Angry Planet - Ethical behavior on the battlefield

Episode Date: February 28, 2017

Growing up, I was always told the military's job was to “kill people and break stuff.” It’s a maxim that gained popularity in the United States at the end of the Vietnam War. But total war with few rules, as World War One demonstrated, carries too high a human cost. This week on War College, philosophy professor Pauline Kaurin explains the role of ethics and morality in warfare, and the gaps in educating military officers and enlistees alike about them. Instead, she argues, the U.S. military places an emphasis on officers and enlistees developing their own personal morality based on core values. But, as Kaurin and I discuss, that isn’t sufficient. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. Personal morality is not a, you know, not a get-out-ethics-free card. And I think that there, I think that is how the military views. these ethical questions.

What ethics surround warfare, not morality, ethics. And how often should the U.S. military revisit those rules? Strategies to prevent the next Abu Ghraib, or Navy bribery scandal, on this week's war college. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today's philosophy professor Pauline Corinne. She's the chair of philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University and an expert in military ethics. She literally wrote the textbook on the subject. She's here today to tell us about the importance of ethical warfare and the breakdown of ethics in America's military leadership. Pauline, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so I want to start with a real basic definition of terms. What's the difference exactly between ethics and morality?

Morality refers to either what an individual thinks is right and wrong, or what a community or a group of people might think is right and wrong, what they claim is right or wrong. Whereas ethics is reflection upon different people's moral claims, So if I claim female circumcision is wrong, that's a moral claim. And ethics is reflecting on that moral claim, asking me questions about how I ground that moral claim, where I got that moral claim from, why I think that's true. And ethics can also be reflection on not just an individual moral claim, but on moral

systems. So I might ask questions about military core values. That's, if I'm asking questions about that, that's doing ethics. The core values themselves are moral claims. The Army thinks integrity is important. That's a moral claim. Okay. So growing up, I was in, I was in, my parents are baby boomers and they live through Vietnam. And I was always kind of taught that war is about killing people and breaking stuff. And when we're talking about morality and ethics, it feels like those things are in conflict with killing people and breaking stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's our intuition, right? But I think war is more than individuals killing people and breaking stuff for their own personal gain or their own personal reasons. Usually we think of war as some

kind of collective enterprise where a group of people are doing that on behalf of another group of people, their citizens, their country, what have you. And presumably they're supposed to have good reasons for doing that. Another way to think about this is usually we say killing people is wrong, but many states engage in capital punishment and the death penalty. So there are times when we allow exceptions to normal ethical rules and war is one of those cases of where we think about, we think normally, no, we shouldn't engage in warfare because it is killing people and breaking stuff, which we don't want people to do, but there may be some cases where we're willing to say it's not a good thing to do. So we don't mean moral in that sense, but

We mean moral in the sense that it's justified. We're going to give you permission to do this under certain circumstances. So if we say that a war is morally justified, we're not saying every war is morally justified. We're saying in this case, we're going to allow permission to engage in this normally prohibited behavior. So it's more narrow than just saying it's okay to break things and kill people as a general rule, we're saying in certain cases it's morally justified. That doesn't mean it's a moral good. I'm not saying this is a fabulous thing to do. You should do it every day. We're saying under these circumstances, it's permissible. It's okay. It's not fabulous, but it may be, we might want to say it's justified. That makes it sound as if ethics and morality, especially ethics,

should walk hand in hand with both leadership and decision making. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think so. I think when it comes to military leadership, you know, it's hard for me to imagine any kind of decision, no matter how small that doesn't have some kind of ethical ramification or ethical reflection that should be required. I mean, it seems to me that it's really difficult and dangerous to separate the two. So how does the U.S. military teach ethics? Well, it depends on whether you're officer, NCO, or lower rank enlisted. If you are an officer, there's officer education that's part of the military academy, is also part of ROTC, also officer candidate school. Some of that has to do with teaching the core values.

Some of it has to do with the law of war, so Geneva and Hague conventions, other international humanitarian law, those kinds of things. They might engage in some case studies. sometimes they do simulations. So that kind of thing and also study what's called just war thinking, which is a tradition of thought that helps us think through under what conditions is war moral and what are the rules, the moral rules that one should follow in war.

