Ethics Education in the Military

Nigel de Lee, Paul Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351938952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

With formal ethics education programmes being a rarity in most countries' armed forces, there is a growing importance for servicemen to undergo additional military ethics training. But how do we ensure that soldiers learn the right lessons from it? Furthermore, how can we achieve a uniformity of approach? The current lack of uniformity about what constitutes ethical behaviour and how troops should be educated in it is potentially a cause for serious alarm. This book advances knowledge and understanding of the issues associated with this subject by bringing together experts from around the world to analyze the content, mode of instruction, theoretical underpinnings, and the effect of cultural and national differences within current ethics programmes. It also explores whether such programmes are best run by military officers, chaplains or academic philosophers, and reflects whether it is feasible to develop common principles and approaches for the armed forces of all Western countries. This is an invaluable volume for military academies and staff colleges to enhance understanding of a matter which requires much further thought and which is becoming a vital force in influencing outcomes on the battlefields of the twenty-first century. The book will primarily be of interest to military officers and others directly involved in ethics education in the military, as well as to philosophers and students of military affairs.

Chapter 1

Introduction:
Ethics Education in the Military

Paul Robinson

Aims and Content

Within liberal democratic countries, demands that the ethics of public office be formally codified are becoming ever louder. ‘Ethics committees’ and the like are a growth industry. This is especially true in the militaries of the Western world, where the work of the armed forces is held up to unprecedented public scrutiny. Furthermore, many military missions are now justified in humanitarian terms, using the language of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’. The British armed forces, for instance, claim that their mission is to be ‘a force for good’. Clearly, if such claims are to be more than self-serving rhetoric, military personnel must uphold the highest ethical standards. This in turn means that military institutions must pay increasing attention to the ethical education of their members.

Until recently, ethics education policies in military forces were developed on an ad hoc basis, rather than drawn from any systematically considered ethical theory or embedded within any pragmatic, workable education programme. This has begun to change, and many countries are establishing new military ethics programmes directly based on the work of academic philosophers and social scientists. The philosophical principles behind these programmes are, however, often very different from one nation to another, producing significant variation in the methods used to tackle the common problem.

One of the reasons for this variation is a degree of semantic confusion concerning the meaning of key terms, most especially ‘ethics’. As will become clear in this volume, for some ethics is synonymous with ‘morality’. The aim of ethics education, therefore, is seen as being what many refer to as ‘character development’, in other words the creation of morally upright persons through the instillation of certain key qualities or dispositions of character (commonly known as ‘virtues’). Others, however, disagree, and consider ethics to be somewhat distinct from general morality. Instead, ethics are more properly seen as being related to a given profession and its requirements. The focus of ethics education therefore shifts from character development to creating an understanding of the purpose and methods of the profession and the values which underpin it. Complicating matters still further, some institutions shy away from the word ‘ethics’ and prefer to speak of ‘ethos’, the intangible tone or spirit which guides a community and the behaviour of its members. The consequence of this semantic confusion is the occasional elision and overlap of terms such as ‘ethics’, ‘morality’, ‘ethos’, and ‘character’. While regrettable, the fact that there is no firm agreement on definitions means that this is unavoidable. Rather than try to impose a narrow definition of ethics, the editors have therefore chosen to allow contributors to indicate how it is understood in the institutions they are describing, and to allow the resulting tensions to become clear.

In addition, the book looks at ethics education broadly, covering both institutional and operational ethics, in both peacetime and wartime, rather than limiting the scope of enquiry to particular activities (be they conventional war, counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, or anything else). A narrower study of ethics education for ‘operations other than war’ is, however, planned for the future.

The essays contained in this volume constitute the first academic survey of the work being carried out in the area of ethics education in the military. The book brings together philosophers, military officers (including chaplains), and social scientists from around the globe to analyze the ethics education schemes currently in place within the armed forces of a large sample of countries, and to conduct a critical comparison and evaluation of those programmes. The authors examine the philosophical principles upon which existing programmes are based, discuss the reasons why those principles have been selected and how they translate into practice, and determine, as far as is possible, their suitability and effectiveness.

In putting this volume together, the editors and contributors had a variety of related aims and objectives:

• to identify and examine a representative selection of current methodologies of ethics education programmes; to exchange ideas and best practices from within the realm of military education; and to inform practitioners of what others are doing, and thereby facilitate the further development of suitable military ethics education;
• to identify the explicit or tacit theoretical underpinnings of individual ethics education programmes (such as utilitarian, deontological, contractarian, or virtue theories); to determine why the programmes exist and why they are constructed in the way they are; and to carry out a critical evaluative comparison of the advantages and constraints of adopting one or other of these theories as the basis for constructing such programmes;
• to investigate the effect of cultural and national differences on the content and rationale of individual programmes;
• to apply the results of these investigations to a consideration of the relationship between the dictates of ‘ordinary morality’ and ‘role morality’ given the practicalities of military operations (should we be seeking to create soldiers who are morally ‘good’ or merely to imbue soldiers with the ethics required for them to carry out their tasks?);
• to consider the appropriate roles of military personnel, chaplains, philosophers, and others within the structure of a military ethics education programme; and
• to investigate the advisability and feasibility of developing common principles and methods for ethics education programmes across all the countries studied in this volume.

