Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (Cass Military Studies)

Military Ethics and Virtues

This book examines the role of military virtues in modern armies. Most militaries cling to traditional interpretations of military virtues – such as honor, courage, and loyalty – yet these may no longer be practical in modern conflicts. In the current understanding of these virtues there is, for example, little which regulates the conduct of military personnel towards those they are supposed to be protecting, nor do they take into account the new constraints military personnel face, imposed by critical public opinion and media coverage. These traditional virtues are mainly beneficial to colleagues and the military organization, not to outsiders such as the local population. As a result, troops trained for combat sometimes experience difficulty in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations after major combat is over. It can be argued that today’s missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional ones, which are mainly about enhancing military effectiveness, but a convincing case can be made that a lot can already be won by interpreting these traditional virtues in different ways. This volume offers an integrated approach, dealing with the most important of the traditional military virtues, exploring their possible relevance and suggesting new, more inclusive ways of interpreting them, adjusted to the military tasks of the twenty-­ first century. The book will be of much interest to students of military ethics, philosophy, war and conflict studies in general. Peter Olsthoorn is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Netherlands Defence Academy, Breda.

Cass Military Studies

Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome Trust in the gods, but verify Rose Mary Sheldon Clausewitz and African War Politics and strategy in Liberia and Somalia Isabelle Duyvesteyn Strategy and Politics in the Middle East, 1954–60 Defending the northern tier Michael Cohen The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991 From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale Edward George Military Leadership in the British Civil Wars, 1642–1651 “The genius of this age” Stanley Carpenter Israel’s Reprisal Policy, 1953–1956 The dynamics of military retaliation Ze’ev Drory Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Second World War Enver Redzic

Leaders in War West Point remembers the 1991 Gulf War Edited by Frederick Kagan and Christian Kubik Khedive Ismail’s Army John Dunn Yugoslav Military Industry 1918–1991 Amadeo Watkins Corporal Hitler and the Great War 1914–1918 The list regiment John Williams Rostóv in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 The key to victory Brian Murphy The Tet Effect, Intelligence and the Public Perception of War Jake Blood The US Military Profession into the 21st Century War, peace and politics Edited by Sam C. Sarkesian and Robert E. Connor, Jr.

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The Military and Domestic Politics A concordance theory of civil–military relations Rebecca L. Schiff Conscription in the Napoleonic Era A revolution in military affairs? Edited by Donald Stoker, Frederick C. Schneid and Harold D. Blanton Modernity, the Media and the Military The creation of national mythologies on the Western Front 1914–1918 John F. Williams American Soldiers in Iraq McSoldiers or innovative professionals? Morten Ender Complex Peace Operations and Civil Military Relations Winning the peace Robert Egnell Strategy and the American War of Independence A global approach Edited by Donald Stoker, Kenneth J. Hagan and Michael T. McMaster

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Military Ethics and Virtues An interdisciplinary approach for the 21st century

Peter Olsthoorn

First published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Peter Olsthoorn The right of Peter Olsthoorn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN13: 978-0-415-58006-9 (hbk)

Contents



Acknowledgments

x

1

Virtue ethics and the military Today’s restraints for military personnel  1 Virtue ethics  3 Duty-­based ethics  5 Old virtues and new tasks  6 Overview of this book  8

1

2

Honor Introduction: conventional ethics  10 The problems of stressing the right intention  12 What honor is  13 The Roman honor ethic  16 The honor ethic criticized: honor as a form of self-­interest  19 Democratic honor and the quiet virtues  22 The judicious and the impartial spectator  24 Honor in our day: the Stoic view  26 Honor and the military ethic  29 Economy and autonomy in the military  30 Honor as social cohesion  32 Honor’s drawbacks  35 Possible solutions to these drawbacks  38 Conclusion  40

10

3

Courage Introduction  44 The ethicist’s view on courage  44 The scientific view on courage  47 How moral courage relates to physical courage  49

44

viii   Contents Moral courage and the military  51 How important is cohesion?  53 Cultural differences  57 Discontinuities in the Western tradition  61 Conclusion  63 4

Loyalty Introduction  66 A gray virtue?  67 Group loyalty and loyalty to principle  69 Our obligations to strangers  71 Wide and narrow circles; universalistic ambitions vs. group loyalty  74 Intentions and consequences  75 Thick and thin moralities in Afghanistan  78 A changing profession  81 Organizational loyalty and professional loyalty  83 Comparing the military ethic: oaths and codes  85 Which loyalty, and to whom?  86 What is to be done?  88 Conclusion  91

66

5

Integrity Introduction  93 Integrity as a special kind of loyalty  94 Integrity as loyalty to yourself: a very short genealogy  95 Problems with integrity as loyalty to personal principles  98 Definitions of integrity within the military  102 Integrity as upholding personal principles and the military  104 Conclusion  106

93

6

Respect Introduction  109 Respect, self-­respect, dignity, honor, and humiliation  111 Honor as a ground for action  116 Humiliation and terrorism: the global level  119 Humiliation and insurgency: the local level  121 Explaining (not excusing) disrespectful behavior: the situational view  124 What is to be done?  127 Conclusion  130

109

Contents   ix 7

Conclusion The moral standing of the military  132 Does educating virtues work?  134 Rules and outcomes  136 Honor one more time  139

132



Notes References Index

141 157 169

Acknowledgments

The chapters on honor, courage, and integrity are partly based on earlier work published in Routledge’s Journal of Military Ethics. The chapter that deals with loyalty draws on a paper presented in 2008 at the conference New Wars and New Soldiers: Ethical Challenges in the Modern Military (organized by the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne), and that will be published by Ashgate as a book chapter, titled “Loyalty and professionalization in the military,” in a volume called New Wars and New Soldiers: Military Ethics in the Contemporary World (eds. Jessica Wolfendale and Paolo Tripodi). I am grateful for Ashgate’s permission to reuse some of the material of that chapter. Also, I am very much indebted to my colleagues Twan Hendricks and Harry Kirkels for improving the English of the manuscript, and to Maarten Rothman and the reviewers of Routledge for their useful comments.

1 Virtue ethics and the military

In recent years, a number of military historians have brought forward the thesis that the West, since the days of the ancient Greeks, has its own specific way of waging war, branded the Western Way of War by one author (Hanson 1989, 2002), which has a number of characteristics that make it both bloody and successful. Supposedly, at the basis of its victories are organization, discipline and, most of all, a lack of restraint (other than, at times, the distinction between combatants and non-­combatants). Some hold that it is mainly by these characteristics that Western militaries, from the Greek phalanxes that battled Persian forces at Marathon in 490 bc to the colonial wars European powers fought in more recent times, have brought carnage to their non-­Western adversaries with minimal losses. In contrast, the non-­Western tradition – more widespread in both time and, at least until recently, space – is purportedly a lot less organized and often limited by, for instance, rituals and taboos that greatly increase the chances of surviving combat. Yet, there are those who believe that it is as a consequence of these self-­imposed limitations that, in the past at least, militaries belonging to this tradition in general have lost their battles when they fought more ruthless Western armed forces.

Today’s restraints for military personnel If ever there was such an identifiable Western tradition (see for a critique Lynn 2003), today this dichotomy between Western and non-­Western ways of war seems to be a lot less straightforward. As has been mentioned in numerous other introductory chapters, for most militaries in the West the core tasks changed radically following the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the reduced risk of a major conflict, and shifted from the conventional task of national defense to the handling of international crises in its broadest sense, ranging from humanitarian missions to regular warfare. At a time when the capacity for destruction is greater than ever, these new operations, even if they on occasion effectively boil down to traditional warfare, often require a lot of restraint on the side of Western military personnel. This is, in fact, considered to be one of the defining characteristics of what has actually been coined the New Western Way of War by another author (Shaw 2005). Not too long ago, US soldiers and marines in Iraq, for instance,

2   Virtue ethics and the military continue[d] to report being in threatening situations where they were unable to respond due to the Rules of Engagement (ROE). In interviews, Soldiers reported that Iraqis would throw gasoline-­filled bottles (i.e., Molotov cocktails) at their vehicles, yet they were prohibited from responding with force for nearly a month until the ROE were changed. Soldiers also reported they are still not allowed to respond with force when Iraqis drop large chunks of concrete blocks from second story buildings or overpasses on them when they drive by. Every group of Soldiers and Marines interviewed reported that they felt the existing ROE tied their hands, preventing them from doing what needed to be done to win the war. (Mental Health Advisory Team IV 2006: 13) Clearly, in this case, what perhaps makes some sense on a policy level borders on the incomprehensible on the level of the individual soldier. At the same time, however, such accounts are illustrative of the fact that in today’s operations there is, as a rule, an asymmetry not only regarding the amount of military might of the respective parties, but also in the methods employed and, more specifically, the amount of restraints imposed on military personnel who have to do their jobs under the scrutinizing eye of politicians, the media, and the general public. That is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, we expect military personnel to uphold high moral standards even when that scrutinizing eye is not present. Without too much exaggeration, we could with some plausibility claim that the combined forces of law, politics, an increased moral sensitivity, extensive media coverage, and public opinion, both at home and abroad, not only pose considerable limitations on Western troops, but, notwithstanding the fact that these factors do not always work in the same direction, to a certain extent also help troops to make true their expressed ambition (that is, by some members of militaries) to be “a force for good.” As far as public opinion abroad is concerned, nowadays the focus is often on winning over the local population, something that as a rule can only be reached by, for starters, limiting the number of civilian casualties as much as possible. Western militaries are for that reason duty-­bound to exercise self-­control when deployed, trying to practice something now and then labeled as the “hearts and minds approach,” that is to say: a non-­threatening style, characterized by minimal use of force instead of overwhelming force, that is both respectful and open with the local population (see for instance Onishi 2004; van Baarda and Verweij 2006: 8). It should be clear that this method has an important self-­ serving aspect, too: it is thought to yield better information and more cooperation from the local population, and thus, in the end, increased security for the troops. In fact, this aspect seems to be one of the more important reasons behind the whole enterprise. We see this two-­sidedness, for instance, in US General Petraeus’ letter from May 10, 2007 to his troops in Iraq, in which he states that our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values

Virtue ethics and the military   3 distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we – not our enemies – occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. (2007) That there is a self-­serving element here does not take anything away from the fact that nowadays wars are probably fought more ethically than ever, testifying that the idea of military ethics does not necessarily amount to a contradiction in terms. To somewhat complicate this rosy picture, it seems that the strict limitations on how asymmetric conflicts can be fought by Western militaries are, in general, only to be respected to the extent that this can be done without increasing the risk to own personnel; some authors have pointed out that avoiding casualties among Western military personnel is in general considered more important than avoiding casualties among the local population (see for instance Shaw 2005). That is the latter count for less is, it seems, perceived that way by both the militaries and the populations at large in the West. At the same time, it is evident that reducing the risks for Western soldiers in ways that increase the chances of civilian casualties among the local population stands in rather stark contrast to the universalistic ambitions behind most of today’s military interventions. The West’s adversaries, in the meantime, repeatedly do not live up to the above sketched picture of the restrained, non-­Western warrior who holds his own life dear. As a Taliban fighter of undisclosed origin remarked, “they love Pepsi-­Cola, but we love death” (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 49). They do not always impose restrictions on themselves, and, what’s more, by mingling with the population take advantage of the one limitation on the use of violence that the West has regularly (though certainly not always) subscribed to: the distinction between combatants and non-­combatants.

Virtue ethics As an inevitable consequence of the restraints imposed on today’s Western armed forces, for instance ethics education for the military today partly boils down to convincing military personnel to restrain themselves, even when their adversaries do not. Incidents in recent years have shown that the required moderation does not always come naturally. There is, so it seems, a certain inclination to think that some maneuvering space is created once the opponent stops playing according to the rules. Extra room is thought to be generated by higher goals, which are sometimes considered to legitimize methods normally considered inhumane (see also Bandura 1999: 196; Fiala 2005). To illustrate, after (and as a result of ) the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 we have seen how, for instance, extracting information by using questioning methods such as sleep deprivation, putting detainees in stress positions, and waterboarding, has been defended by precisely such arguments. What is permissible in a specific

4   Virtue ethics and the military case all depends, it is often thought, on the context, whereas in fact it hardly ever does. It is, for that reason, of considerable importance to find ways to enhance the moral sensitivity of military personnel. As laws and codes of conduct are generally considered of limited use here (more on that below), most of today’s militaries put their money on character building in trying to make their soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines virtuous. As a result, and parallel to the renewed interest over the past decades for virtues in ethics literature (which started with Elizabeth Anscombe’s article Modern Moral Philosophy from 1958 and gained momentum with MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue), in military ethics military virtues are now more in the spotlight than they used to be (see for instance Bonadonna 1994; Osiel 1999; Toner 2000; French 2003; Robinson et al. 2008). A virtue is typically described as a trait of character worth having, not to be understood as an inherited or god-­given quality, but as something that can be acquired, mainly through training and practice. References are often, if not always, made to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where a virtue is defined as a disposition of character, to be developed by finding a middle ground between too much and too little in both feeling and doing. That idea of virtue as a mean between the extremes of excess and defect has by now turned into one of the better known proverbs of Western philosophy. As far as the doing part is concerned, Aristotle stresses that virtues are acquired by, and in fact do not exist outside, actually performing virtuous acts. These acts should spring from a noble intention and serve a morally just cause. This latter element was essential for Aristotle: by definition, a virtue cannot serve an unethical end, nor can it be motivated by the desire for money or glory, or by the wish to avoid punishment or disgrace, as virtue should be its own reward. To give an example, courage is defined as the middle position between recklessness and cowardice, to be developed by practicing courageous acts, and springing from the right attitude concerning feelings of confidence and fear in the pursuance of (and motivated by) an honorable cause. Although virtue ethics comes in many varieties these days, this Aristotelian view on virtues, formulated in the days of the above-­mentioned phalanx, is, for several reasons, still pivotal in many texts on military ethics dealing with the subject of military virtues. First of all, the idea that virtues, and thus character, can to some extent be developed, and that one is not bound to an inherent personality, is, of course, very appealing, and not only to the military. In addition, developing virtues is by some authors seen as the best way to prevent misconduct by military personnel, it, as indicated earlier, being considered superior to rules or codes of conduct imposed from above. The main argument these authors offer is that these solutions are impotent when no one is around, and lack the flexibility often thought necessary in today’s world. Finally, rules and codes try to condition behavior, leaving less room for personal integrity (van Iersel and van Baarda 2002). At first sight, then, there is a great deal to say in favor of virtue ethics as being the best way of underpinning military ethics education.

Virtue ethics and the military   5

Duty-­based ethics Even so, it is not all Aristotle and virtue ethics that form the basis for military ethics today; traditionally, the military has always stressed the importance of rules and obedience. For instance, notwithstanding their possible shortcomings, most militaries try to impose standards and norms by means of rules and codes of conduct. Besides these, there is core literature that is explicitly based, not on virtues, but on rights, such as Michael Walzer’s works on war, without a doubt the most influential in military ethics and required reading in many a military ethics course. What’s more, the just war tradition Walzer stands in is primarily founded on rights as well (although, at the same time, there are unmistakably some consequentialist elements in both Walzer’s thinking and the just war tradition). In addition, there are the works of Lawrence Kohlberg and John Rawls, which are deemed important and useful for educating military personnel (see for instance Toner 2000), especially on the topic of moral development. Both Kohlberg and Rawls are adherents of duty-­based (or deontological) ethics, and do not see much of a role for character traits. Kohlberg, for instance, famously denounced virtue ethics as “a bag of virtues approach” (1981). Duty-­based ethics, to a great extent inspired by the works of Immanuel Kant, stress the importance of universal, categorically binding moral norms. Whereas terms like good, laudable, praiseworthy, etc., (with the focus on the actor) are central to virtue ethics, in duty-­based ethics the emphasis is on what is wrong, right, permitted, or obligatory (with the focus on the act). Where virtue ethics calls for the development of good inclinations – we are virtuous when doing the right thing gives us pleasure – duty-­based ethics asks us to follow these moral rules against our natural (selfish) inclinations, testifying to a much more Calvinistic view on human nature. The best-­known example of duty-­based reasoning is the one underlying the prohibition against the use of torture, a ban that by most accounts should be maintained regardless of how expedient it might be not to do so. That is, in any case, the stance a deontologist would take. (A virtue ethicist, however, would probably highlight that the most important matter is to be, or to become, the kind of person who would under no circumstances commit any acts of torture, while the consequentialist could, for instance, point out that the harm done by the use of torture outweighs the benefits.) With this emphasis on rules and duty, this main alternative to virtue ethics by most accounts not only lacks flexibility, but also aims at nothing more than the ethical minimum, where virtue ethics asks for a lot more, including the kind of supererogatory acts the military depends on. In this view, virtue ethics urges us to do what is good, while duty-­based ethics merely asks us to refrain from doing evil. However, this interpretation seems not entirely fair to either Kant or duty-­ based ethics. Not asking anyone to go beyond the call of duty, this main alternative to virtue ethics nevertheless does demand quite a lot from military men and women: moral duties are to be followed, not because they are imposed from the outside and backed by sanctions, but because one accepts them by choice,

6   Virtue ethics and the military something that requires an amount of altruism and a universalistic outlook that in all probability is missing in not only the majority of military personnel, but also in most people in general. As political philosopher Robert E. Goodin puts it: “What matters more to [deontologists] are individuals’ motives and intentions. It is not enough, for them, that the right thing be done. They also insist that it be done, and be seen to be done, for the right reasons” (1995: 47). Most likely, it is this altruism and universalism required by deontological, duty-­based ethics – asking too much, not too little – that makes it in effect less suited for the military and, for that matter, most of us. Duty-­based ethics seems to assume that knowing what is the good thing to do suffices to motivate people to actually do what is good.

Old virtues and new tasks In spite of the importance of rules and codes in regulating the conduct of military personnel, or Rawls’ and Kohlberg’s preference for duty-­based ethics, it has time and again been argued that virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character building, provides a better basis for military ethics than duty-­based, deontological ethics (let alone utilitarian ethics, if it is taken to mean that precedence should be given to considerations of expedience; see for instance Bonadonna 1994: 18), and it is this book’s main aim to shed some light on different aspects of some of the more prominent military virtues. Although virtue ethics is what militaries have put their faith in when it comes down to enhancing the chances of soldiers behaving morally, this preference for steering conduct by means of promoting certain desirable dispositions is not without any problems, yet as it stands this is hardly ever addressed. To begin with a minor matter: virtues and values are two things that are not the same, yet are sometimes treated by militaries as if they were. As military ethicist Paul Robinson puts it: virtues represent “desirable characteristics of individuals, such as courage,” while values, on the other hand, correspond to “the ideals that the community cherishes, such as freedom” (2008: 5). For reasons of simplicity, from now on the term virtues will be used throughout this book, as this seems to be closest to what militaries actually mean to say, and is also in line with the emphasis they put on character development and their choice for virtue ethics as the basis for their ethics curricula. One likely reason for the fact that such confusion can arise and persist, and for the fact that in general there has been little attention for the more problematic sides of the current emphasis on virtues within the military, is that, although much has been written on virtue ethics, the existing literature on virtues in a military context is surprisingly scarce. The literature that is available often deals with one specific virtue only, such as courage or loyalty, while broader approaches, going into the relations between the different virtues, are relatively rare (see for an exception Toner 2000). On top of that, texts frequently do not refer to much scholarly literature that is critical on the specific virtue they are dealing with, and are more often apologetic

Virtue ethics and the military   7 than critical, as they mainly stress the importance of that particular virtue, and not so much its intricacies. What’s more, the changes in the military’s wider environment, which have led to the above-­mentioned shift from traditional tasks to new, more complex, missions, have raised some new questions, such as: have some virtues lost their importance, and have others perhaps gained significance? These questions should be dealt with, as much depends on whether the actual virtues military personnel aim for are the right ones for a particular job, and one could expect that today, the proper virtues are not necessarily solely the more martial ones. It appears, for instance, that the traditional military virtues are, especially in their common interpretation, mainly beneficial to colleagues (see also Robinson 2008: 6) and the organization, not so much to the local population of the countries military personnel are deployed to. This volume, to be sure, does not answer all the questions raised in the above, but it does try to address some of them. One way of doing that would have been, of course, to begin reflecting on, and in due course working out, a set of more cosmopolitan virtues and values that is in line with today’s new kind of missions (see for instance Deakin 2008a). A new set would most likely be more about exercising restraint (probably giving a place to not so new cardinal virtues such as justice, temperance, and prudence) than about demonstrating virtues such as courage, loyalty, and discipline. Such a fresh “bag” of virtues is, however, probably not only not indispensable but also, and more importantly so, maybe asking a bit too much, at least in the foreseeable future, from what is, on the whole, an organization that has a relatively traditional culture. It is primarily for that reason that this book pursues a different course. Instead of devising a new list of virtues from scratch, this volume attempts to identify some of the weaknesses and downsides of the existing virtues and, as a logical next step, addresses the question if the way the traditional virtues are interpreted by most militaries could not be improved in light of the changes in the military’s tasks. It is, looked at in this way, not so much the question which virtues should be listed as important military virtues, as it is unclear in what form the traditional ones should best be understood. Yet, what does seem clear is that, as it stands, most militaries today cling to fairly traditional interpretations of their long-­ established virtues, which might no longer suffice in their present versions. In this book, an attempt is made to show that there is still a place for the established military virtues, yet that their role in today’s militaries is sometimes a cause for some concern. The following chapters in this volume deal with the most important of the traditional military virtues (with the possible exception of the subject of the sixth chapter, respect, which is perhaps a somewhat less archetypical military virtue), going into their possible relevance for today’s armed forces, and suggesting new, and somewhat more inclusive ways of interpreting them, adjusted to the tasks of the military in the twenty-­first century – the aim of this book is not merely to complicate matters by raising a host of questions, but also to suggest some possible ways for improvement.

8   Virtue ethics and the military

Overview of this book More specifically, Chapter 2, on military honor, contrasts the Roman honor ethic, stating that honor is a necessary incentive for virtuous behavior and that it is even something worth dying for, with today’s prevailing view which sees honor as something obsolete and archaic and not as a legitimate motive. Despite its diminishing role in society at large, it is argued, honor continues to have a role in today’s militaries as an incentive in combat, but sometimes also as a check on the behavior on both the battlefield and in modern Operations Other Than War. Drawing on moral philosophy and military sociology alike, this chapter also addresses some of the serious drawbacks of the military’s use of the honor ethic in its current shape, and tries to identify some solutions to these problems. Chapter 3 argues that the best-­known definition of physical courage, stemming from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is, in reality, for several reasons not very well suited for today’s military. Having done so, a short outline is given of more “scientific” approaches to physical courage, which draw mainly on insights offered by psychologists and military sociologists, and of the problems that are inherent to these approaches. Subsequently, the chapter turns to a topic that is often paid lip service to in the military, yet remains somewhat hard to pin down: moral courage. Although both forms of courage are intertwined, they are so in a less straightforward manner than is often thought; the way the development of physical courage in today’s military is undertaken does not contribute much to the development of moral courage. Chapter 4 deals with loyalty, a “gray virtue” that can serve both good and bad causes alike, partly depending on the form it takes: loyalty to a group (which can range from one’s primary group to one’s country) and loyalty to a principle (such as justice). Most militaries tend to stress the first form, which brings them to, on occasion, reducing the risks for their own soldiers at the expense of the local population. It could be argued, however, that the focus of loyalty for a professional should not only be with his colleagues and organization, and the second half of the chapter therefore addresses the question to what extent the military ethic can be reformulated so as to incorporate the interests of the local population somewhat more than currently is the case. The subsequent Chapter 5 is all about a special form of loyalty, namely to one’s own principles, which often goes under the name of integrity. Although most militaries maintain that they consider it an important virtue, and most military personnel see it as a prerequisite to be able to “look yourself in the mirror,” especially to those working in the armed forces, the notion of integrity as upholding personal values and principles is a very problematic one. For more than one reason, outlined in this chapter, it is very well possible that the benevolent role the virtue of integrity could have in a military organization – because it is in itself one of the rare military virtues that is not geared towards military effectiveness per se – can in fact better be played by other virtues, for example respect.

Virtue ethics and the military   9 Not coincidentally, respect is the subject of Chapter 6, which addresses the rather complicated question to what extent a real or perceived lack of it being shown, for instance by Western military personnel deployed abroad, can be said to strengthen both terrorist groups and insurgencies alike, as some authors proclaim to fear. This chapter is followed by the conclusion that, besides tying up some loose ends and attempting to bring the different lines of argument together, also tries to identify some lessons for training and educating military personnel who have to do their job in a, in many aspects, fundamentally changed environment.

2 Honor

Introduction: conventional ethics In the introductory chapter virtue ethics and deontological, duty-­based ethics were presented as two competing schools. It should be emphasized at this point, however, that the differences between both schools are not to be exaggerated. To name one important common characteristic: as we have seen, both of these dominant strands of thought in military ethics, virtue ethics and duty-­based ethics alike, stress the importance of military personnel acting from the right intention, implying that good conduct should not be a result of, for instance, peer pressure, the fear of punishment, or the concern for reputation, nor by the wish for praise, esteem, and approbation. The question whether or not this demand is realistic has been a recurring theme from Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring to Paul Verhoeven’s movie Hollow Man (2000), though molded into the question what someone would do if he or she were invisible, and the correcting gaze of bystanders no longer fulfills its function. Both Gyges and the main character of the movie, scientist Sebastian Caine, do a convincing job proving the truth of John Locke’s words from the seventeenth century: View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding I.ii.9) Locke’s belief that man has no innate moral principles, made him value something which today we would call conventional ethics: in practice people generally behave well, but this is mainly because they are sensitive to peer pressure and concerned about how their behavior might look in the eyes of others. Today, Locke might be best known for his call for rule of law and the freedom of government interference in our private lives – both these notions stem from his Second Treatise on Government. Yet, in his less-­known Some Thoughts Concerning Education we nonetheless read that this freedom of the

Honor   11 citizen should have its limits in his concern for his name and reputation. That makes the latter book not so much a work on education as on “the art of governing man” (Tarcov 1984: 116), a skill that makes extensive use of the love of praise and a good reputation, as well as the fear of disgrace. This sensitivity for praise and blame is “the great secret of education,” and works for children and grown men alike (Thoughts §55, 56). For Locke, this was not something that lessened the freedom of the citizen: to act from a concern for reputation was still to act freely and from something within (ibid. §42; see also Tarcov 1984). Nowadays, if we say that someone acts from “something within” we mean that he or she follows an inborn moral principle. Not so for Locke, who wrote in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the only inborn principles we have are the selfish longing for happiness and the equally selfish fear of pain, and that they have to be checked “by rewards and punishments that will overbalance the satisfaction anyone shall propose to himself in the breach of law” (I.iii.13). Among the punishments to be taken into account, there is first that of God, consisting of a long and painful stay in hell; as we seldom think of this punishment, its influence is little. Subsequently, there are the sentences ruled by judges; their weight is equally limited, because most of the time we imagine we can get away with our misbehavior. There is one punishment we cannot escape, however, and that is the censure from our fellow citizens. And, more importantly, Nor is there one of ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a strange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. (. . .) This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance. (ibid. I.iii.12) According to Locke, we fear the opinions of others more than we fear hell or jail.1 The visibility that such conventional ethics clearly depends on is also its Achilles heel: morality is potentially reduced to a matter of not being caught. Most ethicists today are therefore probably not too upset that conventional ethics gave way to more demanding forms of ethics that give central place to the notion of autonomy. People are to be just from a love for justice, not from a fear of losing face; different from our distant ancestors, we live in a guilt culture rather than in a shame culture, and many see this as a leap forward in our moral development. In most military ethics training and education programs, for instance, it is often virtue ethics, and sometimes duty-­based ethics or a combination of these two schools, as said both requiring some form of “right intention,” that are used most frequently. The importance of the right intention is also stressed now and again in the literature on military ethics. However, it is especially this requirement that the actions of military personnel should not only serve a noble end, but also be motivated by a noble intention, that is problematic. There are, to be more exact, basically two complications regarding this demand.

12   Honor

The problems of stressing the right intention To begin with, this ideal of making sacrifices from morally worthy intentions, for instance to promote freedom and democracy, might prove too steep. The decision to join the military is, according to some, to a considerable extent motivated by post-­traditional reasons such as salary and the wish for adventure (Wong et al. 2003: 9; see also, for instance, Janowitz 1960; Cafario 2003: 266), but also the hope to find comradeship and the desire to belong to something larger than oneself. More importantly, some authors point out that, although the traditional military ethic underlines the importance of courage, there is a widely shared feeling that especially in Western countries the sense of community has dwindled and that the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good has been on a reverse trend for quite a while both on the individual and the societal levels (see for instance MacIntyre 1985: 254), which is seen as increasingly problematic to the military (see for instance Toner 2000). Similarly, in actual combat neither patriotism nor abstract ideals appear to be the motivating factor, as some famous studies from the World War II era convincingly showed (see for instance Stouffer 1949). A more recent study into the combat motivation of US soldiers during the first weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom seems to corroborate this: the researchers found that most soldiers in Iraq had enlisted for reasons belonging to the economic realm. During the period of the actual fighting, soldiers fought for each other, not for abstract notions, including patriotism (Wong et al. 2003: 9). It is probably a bit too optimistic then, to think that the global village will be the kind of community soldiers are willing to make sacrifices for. The second problem is that military men and women actually have little to say about the causes they are fighting for. Even though Aristotle maintained, and most contemporary ethicists maintain that, for example, courage should serve a morally just cause to deserve that predicate (see for instance Toner 2000: 111–14), in general soldiers are instruments of politics, and do not necessarily subscribe to the causes they are fighting for. In fact, military personnel have no say in what these causes are, nor do they want to have a say in such matters. Military sociologist Morris Janowitz, for instance, wrote in his classic The Professional Soldier that “in their day-­to-day activities they live according to the self-­conception that they are public servants, and according to their own formulation of civil–military relations, namely, that there is no question about who is in control” (1960: 368). The latest war in Iraq is a perfect example of the problems that would arise if the motivation of military personnel would depend on the righteousness of their cause. The 2003 invasion of Iraq by coalition troops has been legitimized in different ways (links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime, the latter not complying with UN resolutions, the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, ending gross human rights violations, and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people), and has since become increasingly controversial. If soldiers were to be motivated by abstract causes, in this case this would mean that their

Honor   13 motivation would have depended on their opinion about the justness of this war, the feasibility of bringing democracy to a country without a democratic tradition, their evaluation of the different reasons rendered, and their sensitivity to the critiques of their government’s policies. It would also have meant that their motivation would have decreased or disappeared if some of the reasons put forward by their governments would have proven to be false, as seems to have been the case here. Clearly, there is a discrepancy here; what military men ought to do according to their Aristotelian role, making sacrifices for morally just causes, is not always the same as what makes them tick, nor is it their concern according to what is considered to be normal civil–military relations nowadays. So, might it be an option to make both spheres come closer together by appealing to the self-­ interest of the soldier, for instance through rewards? At first sight, this is not a very good idea for two reasons. To begin with, it seems highly unlikely that soldiers will make the ultimate sacrifice for any reward. And, in the second place, a courageous act undertaken for a reward hardly deserves to be called moral, not to mention the term sacrifice which seems rather out of place in such a case. On second thought, however, it might not be such a bad suggestion. History abounds with examples of people, soldiers and statesmen alike, who sacrificed their lives for a reward, without the term sacrifice being out of place. In their behavior, the spheres of is and ought came together. They behaved virtuously, but for motives not devoid of self-­regarding elements. The fact is that, in real life, armed forces have long since found a way to close this gap between theory and practice. Soldiers are induced to show courage for the greater good, but for a motive that is not completely altruistic: an appeal is made to their sense of honor.

