks (for whatever reason) that it is important to have a military that functions as well as it can, one also is committed for these same reasons to thinking military professionals are more strictly bound to exhibiting these virtues and behaviors.

Notice that the functional line might be applied in some measure to any enterprise, especially cooperative ones. To the degree that any undertaking is important, then we at once have special reasons for more strictly binding those engaged in the enterprise to general moral standards that are necessary for its success. And cooperative enterprises typically depend very heavily on observing a number of moral standards. For instance, commerce would likely fail if the honesty of the participants dropped below a certain level. Hence insofar as, and to the degree that, commerce is important, we have reasons to be strict about honesty in a commercial setting. Identical arguments can be run for a large number of other enterprises (for example, fire fighting or police work). In each of these cases, we could argue for varying degrees of higher moral standards appropriate to participants in the enterprises.

But the application of the functional argument to the military is particularly apt, and establishes particularly strict and broad versions of a higher moral standard, for several reasons. First, few undertakings require the level and intensity of cooperation that is demanded by the military function. So moral standards, the observance of which are needed for cooperation, become particularly important for the military professional. Second, there are other demands of the military function that, while not directly or primarily concerned with cooperation per se, are also facilitated by clearly moral standards. The needs for bravery, selflessness, and conscientiousness come to mind as examples. These functional requirements need not be related directly to cooperation (though they might be), yet they also generate special reasons for being strict with what amount to moral standards. So the military function seems to make broader moral demands than many other undertakings, in that the military function makes a greater number of these strict demands on behavior and character. Third, failure in the military context likely will issue in tremendously bad consequences, whether considered morally or otherwise. When the military person violates functionally grounded moral rules, there is potential for disaster we just do not see in many lines of work.

If all this is right, then we have found some good reasons to think that military professionals have not only some obligations not normally encountered by others (as we saw in the unique situations approach), but that there are special reasons to be strict in enforcing many general obligations that apply to us all. I think the main idea here is right. But I also think we should be careful not to conclude too much from the functional line. All this argument leads to is a sensible demand for higher standards in the military context. Military people must be scrupulously honest with each other when there is some military issue at hand. They must be selfless when it comes to the demands of military work. They must be courageous when there is some military task to be performed.

What the functional line does not establish is that the military professional has special reasons to be “good” through and through. The argument gives a soldier who would never even think about lying in his unit no special reason not to lie to his spouse or cheat on his income tax. The military function will be no worse off if a sailor always put the needs of the service above her own, but still gives nothing to charity. As long as a pilot is courageous in combat or in dealing with his fellow professionals, he might just as well be a coward with a burglar or his father or his wife. We might well be disappointed with these non-military moral failures, but the functional line does not give us special reasons to be strict outside the military context.

Now one might be inclined to think that what I am imagining is not possible. Either people are honest or they are not, selfless or not, brave or not. This kind of functionalist would think virtues or character traits are not something we can easily exercise in one context and then fail to exercise in another. Hence, if that is true, then for functionalist reasons, the military professional ought to be held to higher standards of honesty, selflessness, or courage in every context, through and through.6 Otherwise, failures will invar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Are Military Professionals Bound by a Higher Moral Standard? Functionalism and Its Limits
• 2 Women in Combat: Discrimination by Generality
• 3 Careerism in the Military Services: An Analysis of Its Nature, Why It Is Wrong and What Might Be Done about It
• 4 Homosexuality and Military Service: A Case for Abandoning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
• 5 How to Teach a Bad Military Ethics Course
• 6 Should Members of the Military Fight in Immoral Wars? A Case for Selective Conscientious Objection
• 7 Does the Doctrine of Double Effect Justify Collateral Damage? A Case for More Restrictive Targeting Policies
• 8 Just War Theory: Triumphant … and Doing More Harm than Good
• Appendix to Chapter 8: Chapter VII of the UN Charter Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression
• References
• Index