The Moral Injury

Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo provides one of the more coherent and compelling accounts of the penultimate cost of war:

[T]he ethical damage of war may be worse than the physical injuries we sustain. To properly wage war, you have to recalibrate your moral compass. Once you return from the battlefield, it is difficult or impossible to repair it... War makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re to be honest about the true costs of war.

Read the article here.

Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli

To celebrate its fiftieth year in print, The New York Review of Books is reprinting excerpts from some of its more notable pieces. Here, Isaiah Berlin reconsiders the place of Machievelli in the larger contexts of moral debate and political philosophy.

Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent question mark in the path of posterity. It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident or error—the clash of Antigone and Creon or in the story of Tristan—but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.

For those who look on such collisions as rare, exceptional, and disastrous, the choice to be made is necessarily an agonizing experience for which, as a rational being, one cannot prepare (since no rules apply). But for Machiavelli, at least in The Prince, The Discourses, Mandragola, there is no agony. One chooses as one chooses because one knows what one wants, and is ready to pay the price. One chooses classical civilization rather than the Theban desert, Rome and not Jerusalem, whatever the priests may say, because such is one’s nature, and—he is no existentialist or romantic individualist avant la parole—because it is that of men in general, at all times, everywhere. If others prefer solitude or martyrdom, he shrugs his shoulders. Such men are not for him. He has nothing to say to them, nothing to argue with them about. All that matters to him and those who agree with him is that such men be not allowed to meddle with politics or education or any of the cardinal factors in human life; their outlook unfits them for such tasks.

I do not mean that Machiavelli explicitly asserts that there is a pluralism or even a dualism of values between which conscious choices must be made. But this follows from the contrasts he draws between the conduct he admires and that which he condemns. He seems to take for granted the obvious superiority of classical civic virtue and brushes aside Christian values, as well as conventional morality, with a disparaging or patronizing sentence or two, or smooth words about the misinterpretation of Christianity. This worries or infuriates those who disagree with him the more because it goes against their convictions without seeming to be aware of doing so—and recommends wicked courses as obviously the most sensible, something that only fools or visionaries will reject.

If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely, that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how men should live. If this is false (and if more than one equally valid answer to the question can be returned, then it is false) the idea of the sole true, objective, universal human ideal crumbles. The very search for it becomes not merely utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent….

 Read the excerept (with link to the original article in its entirety) here.

Dworkin of The Good Life

Ronald Dworkin, author of Justice for Hedgehogs, proposes a refined concept of what cconstitutes the good life:

The austere view that virtue should be its own reward is disappointing in another way. Philosophers ask why people should be moral. If we accept the austere view, then we can only answer: because morality requires this. That is not an obviously illegitimate answer. The web of justification is always finally, at its limits, circular, and it is not viciously circular to say that morality provides its own only justification, that we must be moral simply because that is what morality demands. But it is nevertheless sad to be forced to say this. Philosophers have pressed the question “why be moral?” because it seems odd to think that morality, which is often burdensome, has the force it does in our lives just because it is there, like an arduous and unpleasant mountain we must constantly climb but that we might hope wasn’t there or would somehow crumble. We want to think that morality connects with human purposes and ambitions in some less negative way, that it is not all constraint, with no positive value.

I therefore propose a different understanding of the irresistible thought that morality is categorical. We cannot justify a moral principle just by showing that following that principle would promote someone’s or everyone’s desires in either the short or the long term. The fact of desire—even enlightened desire, even a universal desire supposedly embedded in human nature—cannot justify a moral duty. So understood, our sense that morality need not serve our interests is only another application of Hume’s principle that no amount of empirical discovery about the state of the world can establish conclusions about moral obligation. My understanding of a proposal for combining ethics and morality does not rule out tying them together in the way Plato and Aristotle did, and in the way our own project proposes, because that project takes ethics to be, not a matter of psychological fact about what people happen to or even inevitably want or take to be in their own interest, but itself a matter of ideal.

We need, then, a statement of what we should take our personal goals to be that fits with and justifies our sense of what obligations, duties, and responsibilities we have to others. We look for a conception of living well that can guide our interpretation of moral concepts. But we want, as part of the same project, a conception of morality that can guide our interpretation of living well.

Read the article here.

The Military Knows It Has a Morality Problem

From the National Journal.

Sexual abuse. Adultery. Misconduct. Divorce. Suicide. Has the U.S. military lost its way after a decade of war?


It has not been a good year for America’s armed forces. David Petraeus’s extramarital affair dominated headlines; 25 instructors are under investigation for systematic sexual abuse of cadets at Lackland Air Force Base; and a rash of senior officers—at the rank of colonel or higher—have been reprimanded for serious misconduct. Last month, Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to all four-star generals and flag officers asking for institutional soul-searching. Has the military’s behavior, he seemed to be asking, threatened the “sacred trust” among top officers, the men and women they lead, and the American people? “I know you share my concern when events occur that call that trust into question,” Dempsey wrote in the memo obtained by National Journal. “We must be alert to even the perception that our Nation’s most senior officers have lost their way.”