What honor is This somewhat archaic-­sounding notion of honor is best understood by contrasting it with the more modern notions of conscience and dignity. The latter differs from honor, something not everyone shares in and without meaning when equally distributed, in the important aspect that it is inclusive and lacks gradation (Margalit 1996: 43), with the only noteworthy exception that a person can lose his dignity by behaving too reprehensively. Although this loss of dignity is something most people would wish to avoid, dignity does not have a function in steering our conduct in the way honor and conscience can, and it should therefore not concern us here (although we will return to it briefly in Chapter 6). In other aspects, especially as a guide in matters of morality, honor has been replaced by conscience. Particularly in its popular, very un-­Lockean understanding as an inner voice, this notion is much more demanding than honor, as it presupposes moral autonomy – it might prompt someone to go against social norms. The most important difference, then, between conscience and honor is that the latter, contrary to conscience, has an important external component as it

14   Honor concerns both the value that someone allocates to himself and the value others place on him. Charles E. Cooley, an American sociologist from the early twentieth century, captures this nicely in his often-­quoted definition of honor as a finer kind of self-­respect. It is used to mean either something one feels regarding himself, or something that other people think and feel regarding him, and so illustrates by the accepted use of language the fact that the private and social aspects of self are inseparable. One’s honor, as he feels it, and his honor in the sense of honorable repute, as he conceives it to exist in the minds of others whose opinions he cares for, are two aspects of the same thing. No one can permanently maintain a standard of honor if he does not conceive of some other mind or minds as sharing and corroborating this standard. (1922: 184) According to anthropologist Julian Pitt-­Rivers, likewise, someone’s honor is the value in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride. (1974: 21; see also Cooley 1922: 238) These definitions show that only in his or her relationships to others does it become clear whether or not someone is a man or woman of honor. In view of that, one author appropriately remarked with regard to Pitt-­Rivers’ phrase “in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society” that the reverse order might in fact be more in place (Welsh 2008: 9). For that external element of honor, moral philosophers of earlier days distinguished essentially two functions. First, the articulated opinions of others may be of help in finding out what is the just thing to do. Second, and probably more importantly, the good opinion of others constitutes an incentive, forming the, for most people, much-­needed motivation to actually do what is right. Honor often functions as a reward for making the right choice between higher interests and self-­interest. And although honor can both reinforce rules and virtues alike and as a consequence does not fit neatly into the duty-­based ethics versus virtue ethics dichotomy (see also Krause 2002: 52), there seems to be some agreement in the secondary literature that shame, the emotion most closely related to honor, is often the result of falling short in light of an ideal. To give just one example, according to psychologists Fossum and Mason, “from the shame perspective, a person feels qualitively different from other human beings, not really a full-­ fledged member of the human race” (1966: 22). Guilt, on the other hand, related to the notion of conscience, follows on the transgression of a rule. As John Rawls sums up the difference, “in general, guilt, resentment, and indignation invoke the concept of right, whereas shame, contempt, and derision appeal to the concept of goodness” (A Theory of Justice §73; see also Lynd 1958: 22; Cairns 1993: 18, 20; Sennett 2003: 115).2

Honor   15 In general, it seems to make sense, for that reason, to see honor as something that is especially apt not so much to promote obedience to the law, but much more to encourage the practicing of virtues that are not backed by legal sanctions yet are important in people’s private lives and for the functioning of society as a whole (or the military). In this function, honor sometimes comes in more dramatic appearances: in its ultimate form it might involve the choice between life and death. As Leo Braudy put it in his From Chivalry to Terrorism: “Historically, it is the concept of honor that mediates between individual character and outside forces, as well as the body that wants to survive and the mind that seeks other goals, including a glorious death” (2003: 49). The honorable choice is then often, but not always, the choice against life, and honor is the reward for making the right choice. Especially this idea of it being a reward for virtuous behavior brought discredit upon the notion of honor in modern times. Honor’s undeniably inauthentic side shows both in the fact that the opinions of others have a role in determining what is right and in the fact that it often functions as a reward after having made the right choice, in general, as said, being a choice between higher interests and self-­interest. Honor makes that one chooses the former, although partly for reasons belonging to the realm of the latter. Although we nowadays preferably rely on our conscience to inform us on what is the right course of action, and hold that knowing what is just ought to be enough motivation in itself to act upon it, in this chapter the emphasis is nonetheless on honor in its inauthentic form, that is: on honor as public recognition (see for honor as a “quality of character” and for honor codes Krause 2002: 2–3). This conception of honor as public recognition differs, for example, from the notion of honor in the well-­known West Point credo “Duty, honor, country,” and in the West Point Honor Code (“a cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do”). In fact, honor at West Point is more or less synonymous with integrity (subject of Chapter 5), which is a more demanding notion than the notion of honor as outlined above, and more or less on the same plane as conscience, as both presuppose moral autonomy. The cadet adheres to the code because he accepts it, not because he is concerned about what others might think of him when he breaches it. The notion of honor in this chapter differs equally from Richard A. Gabriel’s definition of honor in To Serve with Honor, his book on military ethics, as “the ability to recognize moral dilemmas and to have the integrity and strength of character to act upon one’s perception” (1982: 157). Thus, similar to the West Point credo, Gabriel’s definition stresses the importance of integrity. The same holds true for the late Colonel Ted Westhusing’s definition  of military honor as a “constancy, harmony, and refinement of the natural virtues of greatness of mind and extended benevolence” (2003: 195). All these definitions see honor as an internally felt duty, not as something with an important external component. Westhusing, for instance, is negative on the idea of regimental honor because it “tends to pervert and transfigure both greatness of mind and extended benevolence, but especially extended benevolence” (ibid. 207). Clearly, it is in particular on account of this external element that honor as public recognition, central to this chapter, is less than altruistic. However, it

16   Honor would be unfair to classify honor as a purely selfish motive; as has been indicated above, it is a notion that just does not fit neatly into the altruistic/egoistic dichotomy. In the end it is essentially a social motive. And although the more demanding notion of conscience clearly is on a par with the way most people see themselves, it could be argued that even today, without deep roots in our present­day vocabulary, the older notion of honor, as a reward for virtuous behavior, can yet be useful because it is less demanding. Yet, should a reward be used to motivate people to, for instance, put their own existence (and that of others) at risk? To answer that question, but even more to get a better understanding of what honor is (as many people seem to have lost sight of that), and of what the pros and cons of today’s use of honor in the military are, it is important to delve relatively deep into the early, aristocratic notion of honor as found in the works of, among others, Sallust and Cicero. After that, we turn to its successive conversion into a more modern, egalitarian form as envisaged by later thinkers, from John Locke and Bernard Mandeville to Michael Walzer and John Rawls. A worthwhile undertaking, as the notion of honor will, in its many different appearances, turn up time and again throughout this book.

The Roman honor ethic The view that a virtue such as courage needs honor as a reward (and especially so in the military) goes back a long way, but was worked out most systematically by various Roman authors. They did not only discern something noble in the longing for honor and a name that never dies, they also ascribed an important function to it in war. In the view of the Roman historian Sallust, for example, the greatness of Rome was a result of the competition for glory by those young men who, destined to lead by birth and education, entered the battlefield with a burning desire to beat their peers by being the first to slay an opponent (Catilinae Coniuratio 1–2, 7).3 Where the Greeks pondered on the ideal depth of the phalanx, the, in military affairs, much more successful Romans addressed the  question of what makes men fight (du Picq 1947: 50–5).4 And no one, the Romans thought, will risk his life for the greater good, unless there is honor to be earned. Courageous acts should be seen and, more importantly, praised extensively – Julius Caesar, for instance, noted how his being a witness on the battlefield motivated his men to a rather extreme degree (De Bello Gallico III.14, VII.62). Sallust, who sought fame as a man of letters only after other paths to glory (such as politics or the military) were blocked to him at a time when, as he saw it, honor was no longer bestowed upon the deserving, opened his account of the conspiracy of Catiline with the statement that every man who wishes to rise superior to the lower animals should strive his hardest to avoid living all his days in silent obscurity, like the beasts of the field, creatures which go with their faces to the ground and the slaves of their bellies. (Catilinae Coniuratio 1)

Honor   17 We find similar views in the works not only of other Roman historians, but also of Roman philosophers, such as Marcus Tullius Cicero. The latter, besides a philosopher also a lawyer and statesman, is without a doubt the best-­known and most subtle representative of the Roman honor ethic. In Cicero’s works we find a form of conventional ethics that is, albeit less demanding, as moral and as sophisticated as modern accounts of morality that give centre stage to the notion of autonomy. A notion we can safely assume Cicero would have thought unattainable; interestingly, autonomy’s underlying view that honor is neither needed as an incentive nor as a heuristic tool to discover what is just, is, although it has come to be the dominant stance only quite recently, not of modern origin. It has always had its adherents, and in Greek and Roman antiquity this then counter-­position was defended by the Platonists, the Cynics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics (see also Taylor 1992a: 20). In his philosophical writings, Cicero especially opposed the latter two schools, which both tried to convince their respective audiences that honor was definitely not worthwhile pursuing. To begin with the Epicureans (their ideas were spread among the Romans through the poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura): they held that happiness and peace of mind were the two things to be valued in life, and that the competition for honor and glory put those very things at risk. They especially ridiculed the ambition for a name that lasted after one’s demise – why bother about one’s standing when no longer around to enjoy it? In Cicero’s view, more polemic than truthful, Epicurean philosophy was mistaken in seeing men as essentially self-­seeking. Although convinced of its being misguided, Cicero feared the consequences of people trying to live by Epicureanism, neglecting their duties to the state. The Stoics were equally hostile to the notion of honor. Partly because of reasons put forward by the Epicureans, and partly out of a more demanding view of man, holding that people potentially love virtue, and should be able to act accordingly. An act undertaken in exchange for a reward, for instance honor or fame, was not virtuous in any way – below the level of perfect virtue everything was equally bad. Although Cicero paid tribute to the Stoic position (and described himself as being Stoic) on some instances in his work (see for instance De Re Publica I.27, De Officiis III.33, 36, 38, and Tusculanae Disputationes II.52–3), this was in his opinion an impossible and even dangerously strict definition of virtue that takes away the incentive for trying to be virtuous from those who may not be without faults, but mean well (De Finibus IV.21, 55, 63–8, 75–7; Pro Murena 61–5). Hence, where Epicurean philosophy asks too little, Stoic philosophy asks too much. Despite Epicurean and Stoic thought, however, most Romans remained convinced that honor was the highest good to men, something with an existence in reality. When looking for a third way amid Epicurean hedonism and Stoic strictness, Cicero therefore thought that honor might provide a middle ground between both extremes. He did not so much dispute that we, for instance, can be brought to accept the principles of justice on an abstract level, but held that in

18   Honor concrete instances our strong passions, our partiality to ourselves, and our inability to be a good judge of our conduct, prevent us from both seeing and acting on what is just and virtuous, and that honor, in the sense of public recognition, is a necessary incentive to both make us see and to actually do what is right. Cicero, for that reason, did not agree with Aristotle’s view that a mature person can be expected to never go astray, and that a good man, consequently, does not need the sense of shame to keep him on the path of virtue, because reason keeps him on track (compare Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1095b, 1128b).5 Although it is of course imaginable that someone perfectly wise acts virtuously for virtue’s sake, just like the Stoics wanted to see it, such individuals are very rare – Cicero claimed he had never met one (Tusculanae Disputationes II.51). For the not so wise a little help from the outside, consisting of the judgments of peers and the concern for reputation, might be of help. Virtuous persons are, in general, far from indifferent to praise, and this should not be held against them for the two reasons already mentioned. First of all, the concern for reputation can help people to actually see what the virtuous way to behave is: We observe others and from a glance of the eyes, from a contracting or relaxing of the brows, from an air of sadness, from an outburst of joy, from a laugh, from speech, from silence, from a raising of a lowering of the voice, and the like, we shall easily judge which of our actions is proper, and which is out of accord with duty and nature. (De Officiis I.146) Not unlike painters, sculptors, and poets, we should consult the judgments of others to find out what to do and what to leave undone, and what to improve or alter (ibid. I.147). Second, and probably more importantly, in Cicero’s view the concern for reputation motivates to actually behave virtuously; although people, soldiers and civilians alike, are in general far from selfish, they cannot be expected to perform their duties from a sense of duty alone either. In the first book of his Tusculan Disputations he wrote that: Again, in this commonwealth of ours, with what thought in their minds do we suppose such an army of illustrious men have lost their lives for the commonwealth? Was it that their name should be restricted to the narrow limits of their life? No one would ever have exposed himself to death for his country without good hope of immortality. (I.32) And, in the second book: Nature has made us, as I have said before – it must often be repeated – enthusiastic seekers after honor, and once we have caught, as it were, some glimpse of its radiance, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and go through in

Honor   19 order to secure it. It is from this rush, this impulse from our soul towards true renown and reputation that the dangers of battle are encountered; brave men do not feel wounds in the line of battle, or if they feel them prefer death rather than move one step from the post that honor has appointed. (II.58) Nobody, Cicero thought, will put aside his own interests for the greater good if there is no fame or honor to be earned.6 He believed this applied to all; those who claimed to be insensitive to fame and glory were not to be believed (De Officiis I.71). Something that, incidentally, also holds true for philosophers: “Do they not inscribe their names upon the actual books they write about contempt of fame?” (Tusculanae Disputationes I.34). And similar to Locke, Cicero held that the censure from our peers is a punishment we cannot run away from and, more importantly, that no one is insensible enough to put up with the blame of others – that is a burden too heavy to bear. The Stoic belief, finally, that there is no relation at all between honor and virtue (and most modern authors seem to share this idea that virtue and honor do not go hand in hand) was not held by him; quite the contrary, he was convinced that both were intimately connected (De Legibus I.32), if only because undeserved praise gives us little pleasure. Cicero for that reason could write quite unproblematically about “a thirst for virtue, which of necessity secures fame, even if it be not its object” (Tusculanae Disputationes I.91). And about true glory, described as “the agreed approval of men, the unbiased verdict of judges deciding honestly the question of pre-­eminent merit; it gives back to virtue the echo of her voice; and as it generally attends upon duties rightly performed it is not to be disdained by good men” (ibid. III.3–4).7 Cicero’s urging to not neglect one’s duties to the public cause, proved to no avail, however. In Sallust we read how the competition for honor that had made Rome flourish, gave way to, first ambition, a fault that, according to Sallust, still comes close to being a virtue, and later avarice, weakening man’s moral fiber and in the end causing the ruin of the Roman republic (Catilinae Coniuratio 10). Subsequently, the Stoic view that peace, and especially peace of mind, are to be valued most in life, would gain in popularity during the tumultuous days that followed the collapse of the republic and the period thereafter. More than ever, the competition for honor and glory, together with human vanity, was seen as endangering those very values.

The honor ethic criticized: honor as a form of self-­interest This does not mean, of course, that the end of the Roman republic also brought an end to the honor ethic; the notion of honor still played an important role, for instance, in the code of chivalry of the Middle Ages. The ethics of medieval chivalry did not resemble the Roman honor ethic, however. In theory it heavily depended on Christian notions of purity, but in practice it often resembled the individualistic striving for honor as depicted by Homer. As one author put it:

20   Honor “Although the Church tried to make the knight subservient to its aims, the moral code of the knight was in disagreement with the teachings of the church. Pride was extolled instead of humility, vengeance was urged for every real or imaginary insult” (Ossowska 1972: 138). The Christian and bellicose elements came together in a favorite pastime of the medieval knight, the crusade, while another popular diversion, the tournament, provided the knight with a public to show off his valor (although some public was present during medieval battles too). When in the late Middle Ages war began to be characterized by what is called guerilla tactics in our days, the medieval form of honor began to dwindle. The canon eventually sealed the fate of chivalry (Huizinga 1982: 100). In the Renaissance the rediscovery of classical thought gave the ethics of honor another impulse. In 1341 Petrarca declared honor to be the highest good for a man of letters, starting the development of an ideology prescribing that the young should be educated to be enthusiastic seekers after honor (Q. Skinner 1978: 100–1). At the end of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon, clearly adhering to the position that honor is a legitimate and necessary reward for virtue, could for instance still write that “there is an honour (. . .), which may be ranked among the greatest, which happens rarely: That is, of such as sacrifice themselves, to death or dangers, for the good of their country: As was M. Regulus and the two Decii” (Of Honor and Reputation). Bacon, one of the founders of modern science, was, as many of his contemporaries were, standing with both feet in the tradition developed by Romans like Cicero. This ideal stayed very much alive, until in the seventeenth century, “with his bristling code of honour and his continual thirst for glory, the typical hero of the Renaissance began to appear slightly comical in his willful disregard for the natural instinct of self-­preservation” (Q. Skinner 1978: 101). In that century, Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan (1651) tried to establish a science of man modeled after the natural sciences, stated that people are driven solely by self-­ interest, thus reducing honor to an important yet selfish motive, hard to distinguish from vanity. This “withering critique,” denouncing the goals of the honor ethic “as vainglory and vanity, as the fruits of an almost childish presumption” proved successful in undermining the ethic of honor (Taylor 1992a: 214).8 In fact, the “rival theory about the universality of self-­interest” did so well that most people stopped believing in honor’s reality (Q. Skinner 1978: 101). This contender was indeed so successful that less than a century later, Bernard Mandeville, famous (and notorious) in his own time but now to some extent forgotten, could in his Fable of the Bees write about honor as being a chimera with instrumental value (as it is the one thing that makes people behave) at best. According to Mandeville, honor was something fundamentally artificial: The excellency of this principle [of honor] is, that the vulgar are destitute of it, and it is only to be met with in people of the better sort, as some oranges have kernels, and others not, though the outside be the same. In great families it is like the gout, generally counted hereditary, and all Lords children are born with it. In some that never felt any thing of it, it is acquired by

Honor   21 conversation and reading (especially of romances), in others by preferment; but there is nothing that encourages the growth of it more than a sword, and upon the first wearing of one, some people have felt considerable shoots of it in four and twenty hours. (vol. I 217) Even though he, like the Stoics, denied honor’s reality, he disagreed with them on a most vital point: Mandeville did not believe that people, despite all their pretences, would ever be capable of doing something from motives not in some way or another self-­interested (nor did he think that the world would be a better place if they did – poverty and boredom would await us). Honor, in Mande­ville’s opinion, is, despite the fact that many who claim to possess it profess the contrary, a self-­regarding drive; it is nothing more than an essentially selfish, though socially useful, motive, necessary as a check on man’s behavior.9 He therefore mockingly stated that “the reason why there are so few men of real virtue, and so many of real honour, is, because all the recompense a man has of a virtuous action, is the pleasure of doing it, which most people reckon but poor pay” (ibid. 246). Like Hobbes, Mandeville, a medical practitioner specialized in nervous diseases, prided himself on being an author who did not present man to his readers as he should be, but as he is. To no avail, he himself thought, because people are prone to deceive themselves: Ask not only the divines and moralists of every nation, but likewise all that are rich and powerful, about real pleasure, and they’ll tell you, with the Stoics that there can be no true felicity in things mundane and corruptible: but then look upon their lives, and you find they take delight in no other. (ibid. 179) Mandeville noted that there were other authors who shared his doubts about Stoicism and have exploded those precepts as impracticable, called their notions romantic, and endeavoured to prove that what these Stoics asserted of themselves exceeded all human force and possibility, and that therefore the virtues they boasted of could be nothing but haughty pretence, full of arrogance and hypocrisy. (ibid. 161) However, “notwithstanding these censures, the serious part of the world, and the generality of wise men that have lived ever since to this day, agree with the Stoics in the most material points” (ibid.). To illustrate his point Mandeville admitted that he knew the Stoic teachings as well as Seneca did, though was not sure about how “philosophically” he would react if someone “made the least motion of spitting in my face” (ibid. 163).10

22   Honor At about the same time, the contemporary view of honor as something with no apparent relationship with virtue had another foreshadowing in the work of Montesquieu, who saw honor as the principle of monarchies, a form of government wherein virtue was replaced by honor, defined (“philosophically false,” as Montesquieu himself admitted) as preferences, rank, distinction etc., leading to fine actions nonetheless. The principle of virtue governed in democracies, their flourishing or falling depending on its citizen’s caliber of virtue (Esprit des Lois I.iii.1–7). And just about a century later, a bit less than two centuries after Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, famously described modern individualism as “a calm and considered feeling which deposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends” (1969: 506). This is nothing less than a complete turnabout when compared with the days of Cicero and Sallust; from now on, the relatively safe private sphere was deemed more important than the public realm, the domain in which a name could be made, not in the least by exploits in war.11 Nevertheless, in Tocqueville’s view, those who, as Montesquieu did, held that there was no place for honor in democracies, mistook what was only a species, in Montesquieu’s case the honor of the court, for the genus.

Democratic honor and the quiet virtues According to Tocqueville, an astute observer of the difference between aristocratic and democratic honor, honor still performed its function in modern society, though with rules less odd and less numerous, and its workings less visible. That in democratic societies (by which term he basically meant egalitarian societies and not per se societies ruled by the people) the rules of honor are somewhat unclear – but also less martial and violent, and more gentle and productive – is in itself a relatively small price to pay for the providential fact that democratic honor, somewhat analogous to the shift from the Roman ranking concept of dignitas to the more egalitarian notion of dignity, is less hierarchical and more inclusive than Cicero’s aristocratic notion of honor. Essentially, democratic honor and its indefiniteness are the by-­products of a more egalitarian society. Aristocratic honor concerned mainly those who were by birth destined to lead, and who had a stake in specific rules and a more violent conception of honor which helped them to maintain their privileged position, whereas in a democracy, with its citizens less keen on eccentric conventions, it’s the action itself that is praiseworthy or blameworthy; who performs it (or suffers from it), is irrelevant (ibid. 617; see also Walzer 1983: 251, 267). In other words, while in aristocratic society descent was very important, therefore making honor based on merit close to impossible, democratic honor was based on desert. Or, so it should be; yet, in the real world, peculiarities – traces of more hierarchical notions – remain (Tocqueville 1969: 618). That notwithstanding, overall the rules of honor in democratic societies tend to stay close to “notions of right and wrong that are common to all the world,” keeping far from the “very exotic notions” endorsed by honor in earlier times (ibid. 616).

Honor   23 A bit more particularistic, though in tune with the present (which somewhat clouds its particularity to us), is that in Tocqueville’s days the productive virtues, and not so much for instance military valor, were seen as something that should be advanced by honor, whereas such things as idleness were something public opinion should discourage. In other words, it was, in Tocqueville’s terms, the “quiet virtues” that were admired, at the expense of the “turbulent” ones that bring glory but also trouble to a society. That in a democracy citizens are more disposed to gentle and quiet virtues is, of course, because that’s what benefits them most. In our day, Francis Fukuyama echoed that observation when he remarked that the “struggle for recognition has shifted from the military to the economic realm, where it has the socially beneficial effect of creating rather than destroying wealth” (1995: 7). This “affirmation of ordinary life,” which brought about the admiration for the productive and useful virtues, was bound to have an effect on the valuation of the, almost by definition unproductive, military profession. And indeed, according to Tocqueville, especially “martial valor is little esteemed” in the democratic era (1969: 620–2), while Adam Smith had already pointed out, in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, that officers of war, and “the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers” (II.3.2), and that war itself is a very destructive activity. For the rest, both Smith and his contemporaries did not mention war nearly as often as Cicero had done. Honor in the modern era, so it seems, should spur us to industrious lives. Kant, who held that wars were the result of aristocrats fighting for personal honor and glory, went as far as stating, in his Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, that putting the power in the hands of the people would make war a phenomenon of the past because ordinary citizens would only lose by it – a thought that still lies at the basis of the democratic peace theory in the study of international relations. This more democratic and productive form of honor had gotten its intellectual footing in the moral philosophy in the century that preceded that of Tocqueville. In the work of some of the more prominent moral philosophers from the eighteenth century who drew heavily from Cicero, we see, for instance, less of honor in its more dramatic forms as ridiculed by Hobbes and Mandeville. Instead, the use of honor was now prized, along the lines of Locke’s philosophy, as “the art of governing man,” and deemed important to promote the quiet and peaceful virtues Tocqueville spoke of. That this role of honor in, and the influence of Cicero on, eighteenth-­century moral philosophy is somewhat neglected, is, in the words of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner, presumably due to our tendency to write a “history of philosophy conceived in terms of our own philosophical criteria and interests” (1988: 292n16). On the other hand, these authors did give a distinctively “modern” turn to the notion of honor, making it into something less hierarchical, and a little more internalized; the main reason they interest us here. Not unexpected, there seems to be more than merely time which separates us from Cicero’s aristocratic notion of honor, while there appears to be plenty we can still relate to in the works of later authors who wrote on the subject of honor, closer to us in both time and outlook.

24   Honor

The judicious and the impartial spectator In the work of the aforementioned Locke, although he presented the sensitivity for praise and blame as “the great secret of education,” a clear standard for the distribution of praise and blame is for the most part absent. He did, however, sometimes hint at utility, making the honor ethic somewhat less particularistic.12 This standard, however, played a more prominent role in the works of David Hume, who held that there is no higher praise than that revealed in the remark that something is useful: Can anything stronger be said in praise of a profession, such as merchandise or manufacture, than to observe the advantages which it procures to society; and is not a monk and inquisitor enraged when we treat his order as useless or pernicious to mankind? (. . .) In general, what praise is implied in the simple epithet “useful”! What reproach in the contrary! (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals II.ii) For the reason that they were so unproductive, Hume explicitly rejected “the whole train of monkish virtues” (ibid. IV.i). We can assume that he, if asked, would also have rejected the equally unproductive soldierly virtues on the same grounds. Yet, notwithstanding this dramatic shift from unproductive to productive virtues, there are important similarities between Cicero and Hume. For instance, analogous to the way Cicero opposed the Stoics, Hume opposed those who in his time held views comparable with the strict Stoic view, and held that morality was not served by the claim that only behavior that springs from a pure sense of duty was to be called moral. Hume noted in his A Treatise of Human Nature that, in theory, it is indifferent to us whether someone tries to do good to us, our neighbor, or someone in China (III. iii.i). Provided that we adopt “some steady and general points of view” – the viewpoint of what Hume famously called the judicious spectator – we in general praise just acts because they contribute to the common good. This goes, however, only for our judgments concerning the conduct of others; Hume held that it does not necessarily mean that we also act justly from sympathy with the public interest. In general, he maintained, our sympathy with the public interest is too weak to have any noteworthy influence on our own conduct, and we tend to be partial in our own favor. If we nonetheless do act justly, as we usually do, this is often not done from a concern for the public interest, but from a concern for our own reputation. According to Hume, “there is nothing, which touches us more nearly than our reputation, and nothing on which our reputation more depends than our conduct,” and politicians and parents put this love of reputation to use in bolstering the esteem for justice, as well as inducing man to behave accordingly (ibid. III.ii.ii).13 Although he also wrote that, because one does not control the circumstances that decide whether an act will bear the fruits its actor expected, we in general praise the intention to do well, and not the actual consequences, whatever they may be (ibid. III.iii.i), yet insofar as the  motive underlying just conduct was concerned it was, for Hume

Honor   25 himself at least, not so much the intention, but the consequences that count. That the motivation behind just conduct – in effect a form of vanity – is often not so noble seems to have been unimportant to him. He believed this is the best we can do, and disagreed with those who, like the Stoics of earlier times, wanted man to be just for the sake of justice and not for the sake of his good name.14 Moreover, and similar to Cicero, whose De Officiis Hume had in his mind when he was working on his Treatise (as he wrote in a letter to Hutcheson cited in Jones 1982: 10–11),15 Hume thought that vanity and the love of fame were closely related to virtue (Treatise II.i.xi, II.ii.i), and are for that reason better not called vices. Vanity is “rather to be esteemed a social passion, and a bond of union among men” (ibid. III.ii.ii). In his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals he concluded accordingly that by the pursuit of “a name, a reputation in the world, we bring our own deportment and conduct frequently in review and consider how they appear in the eyes of those who approach and regard us” (concl.i). A habit that is “the surest guardian of every virtue” (ibid.).16 Perhaps tellingly, Hume called in his short autobiography My Own Life “love of literary fame” his “ruling passion.” This theme is further elaborated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, who found inspiration in the work of Stoics such as Aurelius and Epictetus, and, above all, Cicero (see also Gay 1973: 54–5; Larmore 1987: 17).17 Like the latter, he held that the praise and blame of our fellow citizens are “the only looking-­ glass by which we can, in some measure, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct” (III.1.5). Smith started from the assertion that man suffers from a serious lack of self-­knowledge: he tends to esteem himself too highly, and is incapable of truly judging his own conduct objectively.18 Imagining how a well-­informed impartial spectator would judge it was according to Smith the only way to correct “the natural misrepresentations of self-­love” (ibid. III.3.4). For that reason, “we should view ourselves, not in the light in which our own selfish passions are apt to place us, but in the light in which any other citizen of the world would view us” (ibid. III.3.11). Such an impartial spectator is not only aware of our conduct, but also of our intentions. The virtuous man “almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel” (ibid. III.3.25). In this respect, the impartial spectator somewhat resembles the “divine spark” which, the Stoics thought, we all carry within ourselves. Yet, to Smith the impartial spectator is not almighty, and it is here that we see Cicero’s influence. In a telling passage Smith quotes Cicero: “Many people despise glory, who are yet most severely mortified by unjust reproach: and that is most inconsistently” (De Officiis I.71). Smith, though, added that This inconsistency, however, seems to be founded in the unalterable prin­ ciples of human nature. The all-­wise Author of Nature has, in this manner, taught man to respect the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or less pleased when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or less hurt when they disapprove of it. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments III.2.30–1)

26   Honor To function well, the impartial spectator in the breast “requires often to be awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator” (ibid. III.3.38), which means that it is often difficult for him to go against the confounding judgments of ignorant and weak men, and consequently the impartial spectator sometimes acts “rather to the human, than to the divine, part of his origin” (ibid. III.2.32). More often even, men’s motives seem to be a mixture of the human and the divine element: like Cicero and Hume, Smith held that virtue and the love of praise were closely intermingled, and that “there is an affinity too between the desire of becoming what is honourable and estimable, and the desire of honour and esteem, between the love of virtue and the love of true glory” (ibid. VII. ii.4.10). Since this love of true glory consists of “the desire of the esteem and admiration of other people, when for qualities and talents which are the natural and proper objects of esteem and admiration,” it is “a passion which, if not the very best passion of human nature, is certainly one of the best” (ibid. VI.iii.46). Although a love of virtue might seem more pure than a love of glory, even in that latter passion there is “some reference to the sentiments of others,” because he who does not care about the opinions of others, cares very much about how others should think of him, and this is “the great and exalted motive of his conduct” (ibid.).19

