True Faith And Allegiance: The Burden of Military Ethics

1. Military Ethics: Is There Any Such Thing?

1. Military Ethics Is There Any Such Thing? Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God. —General Orders No. 100 (the Lieber Code), 24 April 1863 At a garden party not long ago I was introduced to a British Royal Air Force group captain. When our host identified me as a professor of military ethics, the group captain smiled and asked the question I knew was coming: "What is military ethics ?" I was prepared for that: "It's the study of honorable and shameful conduct in the armed services," I responded. I was not prepared for his response: "You can't very well teach such things to the military, now can you!" Teaching philosophy to undergraduates was fine, he said, but real soldiers who knew the real world would find "military ethics" a contradiction in terms. Because it was a party, we soon went off to neutral corners, but I hope to respond to that challenge here. Is military ethics a contradiction in terms? Is it sensible to teach ethics to college students but not to professional soldiers?1 Is ethics2 a nice, warm, fuzzy subject for discussion in classes or around a roaring fire but not relevant at all in the real world? In other words, am I wasting my time writing this? I hope not. In fact, I know not. If military ethics is an irrelevant exercise, why did we conduct war crimes tribunals after World War II? Why is there a Code of Conduct for members oi the armed forces, and articles in the Uniform Code of Military Justice—the legal code of service members—about "conduct unbecoming"? Why do we tell our soldiers to search, silence, segregate (by rank), safeguard, and speed to the rear all prison- 8 TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE ers of war? Why not just torture and kill them? Why are lying, cheating, and stealing so strictly prohibited in the military? Why do we still talk about "officers and gentlemen"? Let's begin at the beginning—with the concept of ethics itself. Ethics: A Definition Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court once participated in a case involving pornography, and a key element of that case involved the definition of the term. Justice Stewart found that he could not adequately define pornography, "but I know it when I see it."3 To define key terms is a customary procedure because it is a sound one. The problem with "ethics" and our words for many important concepts is that no one is able, entirely satisfactorily, to define them. My desk dictionary defines "love," for example as "a profoundly tender, passionate affection." Yet there are people well into their mature years who deeply regret having said "I love you": they made a mistake; they mistook infatuation for love. That the word is ambiguous, however, hardly means that love does not exist. "Justice" is a concept equally hard to define. "Rightfulness or lawfulness, as of a claim," my dictionary says. But equating just ice with legality is not entirely satisfactory, is it? What is legal may not always be just, and something that is just may not always be legal (as Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird helps to illustrate). Nazi Germany had plenty of laws but little justice. Vitally important terms such as love, justice, honor, integrity are as hard to define as other terms {table, hypotenuse, home run) are easy. The more important a word is, the more difficult is its definition. If, for instance, we say that God cannot do something , can't we say that because God is thus not omnipotent, he must not be perfect and, lacking perfection, must not be God? Well, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it? If we answer no, we are saying that he can't do something. Because he can't do something, it follows that he can't do everything. Because he can't do everything, he is not omnipotent and therefore is not perfect, and therefore is not God.4 The problem with Military Ethics 9 this, of course, is that the idea of God cannot be compacted into convenient language. In the same way, ethics is too large to be disposed of with a simple definition, yet I must try...