If they want to take Dempsey’s question seriously, senior leaders should ask themselves: Have the exigencies of war fostered a rules-don’t-apply attitude of unquestioned privilege among the top ranks, corrupting a culture of high standards and accountability? Isn’t it remarkable that Petraeus and his successor as top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen, were both ensnared in the same e-mail scandal? (Allen denies wrongdoing.) Why did Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, a married former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, become involved with five women (he is under investigation after being accused of adultery, sexual misconduct, and forcible sodomy)? Did colleagues of Col. James H. Johnson III, former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Iraq, know that he was involved in a bigamous relationship with an Iraqi woman, and that he was attempting to steer government contracts to her father? Why did Gen. William (Kip) Ward, the four-star head of Africa Command, deem it acceptable to take his wife and a large entourage on lavish government-paid trips before he was stripped of a star and ordered to repay $82,000 to the Treasury?

For that matter, what does it say about the evaluation and promotion system for senior leaders that the Navy has been forced to relieve 60 senior officers from command in the past three years (a 40 percent rise over the previous three-year period), including Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette, who was dismissed from his command of the Stennis aircraft carrier group for “inappropriate leadership judgment” while it was deployed to the Middle East?

The fact that so many of the elite—the officers rigorously selected and groomed by the military—have behaved so badly shows just how deep the rot is, says Don Snider, a senior fellow at West Point’s Center for the Army Profession and Ethic. “Moral corrosion has spread throughout the entire profession of arms as a result of a decade of war,” he says. “War … creates a culture where cutting corners ethically becomes the norm.” So much so that military leaders are willing to look the other way. “I can almost guarantee you that in each case of ill-discipline by a senior officer, other people in the command knew exactly what was going on and either didn’t say anything, or it didn’t matter what they said.”

The problem goes much deeper than high-profile cases such as the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians by a U.S. soldier earlier this year, the “sport killing” of three Afghan civilians last year by soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, or the torture and debasement of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, says that his biggest concerns aren’t defense cuts or arsenal upgrades. He thinks the military must reverse what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called a “silent epidemic” of sexual assault in the ranks. According to the Veterans Affairs Department, one in five women report sexual trauma during their service. The admiral says that his second priority is coping with a military suicide rate that is up 22 percent over last year and may reach as high as one death per day this year.

Military sociologists and clinicians worry that the suicide rate is just the leading indicator of a tide of mental and physical suffering. This includes unacceptably high rates of substance abuse (binge drinking among service members ages 18 to 35 is 50 percent higher than among civilians, and, in surveys, up to one in four Army soldiers admit they abuse prescription drugs); divorce (the military divorce rate rose 38 percent from 2001 to 2010); and depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (a 2008 Rand survey found that one in five veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan—some 300,000 people—are suffering either from major depression or PTSD).

Prolonged exposure to combat triggers such intense emotions—fear, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief, survivor’s guilt—that some psychiatrists at the VA have coined a new name for the malady: “moral injury.” All of this threatens “to impede the reintegration into society of a whole generation of veterans,” says David SegalFull Almanac Profile »Recent Coverage », a sociologist who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

In response to the recent scandals, Dempsey has completed an initial review of ethical standards in the senior ranks. The findings are serious enough that he is creating a panel on “professional ethics,” which will include respected retired generals and academic experts. Its first order of business should be to consider whether the “moral injury” that so obviously afflicts the rank and file has spread to the military’s top echelon, and to the institution writ large.

This article appeared in the Saturday, December 8, 2012 edition of National Journal.

"Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman..."

... who's had her salon appointment interrupted by a bunch of young zealots. To wit:

Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.

Read the story here.

Superman Renounces U.S. Citizenship

Comic books are getting complicated:

...Superman announces that he is going to give up his U.S. citizenship. Despite very literally being an alien immigrant, Superman has long been seen as a patriotic symbol of "truth, justice, and the American way," from his embrace of traditional American ideals to the iconic red and blue of his costume. What it means to stand for the "American way" is an increasingly complicated thing, however, both in the real world and in superhero comics, whose storylines have increasingly seemed to mirror current events and deal with moral and political complexities rather than simple black and white morality.

Read the posting here.

Coming Out; Opting-Out

Should service members be allowed to "opt out" of an enlistment if the military changes its values?

"Sir, we joined the Marine Corps because the Marine Corps has a set of standards and values that is better than that of the civilian sector. And we have gone and changed those values and repealed the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy," the sergeant told Gates during the question and answer session.

"We have not given the Marines a chance to decide whether they wish to continue serving under that. Is there going to be an option for those Marines that no longer wish to serve due to the fact their moral values have not changed?" he asked.

"No," Gates responded. "You'll have to complete your ... enlistment just like everybody else."

Read the article here.

Justice for Hedgehogs

Ronald Dworkin believes there are absolute moral values, that when we make a moral or ethical judgment, we are interpreting, and that many of our interpretations have truth values: true or false, and therefore, right or wrong.