Honor in our day: the Stoic view Although in decline from the seventeenth century on, from antiquity to Tocqueville’s days, philosophers always had at least something to say on the theme of honor. Most contemporary philosophers are, however, with some notable exceptions, silent on the subject. Insofar as they still write something on the subject of honor, they limit themselves to explaining how and why honor has disappeared from the scene. The explanations given seem to be based on a somewhat one-­sided interpretation of Tocqueville. Honor, it is thought, disappeared with the disappearance of social stratification; as honor presupposes distinction, no distinction means no honor (see for instance Berger 1984: 153; Finley 1993: 118; Taylor 1994: 27; Margalit 1996: 42–3. Compare Tocqueville 1969: 616–17). Our present-­day understanding of what it means to be moral is partly colored by an economic view that goes back to Hobbes and bears some similarity to Epicurean thought, but for the larger part it follows the views of the Stoics. According to the already mentioned Braudy, for instance, we often echo the Stoics’ “vocal distrust of the urge to distinction in public life” (1986: 18). In addition, still according to Braudy, their vocal distrust of the urge to distinction in public life (. . .) and their paradoxical urge to a fame defined by a turning away from recognition, are all in great part still with us, if only whenever we believe that anyone interested in public office is by definition not suited to it. (ibid. 148)

Honor   27 With the Stoics, we tend to think that people are to be virtuous from a love for virtue, not from a fear of losing face. For that reason, we believe that a virtuous act undertaken for honor is not really moral – the term seems somewhat inappropriate in such a case. As a logical consequence of these suspicions, we tend to think that the distribution of honor, status, respect, and reputation is unfair, and that these good things are often bestowed upon the wrong people. Social status goes to the rich and mighty, not to the deserving, and virtue is not a way to fame and glory, but precludes it. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, to quote one example, notoriously the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage, the world being what it contingently is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful. (. . .) We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound. (1985: 196) What was a concern for nearly all philosophers from antiquity and an insight to Machiavelli, namely that reputation not always follows virtue, and that people can gain glory without deserving it, has today become a truism (see also Walzer 1983: 257). Instead, we have put our faith in conscience, and, as indicated above, the dominant view is that we, contrary to our predecessors, live in a guilt culture, not a shame culture. Authors such as Eric Dodds (1951: 28–50) and Ruth Benedict (1967: 156–7) made this view popular (see also Williams 1973: 47), and, as said, this shift from a shame culture to a guilt culture is generally seen as a moral improvement. Nowadays, we are supposedly less concerned by how our conduct might look in the eyes of others; we are primarily motivated by how it looks in our own eyes, and face and reputation are no longer of overriding importance. Contrary to Cicero, Hume, Smith, and Mandeville we accordingly emphasize the painful side of shame, not the positive function shame can have or the sense of moral direction it can give. And although shame is still a factor in modern social science, it has lost its moral overtones there too. In the opinion of a behaviorist, for instance, it is not the actor that deserves praise and blame but the environment that steers him (see for instance B. F. Skinner 1971: 21). How has this happened? About half a century after the days of Mandeville and some years after Hume, Kant developed a rather different, much more demanding mode of thought, which is still very influential today. In brief, his ideal resembles the Stoic ideal of perfect virtue: any action motivated by self-­ interest, and honor falls under that heading, does not deserve to be called moral. Kant, as he himself said, did not care whether there was anyone who could live up to that ideal. Ethics should be free from all that “nur empirisch sein mag und zur Anthropologie gehört” (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten BA VIII). Consequently, in Kant’s ethical writings “shame is on the bad sides of all the

28   Honor lines” (Williams 1993: 77). Ever since, the largest part of the moral philosophers have not been inclined to be bothered too much by empirical facts about human nature. Rawls, for instance, following Kant, stated in his Political Liberalism that his moral psychology was not “originating in the science of human nature” because “beyond the lessons of historical experience and such bits of wisdom as not relying too much on scarce motives and abilities (say, altruism and high intelligence), there is not much to go on” (1993: 86–7; see also Sandel 1982: 9).20 Although most social scientists count among their “bits of wisdom” that face and reputation are important factors in human behavior,21 while some political philosophers, too, have suggested that honor still exists in the form of the need for, for instance, reputation, fame, praise, dignity, distinction, status, and, above all, respect and cognition (Walzer 1983: 252; see also Taylor 1994; Fukuyama 1995: 7; Margalit 1996: p.  ix; Krause 2002; Miller 1993),22 our present-­day understanding of ourselves follows the Kantian ideal rather closely. In that sense, we “are all Kantians now” (Adkins 1960: 2). Rawls’ own account of moral development in A Theory of Justice is illustrative of the contemporary idea that people are to be virtuous from a love for virtue, not from a concern for their reputation. According to Rawls, the fear of losing face still has a role in our conduct in the earlier phases of our moral development, in which stage the motive for complying with the principles of justice “springs largely from his ties of friendship and fellow feeling for others, and his concern for the approbation of the wider society” and “moral conduct is based in large part on wanting the approval of one’s associates” (§72). Rawls, however, thinks that we, after some time, can reach the phase of moral autonomy, in which “moral attitudes are no longer connected solely with the well-­being and approval of particular individuals and groups, but are shaped by a conception of right, chosen irrespective of these contingencies” (ibid.). Although the opinions of others have a role in the earlier phases of moral development, in the end “moral education is education for autonomy” (ibid. §80). Clearly, then, honor has lost much of its appeal as a guide in matters of morality, and certainly as something worth dying for. Today, according to one author, only some “quaint survivals” of honor are left, like the academic cum laude and summa cum laude (Q. Skinner 1978: 101). According to another, the notion of honor has become obsolete altogether (Berger 1984). The term itself, meanwhile, “has acquired some archaic overtones” (Pitt-­Rivers 1974: 39). Although some domains of modern life, such as politics, business, and sports (and especially the military is also often mentioned in that context) seem difficult to understand without taking honor into account (see on politics and business Fukuyama 1993: 229, 233),23 strands of thought stressing utility and autonomy have replaced the ethics of honor. In theory both these strands share, like Epicureanism and Stoicism, an animosity towards the ideal of honor, though in practice, the ideal of autonomy, as to be found in the work of the Stoics, Kant, and Rawls, is more hostile to the notion of honor than the very loose tradition, in this chapter represented by Hume (and later taken further by Bentham and Mill), that stressed

Honor   29 utility; the latter is alien to honor only insofar as it sees man as essentially a maximizer of material gain. This is the form it appears to take in the work of a few modern economists, although others leave room for non-­material goods, such as reputation, as “commodities” man can strive for (see for instance Becker 1996: 5, 163).24 Our present-­day understanding of ourselves, however, remains closer to the Stoic and Kantian stance, holding that virtue should be its own reward and that honor is nothing but vanity and a source of turmoil and envy, and inauthentic on top of that.

Honor and the military ethic In light of the above, it is not surprising that “honor and chivalry seem to play only a small part in contemporary combat,” supposedly because, here also, “popular passion overcame aristocratic honor” (Walzer 1992: 35). Should honor be mentioned, as for instance in the West Point credo “Duty, honor, country,” something else is meant: as pointed out above, honor at West Point is more or less synonymous with integrity, and the conception of honor at West Point is consequently a lot more demanding than the notion of honor as outlined above, more or less on the same plane as conscience, and presupposes moral autonomy. For instance, the US Army adopted Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs, but the 1983 leadership manual did not address Maslow’s fourth need: that for esteem and recognition (Brinsfield 2002: 403). Still, is the picture regarding honor really that bleak in today’s militaries? Not quite. A closer look learns that the military might be one of honor’s strongholds in modernity, even of honor in its more dramatic forms. In more than one respect, the military ethic is somewhat at odds with the ethics of Western society at large. The military has, for example, a somewhat collectivist outlook (Huntington 1964: 79; Toner 1992), and its ethic traditionally stresses the supremacy of society and, especially, the group over the individual. This ethic centers for an important part around values like duty, honor, and country, and emphasizes the notion of self-­sacrifice, which together lie at the heart of both the idea of the citizen-­soldier and what has come to be known as the institutional model (Moskos 1986: 378–9). According to its author, military sociologist Charles Moskos, the “motivation of members in an institution rests more on values than on calculation, whereas the opposite is true in an occupation” (Moskos and Wood 1988b: 280). Moreover, military men and women, by nature, seem to share a rather pessimistic and conservative outlook on human nature, seeing man as essentially selfish and weak (Huntington 1964: 63). That probably explains why honor still finds a more fertile ground in the military than in larger society: it is deemed necessary as both an incentive to overcome the inherent weaknesses of man and a check to the “softening” influence of a society that is sometimes seen as lacking in order, hedonistic, and materialistic (Jano­ witz 1960: 248). However, in line with Tocqueville’s description of democratic honor, the idea of the officer-­gentleman now relates to standards of behavior, not to descent, although here also, in the words of Tocqueville, peculiarities remain.

30   Honor So, the military has always left ample room for honor, although the notion has been stripped of its aristocratic elements (ibid. 215–32; see also Wakin 2000: 72), to perform its functions as a heuristic tool and a motivator. It seems therefore that for understanding the military it is necessary to recognize that, to put it somewhat pompously, we not only have a Judeo-­Christian heritage, but also a Greco-­Roman one. Today, the notions belonging to the first heritage, such as guilt and conscience, are probably guiding most people in their private morality. For our grasp of matters lying outside the private sphere, it might sometimes be better to also take notions such as honor and shame, belonging to the second, older heritage, into account (see also Kaplan 2002: 108–9; Watson 1999: 55–72; Bowman 2006). This means, however, that, from a present-­day moral philosopher’s point of view at least, military personnel is still on a “lesser,” conventional level of moral development. Or, to use the words of Bernard Williams: from a Kantian perspective they are, similar to the thinkers of Greek and Roman antiquity, like children “in a Piagetian tale of moral development” (1993: 77). A remark Williams possibly directed at Rawls, who, in fact, did build his account of moral development partly on the works of Piaget (A Theory of Justice 461n). Still, how bad is it for military personnel, to be on this allegedly sub-­optimal plane? Not that bad, and to some extent inevitable, it is argued below, although it does have its drawbacks, mainly for those not belonging to the military.

Economy and autonomy in the military Hobbes held that the peace and security that civilian society holds as the highest goods, require a military that itself can only exist by the willingness of some to make sacrifices for the security of others. As one author writes: “According to Hobbes, the sovereign is able to ‘guarantee’ the security of all members of society except those in the sovereign’s army, for they must be sacrificed in order to preserve all else” (Mattox 2002: 308). For the armed forces, both the modern ideology of moral autonomy, harking back to the Stoics, and the economic view of man, slightly resembling the Epicurean view on man as (mis)represented in Cicero’s work, are, in their undiluted form, not workable because both are clearly not very well suited to install this willingness to run risks on behalf of others. The economic view, first of all, has some fairly evident shortcomings when it comes to understanding the motivation of military personnel – Aristotle already stated that the professional, salaried soldier fights well against weaker opponents, but is the first to fly when the danger becomes too great (Nicomachean Ethics 1116b). Even so, it was faith in the economic theory on man that in many countries led to the All Volunteer Force (a Roman invention; see also Lynn 2003: 16) that presumably did away with the citizen-­soldier; the type of soldier that came closest to true courage in Aristotle’s view. The adoption of an AVF meant that “the military was to be treated as any other occupation, competing with the civilian sector to attract adequate manpower and quality” (Gabriel 1982: 5–6). Being a soldier became an occupation instead of a calling, and self-­interest

Honor   31 became more important than identification with a higher good (Moskos 1986: 378–9). This view on the military profession seems to be in line with what economist and Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker meant when he stated that “the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior” (1976: 8). Nonetheless, contrary to what Aristotle thought, in reality, of course, the professional soldier does not run away because, evidently, he is not motivated by self-­regarding motives alone (see also Shields 1993: 514, 515, 519, 525). However, treating soldiers and officers as if they are essentially self-­seeking can seriously hamper their effectiveness, as the US Army experienced during the Vietnam War (Gabriel and Savage 1978: 18–19). This should not surprise us. Somewhat similar to Tocqueville, who noticed that people in his day and age saw only self-­interested motives at work in their own behavior, even when it was clear that more altruistic motives were at play, Allan Bloom wrote that if, for example, one sees only gain as a motive in men’s actions, then it is easy to explain them. One simply abstracts from what is really there. After a while one notices nothing other than the postulated motives. To the extent that men begin to believe that there are no other motives in themselves. And when social policy is based on such a theory, finally one succeeds in producing men who fit the theory. When this is occurring or has occurred, what is most needed is the capacity to recover the original nature of man and his motives, to see what does not fit the theory. (1987: 255) According to Charles Taylor, quite similarly, most people tend to accept the atomist-­instrumentalist conception because it meets their experience: the experience of contemporary men in society who have formed an identity as individual agents, or in relation to some group, while looking on their political society as an environment in which their goals are attained or frustrated. We may judge that this fact of modern experience is the main reason for the popularity of the instrumentalist view. (1980: 87) Just like Cicero feared that Epicurean philosophy, although mistaken, could have adverse effects if people came to believe in it, economic theory on man, true or not, can have analogous perverse consequences. The ideology of moral autonomy, on the other hand, asks too much of military personnel. Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential model of moral development, which has a lot in common with Rawls’ account of moral development as outlined in the previous section, is paradigmatic for this line of thought and widely used by military ethicists. According to this three-­level (and six-­stage) model, people are egoistic and calculating at the pre-­conventional level, the one thing

32   Honor keeping them from misbehaving being their fear of punishment. Once at the conventional level, they are also sensitive to peer pressure (at the first stage of this level) and the norms of society (at the second stage), and concerned about their reputation. Adherence to universal principles is deemed the highest, post-­ conventional or “principled” level (Kohlberg 1981). However, the rare person that reaches this level seems to resemble the perfectly wise one Cicero claimed he never met – Kohlberg mentions Gandhi and Martin Luther King as examples of people who reached the post-­conventional level. One military ethicist, echoing Cicero’s and Mandeville’s criticism of the Stoic philosophy, described Kohlberg’s model, with its emphasis on the morally autonomous individual, as “troubling” in the military context (Toner 2000: 56). Inside the military, as is surely the case elsewhere, most individuals are stuck at the second, conventional level – but most soldiers perhaps function often at the first stage of this level, possibly more inclined to conform to the norms of their peers than to the norms of society. Nonetheless, this seems not to have diminished Kohlberg’s popularity among military ethicists; the same author who called the Kohlberg model troublesome for the military, maintains that the moral education in the armed forces should nonetheless aim at reaching a higher “Kohlberg stage” (ibid. 165). Despite the popularity of virtue ethics, this more duty-­based view still has its advocates in military ethics: in a recent plea for educating military personnel to be morally autonomous, based on the work of Kant, Susan Martinelli-­Fernandez, for instance, states that “it is the mark of a morally mature agent to conform to moral principles voluntarily and for their own sake” (2006: 56–7; see also Tripodi 2006: 219; Challans 2007). This statement is also a further illustration of the modern emphasis on good intention – not only in deontological, duty-­based ethics, but in modern moral philosophy (including virtue ethics) in general. Yet, as already mentioned in the above, this requirement of a good intention will not often be met because military personnel are, in general that is, not primarily motivated by abstractions.

Honor as social cohesion In An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War from 1732, the abovementioned Mandeville was making exactly that point when he stressed that the Christian ethic of his day, in his view comparable with the Stoic ethics of former times, was completely useless in war because it was incapable of motivating soldiers. In practice, every commander will take recourse to the opposite honor ethic, and the men are praised and buoyed up in the high value they have for themselves: their officers call them gentlemen and fellow-­soldiers; generals pull off their hats to them; and no artifice is neglected that can flatter their pride, or inspire them with the love of glory. (Enquiry 161)

Honor   33 The honor ethic expects us to put high value on ourselves, whereas the Christian ethic demands humility. For most of us, the former comes a lot easier than the latter.25 For that reason, pride has nowhere been more encouraged than in the army and “never anything had been invented before, that was half so effective to create artificial courage among military men” (ibid. 60). As in the Enquiry, in his earlier, and better known, Fable of the Bees Mandeville had made it clear from the outset that in his view honor is something which makes soldiers forget their “real” interests and cynically rhymed that “The soldiers that were forced to fight, If they survived, got honour by’t” (Fable vol. I 6). In that work, however, he also made some practical suggestions.26 One makes a soldier courageous, for instance, by “first to make him own this principle of valour within, and afterwards to inspire him with as much horror against shame, as nature has given him against death” (ibid. 231). If in that manner the fundament is laid for artificial courage, then the thing to do is to flatter and praise the bold, to reward the wounded and to honor the dead. High-­sounding words about the justness of the cause, despising death and the bed of honor, together with uniforms and decorations, provide against little cost the courage money cannot buy. No one can resist the “witchcraft of flattery,” provided it is “artfully performed” (ibid. 37).27 The strongest motive for courageous behavior in Mandeville’s judgment, though, is the wish to avoid being considered a coward by fellow soldiers. If one might be tempted to flee if no witnesses are near, the presence of others makes flight virtually impossible: “One man in an army is a check upon another, and a hundred of them that single and without witness would be all cowards, are for fear of incurring one another’s contempt made valiant by being together” (ibid. 233). However, honor was definitely not seen as something worth dying for by Mandeville himself. Therein, mainly, lies the importance of his texts: they combine the modern view of man as self-­seeking and the classical preoccupation with honor, while his insight that honor can be used in an instrumental way received extensive empirical validation in the twentieth century. After World War II a number of groundbreaking studies appeared (see Chapter 3 for a critique of these studies), which stated that abstract principles, such as freedom or democracy, do not play much of a role in motivating soldiers, and that talking about them is almost a taboo under those circumstances. As journalist and military historian S. L. A. Marshall wrote in his highly influential Men Against Fire: Lofty ideas and ideals we must have, if only to assure that man will go forward. But it is unworthy of the profession of arms to base any policy upon exaggerated notions of man’s capacity to endure and to sacrifice on behalf of ideals alone. (1947: 153) According to another famous study from this period, by sociologist Samuel Stouffer and his associates, only five percent of the enlisted US men in World

34   Honor War II named idealistic reasons (including patriotism) as incentives (1949: 108, 150). If abstract notions do not do much to motivate, what does? Religion, the wish to end the war, and group cohesion were all mentioned more often in the Stouffer studies. According to Marshall, it is especially the latter factor that is powerful. Soldiers “do not aspire to a hero’s role, but they are equally unwilling that they should be considered the least worthy among those present (. . .) personal honor is the one thing valued more than life itself by the majority of men” (1947: 149). The soldiers described here were clearly at the conventional level: the attitude of troops caught and corrected in flight is “not unlike that of a small boy caught in the act of playing hooky” (ibid. 150). When peer pressure crumbled because some fled, others were likely to follow. Research into the motivation of the Wehrmacht in World War II reached similar conclusions: it was social cohesion, not indoctrination by Nazi propaganda, which made German soldiers such effective fighters (Shils and Janowitz 1948: 280–315). A study by military sociologist Charles Moskos into combat motivation in Vietnam also underlined that abstract ideals do not do much to motivate, but in addition showed that latent ideology does play a role. That notwithstanding, according to this study soldiers develop primary group relations mainly because their chances of survival are best served that way. They do not seem very willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of the group only. A soldier needs the support from his fellow soldiers, and the only way to get that is to provide such support himself. So, Moskos states, the Hobbesian picture of man is essentially correct (1969).28 A more recent study by the Israeli Defense Force did not look into the role of lofty ideals, though did show that letting dependents, comrades or the unit down was considered “the most frightening aspect of battle” by well over forty percent of soldiers and officers, whereas death and loss of limb scored considerably lower (Shalit 1988: 10–13). A 2003 study into the motivation of US soldiers in Iraq, already referred to in the first section of this chapter, confirms these findings that social cohesion is the most important factor. By stressing social cohesion and peer pressure, armed forces are falling back on a form of conventional ethics which most of today’s military ethicists hold in dismay. In spite of their misgivings, however, both training and organization are aimed at enlarging cohesion (Keegan 1976: 53, 72–3). The omnipresence of the honor ethic and the widespread belief in the advantages of fostering social cohesion in today’s military should not make us blind to its drawbacks, though. Given their preoccupation with honor, shared by both the protagonists and antagonists of the honor ethic, it is no wonder that many pre-­twentieth century philosophers, from Romans such as Cicero and Seneca to Tocqueville, did address most of these negative aspects, and thought of possible solutions. Armed forces themselves, in the meantime, have not always paid much attention to the downsides of the conventional ethics that result from stimulating social cohesion, as well as the negative aspects of an undue concern for honor and one’s reputation among peers.

Honor   35

Honor’s drawbacks Although the only reason to high endeavor in “this brief and transitory pilgrimage of life,” a necessary check on our behavior, and an indispensable tool to find out what is just at the same time, Cicero was not blind to the numerous drawbacks of the honor ethic. He did realize, for instance, that if honor was reduced to a matter of “not being caught,” everything was permitted when no one was around. Tocqueville, for that reason, wrote that honor “is only effective in full view of the public, differing in that from sheer virtue, which feeds upon itself, contended with its own witness” (1969: 626). For what is only known privately and not out in the open does, in a sense, not even exist for those who are led by external honor (Bowman 2006: 42–4; see also Margalit 1996: 131) a point proven by Gyges and Sebastian Caine. The view on morality presented by both Gyges’ tale (in Plato’s Republic related by Glaucon; it is evidently not the Platonic/Socratic view on morality) and the movie is basically the same as Mandeville’s: morality is all about pretence and artificiality, since man’s true nature is in every respect self-­seeking, as is revealed when he thinks himself unobserved. The question is, of course, to what extent Gyges and Caine are truly “universal” characters. If the view on human nature that they depict is true, however, similar problems might arise if there are too many witnesses around. Hume wrote, for instance, that “honour is a great check upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed” (On the Independency of Parliament). In Tocqueville’s view, honor is less binding in a “constantly fluctuating crowd” (1969: 626). If we do not know the bystanders, and they do not know us, we do not care for their opinion, and a necessary check on our conduct disappears. Smith, for that reason, was concerned about the effects of modern industrial, urban society. The man of low condition, for instance, is only taken notice of as long as he lives in his small rural village. However, as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice. (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations V.i.g.12)29 For the military, Marshall, similarly, found that it is crucial that soldiers know each other, because when “a soldier is unknown to the men who are around him he has relatively little reason to fear losing the one thing he is likely to value more highly than life – his reputation as a man among other men” (1947: 150). Cicero further acknowledged that intemperance in the quest for fame and glory could be dangerous. Like most philosophers of the past, he, for that reason, distinguished between “true” and “false” glory. Cicero held that “true” glory should serve the public cause, not some personal end (Tusculanae Disputationes

36   Honor III.3–4).30 Roman history includes some telling examples of young, ambitious noblemen, such as Coriolanus, Catiline, and, most notably, Caesar who brought the republic close to disaster by putting their own personal glory above state interest, taking up weapons against their fellow citizens in their quest for recognition (and it is probably not a coincidence that in the end all three died violent deaths). Today, a commander might endanger his men, his mission and even his country when he is motivated by the individualistic honor ethic we see in Homer’s Iliad embodied in the behavior of Achilles and Agamemnon, aimed at personal aggrandizement before anything else.31 As Mandeville pointed out, honor can be used in a manipulative way by such men of ambition, putting pressure on soldiers to do something definitely not in their own interest. In all probability, John G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-­Rivers stated in a foreword to their Honor and Grace in Anthropology, honor caused more deaths than the plague (1992). Political theorist William A. Galston seems therefore to have been quite right when he wrote that vanity can never be satisfied with the honor and recognition of one or a few men, for every man who goes his own way or refuses to honor the vain man is a direct threat to his self-­esteem. Vanity feeds on, indeed requires, new conquests, for in a curious way the men who bow down cease to be taken seriously, their esteem ceases to be esteemed. The vain man thus looks for larger and larger worlds to conquer and ends up by desiring universal recognition. (1975: 238) Cicero, for these reasons, warned that the pursuit of honor could work not only in the interest of the state, but also against it: the higher a man’s ambition, the more easily he is tempted to acts of injustice by his desire for fame (De Officiis I.65). And while our contemporary celebrity culture nicely illustrates how honor and fame are not the same (see also Bowman 2006: 273–9; Welsh 2008: 1–4), Francis Bacon already noted in his time that “glorious men are the scorn of wise men; the admiration of fools; the idols of parasites; and the slaves of their own vaunts” (Of Vain Glory). Cicero therefore explicitly stated that, especially when we are doing well, we should not listen to flatterers suggesting that we are entitled to praise when we actually are not – for this might lead to the worst kind of blunders (De Officiis I.91). Ironically, he himself could do nothing more than witness the hunger for fame and glory for all the wrong objects, causing the end of the Roman republic (and Cicero’s life) when Caesar started a civil war because of perceived offences to his dignitas. Another, to some extent related, drawback (as it too springs from honor’s inegalitarian character) of the honor ethic is that it can be rather exclusivist, even in relatively democratic times, merely reinforcing the prior inequalities in society or organization. In spite of the close relationship between honor and virtue that he perceived, Smith also noted that the “disposition to admire, and almost

Honor   37 worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition” persisted into modernity, and was according to Smith “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments I.iii.3.1).32 In former days it was, for example, thought quite honorable for an officer not to pay his tailor, to flog a soldier, or to be drunk. Not paying his gambling debts or not adequately responding to an insult was however deemed very dishonorable. Even though these are (apart from the flogging) relatively innocent examples that can be remedied, such an exclusivist ethics of honor might also take less harmless and more persistent forms. If we translate this to today’s military, we see, for instance, that for most of the armed forces in the Western world peacekeeping, humanitarian, and rebuilding missions are becoming increasingly important, and that in these new operations honor, in its modern guise of social cohesion, every now and then leads to the kind of in-­group favoritism that is potentially dangerous to the people the military are supposed to protect. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, it is possible that what was a factor contributing to the success of the involved militaries during the initial phase, might have hampered them later in stabilizing and rebuilding. In some of today’s missions, force protection seems on occasion to have taken precedence over the safety of local populations, and this might well be an unavoidable consequence of stressing unit cohesion, setting a premium on bonding over bridging. It thus appears that social cohesion, peer pressure, and the conventional type of ethics that comes with it, can foster anything from overly warrior-­like behavior to too much force protection, but not necessarily to the sort of behavior that gives central place to the interests of the local population. As one author put it somewhat polemically: “Nonsoldiers lie outside the military honour group; as such they are felt to deserve no respect” (Robinson 2007c). This could very well backfire: some hold, for instance, that some insight in the way breaches of their honor can cause offense to the local population, might lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms behind both terrorism and the rise of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan – a point that will be taken up again in Chapter 6. A final, more theoretical, objection is that, from the ethicist’s point of view, a good action undertaken for honor does not in every respect deserve the predicate moral and that the term sacrifice seems somewhat out of place in such a case. This is a point the Stoics put forward, which in turn was considered a bit too strict by Cicero. This objection, which in all probability has never been considered a problem by those who benefited from good behavior motivated by honor, has never been satisfactorily resolved by the advocates of honor ethics. Nor was this of great concern to them. The more important question is, however, if we can somehow improve on the points that are not merely of theoretical interest, for instance by making use of the suggestions offered by the same authors that also identified most of honor’s shortcomings?

38   Honor

Possible solutions to these drawbacks First of all, on a rather fundamental plane, most philosophers of old deemed it necessary that honor was internalized, at least to some extent: the actual presence of others was no longer needed, and the gaze of imaginary others sufficed for honor to function. As Smith pointed out: applause from our peers should not mean much to us if we know that a better-­informed impartial spectator would disapprove. Man, for that reason, not only wants praise, but also wants to be praiseworthy, and “nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments III.2.7), and morality is consequently not a matter of not being caught. Similarly, Cicero on the one hand held that true and philosophic greatness of spirit regards the moral goodness to which nature most aspires as consisting in deeds, not in fame, and prefers to be first in reality rather than in name. And we must approve of this view; for he who depends upon the caprice of the ignorant rabble cannot be numbered among the great. (De Officiis I.65) In Cicero’s view honor did not consist of the applause of the masses, but was the “agreed approval of good men” (Tusculanae Disputationes III.3; see also De Officiis I.65). On the other hand, however, he acknowledged that taking the moral high ground brings us “on very slippery ground; for scarcely can the man be found who has passed through trials and encountered dangers and does not then wish for glory as a reward for his achievements” (ibid.).33 While the idea of “internalized” honor, serving a greater good, tackles most of honor’s drawbacks, it also brings it closer to the Stoics (and Aristotle), as Cicero himself very well saw. This way out somewhat resembles the solution of the ethicist, cited above, stating that moral education should aim at reaching a higher “Kohlberg stage” (Toner 2000: 165). Some might wonder how realistic this is. Yet, Cicero’s view, although somewhat ambiguous, does point to the fact that the honor ethic only works if it consists of more than what the behavior will look like in the eyes of others. If not, something like moral courage, the type of courage that generally brings moral disapprobation, would never be attained. What’s more, even in the paradigmatic shame cultures like the heroic society as described by Homer, shame was to a certain degree internalized, and, writes Bernard Williams in his Shame and Necessity, it is a silly mistake “to suppose that the reactions of shame depend simply on being found out” (1993: 81; see for a somewhat different view Bowman 2006: 42–4). Without shame being internalized the idea of a shame culture would make no sense (Williams 1993: 81–2). And although the internalized other is abstracted and generalized, “he is potentially somebody rather than nobody, and somebody other than me” (ibid. 84). This somebody is not necessarily the one in closest geographical or

Honor   39 psychological proximity, which basically means that it is not automatically the opinions of one’s nearest and dearest that matter most (ibid. 83). In the case of the military, the “significant other” therefore does not have to be a team member. Michael Ignatieff describes how, for instance, the regimental honor of the Canadian armed forces was badly damaged for quite a while after some serious incidents (described in more detail in the next chapter of this book) in Somalia (2001: 28–9). This is not group cohesion in a small unit consisting of members who know each other well, but esprit de corps: the shared identity of those belonging to a larger unit consisting of people who do not interact with each other on a daily basis. Esprit de corps can be used by the armed forces to counter the more inwardly directed group cohesion, and a code of conduct can be part of it, making the honor ethic less particularistic. Clearly, it is not only the honor in a small group that can work as a check, but also the honor of a regiment or of the armed forces as a whole. It is important to note here that honor in itself does not make unethical behavior more likely to take place; the opposite can equally be the case, all depending on what the culture of the primary group in question endorses (see also Osiel 1999: 227–9). Although honor is, in practice, sometimes more likely to be a cause of misconduct than a cure for it, it seems that it can just as well be listed a means of preventing war crimes because, among other reasons, it has the advantage of being consistent with military training and culture. In the end, the notion of honor is itself devoid of predetermined content. One author has for that reason called honor a “higher-­order virtue” that encompasses other virtues that are relative to a group (Challans 2007: 88). However, because honor is inherently particularistic, depending on group norms not shared by everyone, honorable behavior and moral behavior can never be equated. Locke, for instance, wrote that “murders in duels, when fashion has made them honourable, are committed without remorse of conscience” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding I. ii.9). To what degree honorable behavior and moral behavior do overlap varies greatly from group to group (and depends on the eccentricity of the group norms), although Tocqueville, as we have seen, suggested that, in larger society, this is more the case in modern times than in older days. To what extent the honor ethic can work for the good within the military consequently depends on the question whether or not the norms, virtues and values military personnel subscribe to, and which are furthered by honor, are the right ones for a particular task. As stated in the first chapter, today, the right ones are not necessarily only the more martial virtues. Even though what honor actually is expected to sanction differs from era to era, it is clear that, to perform well in helping us to see what is right, the honor ethic does stand in need of (and cannot exist without) some kind of a standard lying outside itself, for instance in the form of a code, with dos and don’ts (see also ibid. 89). Such a touchstone is not only a prerequisite for honor to function, but also the articulation of praise and blame – honoring and dishonoring – can be expected to add something to its formation; what is considered praiseworthy and blameworthy can be steered to some extent. Hume, for instance, wrote in his

40   Honor Treatise that “public praise and blame increase our esteem for justice; so private education and instruction contribute to the same effect” (Treatise III.ii.ii).34 Although a clear standard makes the honor ethic more demanding, it is still much less demanding than an ethic based on abstract notions such as human rights and freedom and dignity (see also Ignatieff 1997: 6). Hence, honor does not only function as an incentive in combat (and a potential source of problems outside combat); the honor ethic itself might also be part of the solution to its drawbacks sketched above. In fact, some authors have pointed to the importance of honor as a restraint on the behavior on both the battlefield and in modern operations outside the battlefield. Military ethicist Shannon E. French, for instance, states in her book The Code of the Warrior that “when there is no battlefield, and warriors fight murderers, they may be tempted to become the mirror image of the evil they hoped to destroy. Their only protection is their code of honor” (2003: 241). According to military historian John Keegan, there is no substitute for honor as a medium of enforcing decency on the battlefield, never has been and never will be. There are no judges, more to the point, no policemen at the place were death is done in combat. (cited in Ignatieff 1997: 118) Although this warrior code is codified in the Geneva Conventions to make it less particularistic, according to Michael Ignatieff the “decisive restraint on inhuman practices on the battlefield lies within the warrior himself ” (ibid.).

