Are military professionals bound by a higher moral standard?

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 59-75

  Ficarrotta, J Carl ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0031531031     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X9702400103     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. As for codes that require higher standards of ethical conduct, the most obvious example is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, especially Article 133. Charles R. Myers, in reviewing the history of such codes, has concluded that military professionals are held, under the law at least, "to unusually high ethical standards" (USAFA Journal of Legal Studies 5 (1994/95): 15. As for public espousals, take as a recent example the claim by former Navy Secretary James H. Webb, Jr., that "there is no substitute for an insistence on ethics, loyalty, accountability, and moral courage" "Webb Raps 'Self-Serving' Navy Leadership," Navy Times, 6 May 1996. When failures occur, corrections often go beyond mere chastisement. The media regularly reports on military professionals who have been relieved and punished under the UCMJ for moral failures including lying, disobedience, sexual harassment, adultery, and theft.
2. As for codes that require higher standards of ethical conduct, the most obvious example is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, especially Article 133. Charles R. Myers, in reviewing the history of such codes, has concluded that military professionals are held, under the law at least, "to unusually high ethical standards" (USAFA Journal of Legal Studies 5 (1994/95): 15. As for public espousals, take as a recent example the claim by former Navy Secretary James H. Webb, Jr., that "there is no substitute for an insistence on ethics, loyalty, accountability, and moral courage" "Webb Raps 'Self-Serving' Navy Leadership," Navy Times, 6 May 1996. When failures occur, corrections often go beyond mere chastisement. The media regularly reports on military professionals who have been relieved and punished under the UCMJ for moral failures including lying, disobedience, sexual harassment, adultery, and theft.
3. The Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald R. Fogleman, has insisted that "our standards must be higher than those that prevail in society at large" and that members of the military must "always exhibit the utmost in principled behavior, off-duty as well as on" (from a letter released to the public early in 1996 through the Air Force News Service, Washington, D.C.).
4. Examples include, but may not be limited to, the curriculums of all the service academies, various ROTC programs, officer training schools, and resident professional military education for NCOs, senior NCOs, and company grade, field grade, and senior grade officers.
5. We might wonder, at this point, what makes a standard a moral one. This is a large question that would go beyond the scope and focus of this article, and I hope I can put that issue aside for another day. I think we can in this study rely on a pre-theoretical, common-sense notion of what counts as a moral standard, even if that amounts to nothing more than an implicit list of standards we are disposed to characterize as moral. The focus here, as we shall see, is on whether we can find special reasons for binding the military professional to standards we already recognize as moral ones.
6. Elizabeth Anscombe, "War and Murder," War, Morality, and the Military Profession, ed. Malham M. Wakin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 286.
7. Sir John Winthrop Hackett, "The Military in the Service of the State," in War, Morality, and the Military Profession, 2d ed., ed. Malham M. Wakin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 119.
8. Malham M. Wakin, "The Ethics of Leadership: I," and "The Ethics of Leadership: II," in War, Morality, and the Military Profession, 191, 208, passim.
9. I understand "the military function" for these purposes, very narrowly to mean fighting battles and wars. We might also assume a more normatively loaded characterization of the function, so as to include things like "defending the innocent" or "fighting for the right." This would probably make it easier to justify "strictness" in enforcing many moral standards, but I would rather assume less rather than more and see where it takes us.
10. We could take this even further, and believe that a person is either good or they are not. On this more radical view, reminiscent of a Platonic-style unity of the virtues, any moral failing whatever is reason to suspect other moral failings are forthcoming. We would be committed to thinking, for example, that a person who lies on their income taxes could not be relied on to be brave in battle.
11. Do I really need to cite an example? Belching and passing wind, among other things, fit the bill here.
12. Nazi Germany provides many particularly well-known examples of these sorts of context-sensitive dispositions. Stories abound of concentration camp guards and doctors who, while brutal with prisoners, were tender with their families and otherwise more than decent human beings. And the attitude conveyed in this famous passage from a speech by Himmler is instructive: ". . . we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. . . . Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished" Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 559.
13. Again, we can draw on Himmler as a source, for he extols the "virtues of the SS Man: Loyalty . . . Obedience . . . Bravery . . . [and] Truthfulness," in Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 556-7.
14. To be sure, there are both explicit and implicit elements in such agreements. Actually assuming the roles is most often (but not always) done explicitly. What the role requires is often part of an implicit, but no less clear, understanding.
15. The voluntariness might not be essential; but the role-based case for unique or stricter moral obligation seems stronger to me when someone voluntarily undertakes the role. If this does not work to bind the military professional to a higher moral standard, the strategy would be hopeless for obligating a draftee.
16. I would not bring up this incredible possibility if similar bad arguments were not so frequently made.
17. As was the case with fraud in the role-based argument, here we are depending on deriving a complex set of obligations from a simple and presumably noncontroversial one (not hurting one's fellows). It is once again not a knock-down argument, but I think it at least counts as a reason.