A Moral Military

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition

Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition S ince the first edition, the subject of torture has received a lot of attention . Many books, editorials, and congressional discussions have been devoted to the matter. Therefore I have added a chapter, Chapter 10, to consider recent arguments about when, if ever, it is permissible or prudent or moral to use torture. There are also various smaller additions to increase accuracy and relevance to the present. I must thank many audiences for discussion of the material in this edition. A sophomore class at West Point; many classes at Temple University , Philadelphia; and Temple University, Tokyo have used the first edition as a text. I also thank the class members at the University of South Florida in the spring of 2007 for their assistance. In addition, I have also been regularly helped by my daughter, Constance Axinn Johnson , who has led me to relevant material, and done occasional proofreading . My editor, Micah Kleit, is an expert at knowing when to give an author some extra rope, and when to pull on that rope: both actions were necessary for me and much appreciated. I’m grateful to someone I have never met, Bobbie Dempsey, who was the copy editor and made great improvements in the readability and the sense of the manuscript. I’m also particularly grateful to my friend/partner, Christeen Brady, who has gone to great lengths to make it easy for me to work, and for her impressive thoughtfulness. Because it is often misunderstood, I should say something again about the title of this book. Immanuel Kant distinguished between political morality and moral politics: political morality would be determined by political requirements, not by morality. He also distinguished ethical theology and theological ethics: Theological ethics would be theology , not ethics. The title A Moral Military is governed by moral matters : quite different would be A Military Morality, governed by military rather than moral thinking. While I point out this distinction in Chapter 9, many readers have apparently not reached that part of the book. Sarasota, January 2008 x / Preface to Revised and Expanded Edition ...