Conclusion Honor, although often ranking high on militaries’ lists of virtues, is in fact not a virtue at all; it is above all a reward for virtuous behavior. In the past, the question whether, and to what extent, honor was in fact a necessary incentive divided the philosophical community into three kinds of thinkers, and underlying their differing positions are three different views of human nature. Those who condemn the striving for honor sometimes have a view of man that is both optimistic and demanding at the same time, and tend to think that people potentially love virtue, and should be able to act accordingly. Thinkers and schools as diverse as Plato, the Stoics, Rousseau, and Kant, for instance, held the view that virtue should be its own reward, and as a general rule (albeit to different degrees) saw nothing in honor but vanity and a probable source of turmoil and envy. Others, such as to some extent the Epicureans as depicted by Cicero, yet a lot more so Hobbes, Mandeville, and of course many of today’s economists, have a more negative, economic view of man as essentially egoistic and see honor as “foolish pride” (although for instance Mandeville nonetheless did see a clear function for it). Those who, on the other hand, hold the view that honor can fulfill an important function occupy the middle ground between Epicurism and Stoicism. They tend to have a conservative view on human nature, that is, they

Honor   41 not only do not believe that man has a natural tendency to be good, and to act virtuously, but they also reject the economic view of man as fundamentally self-­ seeking. Cicero, Hume, and Smith, among others, held this position that virtue is within reach of most people, but needs a reward. Although all three positions have been maintained at different times by different authors, the first two positions seem to have gained ground. However, while traces of Epicurean and Hobbesian philosophy are still present in the economical view of man, it is especially the Stoic view of honor that can be found in our contemporary moral outlook and discourse, and, more specifically, in our ideals of autonomy and authenticity. Most modern moral philosophy mirrors (and, of course, feeds) these ideals. Although present-­day sociology and psychology suggest that the quest for honor might not have disappeared, but still exists in the form of the need for recognition, respect, approval, and dignity, most moral philosophers, writing often in either an Aristotelian or Kantian vein, today, contrary to their predecessors, have not much to say on the topic, and when they have, they limit themselves to explaining how and why honor has disappeared from the scene (see also Welsh 2008: 1). The explanations given are remarkably similar, and in general based on the debatable view that honor disappeared with the disappearance of social stratification. As we have seen in the above, the view that a social hierarchy with an essentially fixed distribution of honor is likely to hamper honor in its functioning, is equally viable. The shift to a more egalitarian conception of honor is, in fact, essential if it is to have a role in today’s world; although we commonly associate honor with aristocratic times, an open evaluation, a precondition for honor to function properly, can only be arrived at in a democratic age (see also Krause 2002: 66–7).36 In reality, it is because of today’s more egalitarian conditions that honor, both in society at large and in the military, can perform its two roles (making people see, and motivating them to do, what is right) better in our day than in the past, thus making up for the ground lost by honor’s rules having become more indefinite in our time. If there is some truth in this, it is all the more regrettable that most modern theorists have turned a blind eye on the topic. Especially from the perspective of the ethicist, considerations of honor and reputation are generally considered to be on the wrong side of the line, and this is very likely at the cost of having somewhat lost sight of what makes human beings tick. Clearly, this is a loss; although many ethicists have strong ideas about how people ought to behave, a military ethics that does not take man’s actual motives into account seems a bit too academic. As it stands, the unenthusiastic view on honor is present in the writings of a good number of military ethicists, who, as most moral philosophers, more often than not opt for either an Aristotelian or Kantian approach. Others, possibly some military policymakers among them, have a more economic view that is just as hostile to the notion of honor, and see man as essentially self-­seeking. As we have seen, both these accounts are too one-­sided. The military traditionally depends on the willingness of some to be in harm’s way for the security of others, but neither the ideology of moral autonomy nor the economic view 35

42   Honor of man alone is likely to install this readiness. Both give center stage to the individual. The military, however, is, as we have noted before, more collectivist, and somewhat at odds with the ethics of Western society at large in using honor as an incentive to create this willingness (Huntington 1964: 64; Janowitz 1960: 248). Whereas the economic view resides solely in the “is,” the ethicist’s position is firmly located in the domain of the “ought” (see for instance Challans 2007: 64). In behavior induced by considerations of honor, however, the spheres of “is” and “ought” seem to blend, as honor occupies the middle ground between self-­serving and more altruistic motives (see also Krause 2002: 11). This was in effect the reason why honor was deemed so important by Cicero, Smith, and Hume; they, for instance, did not expect people to be autonomous to an extent that was beyond their reach, without, of course, falling into the other extreme: viewing people as entirely controlled by the opinions of those who surround them. In After Virtue MacIntyre presents Sartre and Goffman as respective representatives of these two extreme, yet dominant, positions (1985: 32), while, elsewhere, he states that “the virtue of Hume’s ethics, like that of Aristotle and unlike that of Kant, is that it seeks to preserve morality as something psychologically intelligible” (1969: 50). Although it was Hume who provided for the most cited formulation of the distinction between “is” and “ought,” he himself did not adhere to such a division in his own work, freely basing his prescriptions for man on insights on his most important motives as well as his shortcomings. What’s interesting about this celebrated passage that contains this distinction is that Hume was in fact mainly bothered by the fact that the move from “is” to “ought” often goes without explanation, not with the move itself (Treatise III.i.i).37 Perhaps we too should be somewhat less stringent, accepting that the requirement of the right intention is too ambitious. As a result of the focus on “ought” in military ethics, there are, to name just one thing, on a theoretical plane some problems concerning the feasibility of what military ethics education is trying to teach. These problems are inherent to both the two schools in ethics that dominate most ethics curricula: virtue ethics and duty-­based ethics, that both stress the importance of the right intention. Although it is, of course, the subject matter of (normative) ethics how people ought to behave, and not how they actually do behave, yet, on the other hand, as lawyer and sociologist Mark Osiel writes, “any persuasive account of what makes men willing to fight ethically must be compatible with a more general account of what makes them willing to fight at all” (1999: 202). For educating ethics an all too academic approach could, first of all, mean that the education would be ineffective and, second, that the above-­ mentioned drawbacks of social cohesion would go unattended. Opting for a somewhat more realistic approach to teaching ethics to military personnel would mean that the sights are set a bit lower, no longer aiming for the higher Kohlberg levels. Such a pragmatic approach would be less demanding, and, contrary to theories that stress autonomy and the right intention, has the advantage of being consistent with military training and organization (in our day, such a position is in fact taken by the just mentioned Osiel in his pragmatic Obeying Orders from

Honor   43 1999). Taking this position implies that we accept that moral rules are followed, not because they are moral, but because not following them brings disesteem, and that virtues are practiced, not out of a love of virtue per se, but because virtuous conduct is rewarded with praise, esteem and approbation. If there is any truth in this, the conclusion would be that, in this aspect at least, Cicero’s work probably provides a better basis for ethics education in the military than that of Aristotle, which currently often forms its starting point. The objection that a good action undertaken for considerations of reputation does not in every respect deserve the predicate moral, meanwhile, will not be satisfactorily resolved. Abandoning the requirement of the right intention (which, in effect, would mean taking a more consequentialist point of view – more on that in Chapter 4) definitely falls short of the ideals put forward by Aristotle, Kant, and Kohlberg; from their point of view, settling for conventional ethics would mean settling for a “lesser” level of moral development. One could object against such conventional ethics, for instance, that ethics education in the military should be “aspirational, aimed at improving the moral character of military personnel not just because this will lead to more reliable behavior, but also as an end in itself ” (Wolfendale 2008: 164). Doing so would make soldiers “good people, not just well-­behaved people” (ibid.). This objection, however, is something probably mainly ethicists are bothered by; they might want to point out to us the effect on the soldier’s character of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. For those at the receiving end, today, to be found in for instance Iraq and Afghanistan, it probably does not matter a lot how pure the intention is. It might, of course, be true (to use a common example) that, for instance, married people want their spouse to be faithful because he or she is the kind of person who does not cheat, instead of being faithful because cheating gives such a fuss when discovered, yet it should be taken into account that the relationship between military personnel and members of the local population is evidently an entirely different one. To what extent intentions matter depends for the most part on the context, and in the context the military functions they hardly seem to do so. As outlined above, there are some other drawbacks to conventional ethics that do have real consequences, and which are especially troublesome in today’s missions, which hardly resemble the wars of the past. The solution to these shortcomings, however, lies not in trying to teach soldiers to rise above the conventional level, but probably has to be found within its framework. It seems that a twofold movement, inward and outward, is asked for. Honor should, of course, be to some extent internalized, because otherwise it is reduced to not being found out. In the second place, but just as important, the boundaries that define the honor group should be drawn somewhat less restrictive than now often is the case (a point elaborated in Chapter 4). Although it is perhaps only “a slender hope” (Ignatieff 1997: 157) that what is an incentive in combat can function as a check in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, it might still be, for lack of more altruistic motives, our best bet.

3 Courage

Introduction Although the word courage is no longer synonymous with virtue as it was in pre­Socratic times (see also Plutarch Coriolanus 1), in the existing literature on military virtues, still habitually focusing on the more traditional ones, courage will typically be in the foreground. Not surprisingly, it is this virtue of courage that figures, together with loyalty and honor, prominently on the lists of virtues and values of most armed forces. Yet, although most of us will feel they have a fairly accurate idea of what courage amounts to, one of the oldest attempts to grasp its essence, Plato’s Laches, ends in disappointment, for “we have not discovered what courage is” (199e). One of the more recent texts on courage actually begins with a similar statement: Ian Miller writes at the start of his The Mystery of Courage that he has “no single theory, for none I have seen, nor none I can come up with, will work” (2000: 14). Problematic questions are, for example: is courage the absence or the overcoming of fear? Is courage a stable character trait or can the same person show courage in one instance and behave cowardly in another? Has courage to serve a noble cause to deserve that predicate? Does courage come in different varieties? And can one sensibly speak of courageous and not so courageous nations and cultures, as some do, or is that pointless? Amidst this uncertainty, it is not surprising that most literature on the topic pays tribute to Aristotle, who in his Nicomachean Ethics coolly defined courage as the middle position between rashness and cowardice, and having the right attitude concerning feelings of confidence and fear, to be developed by practicing courageous acts, motivated by the love of virtue itself (and thus not out of a concern for one’s reputation), and serving an honorable, that is morally just, cause. This virtue is, Aristotle thought, especially needed in battle, and a brave man is someone who does not fear a noble death in war (1107b, 1115a, 1115b).

The ethicist’s view on courage Aristotle is of course still relevant: the military depends on the willingness to make sacrifices, and to accept casualties for morally just causes such as the defense of one’s own country, or to restore peace in others, as can still be

Courage   45 witnessed today. Without a doubt, too, Aristotle’s much quoted view, and especially the requirement of courage having to serve a worthy cause, was apt at a time when citizen-­soldiers themselves deliberated on which enemy to march against, while the idea of courage being a mean between cowardice and recklessness fitted the Greek use of the phalanx; an excess or a deficiency of courage would likewise destroy the organized whole it was. It seems a bit odd, on the other hand, that despite the fact that some historians have convincingly argued that “we must learn to do our thinking for ourselves” instead of falling back to thinkers of the past (Q. Skinner 1988: 66), in military ethics the Aristotelian view on courage is still often called upon, and perhaps even a bit too routinely. For more than one reason, a closer look learns, it is less than apt for today’s military. First of all, even though Aristotle maintained, as do most contemporary ethicists (see for instance Toner 2000: 109–24, especially 113), that courage by definition cannot serve an unethical end, and that true courage should serve a morally just cause to deserve that predicate, this requirement does not make a lot of sense nowadays.1 In general, as we already saw in Chapter 2, soldiers do not have a say in what the political or moral objective of their mission is, nor do they want to have a say in such matters. Nonetheless, it is of course true that “no political leader can send soldiers into battle, asking them to risk their lives and to kill other people, without assuring that their cause is just – and that of their enemies unjust” (Walzer 1992: pp.  xi–xii), and modern princes for that reason “work hard to satisfy their subjects of the justice of their wars; they ‘render reasons,’ though not always honest ones” (ibid. 39). Notwithstanding that fact, however, in theory it is and should be irrelevant to the professional soldier whether he fights to spread freedom and democracy, or for more base reasons such as oil or electoral success (practice is an altogether different matter; see also Cook 2004: 124). It is for that reason that we probably would not want to deny every German soldier who fought in World War II the label courageous – evidently, he is a mere instrument of an evil regime (compare Toner 2000: 113–14). There are limits here, however: most of us would not wish to call the September 11 terrorists courageous men. The moral difference between the terrorist and the German soldier is pretty straightforward, though: the former deliberately chose to serve an immoral cause, the latter often much less so (see for a different view McMahan 2009). Second, Aristotle’s definition of courage is a very narrow one. It, to start with, restricts courage to physical courage on the battlefield. Someone who, for instance, faces poverty or disease with equanimity, is a decent man or woman, though, as far as Aristotle was concerned, not necessarily courageous. Even for a soldier, this is too limited a definition, as it excludes, for instance, moral courage, and somewhat downplays the role of physical courage outside combat. A further restriction relates to the motivation behind courage: according to Aristotle, seemingly courageous acts springing from impulses like anger or revenge (basically these seem to have been the motives of most Homeric heroes) do not deserve that predicate, neither can they be motivated by the desire for money or glory, or

46   Courage by the wish to avoid punishment or disgrace – the joy of knowing to be virtuous should be enough of a compensation in its own right. Especially the salaried soldier (which would be a mercenary in Aristotle’s days) did not have his approval. Aristotle held that the citizen-­soldier, mainly motivated by his preference for death to disgrace, comes closer to being courageous (although he thought him falling short of true courage) than the soldier who fights for money and attaches more value to his own safety than to his good name (Nicomachean Ethics 1116b). Aristotle’s definition is clearly that of a philosopher, and possibly aimed at bringing courage within the philosopher’s reach (Miller 2000: 50). It certainly takes it outside the reach of most military personnel, though; sticking to the requirement that, to deserve to go by that name, a courageous act should spring from a love of virtue would probably deny that predicate to most acts by military personnel that now go under that name. Notwithstanding Aristotle’s view that courage should be solely motivated by a noble cause to deserve that predicate, no doubt most of us would, for example, consider the US and RAF airmen, who continued to fly their missions in World War II while knowing that their chances of surviving a tour of duty were slim (about 10 percent during some periods), courageous, despite the fact that peer pressure played a large role in their valor (Rachman 1990: 36–7). Here, too, are limits: we are less keen to see the Japanese sailor in World War II that cheerfully stepped in his Kaiten, a manned torpedo offering no chances of survival, as courageous (Miller 2000: 273–6). The RAF crew still had a choice, the Japanese sailor probably had not, given the all-­pervasiveness of the Japanese shame culture. In fact, many of us would think that the rare Japanese soldier who surrendered, surpassed in courage his numerous colleagues who fought to the death to avoid disgrace. At present, it seems that potential suicide bombers are maneuvered into a position somewhat similar to that of the latter (or the Kaiten pilot): video testaments function not only as propaganda; they also serve the purpose of making it impossible to not commit the planned attack without massive loss of face. Third and finally, modern-­day research shows that, in all likelihood, we do not become brave by performing brave acts, as Aristotle held (Nicomachean Ethics 1103b), neither is courage necessarily a matter of “habituating ourselves to make light of alarming situations” (1104a). Although realistic training of military personnel can augment their courage, it seems that experiencing real and imminent danger does not do so; in general, fresh troops possess more courage (conceivably more a matter of recklessness, from an Aristotelian viewpoint) than experienced veterans, and the idea that the latter are “battle-­hardened” seems to be somewhat mistaken (Horn 2004: 10; Miller 2000: 60). This insight that courage does not per se grow but can actually diminish when tried, has been brought forward by, among others, physician Lord Moran, who was convinced courage was a capital spent every time it is drawn upon (1945: pp.  x, 67–71), and psychologist John Dollard, whose findings were somewhat more mixed (1944: 22). Their professions testify to the transformation of how courage and both its antonyms are perceived.

Courage   47

The scientific view on courage Since (and partly as a result of the experiences of ) World War I, there has been a tendency to view a failure to act not in ethical, value-­laden terms, i.e., as cowardly, but increasingly in medical and psychological terms that are more neutral and “scientific,” i.e., as a consequence of, for instance shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress reaction, or post-­traumatic stress disorder (see also Bourke 1999: 82). Although suffering from such psychiatric injuries was initially seen as a moral failure, with military psychiatrists being employed to get soldiers back to the front as soon as possible, not in the last place by using treatments so harsh that it made the front look relatively attractive, the scientific view in the end led to more understanding for those who broke down (Wessely 2006: 269–73). General George S. Patton, for instance, almost lost his job during World War II when he in August 1943 slapped two mentally collapsed soldiers recuperating in a Sicilian military hospital and called them cowards – by that time, things really had changed, and Patton had to apologize to the two soldiers. It was, also, as a result of this more empathetic view that 306 British soldiers executed for desertion in World War I were posthumously acquitted in August 2006 because they had supposedly suffered from post-­traumatic stress disorder. The scientific approach, which mainly looks at courage from the perspective of fear (psychiatrists and psychologists in general being more interested in the troubled than in the healthy individual), lacks the problems of the Aristotelian view. Describing courage as acting in spite of fear, it is more all-­encompassing and does not have the requirement of a just cause and the difficulties that come with that. Moreover, in general, it gives due recognition to the fact that courage is spent every time when it is put to the test. It further recognizes that fear is not a lump, meaning that a person can be afraid of one thing, but not of another thing that is equally dangerous. In addition, it gives some insight into which factors contribute to people breaking down when in danger (and why others do not), thus forming a basis for tips and tools for the military. It stresses, for instance, the importance of rotation policies, it shows that trust in training, materiel, and leaders can counter feelings of fear, it points at the significance of keeping military personnel active in threatening circumstances in order to give them a (sometimes fictitious) sense of having control over the situation, and it draws attention to the fact that without sufficient sleep and nourishment it is rather hard to show courage. Of course, if someone is better trained, equipped, and led, he has also less reason to fear and thus less fear to overcome – it was on that ground that Plato had Socrates for a moment maintaining that the better-­ trained person is less courageous than the one who lacks training (Laches 193). Another constant finding is that people, in general, over-­predict how frightened they will be (Rachman 1990: 7), which is in accordance with the observation that soldiers in combat initially fear being a coward most. It is only later that the fear of getting killed or wounded takes over (ibid. 45; Bourke 2005: 214). It was also psychologists who drew attention to the fact that in modern war, the chances of psychological harm are a lot greater than the chances of physical harm.

48   Courage This scientific approach has become influential among military scholars, and we see its bits of wisdom back in, for instance, Colonel Carl Andrew Castro’s Military Courage, in which an ethical and a scientific approach are opposed (2006: 60), with a clear preference for the latter. Ben Shalit’s chapter on courage in The Psychology of Conflict and Combat (1988) is another example, as are The Worm Revisited: An Examination of Fear and Courage in Combat by Colonel Brend Horn (2004), and Major Gregory A. Daddis’ Understanding Fear’s Effect on Unit Effectiveness (2004). Not surprisingly, the scientific approach comes with its own set of drawbacks, the most important one being that using the psychologist’s definition would make the September 11 terrorists as courageous as Susan Sontag (2001) held them to be in The New Yorker, terming courage a “morally neutral” virtue. This is probably too relativistic to most people’s liking (compare Foot 2002: 15–16), and Sontag in fact had to put up with a lot of criticism from outraged readers who did not agree with her remark that “if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others” (2001). Where the Aristotelian requirement that a courageous act should be a reward in itself and should serve a just cause raises the bar too high, it seems to be absent in the scientific approach. Considering this, it is not surprising that also in the best part of the literature that leans to the scientific approach there will always be elements of the Aristotelian viewpoint with all its moral connotations. Lord Moran (1945) and Castro (2006), for instance, take a scientific approach to their subject yet still follow Aristotle in his view that courage should serve a moral end. Another complication, and more of a problem for the military, is that from the viewpoint that courage and fear are subjective and that we cannot look into someone’s head to assess how (un)bearable the amount of fear he or she feels is, passing judgment, let alone rewarding and punishing, becomes a rather awkward affair. The only moral measuring stick remaining when someone fails to act is whether or not he tried to at least resist his fear, and made an effort to act nonetheless (Rachman 1990: 298). If he did not, we have a reproachable form of cowardice, if he did but failed in the attempt, we are dealing with, what Miller calls, “a good coward”: the soldier that breaks down at the beginning of battle, but will try desperately at the next occasion not to (2000: 1–4). Breaking down itself is no longer considered a moral failure per se. For most militaries this is probably too lenient; they may invoke the courage/ cowardice dichotomy when they think it necessary for conveying a message about the extent to which soldiers can follow their own subjective assessment of the level of danger. Of course, militaries have never stopped rewarding courage, but also giving in to fear has not always been viewed in medical or psychological terms; they have remained conscious of the fact that a more humane view can offer too easy a way out for the calculating soldier, setting a precedent for others (Bourke 1999: 253; Wessely 2006: 284, 286). The suspicion of having capitulated to fear too easily will therefore still be deemed cowardice, and can

Courage   49 even be prosecuted as such. That was experienced by Sgt. Georg Andreas Pogany who, on his second day in Iraq, suffered a panic attack after he had seen a disfigured Iraqi body. A few days after telling his superior he was unable to function, he was put on a plane and charged with “cowardly conduct as a result of fear” – he was the first US soldier to face such a charge since the Vietnam War. Later, that charge was reduced to dereliction of duty. In some media, he was unfavorably compared with Private Jessica Lynch, about whom tales of heroism had been spread by the Pentagon and the media. Although insensitive in some concrete instances, like in the case of Pogany, drawing a line between cowards and heroes probably corresponds to the judgments most people are inclined to make. Military psychologist Shabtai Noy, for instance, writing in the Handbook of Military Psychology about the treatment of soldiers suffering from combat stress reactions, seems to take a fairly harsh stance, suggesting that indirect messages should be conveyed toward the psychologically injured that he is not really ill and should return to his unit soon – “In general, a few hours rest or an overnight sleep should suffice” (1991: 523). Similarly, not everyone agreed with the decision that the 306 above-­mentioned British deserters suffered from post-­traumatic stress disorder and thus deserved rehabilitation; according to some, at that time at least a number of them were labeled cowards with sufficient reason. The son of commander Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who had been responsible for a number of the executions, remarked in September 2006 to the Guardian that “it was a terribly sad situation and some of these soldiers were genuinely shell-­shocked. But many were rogues, persistent deserters and criminals, or they were guilty of cowardice. They had to be made an example of.” Not everyone agreed with that remark either. While the psychologist’s stance shows some sympathy for people who fail to act, something which these persons would like to have seen differently themselves, this merely diagnosing instead of judging also ousts courage from the domain of morals by not only denying blameworthiness to cowardice, but, in theory at least, also laudability to courage, ignoring our desire to pass some kind of judgment on these issues. Judgment can err, however. At the end of the day, all charges against Pogany were dropped because his condition might well have been caused by an anti-­malaria drug (Glassman 2004) – ultimately, the medical view triumphed in his case, too. And Lynch, in her autobiography, personally exposed all the stories the Pentagon, congressmen, and the media had spread about both her heroism and the heroic rescue by the US military as propaganda, stating that she was not a hero.

How moral courage relates to physical courage How does this discussion of physical courage relate to moral courage? The term itself makes one of its first appearances in The Philosophy of Courage by Horace Porter, a US General of the Civil War, who thought it more important than physical courage (1888). He did not, however, define it. Miller does, and according to him, “moral courage has come to mean the capacity to overcome the fear of

50   Courage shame and humiliation in order to admit one’s mistakes, to confess a wrong, to reject evil conformity, to denounce injustice, and to defy immoral or imprudent orders” (2000: 254). Given this definition, the scientific approach to courage, having some merits in giving a better understanding of physical courage, is not going to bring us very far in coming to terms with moral courage. Whereas the word “physical” in the term physical courage refers to what is at stake, life and limbs, the word “moral” in the term moral courage refers to the higher end that this form of courage aims at (and not to what is at stake in the case of moral courage: esteem, popularity, etc.). It is therefore, evidently, by definition motivated by a moral cause, at least in the eyes of the agent and those who label his act morally courageous. By definition, yet not as a logical necessity: one could imagine someone risking his or her status and reputation for an ignoble end, and the principal distinction between both forms therefore lies in what is put in harm’s way. Notwithstanding these differences, it could be argued that there is a close relationship between the two forms of courage. They were, for instance, pretty hard to distinguish in former days, when standing up for your beliefs, if they were not in line with those held by the state or the church, would not only impede your reputation but also your physical existence. The German soldier who refused to fight for Hitler, presented as an example of moral courage by Toner, was certainly also physically courageous: he would be beheaded (2000: 115, 189n17). In general, however, the situation seems to be somewhat different from the nineteenth century onwards (Miller 2000: 263). A soldier, for instance, who refuses to go to Iraq or Afghanistan may possess moral courage in his own eyes and in that of some others. He will, however, certainly be suspected of lacking in physical courage. Interestingly, the fact there will be others who see the conscientious objector as morally courageous can actually be said to disqualify him being so, at least to some extent: he might lose the esteem of his peers, but in return he will get support from at least some others in wider society. Pablo Paredes, Petty Officer Third Class and weapons-­control technician in the United States Navy, for instance, was heralded as an example of moral courage by quite some people for his refusal on December 6, 2004 to embark on the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard, the vessel that was going to take him to Iraq. Others suspected a lack of physical courage. Paredes had joined the Navy for economic reasons, had never expected to be sent to a place like Iraq, but also thought the war was illegal and immoral, and convincingly argued so before court. In the end, Paredes received a relatively light punishment. Some commentators (among them former marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North) noted with scorn that his case drew more positive media attention than the case of Sgt. Rafael Peralta of the US Marines who entered with his team a house in Fallujah, about three weeks before Paredes’ refusal to board. Peralta was shot in the head and breast, yet was able to save the lives of his colleagues by grabbing the grenade thrown at them and pulling it under his body. Leaving the example of Paredes aside for the moment, it can still be convincingly argued, though, that the two forms of courage also today remain interrelated,

Courage   51 and both Moran and Miller seem to hold this position: who is lacking in one, will probably not score very high on the other. Against this position is the psychologist’s finding that someone can be fearful of one thing, while not of another, and that it is more sensible to speak of courageous acts than of courageous persons, suggesting that the presence or absence of one form of courage in a person does not say much about the measure of the other form. Also, seeing it as an offshoot of physical courage, as Miller does, suggests that moral courage ranks somewhat lower than physical courage, and that it is more easily attained because it is not one’s life and limbs that are at stake, but “only” one’s reputation or “popularity” (see for instance Castro 2006: 69). Some might feel that the cases of Paredes and Peralta are a case in point, with Peralta being the more courageous of the two. This seems, however, to underestimate the extent to which people dread being held in contempt by those whose judgment matters to them; sometimes death is chosen to avoid shame. Famous examples are the chaste Roman noblewoman Lucretia, who killed herself after being raped, and, of course, the committer of hara-­kiri (or the Kaiten pilot), but we can find examples closer at home too. The courageous soldier, for instance, is sometimes neither fearless nor someone who has overcome his fears, but someone fearful of what colleagues think of him; a fear that can prevent him from showing the virtue of moral courage, also much needed in the military.2

Moral courage and the military When militaries these days define courage, they rarely fail to mention moral courage as an important subspecies. Porter seems therefore to have been on to something when he wrote in the late nineteenth century that moral courage is the more important form of courage, calling it a daily necessity. Even in the military, physical courage is asked for less often than that. It is important, of course, in that it contributes to military effectiveness, yet, as such, physical courage is primarily (though certainly not only) something superiors and colleagues benefit from. Moral courage has a wider reach, though, and is, however pretentious it may sound, not so much about being a more effective soldier than about being a better person (compare Robinson 2007a: 22; 2008: 1). It is not only important to the military because it needs people who blow the whistle if necessary, but also because it needs, and much more frequently so, soldiers who are willing to correct a colleague when they think him wrong, or even report him if necessary. Its beneficiaries, today, are not so much their peers, as is the case with physical courage, but the outsiders the military is there to protect. Paradigmatic examples are of course those few in Lt. Calley’s platoon who refused to participate in the My Lai massacre, and helicopter pilot Hugh C. Thompson, Jr. who tried to stop it (here, also, moral courage was accompanied by physical courage). What is problematic is the relative uncommonness of such examples: even if it is true that, in general, the physically courageous are often also the morally courageous, as some authors hold (Moran 1945; Miller 2000), in today’s military this seems to be somewhat different.