So that's sort of what you would see in training for officers. for for NCOs for non-commissioned officers there's much less of that kind of training there's more the ethics is folded into leadership training and there's much less of that and then when you go to the enlisted there's there's even there's even less you might have officers you know in a combat unit who would engage in in some case studies with the people in their unit to try to maybe talk through an ethical dilemma there might be there's some online training modules where you might have like fairly simple ethical dilemmas and you have to choose what's the proper course of action like if you know someone's falsifying reports what do you do those kinds of things but there's a lot of

difference between how ethics is the training and education for ethics is done across the there's differences between the services, but also there's a lot of difference between officer NCO and enlisted. So it seems as if the U.S. military teaches the leaders, then expects the lessons to roll downhill. Yeah, I think, you know, I think so. And how's that working out for them? You know, I think that's a hard question, because the question is, is how do you judge that? We tend to judge whether or not ethics is working by whether or not there are scandalous stories in the headlines, which I don't think is a good way to judge it. I think, you know, overall within the officer corps in particular,

there is an awareness of, you know, the just war thinking, you know, the Geneva-Hague conventions and the core values. I think people are aware of that, especially in the officer core. I think discussion of the core values, at least from what I can tell, is pretty, that does trickle down, both to NCOs and lower enlisted. What I'm not sure trickles down is, I think what happens as it becomes, especially as you go to NCOs and the enlisted, it becomes a checklist. So the core values become a checklist.

Or they become something that people know they're supposed to follow or know that they're supposed to be seen as saying that they're saying that they're. this is important, but the actual practice of it doesn't bear that out. So there was a Strategic Studies Institute report that came out in 2015 called lying to ourselves, where the authors documented all kinds of cases of, in some cases, we might think of a small ethical or moral infractions, you know, pencil whipping reports or maybe not being completely candid on evaluations, those kinds of things, all the way up to much. more sort of egregious lying behaviors and their conclusion was that at least

then they were studying the army but I think this this probably applies to the other service branches as well that there's there's a problem here is that we say integrity is important but we find all kinds of what they called ethical fading so like justifying pencil whipping a report because there's too many you know training because there's too many requirements and I can't get them all done. So, you know, rather than, you know, causing harm to my subordinates, I'm just going to say that this was done. So I think, as with any moral community, I think if it's not internalized by all of the members of the community, then you are going to have, you're going to have

moral breakdowns and you're going to have people thinking that, you know, certain ethical or certain unethical or immoral behaviors are sort of wink, wink, nod, not okay. They're not. They're not that bad. And when you have things like that, then those get passed off. And then it's much easier for the more serious thing that comes next time to get passed off. And before you know it, you have, you know, a fairly serious scandal with a general or flag officer who gets into a great deal of trouble. And people are like, how did how could this possibly happen? It's like, well, that didn't happen overnight. There was, you know, odds are this wasn't the first thing that that person did. So it contributes to a system where some things are, you know, overlooked or sort of tolerated,

but then which things will be tolerated and which things won't be tolerated. It becomes an important question. I want to push back on this idea that we can't look to the headlines for judgment. I've been following the Linn-Glan Francis scandal that's affecting the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet. This is the seventh fleet. This is the most powerful naval force on the planet. In over a few decades, one Malaysian contractor bilked the American taxpayer for millions.

He did this by corrupting the Pacific Fleet. The scandal's so wide-ranging, it's taken down 17 flag officers, and NCIS and justice still aren't done investigating. There's also the naving cheating scandal from a few years ago that involved more than 30 students. One of them claimed that they're all dirty. Do you think that these say anything

about the nature of ethics and morality, in the Navy specifically, is there something about their core values that's at fault? Sure that it is. I mean, I think the line to ourselves report documented sort of the same phenomenon at a much lower level in the Army. So it may be that with the Navy, we aren't as aware of these things until they permeate into the upper levels. I mean, I think many of the scandals, whether it's Navy or there's been some notable, fairly high-level, Air Force scandals in the last couple years as well. I think those are the scandals that get the attention and they get press and they're perhaps more shocking than if a private first class