The book consists of two parts: the first part contains a dozen essays outlining and analyzing the military ethics education programmes of ten democratic states, namely the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, Norway, Germany, France, Netherlands, Israel and Japan; the second part contains critical responses to these essays by moral philosophers.

Describing the practices of the British armed forces, Stephen Deakin and Patrick Mileham note in Chapters 2 and 4 a continuing resistance to the intellectualization of ethics. The British approach is thoroughly pragmatic; as Deakin comments in Chapter 2, ‘abstract ethical theory is kept to a minimum; practical hands on experience of dealing with the issues is emphasized’. This does not mean that the British military produces men and women whose ethical standards are noticeably inferior to those of other armed forces; on the whole its methods appear to work. However, there is, as Mileham says, ‘an intellectual doubt about how to articulate and codify what actually is intuitively well understood’ (see Chapter 4).

By contrast, the academic study of ethics is well established in US military academies, as described by Jeffrey Wilson and Martin Cook in their studies of the US Military Academy at West Point and the US Air Force Academy (Chapters 3 and 5 respectively). Both view Aristotle as the ‘intellectual father of the enterprise’. They disagree to some extent about the effectiveness of their respective institutions’ efforts to build moral character in their charges. Wilson comments favourably that ‘history is replete with fine examples of how well West Point has done in living up to its mission of producing leaders of character’, whereas Cook more negatively notes ‘confusion about the meaning of central terms of this discourse (such as ‘integrity’ and ‘professionalism’) … the balkanized approach to the teaching/training of cadets in this area’, and ‘a fundamentally incoherent and confused welter of programmes justified, if at all, by the belief that if ethics is important, throwing lots of resources at the subject from any number of angles and approaches must somehow be doing good’.

Such alleged incoherence contrasts with the more centralized approach adopted by the Canadian Department of National Defence in its Defence Ethics Programme, described by Yvon Desjardins in Chapter 6. This strikes a ‘balance between judgment based on values and absolute compliance’, with the level and depth of ethics instruction varying according to rank and responsibility. Whereas ethics education in most countries (and consequently in most of the chapters in this book) is overwhelmingly focused on officers, the Canadian Defence Ethics Programme features activities specifically directed at non-commissioned members. It also aims to incorporate ethical problems into field training.

In this way the Canadian Defence Ethics Programme shares something with the approach adopted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). In Chapter 7, Jamie Cullens makes special note of the ADF’s use of the case study method, and particularly of the fact that it is ‘willing to debate contentious contemporary issues’ and to involve those actually involved in the incidents in question. ‘The nature of Australian culture’, Cullens claims, ‘allows the ADF to examine sensitive and contentious issues in ways that other militaries are reluctant to consider’. In this regard, he concludes, ‘the ADF is well ahead of our coalition partners’.

In most countries, responsibility for ethics education lies primarily with military officers, sometimes with the assistance of academic philosophers. The two countries examined in Chapters 8 and 9 (Norway and Germany) constitute an exception, in that military chaplains take the leading role. As shown by Tor Arne Berntsen and Raag Rolfsen, this is especially true in Norway. The German concept of Innere Führung described by Stefan Werdelis also provides an interesting contrast to the ideas put forward in some other chapters. Historical experience has given the Germans a justified suspicion of lofty ideals of military exceptionalism, and one of the aims of Innere Führung, as described by Werdelis, is to prevent such ‘praetorianism’ from gaining a foothold. Rather than seeing the soldier as a repository of virtue, the German perspective is to view him as a ‘citizen under arms’, and the purpose of ethics training as to instil a ‘democracy-oriented model of professional ethics’.

As far as the French Army is concerned, Henri Hude argues in Chapter 10 that ‘Standards and values which have come to count for little or nothing in civil society have continued to be cultivated, and have to go on being cultivated, in the sphere of the armed forces’. Formal ethics education is a recent phenomenon at the Coëtquidan Military Academy, but according to Hude has now been placed at the very centre of officer training, as one of three core areas (ethics, politics and tactics). Hude concludes with a plea for international cooperation ‘to reach an understanding of, and harmony on, ethical issues’.