"Well, for example, if I say abortion is wrong, I believe what I say is true, not that it's one legitimate opinion among many. I hate it when people say: 'It's OK for gay people to get married but that's only my opinion.' You can't think it's just your opinion or you wouldn't hold it. Imagine a judge who's just sentenced a man to jail for life saying: 'Other judges might have found differently and they're entitled to their opinions.' Who could reasonably say such a thing?"

Read Stuart Jeffries' review of Dworkin's new book in The Guardian here. 

Moral Arguments

When making arguments about moral acts, can you build premises around objective moral facts? Or, are all our moral claims a construct of  opinion and/or cultural constructions? Discover Magazine posted the following debate between bloggers:

You can’t use logic to derive moral commandments solely from facts about the world, even if those facts include human desires. Of course, you can derive moral commandments if you sneak in some moral premise; all I’m trying to say here is that we should be upfront about what those moral premises are, and not try to hide them underneath a pile of unobjectionable-sounding statements. 

As a warm-up, here is an example of logic in action:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The first two statements are the premises, the last one is the conclusion. (Obviously there are logical forms other than syllogisms, but this is a good paradigmatic example.) Notice the crucial feature: all of the important terms in the conclusion (“Socrates,” “mortal”) actually appeared somewhere in the premises. That’s why you can’t derive “ought” from “is” — you can’t reach a conclusion containing the word “ought” if that word (or something equivalent) doesn’t appear in your premises.

This doesn’t stop people from trying. Carrier uses the following example (slightly, but not unfairly, paraphrased):

Your car is running low on oil.

If your car runs out of oil, the engine will seize up.

You don’t want your car’s engine to seize up.

Therefore, you ought to change the oil in your car.

At the level of everyday practical reasoning, there’s nothing wrong with this. But if we’re trying to set up a careful foundation for moral philosophy, we should be honest and admit that the logic here is obviously incomplete. There is a missing premise, which should be spelled out explicitly:

We ought to do that which would bring about what we want.

Crucially, this is a different kind of premise than the other three in this argument; they are facts about the world that could in principle be tested experimentally, while this new one is not.

Read the entry here, the counterpoint here.

Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Moral Reasoning in Military Officers

"Military operations often entail sleep deprivation. Such operations also involve a multitude of moral judgments, ranging from managerial decisions to extremely difficult choices, such as whether to attack insurgents in a setting surrounded by civilians. Great importance is therefore assigned to morals in military operational and leadership doctrines as well as in contemporary leadership theory. In the wake of moral scandals such as Enron and the Abu Grahib prison abuse scandal in Iraq, leadership research has shown increasing interest in contextual antecedents of leaders’ moral behavior. Based on observations, it has been reported that sleep deprivation appears to foster laissez-faire leadership."

Read the report here.

Recap: Lessons 1-4

We started with basic terms, Philosophy, Ethics and Morality, and we made a distinction between Ethics and Morality for the purpose of this course. Remember, most people use the terms Ethics and Morality interchangeably (though they wouldn’t say something like “business morality” or “the ethic of the story”). We make the distinction here because (1) the words have seperate roots and origins, and (2) when we look at the etymology, we find that ancient difference informs an important feature of your relationship to the Academy.

It goes something like this: You come here with an established set of morals. The job here at the Academy is to present to you our military ethic. Your job then is (1) to decide whether you want to be a part of the military, and (2) to adopt the military ethos. We all operate under the assumption that the answer to (1) is “yes,” so the real work is going on with (2). Adopting the military ethos is a process, not something you do overnight. Throughout that process, we, the faculty, staff and personnel at the Academy, work to reinforce your decision in various ways. Ultimately, we’re working to persuade you to adopt our ethos. That may sound strange at first, but much of human communication and interaction amounts to little more than some function of persuasion. In class I said philosophers have two main tasks; to analyze and to persuade. The same could be said for any academic field. Science, for instance, does the majority of its business behind the scenes, with scientists working to persuade one another about what constitutes evidence. In the Air Force, our “official” (i.e., the one we learn in PME) definition of leadership is “the art and science of influencing and directing people to accomplish the assigned mission.” Sometimes the best way to persuade someone is to have them persuade themselves, so your fist assignment for the course, reading George F. Will’s lecture and answering the two questions, was designed to have you reflect on your own process of internalizing the military ethos up to this point.

We talked in class about how persuasion moves one to adopt a belief or position or course of action and how it’s based on argument. We looked at the construction of arguments and the different types, how our experience of the world is matured through argument, and how we judge good arguments from the bad ones, which is the critical step in developing our knowledge. On that last point, the Harry Frankfurt reading took us beyond fallacies with his work on BS. We read him as an exemplar of how philosophers do their work. His examinations of lying and intent are also applicable to your experience with the Honor Code here at the Academy. Your second assignment will explore that further and consider whether Frankfurt might offer some enhancement to the Code and its application.

Finally, we applied some tools of the trade to a case study by taking a critical look at the justifications for going to war in Iraq and identifying the bad arguments, i.e., those that failed to persuade.