gets himself into trouble for, you know, doing something. I think that that in terms of media coverage and in terms of institutional attention, it tends to be more jarring. It is possible that there's a cultural difference between the Navy and the other branches, especially with the or core and then as you get up into the upper echelons, that there's something going on there with how ethics is treated at the higher levels. And I mean, having, I mean, I've done some research on the curriculum, like at the Navy War College and the Army War College. And I think one of the things that you find is that there's a thought that by the time people get to that point, that these are mid-career officers and that I think there's this assumption that they're

their ethical development is sort of set. And so they don't really, maybe they need, like, maybe a little refresher on ethics or something, but it's not something that you need to focus on. The curriculum focuses on things like strategic thought and, you know, how do you interface with our allies or interface with other government agencies or other. I mean, there's a lot of other, how do you think about diversity? There's a lot of other issues that are given attention. And I think there's this assumption that by the time people get to that level.

Well, they wouldn't get to that level if they weren't ethical. You know, they're fully formed adults, so there's not much you can do in terms of moving their ethical development. And I think some of this is because the military is very fond of, you know, a certain developmental model of ethics. That sort of assumes that by the time someone's 30 or 40, that's really set. And I think that that's something that's certainly open to question. But if that's your assumption, then of course you're not going to devote resources to having mid-career officers and officers at much higher levels really thinking deeply about ethical dilemmas and ethical reasoning and how to think more complexly about ethics and ask really hard, complex ethical questions. So that may be part of it, which may not just be the Navy, but there may be something in the Navy culture. the scandal you're referring to certainly seems to be a wide-ranging scandal.

I mean, there's a lot of people involved. So that suggests there's something institutional going on. What about this idea that the U.S. military seems to preach where soldiers are supposed to develop their own personal morality and personal code of ethics? It seems hands off. Like, we'll teach them our branches, core values, and then let the ethics and morality develop naturally. Well, I think the problem is that we think, that the two are in the same, right? The military tends to view ethical behavior in terms of

individual personal morality. So that's exactly what happens, is that we give them the core values. They're trained, you know, in the law of war and, you know, just war thought and in these, you know, do some ethical case studies. And the idea is that then each individual person is developing their own personal sense of morality, and that if that's the case, then what should happen is then ethical behavior flows from that. If you are a personally moral person, the idea is then you will act ethically. And that ignores the fact that the military is not merely a collection of individuals. There's also a corporate, a collective element to it. They act in concert. They act together. there are institutional structures and pressures that come to bear in the same way that there are in business.

It's the exact same problem in business. And so there's this assumption in leadership theory that as long as you have a leader who has good personal morality, then you don't have to worry about anything else, right? It just takes care of itself. And I think the empirical evidence is pretty clear that it doesn't because, I mean, there are cases. of people who have, you know, what we might consider a stellar personal morality. So they're nice to their kids. They're nice to their wives.

They help out in their communities. And they do all, you know, things in a group setting that we find morally problematic and reprehensible. Personal morality is not a, you know, it's not a get out of ethics-free card. And I think that that is how the military views, these ethical questions in terms. of developing each individual military members, personal morality, and then that's what it's about. Do you think any of these problems are cultural? In America, we tend to pride ourselves on individualism, and we don't take it well when people from a collective, even if that collective is the military attempts to teach us morals and ethics. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I mean, in terms of our political philosophy, Americans are highly individualistic, and they're very suspicious of institutions to start with, in particular institutions that purport to disseminate values. So there's resistance to teaching values in public schools, for instance, right? And the idea is, well, A, parents should be doing that. And B, you know, we don't want a collective deciding what our values should be. The idea is that each individual person should develop those on his or her, own. So it's a highly sort of individualistic model as opposed to other models that might be more

communitarian that might say, listen, your values, yes, you develop them as an individual, but you're not born into the world as an individual. You're born into a family. You're born into a town. You're born into maybe a religious community or some kind of cultural community. And so to pretend that somehow those communities don't have a role in shaping your moral development seems kind of silly. But Americans are really resistant to that idea because of the ideas for individual self-determination and the self-made person. You know, I can invent myself. I can be whoever I want to be. And so my moral development is completely a matter for me as an individual.

other people don't get to have a say in that. So I think that's part of what's going on as well. I mean, who's the Navy to tell me I should value a particular thing, right? If I decide I don't want to value that. Is the answer training, just better and more consistent training? Yeah, and I think there's also an important distinction. There's a difference between training and education. So I think we have ethics training.