Most of the programmes described in this volume more or less follow the principles of virtue ethics. Chapters 11 and 12, by Peter Olsthoorn and Asa Kasher, describing their experiences in the Netherlands and Israel respectively, present some scepticism about the appropriateness of this model. While noting that virtue ethics underlie ethics education at the Netherlands Defence Academy, Olsthoorn believes that current expectations may be too ambitious. Referring to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (Kohlberg 1981), he comments that we may need to accept that we will not always be able to produce men and women capable of autonomous ethical thinking. We should therefore set our sights somewhat lower. Professor Kasher takes yet another approach; for him, character development should not be the primary aim of ethics education in the military at all. Rather, military ethics is, he says, ‘a conception of the proper behaviour of a person as a member of a military force’. Ethics education should focus not on changing character but on providing service men and women with an understanding of their professional identity, and of what it means to be a military professional in general and more specifically a military professional in a liberal democracy.

In the final chapter in Part I, Fumio Ota provides an Eastern perspective on the issues covered in this book, contrasting the ethics of Bushido, of the Imperial Precepts to the Soldiers and Sailors, issued by the Japanese Emperor in 1887, and of the Ethos of Self Defence Personnel, issued by the Japanese government in 1961 and still the official ethos of the Japanese Defence Forces. The Imperial Precepts, he concludes, were superior both to the code of Bushido and the Ethos of Self Defence Personnel, because the Imperial Precepts include the precepts of Valour and Simplicity, and also because they have more ‘emotional charge’. This introduces an important point — that ethics education needs to appeal to the emotions as well as the intellect.

Part II of this book contains responses to all of the above chapters by Jessica Wolfendale, Alexander Moseley, and Don Carrick. Wolfendale questions whether military commanders have given sufficient thought to the purpose of ethics education. It is obvious that to some it has a purely functional purpose, reflecting the belief that a soldier who is in some sense morally good will also be a more efficient soldier; however, it is also obvious that to others, the moral improvement of soldiers is seen as an aim in itself. Confusion about the purpose of ethics education leads in turn to confusion about the methods chosen to achieve that purpose, perhaps explaining some of the incoherence described by Martin Cook and others. Meanwhile, Moseley argues, like many others in this volume, that the purpose of ethics education should be to create service men and women who can think for themselves about ethical issues. Taken to its logical conclusion that means accepting that on occasion soldiers may wish to disobey orders or even withdraw entirely from combat. Finally, Carrick draws a comparison between ethics education in the military and in the medical and legal professions. Appealing to the notion of ‘professional role morality’, he finds that the traditional methodology and moral grounding of ethics education in the military are inadequate to meet the practical and moral demands made of soldiers taking part in ‘new wars’ and operations other than war. Favouring the approach to ethics education described by Asa Kasher, he suggests that the way forward might be to redefine the professional role of modern soldiers (and consequently to reconsider the values, norms and principles which underlie the role morality), and ethically re-educate them into being soldier-policemen.

Values and Virtues

Taken together, these essays raise as many questions as they answer, if not more. Why have ethics education in the military? What should be included in a military ethics programme? How should it be conducted? And by whom should it be taught and organized? As noted in many of the chapters which follow, the predominant principle which most military ethics education programmes have adopted is that of virtue ethics. This aims to ensure virtuous behaviour among those who serve in the military by means of ‘character development’; in other words to produce people who will act virtuously because they are virtuous. Unfortunately, there exists a certain methodological and terminological confusion in this regard because ‘virtues’ are often mixed up with ‘values’ (virtues representing desirable characteristics of individuals, such as courage; and values representing the ideals that the community cherishes, such as freedom). All the same, the lists of prime military virtues and values produced by the various armed forces discussed in this volume provide a useful basis for examining whether there exists some common set of virtues or values which could be used to build a universal concept of military ethics.

In light of the widely held belief, echoed by Fumio Ota, that ‘servicemen’s virtues do not change over time and geography’, it is worth comparing the lists of virtues and values produced by the armed forces studied in this book, as shown in Table 1.1.

A number of points arise from this table. First, there is great variation among the virtues and values, and also great variation in the length of the lists, although there are sufficient similarities among them to suggest that it might be possible to find some common ground. Most notably, ‘loyalty’ or ‘comradeship’ appear on eight of the 12 lists, and some variation of ‘courage’ also appears on eight. The dominance of these themes, along with others such as ‘self-sacrifice’ (four mentions in one form or another) and ‘discipline’ (five mentions) suggests that the authors of the lists still view the military virtues in a manner which would have been understandable to soldiers of more ancient times. However, the focus is undeniably inward looking: the virtue...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figure and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Ethics Education in the Military
• PART I: CASE STUDIES
• PART II: RESPONSES
• Index