52   Courage Drawing on insights from the scientific approach of courage, the military uses cohesion, a motivator which in itself is morally neutral, as an incentive to create physical courage (see for instance Horn 2004: 9, 13; Daddis 2004: 26); as we have noted in the previous chapter, both the training and organization are aimed at this goal. As a result, the motivation behind instances of physical courage in the military partly boils down to being more afraid of being considered a coward than of dying (see also Dollard 1944: 46; Miller 2000: 178). We might still hold him to be courageous, nonetheless. As said, expecting anything else would simply raise the bar too high. The problem is clear, however: the one thing that fosters physical courage most, social cohesion, inhibits moral courage (and the related virtue of integrity – mentioned as often as courage in the lists of virtues and values and subject of Chapter 5). Testimony to the inverse relationship between social cohesion and moral courage is that, apparently, the more socially cohesive a unit, the more prone to a lack of moral courage it is. To cite three infamous examples: in 1993 Canadian airborne soldiers from 2 Commando, known for its strong in-­group loyalty, tortured and murdered a Somali teenager, Shidane Arone, that had tried to access the Canadian camp – and kept silent about it. A reconstruction for court showed that numerous (about 16) unit members must have heard the screams of Arone, but did nothing to stop their colleagues. Canada disbanded its elite airborne regiment because of this incident (see for the role of group bonding in this incident Winslow 1999). In that same year, and also in Somalia, Belgian paratroopers, too, went amiss. One Belgian paratrooper urinated on the face of a dead Somali civilian, and two of his colleagues held a Somali civilian over an open fire. In both cases there were attempts to conceal the events. In the well-­known Haditha incident in 2005, in which US marines shot 24 unarmed civilians after the death of one of their colleagues, the marines involved initially claimed that 15 civilians were killed by the same roadside bomb that killed their colleague, and that eight others (at that moment the Iraqi death toll was thought to be 23) were insurgents killed in the firefight following the bomb attack on their convoy. There have been more of these cover-­ups in recent years, and both the misconduct and the covering up following it might well be to a large extent consequences of stressing social cohesion. A US Army report published in 2006 showed that marines in Iraq were somewhat more likely to behave unethically, and be less willing to report a colleague who acted improperly, than army soldiers. For instance, only 40 percent of the marines were willing to report a unit member who injured or killed an innocent non-­combatant, while 55 percent of the army soldiers would be prepared to do so (Mental Health Advisory Team 2006) – stronger group ties among marines most likely account for the differences. The statement of a US Navy corpsman, interviewed about his knowledge of Iraqi prisoners of war being mistreated by marines in 2003, that “there was a lot of peer pressure to keep one’s mouth shut,” also bears witness to the role of cohesion in keeping silent.3 It might be no coincidence that in all three incidents related above the military personnel involved belonged to (or were attached to) elite units, and it thus seems that Special Forces, with their stronger social

Courage   53 cohesion compared to regular units, appear to be especially prone to this tendency to cover up. However, it is militaries in general, and not only their elite units, that tend to breed conformism, and they are for that reason, in general, no bastions of moral courage, and probably never will be. Castro’s remark that although “there may be various types of courage, there is nothing explicit or implicit in the processes of developing or sustaining courage that differentiates these types of courage” (2006: 63) seems for that reason somewhat off the mark. Our moderate standpoint concerning the intention behind a courageous act – not that important – turns against us at this point; the intention behind physical courage seems to be significant after all. If physical courage does not meet the Aristotelian requirement of the noble intention, and it generally does not, but is motivated by the wish to gain esteem or save face instead, it is not very likely to be accompanied with the equally important virtue of moral courage. It is not clear, though, whether and to what extent we can with reason blame someone who fails to speak out because he fears the contempt of his peers, especially if such a fear is cultivated by the military itself. If the scientific approach has brought us to judge with some clemency those who fail in the aspect of physical courage, the same should perhaps go for an apparent lack of moral courage. Although most of us would probably judge a lack of moral courage more harshly than a lack of physical courage (because the latter is thought to be more difficult to attain), it is the question whether there is really any reason to do so. If it is not so much the individual soldier that is to blame in case of a possible lack of moral courage, however, and assuming the suggestion that today, moral courage is becoming increasingly important is accurate, the question is if it is not time to reassess the extent to which militaries foster social cohesion.

How important is cohesion? If there is any truth in the above, this would mean that the incidents in, for instance, Iraq and Afghanistan that have in recent years been reported by the media and organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are possibly not the consequence of a breakdown of discipline and loss of cohesion, as has been suggested (particularly in the case of Abu Ghraib, though interestingly enough Sgt. Joe Darby, the man who had the moral courage to blow the whistle on his colleagues, described his unit as, actually, “close-­knit”), but may, to a certain extent, well be a consequence of the emphasis on social cohesion. These incidents are, in other words, perhaps not the result of the military structure not working as it should, but, disturbingly, the result of something built in the military apparatus when it works as it is supposed to work, with everything geared towards military effectiveness on the battlefield. However, most militaries nowadays work in an environment in which stabilizing a country is often more important than war fighting. Under these circumstances it might be difficult to maintain group unity,4 but the even harder question is how to address the drawbacks of social cohesion that have surfaced in recent years.

54   Courage Some pragmatic ways out can be thought of though. First of all, very cohesive, inward-­looking units should, if at all feasible, perhaps be primarily used for what they do best and are trained for: combat operations involving no or limited contact with the local population. Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations probably ought to be left to other units. Second, and lying most at hand, it is perhaps a good idea to stress social cohesion somewhat less than currently is the case in most of today’s militaries. Military education and training should not only be aimed at strengthening cohesion, but also at being able to develop relations with people outside their own group. Research by Miller and Moskos into the behavior of US military personnel participating in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia during the early 1990s, suggested that non-­homogeneous units, that is, including women and ethnically diverse, sometimes do a better job at this than homogeneous groups do (1995: 634). Although troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might have benefited from this insight, the need for cohesion has in fact been used over the last few decades as an argument for closing the military to, respectively, ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals (Segal and Kestnbaum 2002: 445). Also, changes in the US Army unit manning system that since 2004 have been implemented under the name of Force Stabilization aim, in fact, at further increasing social cohesion (Wong et al. 2003: 5). Although this is in line with the above-­mentioned studies into combat motivation, and makes sense from a war-­winning perspective, it might be less desirable from a winning the hearts and minds objective. Now, as we have seen in Chapter 2, there is a host of literature stressing the importance of upshots of social cohesion, such as the concern for one’s reputation among colleagues and the fear of ostracism, as a motivation for courage. Most of the research on this point is rather dated, however, and the methodology and conclusions of the seminal studies that form the rationale behind the emphasis on social cohesion since World War II are increasingly debated (see for instance Segal and Kestnbaum 2002: 445–6). Marshall, for example, supposedly drew his conclusions beforehand, and later fabricated the evidence to support them (Gat 2001: 302n98). The study into the motivation of the Wehrmacht by Shils and Janowitz was, in its turn, criticized for its naivety, interviewing German prisoners of war and taking their word for it when they stated that they were not motivated by the Nazi-­ideology (Segal and Kestnbaum 2002: 445–6). Nonetheless, especially these studies into combat motivation in World War II have been very influential in the military, and are still taught at military academies around the world. In spite of everything, Marshall’s study is to this day often referred to, especially by authors from a military background (see for example Noy 1991: 514; Wong et al. 2003: 2; Daddis 2004: 27; Horn 2004: 14), and armed forces have adapted their internal organizations to make use of the findings that surfaced in this research (Keegan 1976: 53, 72–3). Interestingly, as mentioned in the previous chapter, a new study by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute, based on forty interviews with US soldiers who took part in the military campaign in Iraq in 2003, corroborated most of the findings of the earlier studies (Wong et al. 2003: 9–14, 19). Although after the

Courage   55 outcome of the war ideological notions were mentioned more often as motivating, suggesting that soldiers were on one of the higher Kohlberg stages, soldiers clearly stated that during the days of combat they fought for each other, which means that social cohesion appeared to have been the primary source of combat motivation (ibid.). This study into combat motivation by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute was in effect meant as a follow-­up on Samuel Stouffer’s as yet not disputed research into that topic, laid down in The American Soldier (1949). That the Stouffer study is actually invoked by the Institute’s researchers as evidence of the importance of social cohesion seems somewhat misguided, however, as it only shows that it is not morally just causes that motivate military personnel. The study does not suggest that social cohesion is all that important; only 14 percent of the respondents mentioned it, religion and the wish to end the war being much more important as motivators. Especially the latter factor is interesting: as it happens, the US Army Strategic Studies Institute’s study has also been criticized, among others, on the grounds that it mainly offers quotations from soldiers as evidence instead of quantitative data, yet the main point of critique was that it ignores that, according to most research, social cohesion has no clear correlation with performance, and that a high level of social cohesion (“clubbiness”) can even have adverse effects on performance if the norms of the group do not align with the goals of the military (MacCoun et al. 2006: 647). A famous instance is the “fragging” of about 800 officers between 1969 and 1972 in the Vietnam War (Wong et al. 2003: 3–4; see also Gabriel and Savage 1978). Other research shows that task cohesion (group members sharing the same goal) does correlate with group performance (MacCoun et al. 2006: 648), and Stouffer’s finding that the wish to end the war was the most important motivator seems to fit that picture. That soldiers in Iraq, nonetheless, state that they are fighting for each other is possibly, the critics say, because that is what they heard during training; the idea that social cohesion is all important has grown into a cliché in most militaries, yet with only some dubious studies and a lot of Hollywood movies as substantiation (ibid. 650). Wong et al. seem indeed to overstate their case when they claim that despite the academic debate concerning social cohesion and its effects on performance, social cohesion remains a key component of combat motivation in U.S. soldiers. Social cohesion is what motivates soldiers not only to perform their job, but also to accept responsibility for the interests of other soldiers. At the same time, social cohesion relieves each soldier of the constant concern for personal safety as other members of the unit take on that responsibility. (2003: 13–14) A few pages earlier, we read that “once soldiers are convinced that their own personal safety will be assured by others, they feel empowered to do their job without worry” (ibid. 11). Although in 2003 the insurgency was still in its

56   Courage infancy, it seems rather unlikely that soldiers in Iraq did their job “without worry,” no matter how strong the bonds were. If there is any truth in the above, this would mean the military could do with less social cohesion, putting an end to some of the grimmer consequences of stressing this particular type of cohesion. One could argue, of course, that this way out in turn overlooks that task cohesion, taken as sharing the same goals, can be of no more than limited use to the military because soldiers cannot be relied on to be driven by the ideals that inspired their political leaders, and that as a result, social cohesion remains necessary to motivate soldiers, even if the higher cause is unclear or disputed. Despite its evident drawbacks, social cohesion would in that case be something the military cannot do without. On the other hand, even if it is true that soldiers are not motivated by the abstract goal of, for instance, bringing freedom and democracy, this does not imply that they cannot be motivated by shared intermediate objectives on a more operational level. This leaves another complicating factor unresolved, however, namely that though performance might be more depending on task cohesion than on social cohesion, performing physically courageous acts is a very specific form of performance (see also Kolditz 2006: 657). Possibly, because of its particularity, the underlying motivation of physical courage is not always the same as that of performance per se. The action of Sgt. Peralta, aimed at saving his colleagues, seems to be a case in point. Then again, as said, the Stouffer study did not find that cohesion was overly important in motivating soldiers to continue fighting. Interestingly, in another study from the same period, less famous and less often cited, 93 percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans that had fought in the Spanish Civil War were of the opinion that “having a clear idea of the things that were at stake in the war made them a much better soldier,” while 6 percent thought it made them a better soldier (though not much), and only 1 percent thought it had no effect (Dollard 1944: 42). The Israeli Defense Force found that working with ad hoc and thus less cohesive teams did not affect team performance negatively at all (Ben-­Shalom et al. 2005). This combination of an at best ambivalent relationship between social cohesion and physical courage and the clearly unfavorable effects on moral courage of stressing cohesion suggests that, if it is morally courageous soldiers that we wish for, military education and training should not only be aimed at social cohesion, but also at preserving (or even fostering) the ability to dissent from the opinion of one’s peers. As to the question what in truth motivates soldiers in combat, we are left without definite answers. At present, the consensus within most militaries is still that social cohesion is key. For instance, according to Daddis, an US Army major, in an article in Military Review, “commanders and historians recognize comradeship as an ingredient for combat effectiveness. Fighting for a cause has less influence on behavior than fighting for messmates” (2004: 26). However, much in the above can be seen as illustrations of the fact that, in spite of Daddis and many others, “there is no universal explanation why men fight,” with the social sciences offering “an ever-­changing mixture of social, moral, pragmatic

Courage   57 and psychological theory. Rather than being universal truths about how men fight, these are themselves historical material in their own right” (Wessely 2006: 286). There are, however, more authors than those referred to in the above who nonetheless maintain that what motivates men in combat has been quite stable over the years – that is, as far as Western soldiers are concerned. They, however, do not think in terms of decades but of centuries and millennia, and, in a way, resemble Niccolò Machiavelli, who held that in war, and everywhere else, nothing really changes, and that for each new development in modern-­day warfare there is, in fact, an analogy in ancient times (which most of the time can be found in the work by Livy). In Machiavelli’s view, as a logical consequence, the invention of the firearm brought us nothing more than just a new variety of the age-­old catapult.

Cultural differences In the opening section of the first chapter of this book mention was made of the view that there is such a thing as a Western Way of War, a tradition that by some accounts has proved very successful up till now. This tradition is thought to go back to the hoplite armies of the Greeks that came into existence between 800 and 500 bc, and that marked the beginning of a form of warfare that was considerably less individualistic than the fighting in the preceding eras, as for instance depicted in Homer’s Iliad, and probably embodied foremost by the impulsive Achilles. In such a hoplite army, called a phalanx, the infantry soldier was key. For the first time, he was part of an organized whole: with a shield on his left arm and holding a spear with his right arm, he depended for protection on his neighbor on his right side. This, incidentally, caused the phalanx to tend to the right, as every soldier sought cover behind the shield of his neighbor. In Thucydides we read that experienced commanders for that reason never put their armies exactly opposite of each other (The History of the Peloponnesian War 5.71.1). When the battle started, both armies, often eight lines deep and up to hundreds of meters wide, ran at each other at full speed. After making contact, the idea was to wound or kill the opposing soldier (fellow Greeks in most instances) with a well­aimed stroke of the spear, often going for the face or genitals. When the first line fell the second stepped in. The lines in the back had to push to provide the phalanx with the necessary momentum. The battle ended when the organization of one of the phalanxes collapsed, followed by a disorganized and dangerous flight by one party, and a not too fanatic pursuance by the other. To avoid the break-­up of the phalanx – and thus losing the battle – holding your ground was absolutely imperative; it was deemed more important than individual heroic acts, but also more important than staying alive. The Greek soldier had therefore to overcome his natural instinct for self-­preservation. Notwithstanding Colonel Ardant du Picq’s observation, referred to earlier, that the Greeks gave more thought to the ideal depth of the phalanx than to the question what makes men

58   Courage fight, this feat was nonetheless accomplished by a keen sense for honor and shame, but also by means of discipline and organization imposed from above. Advocates of the theory of a Western Way of War claim that, except for the tendency to drift to the right, the central elements of the Greek way of war fighting, such as for instance organization and the preference for a short and decisive pitched battle, but especially ruthlessness and a lack of restraint, remained a central part of the Western tradition. Supposedly, this tradition of organized, disciplined, and unrestrained warfare made that the Greeks defeated the numerically vastly superior Persians at Marathon and Salamis, enabled the Romans to conquer the Gaul, proved probate against the Moors in the Middle Ages, helped Europe to win their colonies, and made that America could beat Japan to end World War II. In fact, one author sees the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as testifying to the supremacy of the Western tradition (Hanson 2002: 456–61). At the basis of the West’s successes lie not its natural resources, technological sophistication, or geographical location. What gives Western countries an edge over the others is that their militaries are supposedly better than their non-­ Western counterparts in inducing soldiers to overcome their fear of annihilation. And, as said, honor, in the form of peer pressure and aided by discipline, plays a large role in that. That is why du Picq, who, as said, gave more credit to the Romans than to the Greeks for this accomplishment, wrote in the nineteenth century that man has a horror of death. In the bravest, a great sense of duty, which they alone are capable of understanding and living up to, is paramount. But the mass always cowers at sight of the phantom, death. Discipline is for the  purpose of dominating that horror by a still greater horror, that of punishment or disgrace. (1947: 94)5 Elsewhere, he wrote that “the purpose of discipline is to make men fight in spite of themselves” (ibid. 111). In contrast, the natural instinct for self-­preservation gets a lot more room in the non-­Western tradition. When the situation gets too tense the best thing is to retreat, because tomorrow there will be another day of fighting. Battle should leave someone dead at the opposing side, and not with oneself. As a consequence, this tradition is less lethal and bloody – yet at the same time, some hold, it is a lot less successful (Hanson 1989, 2002; Keegan 1993). In Marathon, for example, only 192 Greeks lost their lives, against 6,400 Persian soldiers, and this 1 to 30 ratio seems to be rather constant; it is comparable with, for instance, that of the Spanish under Cortés against the Aztecs in 1520 in Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), and the British against the Zulus at Rorke’s Drift in 1879 (Hanson 2002). Of course, this is not a matter of superior genes on the side of the West. According to its foremost protagonists, Victor Davis Hanson and John Keegan, at the end of the day culture is the key to the successes of the Western Way of

Courage   59 War, and culture is also the key to understanding why other countries are less successful. The West, for that reason, in this case does not so much signify a geographical location, but, as said before, a culture that has originated in ancient Greece and from there has spread, via Rome, to the rest of Europe, the Amer­ icas, and, by now, parts of Asia and Africa. That it is culture that is behind the Western successes makes this success rather robust: different from a tactic, a culture cannot just be copied. Especially Hanson stresses that the successes of Western militaries are not only a result of organization and discipline, but as much of the fact that they are embedded in societies that are free, democratic, and capitalistic. To give a pretty straightforward example: the latter factor, capitalism, makes that technological innovation spreads fast and becomes affordable quickly, and enabled, for example, the city-­state of Venice in the sixteenth century to build a fleet that could outdo that of the Ottoman Empire with its hundredfold population (Hanson 2002: 233–75). The role Hanson sees for freedom and democracy is a bit more complicated, however. It is because of such ideals that, according to Hanson, there is something to be won or lost for the Western soldier: his own liberty. This is, in his view, a factor that over the centuries made the Western soldier a more motivated one compared to his non-­Western counterpart who often fights for the personal ambitions of a dictator and is subject to the latter’s whims, as in the past for instance a Persian soldier in Darius’ or Xerxes’ army was, and more recently his Iraqi counterpart in Saddam Hussein’s forces. In general, the soldier fighting for a dictator loses. This seems somewhat at odds with the popular view, held by quite a few authors, that today, the willingness in, for instance, some sections of (often everything but democratic) Islamic societies, with their often young populations and sometimes dim prospects for the ambitious, to both accept casualties and inflict casualties in furthering political goals, is considerably higher than in the West (see for instance Huntington 1996: 116–21; Kaplan 2002). In the view of some, this is as problematic for the West as the West’s own diminished willingness to bring sacrifices. This idea, true or not, might partly explain why all suicide attacks of the past two decades have been aimed at democracies: terrorists see them as soft (Pape 2005: 39, 44–5). In the eyes of one author there seems even to be a shaming element in these suicide attacks that presents “a challenge to a spectator’s own lack of faith or inaction” (Burke 2004a: 35). Apparently, “Islamists juxtapose this perception of the death-­fearing infidel with the readiness to die that is said to prevail among the true Muslim” (Moghadam 2003: 71), while references to earlier “shameful” retreats by Western militaries from Vietnam, the Lebanon and Somalia are made to substantiate this image of a feminine West (Lewis 2003: 125). In the eyes of Osama bin Laden and others, for instance, America is a paper tiger, easier to defeat than the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (bin Laden 1998). This idea of a feminine West seems widespread, and has a long history. As Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit have pointed out in their book on stereotype views of the Western world, entitled Occidentalism, the suggestion that the West lacks a willingness to make sacrifices, itself supposedly a consequence of

60   Courage the absence of a sense of honor and community, is part of a strand of thought that goes back a long way and has many different manifestations (2004). However, the common denominator of most forms of occidentalism is the view that the West is nowadays characterized by calculative, scientific thinking, mercantilism, and a loss of the sense of community – the Gesellschaft has replaced the Gemeinschaft, in the words of the German nineteenth-­century sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1955).6 Some telling forms of occidentalism in the past were the Japanese view of the West during World War II, and the Romantic criticism of modern society in eighteenth-­century Europe, the birthplace of occidentalism and orientalism alike. Today, occidentalism is found among the advocates of political Islam, who sometimes harbor views of the West that are often as simplified as the pictures of Islam that have been held by many Christians over the ages. In their view, America, as the leader of the West, resembles Rome in its later, degenerate and demoralized stage (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 126). It is such simplified views that Hanson challenges (in turn leading to simplifications on his side, as we will see), and he is convinced that these commentators, terrorists, and their supporters are mistaken in their view that Western societies are no longer willing to make sacrifices, as they are bound to find out sooner or later; if their liberty is at stake, Western societies are ready to make sacrifices. He finds himself equally in disagreement with the idea that Western weakness not only relates to the West’s presumed unwillingness to accept casualties, but also its reluctance to inflict casualties among its enemies in defense of its own interests (see for instance Nafziger and Walton 2003: 260; Pape 2005: 44). Since Hanson is of the opinion that ideals do play a role (a view, incidentally, also held by Greeks such as Herodotus; see his Histories 5.79), he also takes issue with the idea that comradeship is the main motivating factor for soldiers in combat. As we have seen in Chapter 2, however, there is, apart from Moskos’ finding that latent ideology plays a role, not much empirical support for Hanson’s remark that modern sociological insights that “soldiers fight only instinctually – largely to preserve their battle comrades, not for some wider abstract and ethical idea” are “cynical” (1999: 12).7 Although there is ample reason to have second thoughts about the importance attributed to social cohesion by some military sociologists, Hanson seems to make somewhat of a straw man of the sociological view by assuming that according to the sociologist’s view the primary group is the only thing that matters in combat. Despite these complications, and notwithstanding the assumed robustness of its success formula, it seems that the wish to emulate Western successes has made that almost all militaries are now based on Western principles, at least in outward appearances. That does not change the fact that Machiavelli, of course, was wrong when he maintained that war never really changes; the invention of the firearm proved as crucial as the spread of the stirrup some thousand years before. Some hold that those who claim that there is a continuous Western tradition are equally mistaken.

Courage   61

Discontinuities in the Western tradition Although culture is central to understanding why wars are fought the way they are fought, the Western versus non-­Western dichotomy seems too simple, and Hanson’s account of both Western and non-­Western warfare is rather one-­ dimensional. To begin with, even if it is the case that there are similarities between the way the ancient Greeks fought and the way today’s Western militaries fight, the continuity Hanson sees is in fact not present. As military historian John Lynn convincingly argues in his book Battle, which depicts Hanson’s work as “deeply flawed” (2003: p.  xvii), especially the preference for decisive battle was sometimes missing in Roman warfare, was certainly absent during the Middle Ages, and was not to reappear before the days of Napoleon. The latter, incidentally, also profited from the reintroduction of the figure of the citizen-­ soldier – another supposed constant of the Western Way of War – by means of the levée en masse during the French revolutionary wars (see also Lynn 2003: 19). Moreover, organized fighting has never been an exclusive characteristic of the West; in Asia the armed forces were at times as organized as those of Western countries (ibid.), while, for instance, during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France armies used a tactic – plundering, torching and raping the local population just to prove their lord was not capable of protecting them – we today would call terrorism (and that to a certain extent resembles the tactics of the Taliban who also try to convince the local population that it is safer to side with them than with NATO). As a critic of the thesis that there is such a thing as a Western Way of War though an adherent of the idea that culture is central to understanding how war is fought, Lynn provides us with some examples of the ways – much more diverse than Hanson envisages – culture in fact influences, not only the way wars are fought, but also the shape both physical and moral courage can take.8 For instance, when the French waged their wars under the Ancien Régime, they did not use their rifles to fire from a safe distance at the enemy, but to fire at a very short range instead, and to subsequently press the attached bayonet into the opponent. This tactic required that one held one’s fire while marching towards the opposing lines (reloading took too long), meanwhile receiving fire from the enemy. This all was, so the French thought, to conform to their culture of braveness, and of course contrary to English culture. During World War I, the French paid the price for this boldness (Lynn 2003: 111–44). The repeated failure of the Arabic militaries during the second half of the twentieth century is according to Lynn the consequence of the Arabic shame culture, which made that officers in several wars concealed or downplayed the losses. As a consequence, on June 5, 1967 (the first day of the Six-­Day War) the Egyptian President Nasser only learned late in the afternoon that his air force had been destroyed early in the morning by the Israeli air force, at the moment that the pilots were impossible to reach, on their way from their homes to the airbase. Egypt’s fairly sophisticated air force proved to be of less significance than these cultural particularities that were prohibitive to moral courage (ibid. 281–315).

62   Courage In conclusion, notwithstanding the fact that culture definitely influences the way wars are fought (and it would be odd if it were any other way), there appears not to be too much truth in the contention that there exists a characteristic Western Way of War. There seems to be a dichotomy, though one between organized and non-­organized warfare, which does not correspond one on one with the distinction between the West and the rest that especially Hanson presents to us. Moreover, thus phrased this insight that there are two ways of war is not very new: du Picq, for instance, already argued so well over a century ago in his Battle Studies: A million men at maneuvers are useless, if a sane and reasoned organization does not assure their discipline, and thereby their reliability, that is, their courage in action. Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell. (1947: 110) That said, the foregoing century did see some unrestrained, organized, and very bloody warfare, especially by the hands of Western powers, with whole societies turned into war machines. This organized yet unrestrained style of warfare may have brought easy successes when applied against restrained, non-­Western forces, but it brought havoc in the wars of the twentieth century between Western powers (Keegan 1993: 391). In fact, it has always been the case that when Western forces fought Western opponents it has caused slaughter on both sides (Hanson 2002). This happened, for instance, when, after having beaten the Persians, Greeks fought Greeks in the Peloponnesian War, while the trench warfare of World War I and the bombing of European cities in World War II are among the most famous cases in point in more recent times. In the case of World War I, this absolute war was devised by officers steeped in the thought of Clausewitz, who was an admirer of Napoleon (Keegan 1993: 354; see also Lynn 2003: 19), and author of the notion that wars of essence in fact do tend to “absoluteness,” and that all limitations imposed by law and morality are alien to it, at least in theory. Today, in an age of nuclear weapons but also of wars without clear front lines against enemies that use non-­Western tactics in a successful way (to be more precise: they succeed in not losing the war by avoiding direct battle), one could wonder if there really is much to be said in favor of the unrestrained warfare in which, according to Hanson, Western militaries always have excelled – although fear of an all-­out nuclear war might have been the thing that has contributed most to the waning of war between the big powers since 1945 (van Creveld 2008: 270–89). Regardless of the truth of that last observation, there might be some lessons to be learned from what are generally seen as “primitive” and oriental styles of warfare (Keegan 1993: 387, 392).

Courage   63 Meanwhile, even though there is not much as substantiation, the idea that there exists a Western Way of War is apparently appealing to many. Probably, this theory is to some extent self-­fulfilling: Western militaries just fight fair and square as a matter of good habit, yet without too much holding back. That there are, as related in the first chapter, at present many and diverse restraints for Western militaries (especially when active outside traditional warfare) is subsequently of necessity something “imposed upon,” and “alien to,” what war is all about, making the Clausewitzian dictum that war (in theory) tends to be fought without limitations on the face of it ring true. Hence, we today can still read in the “Soldier’s Creed” of the US Army that the American soldier stands “ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.” In its current rather aggressive form this credo was in 2003 implemented by Donald H. Rumsfeld, at that time US Secretary of Defense, incidentally a man of the caliber of George Marshall in the eyes of Hanson, and according to some responsible for the ethical climate that made the Abu Ghraib scandal possible; this revised creed has been criticized for being overly martial and having adverse consequences in for instance Iraq. The Greeks apparently lost the key to success somewhere on the way. Interestingly, Keegan relates how, when the Greeks fought their war of independence against the Turks between 1821 and 1829, many young West-­European aristocrats felt they had to come to the rescue of the Greeks. To the dismay of the former, it soon became apparent that the latter, the alleged founders of the Western Way of War, had forgotten everything about it, and showed themselves unwilling to relearn; their tactics were definitely not aimed at forcing a decisive battle that could win the war, yet would also bring the loss of life. Their European helpers, Lord Byron being the most famous of the lot, were often former officers from the Napoleonic wars who were brought up differently – disillusioned, they returned home (1993: 10–11).

Conclusion How elusive and mysterious is this phenomenon of courage – physical and moral? First of all, there seems to be a general agreement among ethicists and psychologists alike that courage is not the absence of fear, but the overcoming of fear, and that it has to show in acting (or not fleeing) or, in the case of moral courage, speaking. Someone who knows no fear is a psychopath or, in Aristotle’s worldview, a Gaul, only afraid that the sky would fall on his head. Such a person without stress hormones might have pursued a criminal career in civilian life; as a soldier he does not seem to be entitled to heaps of commendation. This idea of courage as the overcoming of fear is also in line with Philippa Foot’s idea of a virtue as being a corrective to a temptation (2002: 8–12). As to what enables someone to overcome his fears, there is much less consensus, although at first sight it seems pretty clear that, to have any meaning in today’s military, one should not to be too inflexible on the motivational issue where physical courage is concerned – the military ethicist’s requirement that courage should

64   Courage spring from the wish to further a morally worthy cause clearly is too strict and oblivious to the fact that military personnel are in no position to pick the causes they are fighting for. On the other hand, accepting that (physically) courageous acts often spring from motives that are somewhat suboptimal morally – i.e., from a solid concern for reputation that is installed by stressing social cohesion – means accepting that moral courage remains a rare occurrence at best. The problem is that, also in the military, it is moral as well as physical courage that is needed (and sometimes even both at the same time). Although there is some debate about the extent to which both forms of courage are actually one, with most authors contending that moral courage is an offshoot of physical courage, in the military they seldom come together because armed forces use social cohesion as a spur to physical courage, at the expense of moral courage. The only way out seems to lie in stressing social cohesion to a somewhat lesser extent; not an outrageous proposal if the correlation between performance and social cohesion is as unsubstantiated as some authors maintain it is. Yet, even if physical courage depends on social cohesion, we can still wonder to what measure we want to train for physical courage if it is at the expense of moral courage, the type of courage that generally brings moral disapprobation from one’s peers, and is in today’s military probably as often needed as physical courage. Most military personnel deployed today find themselves in a situation that does not quite resemble the death-­defying circumstances the earlier-­ mentioned US and RAF airmen were working in. Notwithstanding the recent wars to oust the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, for most of the militaries in the Western world peacekeeping and humanitarian missions have become part of their core business. It is especially in these new operations that the furthering of social cohesion can lead to a lack of moral courage that is perilous to the people the military is supposed to protect. As it stands, however, it is clear that peer pressure and social cohesion are deemed important in virtually every military, and, it has to be feared, have played a role in quite a number of incidents, recent and not so recent. A final thought: today, unmanned vehicles – robots – such as SWORDS (on land), and Predators and Reapers (in the air), make it possible to engage the enemy from a very safe distance – the pilots of Predators and Reapers (essentially the opposites of the Kaiten), although wearing flight suits, never leave their cubicle in Nevada (P. W. Singer 2009: 329). In earlier days, bows, catapults, and firearms have already been vilified for being the weapon of choice of cowards, yet it seems that robots push things even further by doing away with risk altogether – which raises the interesting question to what extent risk is fundamental to the military profession, and whether the elimination of risk will change it. One could imagine, for instance, that the profession becomes a less honorable one, as honor involves acting against one’s own well-­being to further a higher interest. The use of unmanned aircraft is certainly seen as dishonorable and cowardly in, for instance, Waziristan, the region in Pakistan that has seen a lot of drone attacks on Taliban leaders. As one author formulated it:

Courage   65 For men to join in battle is generally thought to be honorable, but not if they are so situated as to be able to kill others without exposing themselves to danger whatever. On the contrary, the willingness to risk one’s life – it could be in an act of passive resistance – comes as the test of honor we most often hear invoked. (Welsh 2008: 4) It seems somewhat ironic, for that reason, that iRobot, a leading manufacturer of robots, named its latest creation for the military “Warrior” – which, incidentally, will also be the name of the upgraded Predator (the name Reaper for the Predator’s bigger brother, a drone especially designed as a “hunter-­killer,” seems more adequate). Nonetheless, after initial reluctance possibly due to the perceived dishonorableness of their use, militaries have now embraced the use of robots (P. W. Singer: 216–17). Some, however, see mainly advantages in this development: “I never, ever want to see a Sailor or a Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage,” the American Admiral Roughead said following the demonstration of the Rail Gun with a range of over 200 miles.9 What’s more, as a result of a lot of money and effort spent Western militaries seem to get better at this killing without getting killed than they already were, and this is, of course, the background of Susan Sontag’s infamous remark that the September 11 attackers were more courageous than the pilot who drops his bombs from high altitude.