So which training is much more sort of checklist oriented or you might give us sort of simple case study and there's a simple answer to it. And there's not a lot of complexity necessarily to it. So I think training is one thing. Ethics education is a very different kind of thing that involves more reflection on not just what the core values are, but why are these are core values? or what happens when they come into conflict with each other? Or how are these core values going to be applied? Are they good core values? I mean, why, you know, the Army has seven, you know, Navy only has three.

I mean, maybe the Army has too many. Or maybe the Navy doesn't have enough. So those kinds of questions are more what would be involved in ethics education, which I think is a very different kind of thing. And I think ethics education doesn't happen a lot. if it does happen, it happens really at the officer training level. It doesn't happen in those other places. What happens in the other places is training. Those are very different kinds of things, but I think we sort of conflate the two and assume if people are trained in ethics, then that's all

you need. You don't actually need ethics education. And I think you do need ethics education. Otherwise, you don't know how to apply the core values or you don't know what to do in difficult situations where, say, two of the core values conflict. You just know that you're supposed to be loyal. But what happens when, you know, your loyalty to the Constitution conflicts with the loyalty of a member of your combat group? What do you do? If you haven't had ethics education, it's going to be very hard to sort that out, except well, here's what I personally think is moral, which, you know, that's always, I think that's problematic because different people have different ideas about them.

I'm wondering about the makeup of your classrooms. Is it mostly civilian? Do you have any career military or ROTC? It depends. So I teach an honors class on the experience of war, and that's usually all civilians. We might have one or two ROTC people in that class if they happen to also be. honors students. So the last semester I happened to have an ROTC cadet in there. My military ethics class, which is a philosophy course, is about half ROTC because it is, it's a course

that's been identified by our ROTC program here at PLU as a professional military education course. And they need to have a certain number of those PME courses. So usually that class is about half ROTC cadets and then half civilians. So it really, it sort of depends on the class. What's the difference between civilian and military students? I think the ROTC students ask different questions. I think they also have a little bit harder time, at least initially sort of embracing the messiness of it. They want a straightforward kind of checklist answer.

That impulse doesn't, it's a four-week course we meet every day for three hours. That doesn't usually last through the, it doesn't survive the first week. Because in order to do the kind of work that we're doing in that class, things are going to get messy and they have to deal with complexity. So I think maybe they bring a different mindset initially, but then pretty soon once they get used to the enterprise, then they are, you know, they do ask really serious questions and they do enjoy, I think they enjoy having the maybe the freedom to debate different. positions and to explore different positions than they might and say their military science classes because it's a philosophy class so that's part of the aim of the class is to practice the discipline of philosophy and also I think it depends whether the some of our ROTC cadets are former service former so they were enlisted and have served I've had students who have come back

and they've been to Iraq or Afghanistan, and then they become part of our ROTC program. And they bring an additional level of complexity and experience. And so they ask, you know, very interesting questions because they've been there and done that. Then say the ROTC cadet who is, you know, hasn't had that experience. It's just come straight out of high school. What's one of the hardest and most complicated situations that you run them through? We do at the end of every semester, we do a case study and so they have to, and it's a pretty in-depth case study.

