Issues in Military Ethics: To Support and Defend the Constitution

Chapter 7: Professional Military Ethics across the Career Spectrum

7 Professional Military Ethics across the Career Spectrum Prologue and General Framework In the past decade, the Army has made great progress in defining and sharpening the central idea that military officers are “professionals” in a strong normative sense. Although we often use the term “professional” quite loosely to refer to anything a person does for pay, the Future of the Army Profession project and its successors have done much to bring a more precise and focused meaning to the term. Among the central features of that understanding are the ideas that professionals possess a specialized body of abstract knowledge, that they provide an essential service to the “client,” and that they are responsible to advance that body of knowledge so as to insure its relevance to the changing circumstances of practice. In addition, the focus on professionalism highlights the ideas that the motivations of a professional are and ought to be altruistic service and that professionals are accountable for maintaining their own standards and discipline. In this chapter, I want to focus on the concept of professional ethics as a developmental arc that spans a whole career. Professionals are grown and developed over the course of decades of growth in expertise and responsibility . It is important, therefore, that professions think as deeply as possible about this developmental arc and view professional ethics as a cumulative process. In that developmental process, each stage of development requires explicit attention. What are the essential foundations of professional development for newly entering members? What new skills, knowledge, and attitudes do they need as their responsibilities grow and broaden in midcareer? What unique challenges face senior members of the profession as they take full ownership for the health and future of the profession? What has the profession done to ensure that they have been properly prepared to assume those duties? In this chapter, we will reflect on these questions for the span of the career path of a military professional. Let’s begin with a definition of “professional military ethics.” Professional military ethics is a set of normative expectations of what military 81 82 Issues in Military Ethics officers should be, know, and do. A brief reflection is in order on the word “normative.” Often, because there is a tendency to like empirical approaches to the world, military personnel and organizations look to the social sciences for insight when they want to discuss leader development, values, formation of character, and similar issues. It is important to flag explicitly the limitations of that approach. By their very nature as empirical disciplines, social sciences are inherently descriptive in their approach: they discuss what is and what is measurable. In philosophy there is something commonly called the “naturalistic fallacy” that points out that “you can’t get an ought from an is.” It is occasionally quipped that all social scientists can tell you in the area of ethics that “most people are average.” In other words, we need to get norms (the “oughts”) from disciplines that deal with the normative such as philosophy or functional exigencies of the profession itself. Once norms are identified, social science can be of great use in determining the best approaches to training and development to increase the adherence to norms—but only after norms have been clearly identified by normative disciplines. The central themes we will develop in what follows are that professional military ethics is (a) developmental and cumulative—that is, that different challenges and developmental needs arise over the course of a career and new skills and expectations build on foundations of earlier development —and (b) it is multidimensional, involving educational questions of things officers ought to know, functional excellence and settled traits of character that define the kind of persons officers ought to be, and specific expected behaviors in different circumstances, or what we expect officers to do. In other words, the existing Army framework of “be, know, do” captures the right dimensions to explore. But traditionally it treats those elements somewhat statically, whereas what this discussion hopes to add is the developmental and diachronic dimension of officer development. Precommissioning and Junior Officer Development At the precommissioning and very junior officer level of development, a bulk of the emphasis on ethical development is necessarily on questions of personal ethics. Whether or not one agrees with the “good old days” refrain commonly heard—that there is a general decline in societal ethical standards that results in more morally compromised entrants into the profession—it is still the case that...