4 Loyalty

Introduction After World War II the Netherlands made an ill-­conceived attempt to keep the Dutch East Indies as a colony. The Indies, having been in possession of the Dutch for some centuries, had been occupied by the Japanese during the war, and, somewhat unexpectedly for the Dutch public, a significant part of the population proved unwilling to succumb to Dutch rule again after Japan’s capitulation, striving for an Indonesian Republic instead. For over four years, under the guise of restoring order, the Dutch fought a counter-­insurgency campaign that was to no avail. The operation was supported by and large by the Dutch population and most of its politicians, in spite of the fact that the campaign led to widespread international disapproval. With ample reason, so it seems, given that the methods used were brutal, including hundreds of summary executions of both insurgents and innocent civilians (the latter were regularly shot as a reprisal for Dutch casualties), the torture of prisoners, and the burning of villages and houses (including that of US President Barack Obama’s stepfather; Obama 2008: 42, 111). At the time, this reminded some observers of the Nazi brutalities the Dutch had suffered in the preceding years. At present, we cannot but notice the similarities with a number of much more recent incidents in today’s counter-­insurgency operations – although it appears that these later instances of misconduct, more than was the case in the Indies where the violence was structural, come closer to being really just incidents. Poncke Princen, a Dutch soldier who had seen a few Nazi prisons from the inside in the years 1944–45, did not want to be part of what were euphemistically called “police actions.” Aged 22, he deserted in 1948, as did about 26 others, though Princen was the only deserter to join the guerrillas that fought for the independence he believed they were entitled to, as most of the world did. As a guerilla, he at least on one occasion fired at his former comrades, possibly killing some of them. In 1949 Dutch soldiers, in an attempt to catch Princen, killed his first wife in their house while Princen made a narrow escape. After the Dutch East Indies gained independence, Princen became an Indonesian national, yet subsequently spent eight years in prison for his fight for human rights in the then independent country. The excesses in the former Indies, meanwhile, were not talked about in the Netherlands in the years following the war in its former colony. This changed

Loyalty   67 when in 1969 psychologist Dr. J. E. Hueting, a former conscript, went public with the fact that Dutch military personnel – including himself – had committed serious war crimes, in his view comparable with those of the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam (1969 was also the year the My Lai massacre reached the media). He was called a traitor and worse. The Netherlands’ biggest newspaper called, in a headline, a performance by him on television “sickening.” In the end, Hueting had to go into hiding. The subsequent debate in parliament did lead to the setting up of a government committee, resulting in a report that described about 600 excesses (the term war crimes was not used) committed by the Dutch, yet was still incomplete at best, as the committee itself acknowledged. The gaps were partly filled when, in the following year, military sociologist Jacques van Doorn and psychologist Wim Hendrix published their classic Ontsporing van Geweld [The Escalation of Violence], drawing on both their own experiences as conscripts and that of hundreds of colleagues (1970; their results are summarized in English in van Doorn 1975). Both authors pointed out that incidents in such counter-­insurgency operations, where the confrontation with the enemy is not limited to a narrow front, cannot be solely ascribed to individual soldiers going amiss; unethical behavior is often the result of what is nowadays called the “ethical climate” as shaped by the larger organization and the political leadership that leaves room for individuals (relatively often military intelligence personnel), not troops in general, to cross the thin line between legitimate and excessive violence (van Doorn 1975). Yet, despite all the turmoil, in the 1970s it was still possible for Princen to visit the Netherlands without attracting too much attention. In the 1990s, however, with most of the veterans having ended their working lives and having plenty of time to think, a second visit met with great resistance with Princen receiving numerous death threats. The Dutch police actions, Princen’s desertion, and the loss of the colony still proved to be a raw nerve. That the Indonesian struggle for independence had been legitimate was, however, no longer disputed by that time; what Princen was blamed for was his, in the veterans’ view, flagrant disloyalty to his country and, especially, his comrades. The harsh treatment that befell Princen – and Hueting – points to a special feature of disloyalty: the disloyal person is not only condemned because of the damage he causes, but also, and probably more so, for the disloyalty itself (see also S. Keller 2007: 216). It is insult added to injury. It is probably for that reason that to be lacking in loyalty is often perceived as being dishonorable; it can be seen as a “betrayal” of one’s own honor group (Bowman 2006: 4). Conscientious objectors and whistleblowers, for instance, are often penalized more heavily than would seem proportional considering the harm they did. Possibly, this is the case because to be lacking in loyalty is seen as a serious character flaw. But is it?

A gray virtue? Loyalty is not among the cardinal virtues as found in Plato’s work, nor is it present in the more elaborate classification of virtues of Thomas Aquinas. Still,

68   Loyalty loyalty is, of course, not a “new” virtue (just think of God’s testing of Abraham’s faithfulness, or Sophocles’ play on conflicting loyalties in Antigone), yet it is only since fairly recently that it goes under its own name. Unfortunately, the existing literature on loyalty is scant, and in the case of loyalty in the military bordering on the absent (exceptions are Wheeler 1973; Kaurin 2006; Snider 2008). This might be for a reason, since loyalty is a virtue that is rather hard to define. More importantly, the more one tries to grasp its content, the more questionable it becomes whether it really always is a virtue. It is perhaps so in the private realm – being loyal to your spouse, for instance – yet with friends the situation already becomes somewhat more complex. How far, for example, should one go in protecting a friend who one knows is in the wrong? Outside that personal sphere things are even less clear. For instance, being loyal to king, country, or organization when all is well seems a bit easy, even gratuitous. It does not require a lot of virtue, and for that reason it cannot be that that is all there is to loyalty. On the other hand, remaining loyal in difficult times is not praiseworthy per se either. Standing behind fellow countrymen, colleagues, or organization, when it is clear that they are at fault, seems, for example, a highly undesirable form of loyalty, and certainly not virtuous. “Our country, right or wrong” cannot be right from a moral point of view (Primoratz 2008: 208), and it is this unquestioning patriotism that Princen lacked. Yet, it seems that to a certain extent that is what loyalty is sometimes about: standing up for your group just because that is what it is, your group. In general, loyalty tends to signify in some way giving priority to the interests of its object, be it an individual, a group, or a country, even if reason dictates a different direction (Ewin 1992: 406; see for a critique of this view S. Keller 2007: 8–11). Loyalty, thus defined, “requires us to suspend our own independent judgement about its object” and “affects one’s views of who merits what” (Ewin 1992: 403, 406, 411). Some might argue at this point that misplaced loyalty is not loyalty at all, but that seems too easy a way out (see also ibid. 404). In fact, one might even say that the opposite is more likely to hold true: someone who is cautious with his loyalties, weighing them carefully against other values, is not someone we would in general describe as having loyalty as a paramount attribute (S. Keller 2007: 158; see also Ewin 1992: 411). Although not all loyalty is blind loyalty, it does presuppose a certain near-­sightedness. If a virtue is a corrective to a temptation (Foot 2002: 8–12), then loyalty clearly does not always meet that criterion. Loyalty is probably a disposition, but whether it is a beneficial one is doubtful at best. It has therefore been called a “gray virtue,” one that can serve both good and bad causes alike (Miller 2000: 8). But maybe this is even being too kind to loyalty; the fact is one can coherently speak of “bad” or “misplaced loyalty,” while it is more or less nonsensical to talk about “bad” or “misplaced” justice. Or, to be more precise, one could perhaps speak coherently of misplaced justice, but one who does so clearly does not consider it to be, in fact, justice. Misplaced loyalty is, however, still loyalty, and this might be seen as an indication that loyalty is not a virtue to begin with (compare Ewin 1992: 415; S. Keller 2007).

Loyalty   69 Is, by the same token, disloyalty perhaps not in all instances a vice? The whistleblower, for instance, is apparently acting disloyally but, provided he has the right reasons, clearly justified in doing so (ibid. 204, 215). We deem him for that reason, if he indeed acts on good grounds, not a disloyal person, i.e., not as someone willing, or even tending, to betray, deceive, desert, or let down. It seems that having a disloyal character cannot be seen as anything else but a severe defect – to most people, a disloyal Nazi will seem even more contempt­ ible than a loyal one (see also Ewin 1992). However, can it consistently be held that acting disloyally is not always a vice, while being a disloyal person clearly is a bad thing? Is the whistleblower’s conduct disloyal in the first place? Possibly, some of the confusion here may disappear to some extent by not seeing loyalty and disloyalty as opposites on the same dimension, as two excesses we have to find a mean between, but on two distinct continuums. The opposite of acting loyal (and being a loyal person) is the absence of loyalty in someone’s deeds and character, i.e., the absence of the tendency to suspend judgment and to side with someone or something more or less unquestioningly. Someone never led by loyalty might be a strange creature, but not per se morally flawed. Likewise, the opposite of disloyalty is not loyalty but not being disloyal, that is: not betraying the persons who trust you. Seen in that light, the whistleblower is not being disloyal, but someone who is not led (astray) by loyalty, in this case to his employer. A similar line of reasoning might also hold true for conscientious objectors, and maybe even for Mr. Princen. His case does illustrate how difficult it nonetheless is to draw the distinctions; one could say that his refusal to take part in the police actions, and thus his desertion, testify of a healthy lack of loyalty, but did his shooting at former colleagues not amount to disloyalty?

Group loyalty and loyalty to principle Following a different line of argument someone could maintain, however, that whistleblowers, conscientious objectors, and Princen’s desertion (leaving the shooting aside for the moment) are not only not disloyal, yet may even qualify as loyal, albeit to a principle instead of to a group or organization – Princen’s autobiography (1995), for instance, points in that direction. Although often treated under one heading, one could wonder, even, if loyalty to a person, group, or nation on the one hand, and loyalty to a principle on the other, are really two manifestations of one phenomenon, or two different things altogether. Suspension of independent judgment, or the “willingness not to follow good judgment” (Ewin 1992: 412), is, in general, not required by loyalty to principle, to name one important difference. What is certain, however, is that both forms, group loyalty and loyalty to principle, often collide. The latter form we could call, because it often boils down to that, justice, and its demands often go against the claims made upon a person by group loyalty. One could say that the inevitable clashes between both forms of loyalty are in fact conflicts between reason and emotion, on the assumption that loyalty to persons, groups, organizations, or countries is based on sentiment, while justice

70   Loyalty is founded on reason (Rorty 1997). That sharp distinction between reason and emotion gets somewhat blurred, by the way, if we follow Richard Rorty in his view that justice is nothing more than loyalty to a very large group: that of all human beings (1997; see for a critique Pattyn 1997). That very specific form of group loyalty aside, it is clear that loyalty to a group “is the sort of thing that one grows into rather than decides to have” (Ewin 1992: 408). Some authors, most notably Michael Walzer, have pleaded that these group loyalties represent forms of “thick morality,” and that those are not only stronger than, but are also prior to, forms of “thin morality” such as justice. It is universalistic concepts such as justice that are derived from particularistic loyalties, Walzer claims, not the other way around. Thin moralities are impersonal in that they do not serve someone’s particular interest, and bear no mark of their particular origin (1994: 7). As a result, they are much feebler. Justice comes consequently much harder than loyalty to a (small) group of people we (can) identify with. In difficult circumstances, this is all the more so, writes Rorty: “The tougher things get, the more ties of loyalty to those near at hand tighten and those to everyone else slacken” (1997: 139). Not surprisingly, Poncke Princen’s former comrades felt utterly betrayed. What is surprising, though, is that Princen almost as a matter of fact preferred the “thin morality” of justice, or loyalty to principle, to loyalty to concrete groups or persons. Rather distressingly, accepting the notion of thick morality would mean that the extent of a soldier’s moral obligation to the local population would depend on to what degree he sees the local population as “insiders.” At first sight, this may look like a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. On the other hand, if and when military personnel actually have a moral duty to, for instance, run a higher risk when reducing the risks for the local population, is in fact not that easy to say. The question to what extent in such cases Western militaries have an obligation to do more to protect civilians, even if this may cause more casualties on their own side, is in effect the much larger question of how far our obligations to complete strangers go. Walzer, for one, thinks this obligation goes rather far; “if saving civilian lives means risking soldiers’ lives, the risk must be accepted,” within due limits, of course (1992: 156; see for a critique regarding the due limits clause Shaw 2005: 135). Interestingly, both the two examples Walzer provides us with are about military personnel attempting to reduce the risks to their own occupied populations during World War II (1992: 157). Uncertain is to what degree there is a willingness on the part of military personnel to run the same risks protecting “outsiders.” Notwithstanding his (later) views about the strength of thick moralities, Walzer thinks soldiers ought to have this readiness (ibid. 158). This is not as inconsistent as it might seem, since, to Walzer, just war theory lies firmly within the domain of thin morality (Orend 2000: 32). In real life, thick moralities seem to win through: research among American soldiers and marines in Iraq, for instance, found that only a quarter of them were in fact willing to risk their own safety to help a non-­combatant in danger, with marines scoring marginally lower (Mental Health Advisory Team IV 2006).

Loyalty   71

Our obligations to strangers For sure, one could simply argue, and this is generally done from a consequentialist perspective, that one person indeed has far-­reaching obligations to another. The utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, for instance, has influentially argued that we have a moral duty to prevent the suffering of others, if we are in a situation that allows us to do so “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” i.e., without causing something else that is equally bad to happen (a few lines later, however, “comparable moral importance” has become “morally significant”). Distance, on the other hand, should play no role in the consequentialist’s view; the fact that some catastrophe is happening far away does not exempt us in any way from our moral duty to act (P. Singer 1972; see also Parfit 1987). Singer’s example is that of the people in East Bengal, dying, at the time (November 1971), “from lack of food, shelter, and medical care” caused by “constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war.” Westerners are in a position (and, more importantly, have a moral duty) to end this suffering by opting for a more sober lifestyle, and donating what they thus save to those who need it so much more. Evidently, in the case of the military the problem is that Singer’s requirement “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” is seldom fulfilled, as military personnel often have to put their own lives at risk if they are to prevent the suffering of others. Different from the case Singer presents to us, military personnel are not confronted with the choice between a (to use Thomas Nagel’s terms) “relative reason,” e.g., the wish to lead a luxurious life, and an “objective reason,” e.g., the right to life, but between one’s own right to life and that of a stranger. Other consequentialists, however, have gone considerably beyond Singer’s claim that we should give up some of our surplus wealth, something with merely “subjective value,” for things with “objective value” (again Nagel’s terms), such as the lives of others, and one author indeed did hold that he would rather save the Archbishop of Canterbury from a burning house than the chambermaid, and if the latter happened to be his mother this would have no bearing on the matter (Godwin 1793). Most of us, however, would probably think that he who rescues the bishop not only acts unnaturally but also immorally. Then again, from a consequentialist’s point of view, it is not so clear that we in fact have any reason to give priority to the interests of those close to us, including that of our children, and even ourselves, over the interests of others. As we have seen in the above, group loyalty is all about giving priority to the interests of some persons, group, country or organization, and it is this aspect that is considered morally dubious (Parfit 1987: 98). From where a strict consequentialist is standing, the fact that most people are more inclined to help their nearest and dearest than unknown persons in faraway countries, even when the latter’s predicament is much greater, is therefore, although perhaps understand­ able and natural, certainly not moral. In his opinion, the idea of thick morality, a form of what a consequentialist would call common-­sense morality, is morally

72   Loyalty flawed because it cannot be consistently held that we have special obligations to those that are close to us that override our obligations to strangers. Moreover, it is self-­defeating because if everyone would give priority to the interests of special others above those of strangers, we would all end up less fortunate (ibid. 95–108, 444). Clearly, at this point consequentialism is harking back to the utilitarian dogma that everyone’s life and happiness are of equal weight – “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as Francis Hutcheson put it (Treatise II.III.viii). The revolutionary idea here is not that happiness (or utility) is put to the fore as the highest good, but that each person’s happiness should count for the same – though Hutcheson still held that “the dignity, or moral importance of persons, may compensate numbers,” and Mill thought it better “to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (1987b: 281). Although this idea that all count for the same in turn has some resemblances with the time-­honored rule, often called the “golden rule”1 in ethics that one should treat the other, and not just the members of one’s own group, as one wants to be treated oneself (a dictum that goes as far back as Thales of Miletus and Confucius, yet it, to some extent, also underpins Stoic cosmopolitism, Kant’s categorical imperative, and the modern human rights doctrine), this thought was a relatively new one to most people when reformulated in the eighteenth century. It was, in effect, meant as a plea for thinner loyalties, and at that time a welcome antidote to class justice and the like. By now, this notion has become commonplace to the extent that we do not even see the revolutionary character of it any longer. That is to say, as far as we are dealing with fellow countrymen. In our dealings with “outsiders,” it is still rather novel. However, if we for whatever reason do not agree to the belief that every individual counts as much as another also in our dealings with strangers, the question then is what the ratio should be like. Yet, even if we acknowledge that we have such far-­reaching obligations to strangers, the problem remains that most people do not feel they have those obligations (and, as said, loyalty lies more within the domain of sentiment than reason), let alone act on it. Although considered to be one of the precursors of utilitarianism, David Hume wrote that “a man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where every thing else is equal” (Treatise III.ii.ii), and he is not able to cure “that narrowness of soul” (ibid. III.ii.vii; see also Rothman 2004: 11–12). The conscientious utilitarian “may well be required by utilitarianism to do more than psychologically he can bring himself to do,” especially if he or she wants to compensate for the self-­centered choices of others too (Goodin 1995: 67). It is not only a psychological impossibility, though, but also a sociological one: John Dewey concluded (with some disappointment), in defense of an ethic with a consequentialist side, that “theoretical approvals that run counter to strong social tendencies tend to become purely nominal” (1989: 259). On the other hand, as we have seen in Chapter 2, honor can function as a motive to do the right thing, against one’s immediate self-­interest. Can honor perform that role here?

Loyalty   73 The just-­mentioned Hume already noted, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, that we generally praise just acts because they contribute to the common good, yet he also stressed that this does not mean that we are motivated to act justly by sympathy with the public interest. Political philosopher Brian Barry has for that reason remarked that Hume has no answer to the question why we should act honestly, other than that virtue should be its own reward (1989: 167).2 If that really were the only answer Hume gave, it would be a rather unconvincing one, given that he wrote in the same work that self-­ interest is the original motive to the establishment of justice (Treatise III.ii.ii). However, at several places in this work, as we have noted in Chapter 2, Hume explained that, even though we in general do act justly, we do so not from a love of virtue or concern for the public interest but, often, from a concern for our own reputation. Utilitarianism’s main protagonist, Jeremy Bentham, would take this idea a bit further in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. While to Hume, utility was the standard we normally use for judging, for Bentham it was a standard we all should use: the concern for reputation has to keep the conduct “of each in the line which promotes the general happiness” (Mill 1987a: 249–51). The latter phrase is from John Stuart Mill, who, defending Bentham against the allegation that he made “the approval of our fellow creatures” into the foundation of morality, wrote that public sanctions have their value “not as constituents or tests of virtue, but as motives to it; as means of making the self-­interest of the individual accord with the greatest-­happiness principle” (ibid.). Different from Bentham, though, modern consequentialists do not see much of a role for honor to bridge the gap between our natural tendency to pursue our self-­interest, and our moral obligation to further the general interest. Nevertheless, and in contrast to what is often thought, utilitarianism is not necessarily hostile to honor, or the concern for reputation, as motives. It has to be feared, however, that in reality honor will not be of much use in inducing military personnel to do what is in the interest of the greatest number. As we have seen in Chapter 2 (and 3), military personnel are, in fact, very much concerned about their reputation, yet as it stands this concern is often limited to how they are viewed by their peers. Nor are they, in general at least, prone to praise an act because it contributes to the common good or general happiness; on the whole, they tend to praise an act because it contributes something to their own well-­being, or the mission. That amounts to another reason to think again about the wisdom of stressing social cohesion and group bonding to the extent it happens now. The ethic of honor is by nature very much a group phenomenon (see also Welsh 2008: 4, 10), and in reality, different from what Mill hoped, often does not function at all as a means of making self-­interest accord with the greatest-­happiness principle. The “narrowness of soul” Hume spoke of plays a role here too. At the same time, the intent between most modern missions seems to demand for a more inclusive ethic.

74   Loyalty

Wide and narrow circles; universalistic ambitions vs. group loyalty The predicament facing most militaries is therefore clear: while they are themselves institutions that put emphasis on, and thrive by, ties of loyalty among colleagues and to the organization, those who deploy troops are politicians who more and more further a universalistic, “thin” form of morality (see also Walzer 1994: 16), ironically enough often regarding conflicts that are a result of people allowing themselves to be led by a thick morality. Where the military works with rather narrow circles of loyalty because that is what military effectiveness by most accounts demands (see for example Wheeler 1973), politicians tend to take the widest possible circle as their starting point (see also Rorty 1997: 140). Perhaps acting on the quite defendable assumption that permitting harm to be done is as objectionable as doing harm, many politicians today maintain that human rights, and the fulfillment of basic needs, should be secured for everyone. In that respect every individual counts as much as another, yet in another respect he clearly does not. Where, for instance, lies the loyalty if thin and thick conflict? It has been noted by several authors, though probably foremost by Martin Shaw in his The New Western Way of War, that, when it comes to losses, civilian casualties among the local population are deemed less important than Western military casualties (2005: 79–88). It is perceived that way by both politicians and the populations at large in the West, hence the emphasis not only on maximum force protection, but also on relatively safe ways of delivering firepower, such as artillery and bombers. The Kosovo War of 1999, for example, which numbered 78 days of bombardments on an increasing range of targets (as results were initially wanting), costing the lives of about 500 civilians, ended with a zero NATO death toll (ibid. 10, 22). Although 35 percent of the 23,000 bombs and missiles used were “smart,” military ethicist Martin Cook commented that “one cannot help but note that the precision would have been higher still had the aircraft operated at lower altitudes (and greater risk)” (2004: 127). Another case in point: the overthrow of the Taliban regime was mainly brought about by the Afghan opposition helped by bombardments by coalition forces, and cost the life of one CIA operative who was killed in a prisoners’ rebellion (Shaw 2005: 27). Today, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the American Predator and Reaper, and Israel’s Hermes, reduces the risks for military personnel to about zero, but has in recent years taken many innocent lives in Pakistan (where, for instance, on January 13, 2006 18 villagers died in an attempt to kill Ayman al-­Zawahiri), Afghanistan, and Gaza. Developments in this area seem to go considerably quicker than those in what is essentially its reverse image: the development of non-­lethal weapons that are designed to avoid casualties among the local population as much as possible. This, in fact, reminds us of the “old” Western Way of War as described by Hanson: Western militaries have long since been successful at killing non-­Western opponents without getting themselves killed in the process, and the New Western Way of War is no different in that aspect.

Loyalty   75 Every so often, it thus seems, force protection seems to take priority over the safety of the local population. Armed forces are in practice not primarily in the business of promoting the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers irrespective of whom those numbers are made up of, but more concerned with preventing mishaps befalling the colleagues they work with on a daily basis. In line with that, most military personnel are not at all impartial as to whose lives they are risking or saving; they act from agent relative reasons, not from agent neutral reasons, meaning that the relationship in which the subject (stranger or colleague) stands to them, matters (Parfit 1987: 27). The general public appears to agree. Although “we consider it a worse moral error if the police were to injure or kill innocent bystanders than for them to fail to apprehend suspected criminals at large,” it seems that, as far as military missions in far away countries are concerned, it is not considered a worse moral error to kill or injure innocents “than to fail to apprehend suspected terrorists, or even belligerents” (Challans 2007: 17–18). This bias towards the safety of one’s own military personnel is, of course, not very surprising in that it is in line with the findings of those who have pointed to the strength of “thick moralities.” However, although this risk-­transfer will generally remain within the limits of the double effect principle of the just war tradition in that civilian casualties are an unintended (and proportional) side-­effect of legitimate attacks on military targets, it possibly falls short in light of Walzer’s restatement of that principle, holding that the actor has to make efforts to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible, “accepting costs to himself ” (1992: 155) – with which Walzer seems to go further than Singer who, as we have seen, requires us to help strangers insofar as that can be done “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance.” Risk-­transfer definitely falls short in light of what theologian Francisco de Vitoria preconditioned for the double effect principle about four and a half centuries ago: civilian casualties are only acceptable if there is no other way of advancing a just war (cited in Coady 2008: 143).3

Intentions and consequences At first sight, there is something to be said for Walzer’s reformulation and Vitoria’s precondition, especially in cases where civilian deaths are foreseeable (and thus incidental, as opposed to an unforeseen, accidental death – an unforeseen death in turn is either a genuine accident or a case of negligence; see also ibid. 135). Without them, the double effect principle perhaps attaches too great a weight to the right intention – one is not to kill an innocent person intentionally, but an unintended death is an altogether different matter. As a consequence, terrorism is considered a great wrong since it involves the intentional killings of civilians, whereas, as long the conditions of double effect are met, bombardments and air strikes during close air support that unintentionally kill civilians are not, regardless of the death toll (that may, in fact, in any given year be a lot higher than the number of deaths caused by terrorism; compare ibid. 154). The underlying

76   Loyalty assumption is that it is far worse to murder someone than to kill him unintentionally, even if his or her death is foreseen. No doubt, there is a great amount of truth in that, although it is not easy to say exactly why. Possibly, it is because murdering goes directly against the goals you want to further (Nagel 1986: 182), and is intrinsically bad on top of that (ibid. 183), as terrorism certainly is. There is no truth in the idea, however, that unintentional deaths do not amount to an evil that should be avoided, if at all possible. For who gets killed, the intention makes no difference (for those who remain behind, no doubt it does, however). It is not clear, therefore, why in a military context the intention should matter that much, especially since it is difficult to draw the exact boundary between a foreseeable death and an intended killing, even though they are not the same (ibid. 179). Possibly, Western militaries hide behind the double effect principle a bit too easily, and some might argue that if it is foreseen that an action will kill innocent civilians then it should probably not be carried out – this is essentially the pacifist’s stance (Coady 2008: 136), as it basically rules out war altogether. On the other hand, abandoning this distinction would bring military personnel involved in unintentional killing on the same level as terrorists – not a conclusion many people will want to accept, despite the uncomfortable fact that the war on terror has cost more civilian lives than the terrorist attacks of recent years, including that of September 11, 2001. Also, one could expect that, in the long run, doing without this distinction based on intention, and thus not allowing the principle of double effect, is in fact likely to lead to less restrained warfare precisely because in almost every situation non-­combatant casualties can be foreseen (ibid. 142); the likely effect of that will be that the immunity of civilians will turn into a dead letter fairly rapidly. For instance, not attacking the Taliban when civilian casualties might result comes close to, in effect, not attacking the Taliban at all, especially since the latter, in that case, most certainly will make even more use of civilians as human shields than they already do (Dadkhah 2008). Nonetheless, although most authors are “in agreement that utilitarian ethics don’t work well in the military setting,” mainly because “an outcome-­centered approach may lead all too easily to military expedience as the sole guide to actions in war” (Bonadonna 1994: 18),4 and despite Walzer’s rather ferocious critique of the doctrine (1992: 129–33, 2004: 37–40), something might be said for a military ethics that does not focus too much on the intention, but also takes into account the consequences for all parties concerned. Of course, weighing the consequences already plays a role in military decision making, but, as Shaw pointed out, it is not the case that the consequences to all parties involved are weighted equally. In regular warfare that might very well be unavoidable. Walzer, to quote him once more, has pointed out that the valuing of “each and every person” in the same way will not work when “solidarity collapses.” Such is the case in war, when “cost/benefit analysis has always been highly particularistic and endlessly permissive for each particular. Commonly, what we are calculating is our benefit (which we exaggerate) and their cost (which we minimize or disregard entirely).” In the end, “no ‘enemy life’ has any positive value; we

Loyalty   77 can attack anyone; even infant deaths bring pain and sorrow to adults and so undermine the enemy’s resolve” (2004: 39). The decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a famous instance of the use of such a utilitarian calculation, where it in fact should have been “stopped short by the rules of war and the rights they are designed to protect” (Walzer 1992: 263–8). Although this might very well hold true in war (Walzer seems to state his case rather strongly, though), in missions such as those currently undertaken in Afghanistan – where there is not only an enemy, but also a third party: the, for the most part, innocent population – both commanders and politicians should perhaps be able to rise above loyalty to their own kind and come a bit closer to this solidarity utilitarianism asks for. Although Walzer concedes that utilitarian arguments and rights arguments are not completely dissimilar, and that there is, for instance, something utilitarian in his idea that military personnel, within due limits, should, at cost to themselves, avoid making casualties among civilians (Orend 2000: 120), he nonetheless portrays utilitarianism as a threat to individual rights (and Bentham gave him some reason to do so when he called rights nonsense on stilts). Walzer’s position on this is encountered more often: utilitarianism is not bad per se, but prone to be misapplied in a self-­serving way. One author, for instance, writes that “utilitarianism would lend itself to abuse in precisely those kinds of situations in which ethical safeguards are most needed, and should, for this reason, be stricken from the list of viable alternatives for the military” (Snow 2009: 560). As it now stands, however, the utilitarian credo that all should count for the same would, if taken seriously and implemented with some objectivity, have the favorable outcome of effectively distributing the effectuation of the right to life somewhat more evenly than up till now has been the case. Civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are an obvious example, but also the missions in Somalia (1993) and Rwanda (1994) are cases in point: there, the local population was basically left at the mercy of warlords and rebels after the public opinion in Western countries turned against a continued involvement in these countries, partly because of casualties among Western military personnel. When the civil war in Rwanda broke out, Western countries made sure to evacuate their expats in time, though they allowed thousands of refugees who thought they were under UN protection to be massacred. Consequentialism has a bad repute in military ethics – as we saw, it would supposedly make military expedience override all other concerns – yet it seems that this is not entirely deserved. More often than not it is on the false assumption that it condones egoistic, calculative behavior – not completely unlike Cicero’s (consciously) erroneous denunciation of Epicurism. As Goodin writes in his defense of utilitarianism as a public philosophy, perhaps it is novel nowadays to look at utilitarianism as essentially a public philosophy. If so, the novelty is itself wholly new. In earlier times it was much more of a commonplace to suggest that utilitarianism constitutes a solution to public rather than personal moral problems, to defend it as a public philosophy rather than as a personal moral code. (1995: 11–12)

78   Loyalty Utilitarians are not the hedonistic maximizers of sensory pleasure they are sometimes made out to be, but are in fact more often than not staunch moralists. Possibly, we have to conclude that consequentialism has been brushed aside a bit too overhastily in military ethics (an exception is Christopher Coker’s Ethics and War in the 21st Century from 2008). Even if taking a completely objective, detached view is impossible (yet, if attained it would perhaps make war a thing of the past), moral progress in all likelihood does involve a shift towards a more impersonal, agent-­neutral morality (Nagel 1986: 185–8). Such a universalistic morality is not something completely imposed from outside, Thomas Nagel writes, but reflects “our disposition to view ourselves, and our need to accept ourselves, from outside” (1986: 198). If true, this means that consequentialism is not the psychological impossibility it appeared to be at the outset.