And the one that we have done for the last couple of years involves that you're advising, you're advising a military in another country and they have a particular cultural practice that you find, you know, morally reprehensible and they're, you know, so you have to think about how you're going to advise these military people that you're supposed to be training. You're supposed to be, you know, training them in a way that's, to some degree, consistent with your values. But what if they have a particular practice that you find morally reprehensible? So there's some kind of, you know, native or indigenous conflict between the group

that you're training and another group within the country. and there's been a conflict and, you know, the group that you're training wants revenge and they want to go in and wipe out this other group and basically kill women and children. In other words, engage in a war crime. You know, so when we think through, well, this is the, you know, well, is this their culture, right? You can't, you shouldn't interfere with their culture. You should make judgments about their cultural practices. But on the other hand, they're, you know, about to do something that, you know, is legally and morally problematic. If you stand by and let them do this, then are you

complicit in that? And if you interfere, then are you exceeding your role as advisors or as support? You're not supposed to be perhaps directly involved in combat unless it's absolutely necessary. So, I mean, that's an example of one case that, you know, we might do. We also have done in the past we've done an interrogational torture case, which is a bit more complex than the usual sort of 24 TV show scenario. So we sort of make that more complex. So it's much more, it's sort of more realistic, perhaps, and also there's less certainty because I think one of the issues in war is that there's a lot of what philosophers would call epistemic uncertainty. There's stuff you don't know. And you only have so much information.

and you have to make decisions based on incomplete. And in some cases, perhaps false or sketchy information. So that's one place where the complexity kind of comes in. One last question. How do we prevent another large-scale ethical screw-ups, specifically ones that lead to human rights abuses? Like, how do we prevent another Abu Ghraib or a Miley massacre? I don't think there's a way to guarantee that that won't have.

happen. I do think that the more, I mean, I guess the thing that concerns me is that there's so much pressure, there's such a time pressure, there's so many things that people have to train on and that they have to do, that then ethics becomes just another thing to check off on the list and in a very simplistic black and white manner, right? So you just memorize the core values, you'll be fine, right? Or let's just look at this really simple, like three-sentence case study and talk about it. And if you can do that, then you'll be fine. Or if there's an ethical problem, you go talk to the chaplain, we sort of outsource that to chaplains. And I think, or you might, or to maybe to your CO, but I think that, you know, the way and the pressures of combat and

complex combat, I think, mitigate against or make it difficult to actually do ethics education as opposed to ethics training. And so I think there are things. I think there are things that are being done, like the, you know, the reading lists that, you know, different branches have, the commander's reading list, a lot of which may include, meaning includes things like Klauswitz and Sonsa, but it might also include works of fiction. I think reading literature, talking about movies or you know those kinds of things that might be viewed as more either popular culture or literary pursuits actually I think are really helpful I mean there are some platoons and combat groups that have like book groups that where the you know the the leader will have them read

you know some work of fiction or something about World War I or something and where they can discuss these things in a little bit more of a nuanced manner because Because the reality is that in warfare, ethics is really complicated, and there aren't simple black and white answers. We know that people should not kill non-combatants, but, you know, in the contemporary battlefield, sometimes it's difficult to tell who's who. And so I think there's, I think we need to embrace that complexity and understand ethical complexity is just part of the enterprise. And so our ethics education needs to take that into account and sort of learn to work with that. But I think the military tends to train for, you know, zero defects. And there's sort of a, you know, a no tolerance policy towards ethical infractions, or that's the perception.

So complexity is one piece. The other piece is that people have to be able, they have to be able to learn from their mistakes. And so I think one of the things that happens is earlier in your career, there might be an ethical infraction or something that you did wrong. And the temptation is perhaps for you to cover it up or for people who are around you to say, oh, it's okay, it's not a big deal because you don't want to ruin their career. Rather than having some kind of structural way that people can make a mistake and have some reform. on that and learn from that and then show growth from that rather than having sort of a zero defects in environment because that only encourages cover-ups and that was part of what happened in Milai was that there was this you know this sort of sense that we couldn't have you know well that's not that's not what Americans do so there was this this sense well that couldn't possibly happen and I think because of that culture then there was there was a cover-up So I think if there are ways earlier in people's career for there to be moral growth under sort of controlled circumstances like we do with children, right? We allow children to make small mistakes and then learn from them early rather than waiting and tell their teenagers to talk to them about a line.

As you don't wait until someone's a teenager to talk about the definition of line. You sort of work with them as they are coming up as toddlers when they learn to speak. So I would like to see more of that. And I think we'd have fewer of the high profile scandals and fewer perhaps cover-ups or less angst about making mistakes if there was a sense that you could learn from that and you could grow from that. Pauline Corinne, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedick.

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