Thick and thin moralities in Afghanistan To give an example of the difficulty all this poses for Western militaries: some 60 years after the “police actions,” the Netherlands military is involved in another counter-­insurgency in Asia, again with the aim to restore order, although this time under the scrutinizing eye of the media, and with a public that is sensitive to both the number of Dutch casualties and (albeit perhaps less so) the fate of the local population. These sensitivities clashed when on June 10, 2007 the district of Chora, in the Afghan province of Uruzgan, was surrounded by 300 to 1,000 Taliban fighters. At the time, the district had Dutch (about 60) and Afghan troops within its borders, and was also home to 75,000 Afghans who depended on them for protection. Extra Afghan police forces were requested, yet the few reserves that were sent by the Minister of Interior to Uruzgan to help in the end refused to go to Chora. On June 16 the Dutch and Afghan troops came under attack. Just two months earlier, because of the limited progress with this restrained approach, the Dutch troops changed to a more outgoing approach – from an “ink spot approach” to a more mobile “amoeba approach” –, increasing the chances of encounters with the Taliban. In all probability, it also enhanced the likelihood of Dutch casualties. Meanwhile, the Minister of Defense denied that a change of strategy had taken place and stated, in line with the restrained Dutch approach, that Dutch military personnel in Afghanistan are working “as civil as possible, and as military as necessary” (MoD 2007).5 He most likely could not have stated it otherwise since his remark pretty much captures the prevalent opinion in Dutch politics, in turn mirroring the popular sentiment that if Dutch military personnel are sent to Afghanistan, it should be to rebuild and not to fight. Political support in parliament for the decision in early 2006 to send troops to Uruzgan was, in fact, on the condition that it should be a “rebuilding-­mission” and not a “fighting-­mission” (these terms were used a lot in the debate in both parliament and in the media, but hardly within the Defense organization itself, which, instead, used the term counter-­insurgency that covers both aspects). In line with that sentiment, parliamentarians and journalists tend to closely monitor the ratio

Loyalty   79 between the progresses made in rebuilding and the time and effort spent in fighting the Taliban; something bound to have an influence on the way things are undertaken in Uruzgan. It is against this background that both journalists and military personnel who had been in the area during the battle for Chora, later recounted having had associations with the Srebrenica tragedy of July 1995. On the evening of the 11th of that month, the day that the vastly superior, in numbers and weaponry, Serbian troops had captured the “safe area” thousands of Muslims had taken refuge to, the Dutch Minister of Defense and his colleagues in the cabinet in their bunker in the Hague at the time felt that the Dutch troops should show “solidarity” with the remaining local population and refugees. In retrospect this sounds somewhat hollow, given the fact that, due to an insufficient mandate and a lack of men and weapons, the Dutch battalion had been unable to prevent either the fall of Srebrenica or the subsequent murder of 7,000 Muslims it was supposed to protect. The disaster stuck with the Dutch forces for a long time (and to some extent it still does), even though a voluminous report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (2002) years later would lay the responsibility at the doorstep of the government that had decided to send the troops; it had been blinded by a combination of universalistic humanitarian ambitions and the wish to enhance Dutch prestige abroad. Something traumatic like that should not happen again in Uruzgan. The decision was quickly made not to leave the local population in the hands of the Taliban, and large elements of the 500-men Dutch Battle Group were moved in over the next two days. Howitzers, Apaches, and F-­16s, not available in Srebrenica, were called in to assist the troops on the ground in Chora. In the end, control of the area was regained, and about 200 Taliban were killed. Next to this, an unknown number of civilians lost their lives. According to a report by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (2007), estimates range from 30 to 88, with 60 to 70 being a more realistic estimate. Some of them had been tortured, shot or beheaded, and torched by the Taliban, yet there is no doubt that others died as a result of bombardments by Dutch artillery, despite efforts to warn the local population beforehand using loudspeakers. According to the report the methods used by ISAF were heavy-­handed, and not always accurate. President Karzai and the ISAF Commander, US General Dan McNeill, criticized the Dutch for using a howitzer, positioned 30 kilometers from Chora, without a forward controller. According to McNeill, in a classified report, this last element was a breach of the law of war. In the view of others, and among them Dutch Secretary General of NATO De Hoop Scheffer, a modern howitzer such as the one used in Chora (the PzH 2000) can do without a forward controller. Later, in October 2007, it became apparent that Australian troops in Uruzgan, operating under Dutch command, had refused to participate in the operation, worrying about the risks the operation would impose on civilians, and being of the opinion that it was not in accordance with the rules of engagement. However, Karzai’s, McNeill’s, and the Australians’ misgivings

80   Loyalty notwithstanding, a Dutch district attorney decided in June 2008 not to prosecute military personnel for what happened in Chora because they had acted within the limits set by the law of war and their rules of engagement. A potential discussion on how far the Western militaries’ moral obligations to the local population go, and when force protection becomes risk aversion, was thus reduced to a dispute on technical and legal issues. During the battle for Chora, one Dutch sergeant major died due to an accident with a mortar. Interestingly, these criticisms from the Americans and Australians on the decisions taken by the Dutch military in the biggest battle by the Netherlands military since Korea came some months after critique on the Dutch approach that at first seemed to be of an opposite character. In December 2006 some high-­ ranking Canadian and British officers testified to seeing this approach as essentially flawed, because it avoided doing what is a precondition for rebuilding Afghanistan: dismantling the Taliban. According to them, the relatively small numbers of Dutch casualties gave evidence to its exaggerated caution, cowardice even (critique that, too, brought back to the minds of many in the Netherlands the tragedy in Srebrenica and the following – and ongoing – debate in the media on whether the Dutch lack courage). This censure also led to some debate in NATO and subsequent media attention in the Dutch newspapers, with the latter providing a forum for Dutch commanders in Uruzgan, assuring the readers that the Dutch soldier fights as well as any other. In fact, however, both accusations – too careful at first, too heavy-­handed later – come down to the same thing: Dutch military personnel are not willing enough to run risks at their own peril. It seems, however, that similar criticisms could be launched against all NATO and US troops in Afghanistan: the number of civilian losses caused by airpower tripled from 2006 to 2007, mainly due to the increased use of air support called in by ground troops in unexpected contact with the Taliban (Human Rights Watch 2008: 14), itself a result of “the combination of light ground forces and overwhelming airpower” (ibid. 2). Most of these deaths were foreseeable. What’s more, neither was it the case that the killing of these civilians, to use Vitoria’s words again, was the only way to advance the war, nor were, as Walzer put it, in all cases sufficient efforts made to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible, accepting costs to one’s own side. Possibly, the threshold should be somewhat higher than it sometimes has been in recent years; according to a recent report of the Human Rights Watch on civilian casualties in Afghanistan, taking “tactical measures to reduce civilian deaths may at times put combatants at greater risk,” yet is a prerequisite for maintaining the support of the local population (ibid. 5), which in its turn is something the mission in Afghanistan depends on. Even though one could perhaps argue that it is to be expected that the military places the lives of soldiers above that of the local population (see for instance Cook 2002: 347), it is to some extent inconsistent with the intent behind missions like these, and the tactics employed: trying to prevent the Afghans from developing loyalties to the Taliban. Airstrikes that hit villages “have also had significant political impact, outraging public opinion in Afghanistan and

Loyalty   81 undermining public confidence in both the Afghan government and its international backers” (Human Rights Watch 2008: 3). The rising civilian death toll is thought to increase support for, and facilitate recruitment by, the Taliban, notwithstanding the fact that most of the civilian casualties are, in fact, caused by insurgent forces (ibid. 5). There seems to be, incidentally, an asymmetry here, too: war crimes committed by, for instance, Hamas, the Taliban, or insurgents in Iraq seem to draw considerably less media attention, and cause much less moral outrage, than those committed by Western soldiers, who are, however frustrating that might be for them, never compared with their enemies but always to a spotless ideal. Although partly natural since Western militaries profess to bring good – and sometimes even to be “a force for good” – the blind eye turned to atrocities committed by the other side seems unfair at times. Even so, for the just-­ mentioned reasons, the second half of 2007 saw a change in NATO tactics, reducing the number of civilian casualties significantly, at least temporarily; the death toll rose again during the first seven months of 2008 (ibid. 6). The number of civilian casualties dropped again in 2009, most likely as a result of “ISAF ’s declared strategy of prioritizing the safety and security of civilians” (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan 2009: 23). Such “statistical” victims, however, in general seem to attract relatively little attention from the media, and war crimes tribunals (Coker 2008: 18), especially when compared with the interest in the more visible and “real” victims of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Haditha. Interestingly, this lack of attention for victims of technical violence seems to be a constant, as it was, for instance, also noted with reference to the police actions in the Dutch East Indies in the late 1940s (van Doorn 1975: 153). About two decades later, the 400 victims of My Lai would become iconic, while the estimated tens of thousand civilians that were killed as a result of the US aerial bombardments on Vietnamese cities have by now sunken in anonymity. Today, that seems to be the fate of the estimated 100,000 civilians that since March 2003 have died in Iraq as a result of the war.

A changing profession Notwithstanding all good intentions to reduce the number of civilian casualties (see for instance Dadkhah 2008), however, as it stands the largest part of military codes, military oaths, value systems, and culture, in short the military ethic (but also the national political viewpoints and the popular sentiment), seem more or less antagonistic to the idea that the life of a local civilian counts for the same as that of a Western soldier. This ethic took shape, though, at a time in which the interests of the local population played a lesser role, and a “thicker” form of morality (characterized by loyalty to, and defense of, one’s own country) prevailed. At present, it is becoming ever clearer that soldiers who are trained for combat, now and then have difficulties in changing to the less confrontational tactics needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations. At the same time, however, there is a pressure on military personnel to take the interests of others rather than just the organization and colleagues into

82   Loyalty account, in recent years more so than ever before. For most of the militaries in the Western world Operations Other Than War have become quite a significant, if not their main task. In general, such operations require the exercise of a lot of restraint on the part of military personnel. This poses questions and dilemmas for them they were not likely to encounter in earlier days. Let’s take a look at two more examples that might not only shed some light on the complex political and juridical environment modern armed forces function in today, the restraints they face, and the potential adverse consequences of not acting within the limits set, but also on the conflicting demands posed on military personnel by the local situation, colleagues, and the organization on the one side, and the universalistic ambitions behind their mission on the other. On November 17, 2006 the Dutch quality newspaper de Volkskrant used their largest heading to publish the news that Dutch military intelligence personnel, stationed in the southern province of Al Muthanna, had tortured 15 Iraqis in November 2003, suggesting a new Abu Ghraib-­like scandal to its readers. Based on the assumption that the detainees could very well possess important information, for instance about impending attacks on NATO troops in Iraq, the Iraqi prisoners had been subjected to forced sleep deprivation (by throwing water on them), deprivation of sight (by using ski masks), and loud music. To investigate these allegations two committees were set up and both concluded that the maltreatment was not serious enough to amount to torture, though it was considered illegal. Unlike the original newspaper article, this news did not make it into the international media. Although some questions remain unanswered, current general opinion has it that both the size of the heading and the use of the word “torture” were somewhat disproportionate. Also, there have risen some suspicions that the timing of the article, just six days before the general elections, was not coincidental, but a deliberate attempt to embarrass the ruling liberal party by damaging its Minister of Defense. However that may be, what is certain, is that about a year after the publication Dutch troops in Afghanistan had to let a Taliban leader walk because higher echelons in the Defense Department were determined, with the torture row in mind, to avoid another “fuss” at the political level. This does not, however, take anything away from the fact that the officers involved in the incident in Iraq, all from military intelligence, were out of line. Not belonging to the occupying forces, they faced the rather ambiguous situation in which they were allowed to have informal “talks,” yet were not authorized to interrogate prisoners, let alone that they were allowed to use harsh interview techniques.6 In some aspects the above incident is somewhat akin to an incident that made it to the headlines for a number of years in the Netherlands: that of Erik O., a sergeant major of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps deployed to southern Iraq, who fired a warning shot on December 27, 2003 in the direction of a mob of about 100 Iraqis during what was perceived by him as a threatening situation. According to his own account, his warning shot accidentally killed an Iraqi looter. The military police thought otherwise; Erik O. was arrested, detained, flown to the Netherlands, and brought to trial for manslaughter. In the view of

Loyalty   83 the Department of Justice, his shot was a directed one, and even if it had been a warning shot, the Department held, he had transgressed the rules because warning shots were not permitted in that situation. Public opinion, most politicians, and certainly the Ministry of Defense turned against the Department of Justice, questioning the decision to prosecute a distinguished marine for doing his job. The popular sentiment was roughly that when finally a Dutch member of the armed forces used his weapon, he was wrongly brought to trial by people who do not have an inkling as to what war is all about. Dutch soldiers and marines were perceived, both inside and outside the armed forces, as having to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their backs amidst insurgents who fought without scruples. In the end, Erik O. was released by the court on the grounds that, given the threatening situation he was in, he had had, in fact, the right to fire a warning shot. His acquittal was, unfortunately for him, not the end of the story. In 2007 two of his fellow marines went public with the claim that a) the situation had not been threatening and b) that higher ranking marines had used intimidation tactics to ensure that all statements issued by marines depicted the situation as threatening. On March 29 of that year, one marine filed an official complaint for intimidation and concealment of evidence. Although by the end of 2008 the Netherlands’ government decided to pay Erik O. compensation for damages – a form of rehabilitation by most accounts – it has never become completely clear whether and to what extent these allegations were grounded. Even less clear, though, is how military personnel is to deal with situations in which conflicting values – the safety of oneself and one’s colleagues vs. the safety of the local population, but possibly also between military virtues and more civilian ones – impose conflicting demands on them. As it stands, however, the natural inclination to give priority to the interests of colleagues will in most instances prevail, as seems to have been the case on these two occasions. The issue here is whether the military ethic can be reformulated – at least somewhat – as to include the interests of the local population more than currently is the case, and what such an ethic should look like to bring the military profession closer to the ethic of other professions, in general giving priority to the interests of those at the receiving end.

Organizational loyalty and professional loyalty Contrary to what is published on loyalty, a great deal has been written in the last few decades on the professionalization of the armed forces (see for instance Wolfendale 2007), and some militaries, for example those of Israel and Australia (Robinson 2008: 7), have included professionalism in their value lists. Professionalization in the case of the military is sometimes taken to mean something as making use of volunteers (instead of conscripts) who are skilled, well-­educated, etc. This description, however, fails to make clear what sets a professionalized army apart from any other occupation that requires a fair amount of skill and education. On other occasions, a professional within the armed forces is

84   Loyalty described as someone who is prepared to loyally fulfill the missions imposed by politicians, leaving one’s own opinions aside. This latter depiction, however, seems to be at odds with what is generally understood by the term professional: someone with an expert body of knowledge and, therefore, a considerable degree of discretion and professional autonomy (see also Cook 2002: 342–3). However, generally speaking, the term professionalization refers to the conduct, objectives, and values that typify a profession, which sociologist James Burk, based on a review of relevant literature, defines as “a relatively ‘high status’ occupation whose members apply abstract knowledge to solve problems in a particular field of endeavor” (2002: 21). Evidently, to label an occupation as a profession is “to make a positive normative judgment about the work being done” (ibid. 19). Not surprisingly, professions compete “to secure their place in society” (ibid. 23). There is, however, yet another side to professionalism. In general, a professional is someone who is loyal to his profession and his professional ethic, more than to his organization, and it is this element that truly sets a profession apart from other occupations. In practice, this loyalty to a professional ethic seems to somewhat resemble loyalty to principle, most importantly in that it, too, does not ask for the suspension of independent judgment. Quite the contrary, the standards of a profession are general, in the sense that they are not confined to the institution of a professional; they have largely originated in universities and professional associations, the institutions that are also largely responsible for the professional’s socialization, and not in the organization he or she is employed by (Mintzberg 1983: 192). A surgeon, for instance, is as a rule more concerned about the judgments of his fellow surgeons, such as those brought to him in the verdicts of his professional association, than those of his happen-­to-be-­employer of that moment. Furthermore, he tends to place his own professional judgment above that of the management that supervises his work, based on the conviction that his training, education, and professional experience make his judgment a more informed one compared to that of those at a higher level in the organization who usually have a different background and training. That his profession is the focus of his loyalty makes the professional someone who can relatively easily, without too much pain in the heart, switch from one employer to another. More importantly, the interests of colleagues or an organization have less room in a professional ethic than those of a professional’s clients. It is this aspect of professionalism, loyalty to the profession instead of the organization, which is, not surprisingly, less developed in the military. The bureaucratization of the defense organization predated the professionalization of its officer corps by some centuries, and the former is for that reason quite capable of surviving the fusion of these two, at the bottom of it contradictory, control mechanisms in one organization (van Doorn 1975: 37). Although the right of, and even duty to, dissent has been the topic of some heated debate (see for instance Cook 2008a; Snider 2008; McMahan 2009; Lucas 2009), hierarchy of course still is, and will remain, a defining characteristic of every defense organization, notwithstanding the fact that it is at odds with the more egalitarian professional ideal of listening to peers, be it inside or outside one’s own

Loyalty   85 organization, instead of complying with management. An additional factor contributing to organizational loyalty is that, in fact, quite some effort is taken to ensure military personnel are meticulously socialized into the armed forces (and, possibly even more so, their own service), not into a profession. This socialization into the organization is made easier by the fact that, where doctors and lawyers receive most of their formal professional training before entering their job, military personnel are predominantly trained in-­house. Furthermore, professional associations, compared to similar associations in other professions, traditionally do not play much of a role in the development of the profession (and as a result do not enhance loyalty to the profession), as they mainly look after the material interests of their members (van Doorn 1975: 36). As a consequence, there are one’s own values (and upholding these as required by the virtue of integrity – something that is at least paid lip service to by most militaries and subject of the next chapter), and the organizational values (in many forces still service specific), but there are, in the case of the military, not really any values of the profession. Nonetheless, not many authors today seem to take issue with the view that the military profession is, indeed, a profession. Viewing some concrete examples of professional oaths, value and virtue lists, and codes of conduct, to see how exactly this side of professionalism – professional instead of organizational loyalty – has taken shape in other professions, compared to the military, might be instructive, in particular since unethical behavior is frequently not a result of failings at the individual level; it is rather a product of the situation, which includes the ethical climate in the organization partly shaped by oaths, codes of conducts, and value lists.

Comparing the military ethic: oaths and codes Most manifestations of military ethics as well as other professional ethics are fairly consistent as to whose interests are most important, though it seems that they point in different directions. Let us first look at the best-­known professional oath, the medical oath. Although it comes in many varieties, the common denominator is that a doctor should work in the interest of his patients; in general, there is no mentioning of parties outside the doctor–patient relationship, such as hospitals or governments. The military oath is different in this respect; although it also comes in many forms, it as a rule stresses loyalty to a head of state (“I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors,” British Army and Royal Marines), constitution (“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” US Army), republic and people (Bundeswehr) or queen, laws, and military law (Netherlands Armed Forces). The people at the receiving end, such as the local population in Iraq or Afghanistan, are not included. Interestingly, these two different oaths, medical and military, can – and do – lead to conflicting loyalties in the case of doctors working for the armed forces. Military medical personnel can be put in a difficult position when their presence

86   Loyalty during unlawful interrogation is presented as in the interest of the detainee. Advising on the prisoner’s physical limitations enables the interrogator to use for instance sleep deprivation without causing lasting harm. Guantanamo Bay has been referred to as an example of doctors overlooking, not reporting, advising, and even assisting in the abuse of detainees (Clark 2006: 577; see also Miles 2006). Dilemmas of a different kind arise when, for instance, medical personnel must choose (and they regularly have to) whom to help first: a seriously wounded insurgent or civilian, or a somewhat less seriously wounded colleague. Similar problems of double loyalties might be experienced by other professionals in the military, for instance counselors, lawyers, or controllers. Turning to codes of conduct for military personnel, we see, for instance, how the furthering of international rule of law is mentioned in the Dutch Constitution as one of the two key tasks of the Dutch military, but that the latter’s code of conduct stresses primarily, among other things, the importance of being a team member who maintains his professional skills and does not tolerate discrimination, sexual intimidation, or the like; treats everybody with respect; and contributes to a safe working environment. As such, it is more, although not exclusively, about regulating the conduct of military personnel towards each other than about their conduct towards those they are to protect. In fact, the preceding 1996 code had much more to say about conduct towards outsiders, stating, among other things, that a soldier refrains from unnecessary or disproportionate violence; helps his fellow human beings in distress, regardless of their status and origin; adheres conspicuously to national and international law; and respects his fellow human beings, also when belonging to a different people or culture.7 Codes of conduct for doctors, to the contrary, do emphasize the interests of outsiders, namely the patients, as do those of for instance the police. In fact, both practitioners of medicine and police chiefs have their own worldwide associations, the World Medical Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police respectively, with their own codes of conduct. How worrying the omission of outsiders in military codes of conduct is, is uncertain; according to some, the impact of codes of conduct is limited anyway (see also Verweij et al. 2007: 24, 34). Nevertheless, these codes do communicate what an organization thinks important, and clearly the gist of the codes, oaths, and values as currently formulated in most militaries is undeniably somewhat one-­sided in that they mainly pay attention to the organization and colleagues.

Which loyalty, and to whom? A by now familiar pattern emerges when comparing the values of the military profession with those of other professions. Armed forces are, first of all, less hesitant than most ethicists about loyalty’s beneficial properties. They often include it in their lists of values (Robinson 2007a) and do consider it a cardinal virtue. Yet the question is, loyal to what? Now, as mentioned earlier, one can be loyal to a clan, tribe, or organization, but also, by most accounts morally on a higher plane, to a principle, an ethic, or a code. Apparently, as indicated earlier,

Loyalty   87 loyalty to an organization is not only different from loyalty to principle; given the fact that most organizations go astray every so often, these two loyalties will even clash at times. The question which form should prevail is easily answered for military personnel as far as the organization is concerned: clearly, it is loyalty to the organization that militaries intend to stress when they include loyalty as a value, more than loyalty to principle, which is hardly ever mentioned in the various armed forces’ value statements. Loyalty in the US Army (to be found in its Seven Core Army Values) for example means: Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Army, your unit and other Soldiers. Bearing true faith and allegiance is a matter of believing in and devoting yourself to something or someone. A loyal Soldier is one who supports the leadership and stands up for fellow Soldiers.8 Country, colleagues, and the organization, are central in this description. This is in line with how other values are seen: they, including respect, also mainly relate to colleagues. It is also in keeping with how other militaries view loyalty. In the Values and Standards of the British Army, for instance, loyalty is described in similar terms: Loyalty binds all ranks of the Army together: it goes both up and down. It turns individuals into teams, creating and strengthening the formations, units and sub-­units of which the Army is composed. The Nation, the Army and the chain of command rely on the continuing allegiance, commitment and support of all who serve: that is, on their loyalty.9 Here also, the description is mainly inward-­looking. However, the latter half of this description touches upon a rather important issue: “Being loyal to one’s leaders or subordinates does not mean that wrong-­doing should be condoned or covered up: this is misplaced loyalty and questions a soldier’s integrity.” The definition refers here to the possibility of conflicts between loyalty (to colleagues and the organization) and other values, in this case integrity (mentioned as often in military value lists as loyalty) whose general meaning is rather close to that of loyalty to principles and one’s own values. Yet, if we look at how integrity is defined by the British Army, it again relates exclusively to conduct towards others in an organization, emphasizing the importance of integrity for the building of trust between colleagues (more on that in the next chapter). On the other hand, it should be said that this definition at least raises the question how loyalty to an organization is to be combined with other values, for instance the loyalty to principle which integrity requires as defined outside the British Army, or the moral courage that is included under the heading of courage by both the US Army and the British Army, and most other militaries for that matter. In effect, moral courage, like integrity in its general meaning, also comes very close to loyalty to principle.

88   Loyalty Whereas in the value lists of the different armed forces military effectiveness and the interests of organizations and colleagues hold central place (Robinson 2007a), the values of the medical profession, formulated by professional organizations, give precedence to the patient and the doctor–patient relationship. They state, for example, that the practitioner should always work in the interest of the patient, refrain from prescribing treatment he knows is harmful, and respect the patient’s dignity. Medical ethics is about patients and medical care, and not about how to behave towards colleagues.10 Somewhat similar, police forces, a bit more akin to the military profession, put the interests of civilians first in their value statements. The police of England and Wales, for instance, state in their common values that “every police officer and member of police staff must be animated by the sense of service to the public.”11 To return to the military doctor of the previous section: the clear difference between the medical and the military profession in oaths, codes, and values, and the conflicting loyalties that can result from that for military doctors, testify to the fact that a doctor in the military serves in his capacity as a physician a different client than in his role as a member of the armed forces. For a civilian doctor, on the other hand, it is manifest that it is the patient who is his client, and no one else. This seems to be characteristic of a professional, described by one author as someone who “works relatively independently of his colleagues, but closely with the clients he serves” (Mintzberg 1983: 190). Disregarding working independently (although that this element, too, is absent in the military does once more raise the question to what measure it is justified to speak of a military profession in the first place), for military personnel the client, if we want to use that term, is the state or the people, not the local population in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Sudan.12 It seems the latter are often not even considered a party. The British Army, for example, states that a “mutual obligation forms the Military Covenant between the Nation, the Army and each individual soldier; an unbreakable common bond of identity, loyalty and responsibility which has sustained the Army throughout its history.”13 John Mattox, somewhat likewise, holds that US Army officers have moral obligations to the nation and to their subordinates (2002: 295). Political scientist Don Snider, writing about (and for) the US Army, mentions “three critical trust relationships of the military profession – those with the American people, those with civilian and military leaders at the highest levels of decision-­ making, and those with the junior corps of officers and non-­commissioned officers of our armed forces” (2008: vii). Given the strong and exclusive emphasis on institutional loyalty, it is perhaps not surprising that, when military doctors have to choose between their responsibility for their patients and the demands of the military, they sometimes have their obligations to their patients overridden by their sense of military duty (see also Clark 2006: 577).

What is to be done? As we have just seen, loyalty does figure prominently in the lists of virtues and values of most armed forces. Yet, these armed forces do not insist on loyalty to

Loyalty   89 principle, nor do they demand loyalty to professional ethics, which is, as said, in some aspects somewhat similar to loyalty to principle. One could argue that there is some logic in all this. To state the obvious: militaries cannot have too many soldiers taking an impartial, “objective” view on matters like Poncke Princen did. Furthermore, military organizations ask much of their personnel, such as running considerable risks, which they cannot be expected to fulfill in return for a salary alone (the willingness to actually die for others – instead of just running risks – seems to be again an altogether different matter, especially so in today’s missions that are rarely about defending one’s nearest and dearest; see also Cook 2004: 121–8). As stated above, loyalty is not just about standing behind an employer when all is well; particularly military organizations are dependent on people who will stand their ground in difficult circumstances. Indeed, the position of, for instance, a police officer or a practitioner of medicine is, in essence, different from military personnel deployed on a mission. A doctor in particular (for a police officer the situation is obviously somewhat different) can put the interest of his patients above everything else without putting himself in harm’s way, whereas the latter cannot at all times act in the interest of the local population without incurring more risks to himself. For that reason, especially when we consider the fact that in the eyes of many the predominant task of a defense organization is still the defense of its own territory, the emphasis on loyalty to the organization is not so surprising. In the past, some have for that reason maintained that the military profession was ill-­suited to develop into a “true” profession (see for instance van Doorn 1975). At the same time, it is evident that the tasks of the military have widened in scope, which essentially means that they have to deal with more than just opposing forces. What’s more, what seems to be behind the many moral dilemmas military personnel face today is often a conflict between loyalty to a group – one’s team or organization – on the one hand and loyalty to principle on the other hand. Interestingly, the moral exemplars frequently used in, for instance, ethics education in the military – such as Hugh Thompson Jr., the helicopter pilot who tried to stop the My Lai massacre – chose loyalty to principle, or justice, above loyalty to their organization and colleagues. The current emphasis on loyalty to the group even seems somewhat outdated, as the rest of the world is thought to have moved on to a new “ethical demand of the hour,” and now adheres to what has been called “transcendental humanism” by one author (Coker 2008: 124). This “transcendental humanism” seems, for instance, to lie behind the (by some accounts somewhat utopian) doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, coined in 2001 and not much later embraced by the UN, which basically sets a limit to the sovereignty of states that seriously fail in the protection of their subjects. In addition, it is generally thought that armed forces are moving away from the traditional “institutional” model and will evolve more and more towards an “occupational” model, which in effect means that the military profession will be less of a calling, but will resemble other occupations much more closely instead (Moskos 1986; 1988a/b). Possibly, this change from the institutional to the

90   Loyalty occupational model will lead to a more critical workforce and a reduction of loyalty to the organization to some extent; the latter is the main aspect of military professionalism that is somewhat at odds with what a “regular” professional ethic entails. One might ask the question, therefore, if, at a time when many armed forces consider the promotion of universal principles as their main ground for existence, the development of a truer professionalism, with the main focus of loyalty being the soldier’s professional ethic instead of his organization, is still too far-­fetched. To make a beginning with such a shift towards a truer professionalism, the most important measure to be taken possibly lies in somewhat adjusting the self-­ image, or social identity, of military personnel (Franke 2003; see also Tripodi 2006). For most of the militaries in the Western world peacekeeping and humanitarian missions are becoming increasingly important, also in the eye of the public, and in general such “new” tasks require the exercise of a lot of restraint on the part of military personnel. As it stands, however, it seems that Operations Other Than War are precisely for that reason sometimes seen as lesser than “the real thing.” US Marines, for instance, follow a martial arts program nowadays, aimed at keeping them in touch with their warrior ethos after years in which the military was seen “as an instrument of social engineering” (Yi 2004). At the  basis of the whole enterprise seems to be a somewhat hostile attitude to civilian values. Allegedly, in the 1970s, “pacifism, self-­indulgence, and egalitarian multiculturalism supplanted selfless patriotism as core values across the spectrum of American social institutions,” with the result that “in today’s society, many 18- to 20-year-­old youths are members of gangs or participate in other nonproductive, destructive groups in search of personal identity, peer recognition, and respect” (ibid.; see also Coker 2007: 141–2). The proliferation of the term warrior at the expense of the more humble word soldier (in recent years we have seen a host of new books on military ethics with the term warrior in the title) probably does not contribute much to adjusting that self-­image, either (see also Challans 2007). Although Dag Hammerskold, then Secretary General of the UN, once said that peacekeeping is not a soldier’s job, but that only a soldier can do it, a soldier will definitely not do a better job if he sees himself as a warrior before anything else. For instance, a study into the behavior of US military personnel participating in Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, already referred to in the chapter on courage, found that military personnel falling back on warrior strategies during peacekeeping are more likely to have escalating contacts with the local population (Miller and Moskos 1995). Although their impact should not be overrated, oaths, codes of conduct, and value and virtue lists that give due place to the interests of outsiders can possibly contribute something to altering that self-­image. As far as those value and virtue lists are concerned, there is, as mentioned above, no need to immediately replace the existing values by more cosmopolitan ones (compare Deakin 2008a).14 Interpreting the current values, especially loyalty, somewhat more comprehensively is already an, admittedly small, step in the direction of a more outward-­looking ethic. Possibly, it could also include enemy combatants (who are sometimes

Loyalty   91 involuntarily fighting for a regime or a cause that is not at all theirs – think of the many Iraqi soldiers killed on the so-­called Highway of Death in 1991), substituting controlled or even minimal use of force for overwhelming force. In addition, the increased deployments under the flag of NATO, EU, and the UN might, too, contribute to a more professional, and less organizational or national, ethic (see also van Doorn 1975: 42). In that vein German military sociologist Gerhard Kümmel writes, somewhat optimistically perhaps, that “the soldier will have to develop (. . .) some sort of humanitarian cosmopolitanism that exists besides feelings of patriotism” (2003: 432). So far, however, these organizations have not done much in developing their own values and codes.15 Finally, some form of protection for whistleblowers, not disloyal of character yet just not willing to suspend good judgment, is perhaps a good idea in every line of work, though seems particularly needed in the military, since those who “tell” every now and then do not just find themselves out of a job. Abu Ghraib whistleblower Joe Darby, for example, feared for his life for a while, and lived several years in protective custody at an undisclosed location.

Conclusion A world without loyalty, with, for instance, parents taking an objective view to their children, or friends looking in a similar vein towards their friends, would be rather inhospitable. Viewed in that light, loyalty might qualify as a value (see also S. Keller 2007). However, as we have seen, loyalty, one of the quintessential military virtues, is, just as honor, but for different reasons, most likely not a virtue per se. The question is whether loyalty might nonetheless be a praiseworthy or even necessary quality in military personnel; it seems to be a quality that is, in fact, intended to be more beneficial to one’s colleagues than outsiders. On the other hand, if we see loyalty as, at least partly, consisting of the suspension of independent judgment, one could even wonder whether it is in fact that helpful for colleagues in the longer run (see also Gabriel 1982: 12); that is, if we take loyalty as it is defined and demanded by the military itself: loyalty to the organization and colleagues. Where the interpretation of honor as integrity, also prevalent in the military’s value lists and credos, asks too much (see Chapters 2 and 5), loyalty as defined by the military generally asks too little or, maybe more accurately, the wrong thing. As we have seen, however, a closer look learns that loyalty comes in two basic forms: loyalty to a group (which can range from one’s primary group to one’s country) and loyalty to a principle (such as justice). The fact that most militaries tend to stress the first form, group loyalty, means that they sometimes reduce risks for their own personnel in ways that increase the chances of civilian casualties among the local population. Also, this narrow interpretation of loyalty might very well be among the causes of the cover-­ups that at times follow on from incidents involving military personnel. This is somewhat at odds with the view of the soldier as a professional: someone who is loyal to his profession and his professional ethic, more than to his organization and colleagues. Loyalty to

92   Loyalty principles, not asking for the suspension of free judgment, is not promoted by militaries under the banner of loyalty (though probably present in the often-­ mentioned value of integrity), yet can be expected to be beneficial to colleagues and outsiders alike. The obvious question is to what extent, at a time when many armed forces consider the promotion of universal principles as their main reason for being, the military ethic in effect can be reformulated to include the interests of the local population more than currently is the case. Without a doubt, we would be expecting the impossible if we wished militaries to substitute one form of loyalty for another, that is to say, loyalty to principle for group loyalty. However, there seem to exist some shades of gray between group loyalty and loyalty to principle. The German officers that plotted against Hitler, or some examples of whistleblowers, for instance, although clearly denouncing blind group loyalty, did not act from universal principles either (see also van Creveld 2008: 372). Hitler’s adversary Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, for instance, was motivated by loyalty, yet not to the Germany as it was, but to an idea of what Germany should be. Whistleblowers, likewise, although not acting how the organization desires, sometimes profess to act from values their organization once held in their opinion, yet alas has departed from (see also Hirschman 1970: 76–105). These examples suggest that there is a middle ground between loyalty to principle and group loyalty. The development of a more professional ethic in the proper sense of the term, with the focus on loyalty to a profession rather than an organization, would in fact be holding that middle ground and is therefore perhaps an attainable ideal. In a sense, it would also be holding the middle ground between the hard-­to-attain universalism of the consequentialist and the sometimes somewhat too relativistic particularism of Walzer’s defense of “thick moralities.” Although not as principled as loyalty to principle, loyalty to a professional ethic would be a lot more so than the current organizational and group loyalties. Taking a somewhat more unbiased view would have the beneficial effect that civilian casualties that are a result of reducing the risks for Western military personnel, for instance by opting for bombardments from a high altitude (as in the Kosovo War), or for unplanned air strikes during close air support when troops in Afghanistan are in unexpected contact with the enemy (who, in case of the Taliban, are, of course, responsible for most of the civilian deaths), would be taken somewhat less lightly than at present now and then seems to be the case. If there is any truth in the often heard suggestion that tactics that are relatively safe for military personnel yet put civilians at risk in fact can drive the local population into the hands of the insurgents, such a more professional ethic will in the long run benefit outsiders, colleagues, and defense organizations alike.

5 Integrity

Introduction On the brink of the new century, in 1900, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim sees the light: a story about lost honor and the attempt to win it back. Jim, a sailor with an honest appearance, embarks on a hardly seaworthy ship, the Patna, which is to transport several hundreds of pilgrims. In mid-­voyage, when the ship takes in water and appears to be sinking, the crew decides to abandon ship – and the 600 or so sleeping pilgrims with it. Although Jim aspires to be a hero, “and live[s] the sea-­life of light literature,” he also, in a moment of confusion, leaves the ship with the officers. They reach land – the pilgrims too. The ship miraculously stayed afloat, and when the pilgrims tell their side of the story this differs from the account provided by the crew: that the time and means were not there to do anything for their human cargo. The officers are able to steer clear of prosecution, but Jim is not. In fact, he does not want to flee, “from no man – from not a single man on earth.” The hearing attracts a lot of attention, and even in the remotest sea ports Jim is known as a man who broke the code of honor, as someone not to be trusted, as a man “with a soft spot.” After this episode, he becomes a trader in faraway Patusan, where he rises to a position of trust – he becomes Tuan (Lord) Jim – among the local population. His past haunts him when a pirating rogue, Brown – a man who is everything Jim does not want to be – refers to common ground between both of them when he asks Jim whether he himself does not understand that when “it came to saving one’s life in the dark, one didn’t care who else went – three, thirty, three hundred people.” Jim’s judgment errs again when he misapprehends Brown’s intentions, a mistake that costs the lives of some members of the local population. In an attempt to redeem himself, Jim this time chooses death; thus for a second time abandoning those who have put their trust in him. He has failed to see how the inlanders, including the wife he found among them, need him. In the words of the story’s narrator, Marlow, Jim went “away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” In Conrad’s novel, a lot of the virtues that militaries deem important are, sometimes by default, present: loyalty, courage, and, in abundance, honor. Yet

94   Integrity above all, it can be read as a tale about integrity: Jim’s acts are not those of the man he is in his own eyes, or wants to be. That failure to live up to his own high principles, and not his lack of courage per se, is his essential flaw. In a quintessentially “modern,” yet somewhat puzzling phrase, we could say he fails to be “loyal to himself.”

Integrity as a special kind of loyalty As we have seen in the previous chapter, loyalty seems to come in two basic varieties: loyalty to a group (which can range from one’s primary group to one’s country) and loyalty to a principle (such as justice, or respect for human life). Although militaries have a propensity to the first form, group loyalty, most philosophers and ethicists have a preference for loyalty to principle, and they seem to have a point; where group loyalty tends to require the suspension of independent judgment, loyalty to principle, on the whole, does not. Not clear, however, is where these principles should stem from. It would seem obvious to look for these principles outside oneself, be it in a moral tradition, religion, or the values espoused by society, yet there are those who believe the highest form of loyalty is loyalty to the principles and values you find within yourself. This loyalty to one’s own principles and values is what is often denoted by the term integrity, although other meanings abound; today, integrity has acquired so many, sometimes contradicting, meanings, that, in fact, one could almost say the term has come to signify everything and nothing. Integrity is, according to one military ethicist, a “much-­used term but very much in need of analysis” (Wakin 2000: 115). Notwithstanding this profusion of meanings, the term has a rather restricted connotation in most organizations, is mainly negatively formulated, and as such is concerned with the things an employee should not do: for example, taking gifts of a value above a certain threshold, being careless with sensitive information, or taking office supplies home for private use. Clearly, this is not what integrity as a virtue is about, nor what for instance most militaries on the whole take it to be, although this narrow definition of integrity is very much alive in most armed forces too. In general, however, integrity as a virtue has a wider meaning, although somewhat hard to pin down. It can, for instance, stand for “wholeness,” which is actually closest to its original meaning (the Latin integer stands for “whole” or “complete”). This meaning of the term goes back to the ancient idea that one cannot have one virtue without the other, and that all the virtues are interrelated. Being just, for instance, does not mean a lot when one lacks the courage to defend it, while courage, in its turn, is of not much use without practical wisdom to guide it. This unity of the virtues also suggests that one cannot be a moral person in one sphere of life, and wanting in morals in another. Somewhat resembling this definition of integrity is the view of integrity as consistent in time; integrity can also be seen as asking us to be steadfast, and not to give up our once dearly held beliefs under pressure. At the same time, complicating matters somewhat, integrity can, some hold, also demand the balancing and reassessing

Integrity   95 of our own principles and values in the light of new circumstances (Cox et al. 2003: 2–5, 17, 41). To circumvent these definitional subtleties, “possessing integrity” is often simply used as synonymous with “being ethical” (see also ibid. 56), and this is the meaning it appears to have when a military organization lists it as a principal virtue or value; someone who possesses the virtue of integrity to the extent that he or she upholds moral principles. Although upholding moral principles is a good thing, it does not begin to help us understand what this virtue then is about. In all likelihood, integrity may be located somewhere between the narrow definition of integrity as conforming to organizational rules and the all-­too-wide definition that equates it with ethical behavior. Essentially, if we seek the meaning of the term in its use, and also want to stay close to the everyday understanding of integrity already hinted at in the above, we can take integrity to mean something as living by, and being loyal to, one’s own values and principles, in other words: as “being loyal to oneself.” This, then, suggests that we have moral obligations, not only to others, but also to ourselves, and especially an obligation to live in accordance with our own moral principles. In the sense of loyalty to personal principles and values, integrity, not requiring the suspension of independent judgment, obviously resembles loyalty to principle to quite an extent (one could say it is a subspecies) with the important qualification, however, that integrity requires us to be loyal to our own prin­ ciples, and, in that way, to ourselves. Who does not do so, like Jim, is disloyal to him- or herself; he or she is self-­deceiving. Although this loyalty to oneself might be like loyalty to a very small group indeed (just like justice can be seen as loyalty to a very large group, as we have seen in the preceding chapter), it is in fact considered to be very principled by some, and, according to one military ethicist, even the basis for all other virtues (Wakin 2000). Yet, can a virtue that is devoid of any fixed content really perform that function? Before we can answer that question, and the question to what extent people, for instance military personnel, should (or can), in fact, be loyal to their personal principles, we first have to come to a clearer understanding of what integrity as loyalty to personal values could denote. As said, “being loyal to yourself ” is indeed a very modern phrase, that would have been unintelligible for any author of old because he probably would not have subscribed to the first, and certainly not to the second, of the two assumptions underlying the notion of integrity: 1) that an individual has innate moral principles and 2) that those are unique to him or her. So, where does this relatively new notion spring from? In the philosophy of the old Greeks and Romans we encounter views that, on the surface, seem to resemble integrity as we understand it today, so we should (re)turn to them first.

Integrity as loyalty to yourself: a very short genealogy Cicero held that the heaviest sanction for unethical conduct does not consist of legal penalties (that possibly can be avoided), but lies in the corruption of our own morals (De Officiis III.38). Yet, as we have seen in Chapter 2, in Cicero’s

96   Integrity view our “own” morals largely originate from our relations with others. Ignoring public opinion testifies a lack of principle, he therefore held (ibid. I.99). That goes rather against our intuition about what integrity is. The Stoics, at first sight, came closer to our idea of integrity with their idea that someone’s social roles, descent, and the like were masks behind which an individual’s true self was hidden. However, here a closer look learns that the “divine spark” we all carry within ourselves according to Stoic thought, stands for a universal “cosmic” wisdom, the knowledge of a principle outside one’s self, not for the kind of personal values integrity asks us to stand up for. It seems, therefore, that, different from loyalty, integrity in the above sense is really a recent virtue. As will be remembered from Chapter 2, as late as the seventeenth century an author such as John Locke did not believe that man had inner moral principles, and our idea of integrity would have been incomprehensible to him. It is in fact only in the Romantic era that we see for the first time the notion of an inner moral compass that is truly individual and unique, and it is with the work of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau that this notion of conscience as an “inner voice” has its most influential expression. Rousseau, an intellectual heir of the Stoics in more than one respect,1 wrote, in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar (part of his pedagogical work Emile), that “everything I sense to be good is good; everything I sense to be bad is bad” (1991: 267). According to Rousseau, “too often reason deceives us. (. . .) But conscience never deceives; it is man’s true guide” (ibid. 286). And, a few pages further, Conscience, conscience! Divine instinct, immortal and Celestial voice, certain guide of a being that is ignorant and limited but intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and bad which makes man like unto God; it is you who make the excellence of his nature and the morality of his actions. (ibid. 290) That so many people do not listen to their inner voice is, in Rousseau’s view, because its sound is lost in the murmuring around us – and because we put far too much value on how others see us.2 Other eighteenth-­century thinkers such as Adam Smith hastened to show the impossibility of this individualistic morality by pointing out that, as we have already seen in Chapter 2, the praise and blame of our fellow citizens are the mirror by which we can, to some extent, examine the appropriateness of our conduct (The Theory of Moral Sentiments III.1.5). On the whole, Smith’s impartial spectator does not represent some inborn rule that goes against the norms of society, but tends to follow the conventions of society rather closely. Remember from Chapter 2 too that, although it might seem flawed to us, for thinkers from Cicero to Smith, the terms “good” and “virtuous” were close to synonymous with what was considered honorable in a society (both meanings are present in the Latin honestum). Looking at what is praised and blamed was therefore deemed indispensable as a heuristic tool to discover what the moral thing to do was. As one author wrote about David Hume’s moral philosophy: “It is not that

Integrity   97 virtue is approved because it is virtue, but that virtue is virtue because it is approved” (Hill 1987: 543). Still, the idea that what is good and true for one person is not necessarily so for another, proved so powerful that in the late eighteenth century the idea grew that each individual is different and original, and that this originality determines how he or she ought to live. Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new. (. . .) What is new is the idea that this really makes a difference to how we’re called on to live. The differences (. . .) entail that each one of us has an original path which we ought to tread; they lay the obligation to live up to our originality. (Taylor 1992a: 375) Jim, for instance, considers himself unique too. As far as his colleagues onboard were concerned, he felt that “the quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was different.” Later, this idea that we all posses unique personalities has had its echo in the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Erich Fromm, including the idea that our concern for how others might judge us is precisely the thing that bars us from following our true selves. As Fromm writes, in language borrowed from Rousseau: Here also we find the irrational distortion of a normal attitude: man naturally wants to be accepted by his fellows; but modern man wants to be accepted by everybody and therefore is afraid to deviate, in thinking, feeling, and acting, from the cultural pattern. (1949: 164) Partly as a result of this view, the majority of us try to be a free subject who chooses his or her own way through life, not needing the help judgments of others may offer, or the check that the sense of shame can be. Independence is the ideal, the way we want to be, other-­directedness is seen as the regrettable reality, the way too many people are. Also in matters of morality, autonomy is considered to be the highest good, and everything that falls short of this ideal is simply not good enough (which, of course resembles Stoic thought). This view has, incidentally, been made fashionable by authors such as the just-­mentioned Fromm and Maslow, but also by sociologist David Riesman.3 At the present time, this idea resonates in popular psychology, self-­help literature, and our notion of integrity. In order to know what is the moral thing to do, we have to look within: “a public-­spirited citizen must do a bit of soul-­searching – must decide what he or she most truly and deeply believes to be right and good – before it is possible to live with integrity” (Carter 1996: 10).4 Today, conscience as an inner voice is not only considered important because it tells us what is right; it has also become something with “independent and crucial moral significance”

98   Integrity (Taylor 1994: 28). Most of us hold that listening to our moral feelings is “something we have to attain if we are to be true and full human beings” (ibid.). One could even say, as James Bowman does in his book Honor: A History, that doing what your “inner self ” tells you, against external pressure, is now considered the honorable and courageous thing to do (2006: 206). Thus, while “a man in heroic society is what he does” (MacIntyre 1985: 122), most people today hold their inner personal principles and values very dear, and make an effort to live by them. The “inner depth” this presupposes is, just as integrity itself, a comparatively new construct too, and something also Conrad’s Jim suffered from. When narrator Marlow presents Jim’s case to the German trader and butterfly collector Stein, the latter is quick with his diagnosis: “I understand very well. He is romantic.”5 A disease only death – “One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure” – can heal us from. When Marlow remarks that “strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to live,” Stein answers by rephrasing Shakespeare: “How to be! Ach! How to be!” A difficult enough question because, as Stein puts it, man is fickle: “he wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil – and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow.” However, “because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble – the heart pain – the world pain,” caused by not being able to live up to one’s own self-­image. At first sight, then, it looks as if a man or woman of integrity is one who in spite of everything found an answer to the question of how to be, and, more importantly, succeeds in living by it. There are, however, some problems with this notion of integrity, especially when we for the moment stick to its most common understanding as being true to oneself and one’s deeply felt principles.

Problems with integrity as loyalty to personal principles First of all, although integrity is often considered to be an important virtue, both within and outside the military, everything obviously depends on the values and principles someone actually holds dear (see also Wakin 2000: 115) – does he or she aspire to be a devil or a saint? Rawls notes in his Theory of Justice that “of course the virtues of integrity are virtues, and among the excellences of free persons. Yet while necessary, they are not sufficient; for their definition allows for most any content” (A Theory of Justice §78). There is, consequently, nothing in integrity that precludes a malevolent dictator, a mobster, a terrorist, or, for that matter, Conrad’s most famous character: the ivory collector Kurtz from the Heart of Darkness (essentially a novel about our inner depths by most accounts), of rightfully claiming to be a person of integrity (see also Margalit 1996: 49).6 The pirate Brown, for example, does a better job living according to his principles than “moral” Jim. The evil-­doer that acts out of deeply felt principles, against the norms of wider society, might sometimes even get admiration because of his principled disregard for the consequences of his actions for himself and for others, which for instance happened with some members of the terrorist Baader-­Meinhof

Integrity   99 Group that met with quite some sympathy in Europe and the US, or the above-­ mentioned Kurtz who had an admirer in the story’s narrator, Marlow. It seems, in view of the above, somewhat misguided that militaries use integrity in some cases as the equivalent of being ethical. Apparently, integrity as a particular form of loyalty to principle is as “gray” a virtue as group loyalty. It is for these reasons that Rawls deems integrity a secondary virtue, more about form rather than matter, and most definitely not the basis for other virtues. Nonetheless, sometimes, virtues of form are in demand. Especially when it is not clear what is true or just or good, we want our beliefs at least to be our own, originating from within. As Rawls writes: “in times of social doubt and loss of faith in long established values, there is a tendency to fall back on the virtues of integrity: truthfulness and sincerity, lucidity and commitment, or, as some say, authenticity” (ibid.). It is not a one-­on-one relationship, but evidently sticking to your own, personal values and principles is more likely to be seen as virtuous when the general feeling is that there are no shared, external criteria to judge them by.7 One can, for instance, be in total disagreement with someone else yet still deem him or her a person of integrity (as was possibly the case with some admirers of the Baader-­Meinhof Group, and Marlow’s admiration for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness). Note that this relativistic side of integrity presupposes that different persons have values and principles that are not only different from each other, but also unique in a way that makes these values and principles central to who they are. This might be a commonplace today but, as we have seen, historically it has arrived on the scene relatively recently, being closely related to integrity’s attendant virtues sincerity and, especially, authenticity. Although they appear to be roughly similar, there are important differences between these two latter virtues, explained by Lionel Trilling in his classic Sincerity and Authenticity. Sincerity, to begin with, serves a social purpose; one says what one truly thinks, without distorting information, holding it back, or deceiving, in order to be a dependable partner to others. In brief, do what you say, and say what you think. This is less straightforward than it might seem: there is, for instance, at times something uneasy about this combination of being oneself for other-­directed reasons. As a result, Trilling writes, we now and then “play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed on our sincerity that is not authentic” (1971: 12). Although some military men and women, for instance, have a tendency to indulge in “straight talk” and “speak one’s mind” in an effort to pass for sincere, this is not always authentic. Not so with authenticity itself, however: here, being true to oneself is an end in itself.8 How others might feel about that is irrelevant. Evidently, as a moral ideal, this is bound to have its catches too. Building upon Trilling’s work, Charles Taylor observes in his The Ethics of Authenticity (1992b) that people nowadays tend to confuse two aspects of authenticity: that of matter and that of manner. The first, matter, is about the content of our strivings, manner is about the way we do things. Now, we can probably find our “own way” how to do things by looking within ourselves, and this “own way” is in that case self-­referential in the sense that we use it as a

100   Integrity means of expressing ourselves.9 This does not apply to matter, though. It is a mistake to think that our goals should come from within, should be an expression of ourselves, and thus can be self-­referential too. This is an impossibility, Taylor argues: human nature is fundamentally dialogical (1992b: 33), that is, it develops through engaging in a dialogue with those around us. Although we choose our own goals, we necessarily choose them within a tradition and a framework. Fulfillment we only find in things that have significance outside ourselves, and confusing both kinds of self-­referentiality “lends legitimacy to the worst kinds of subjectivism” (ibid. 82). This is not a point of view only communitarians hold: not unlike Taylor, though possibly leaving somewhat more room for choice, liberal political philosopher Rawls holds that society’s many associations simplify decision by offering definite ideals and forms of life that have been developed and tested by innumerable individuals, sometimes for generations. Thus, in drawing up our plan of life we do not start de novo; we are not required to choose from countless possibilities without given structure or fixed contours. (A Theory of Justice §85) Taylor provides us with an example that is perhaps somewhat faraway from the military yet illustrative for our purposes: art. Since Romanticism, artists are looking for, and finding, individual ways of expression. Good artists, however, try to articulate something beyond their self, and their own sentiment. Art that is mainly about the artist’s personal feeling is not very interesting (and Taylor deplores the fact that in modern art this is often the case; 1992b: 82–91). Another example, not from Taylor (and closer to the military), is Tolstoy’s character Konstantin Levin, from Anna Karenina, who looked inside for what to do with his life, and consequently was, as Tolstoy portrays him, always at a loss about what to do (until finding the answer in Christianity). In the life of his opposite, the young officer Andrej Wronski, there was, although somewhat superficial, also something to be envied: as an officer, he had access to a code that told him what to do in almost every circumstance. This code, for instance, in his day specified that you could have an affair with a married woman though you couldn’t run away with her (probably running away with your mistress would bring things too much in the open – in most honor cultures, as we have seen in Chapter 2, what is not spoken of publicly does not exist). After he broke the code by leaving the military for Mrs. Karenina, he had no inkling as to what to do. It might be interesting to add that Tolstoy, who apparently modeled Levin after himself, was a great admirer of Rousseau, and wore a medallion with his picture around his neck as an adolescent. Lastly, and following up on Taylor’s remark about man’s dialogical nature, there is the question of how we know whether someone who declares that he is following his own “moral compass” is actually doing so. He could, to begin with, be willingly deceiving his public, yet that would imply that his claim to

Integrity   101 integrity is a false one, something which he himself would know. Much more relevant (and interesting) is the question of how someone, who sincerely believes he is following an innate moral rule, or acting on his own values, can possibly know he is, in fact, following such a moral rule. This is especially hard to answer if he is acting against the opinions of others, which the virtue of integrity requires us to do when our principles are at odds with the general opinion. In that case we have in effect to do with, as Bernard Williams puts it, a man who thinks that he is just, but is treated by everyone else as though he were not. If he were given merely that description of himself, it is less clear how steady his motivations would prove. Moreover, it is less clear how steady we think they should prove. For given simply that description, there is nothing to show whether he is a solitary bearer of true justice or a deluded crank. (1993: 99; see also Miller 1993: p. ix; Robinson 2009: 262) Although Williams does not mention him, he does seem to hark back to Wittgenstein, who has pointed out that there are essentially three options if someone claims to follow an innate moral rule: 1) he is indeed following a rule and does so consistently; 2) he follows a rule, but is to some extent inconsistent. That what is considered morally sound on one occasion differs from what is morally sound in another instance; 3) he proclaims to follow a rule but his judgments are, in reality, totally random. The problematic point here is, of course, that for neither himself nor his audience is there a possibility of determining with which of the three possibilities we are dealing.10 The follower of an innate rule finds himself to some degree in the same position as Robinson Crusoe who, alone on his island, tried to keep track of what day it was, and named the native he befriended Friday, because it was on a Friday that they met. Until his rescue, however, there was for him no way of knowing whether Thursday, or Monday, would have been a more appropriate name. It seems, therefore, that following a rule, or acting on a principle, moral or otherwise, can only be consistently done if there is some form of public that can tell the rule-­follower whether he or she is in the right or in the wrong. A problem that Mill hints at might well be hampering this process in democratic times: although we have a right to warn someone if we think him at fault, or even a fool, it seems that it would be well, indeed, if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit, and if one person could honestly point out to another that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerly or presuming. (1993: 145)11 Rendering the “good office” Mill speaks of is in our day probably even more contrary to custom than in Victorian England, and it seems that it can only

102   Integrity perform its function as a check when criticism does not amount to a narcistic injury in its own right (see for the virtue of rudeness: Westacott 2006, especially 13). There is some danger in that, because, as Amitai Etzioni writes in words that somewhat remind us of those used by Mill, “it is unrealistic to rely on individuals’ inner voices and to expect that people will invariably do what is right completely on their own” (1995: 36), something that follows from his assumption that “individuals’ consciences are neither inborn nor – for most people – self-­enforcing” (ibid. 30). Having said that, it is obvious that, despite the fact that the notion of integrity does not give due attention to the inescapable frameworks we live in and by, it itself has become a part of that framework, and that today, we cannot help but seeing ourselves, and judging others, in the light of integrity and its attendant virtues (Taylor 1992a/b). In the final pages of his voluminous Sources of the Self, Taylor writes: “what I hope emerges from this lengthy account of the growth of modern identity is how all-­pervasive it is, how much it envelops us, and how deeply we are implicated in it” (1992a: 503). In view of the fact that integrity itself has become a part of our moral space, it is inevitable that military personnel, too, attach great value to being able to, as they put it, “look at yourself in the mirror” – a telling phrase, as it suggests that what others think of one’s conduct is reckoned to be of less importance today, even in the military.

Definitions of integrity within the military In the military integrity is one of the most used moral terms – according to Martin Cook because of lack of a more comprehensive moral vocabulary. One praises an officer or soldier by saying he or she has integrity, one blames him by saying he or she lacks it (2002: 337). The US Army, for instance, describes integrity as a quality you develop by adhering to moral principles. It requires that you do and say nothing that deceives others. As your integrity grows, so does the trust others place in you. The more choices you make based on integrity, the more this highly prized value will affect your relationships with family and friends, and, finally, the fundamental acceptance of yourself. As we already noted in the chapter on loyalty, the British Army has also a rather wide definition of integrity (in the Values and Standards of the British Army) that is primarily about the relations with colleagues, and sees it as having a unique significance to soldiering, it is essential to trust: soldiers must have complete trust in each of their comrades for their lives may ultimately depend on it. Integrity means being honest and truthful. All forms of deceit and dishonesty constitute a lack of integrity: they call into question whether an individual can be relied upon, damaging the team and therefore operational effectiveness.

Integrity   103 Both definitions clearly emphasize sincerity more than authenticity – for understandable reasons – yet their paramount quality is their imprecision: “possessing integrity” is seen as, as is sometimes the case outside the military, more or less tantamount to “being ethical.” This imprecision when writing about integrity is widespread: not unlike the above descriptions, in 2004 the Netherlands Army communicated to their officers (in a leaflet called The Domain of the Officer) that integrity meant that they are capable of recognizing moral questions and dilemmas and making a morally sound judgment. However, in the military integrity also has more than one meaning. We see for instance the notion of integrity as wholeness present in the widely held view, among military ethicists that is, that a good officer or soldier is bound to be a good person in all walks of life (see for instance Wakin 2000: 119; Toner 1995). From there, it is only a small step to proclaim the military a potential source of moral inspiration for the rest of society (see for instance ibid.; Gabriel 1982: 10; Mattox 2002; French 2003: 3). A variance of this notion of integrity as wholeness is the view that integrity forms a sort of underlying virtue on which the other military virtues rest (Wakin 2000). Integrity as steadfastness can be observed in the fact that men like Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese Army and refused to cooperate with his captors at high personal cost, are often presented as archetypical examples of integrity. It is probably admiration for integrity in this sense that is behind the dislike of some military personnel for politicians (possibly matched by their aversion to journalists); people who, in their view, are the contrary of steadfastness, changing positions whenever there are votes to be gained, and compromising when they should show some persistence.12 This abundance of meanings of integrity in the military makes judging someone’s integrity a seemingly random affair; it all depends on what one chooses it to signify. This became apparent, for instance, when retired US generals criticized their civilian leadership because they sincerely thought it was misguided in its handling of the Iraq war, and by doing so showing integrity in the sense of speaking one’s mind. According to Don Snider, these generals in fact demonstrated a lack of integrity, in this case taken to be consistency and wholeness. Apparently, these generals had led their soldiers, and put them in harm’s way, in a war they themselves did not believe in (2008). Snider’s debated standpoint (see for a different view Cook 2008a) is representative of the organizational view in at least one aspect, though: integrity as viewed by most militaries is primarily about upholding organizational values, not per se about upholding one’s personal values and principles. Any other way seems virtually impossible, for it would have been somewhat inconsistent to include integrity as living according to one’s own values in a list of values and virtues military personnel are supposed to adhere to. At the same time, despite that it is defined otherwise in the different value lists, to most military personnel this upholding one’s personal principles is indeed what integrity signifies (Robinson 2007b: 261; Wakin 2000: 115; Challans 2007: 88). This acting on one’s own principles is not a problem if they

104   Integrity are in agreement with what the military asks; however, this is of course not necessarily the case. How much room there is for upholding one’s personal values and principles in a military organization is consequently a thorny matter; integrity comes, as we have seen, with a good dose of moral subjectivism and, hence, relativism, and all the complications that come with that.

Integrity as upholding personal principles and the military An organization such as the military by its nature offers a hostile environment for acting according to personal principles if these are at odds with the organization’s views. This is not meant in a derogative way. The military is inherently more collectivistic than individualistic, stresses the importance of cohesion and group loyalty, and essentially exists to further goals that definitely rise above the level of the individual: from the defense of national territory to the promotion of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, sometimes in countries that do not count these things among the values of their culture. Although it therefore remains to be seen whether in the military all other virtues really depend on integrity, as at least one author claims (Wakin 2000), it is unmistakable that this virtue, also in its everyday meaning of living by one’s personal values and principles, is in some way related to the other virtues militaries believe important. There is, to name one thing, some similarity between integrity and the virtue of moral courage, which asks us to uphold our principles even if others disagree, and perhaps even holds us in contempt for sticking to them. There is an important difference, however: as we have seen in Chapter 3, moral courage by definition aims at a moral end outside oneself, whereas integrity clearly does not – in view of the fact that a devout Nazi could also claim to possess this good quality (see also Margalit 1996: 49). A closer look learns that the relationship between integrity and the other virtues is often not a positive one (see, for a somewhat different view, Robinson 2009). What is quite obvious, for instance, is that integrity, defined as loyalty to personal principles, often collides with group loyalties to, for example, colleagues or an organization. In fact, as we have seen, militaries define loyalty as loyalty to an organization and colleagues, not to prin­ ciples. Military oaths in general point in the same direction. A similar conflict arises between integrity and another quintessential military virtue, obedience; if an order is not patently unlawful, military personnel are expected to follow it, regardless of their personal principles (which, of course, does not mean that they cannot air their concerns). Most of all, however, integrity is at odds with another virtue that is considered fundamental to the military ethos: honor – in its meaning of a reward for virtuous acts. Clearly, integrity is much closer to the Stoic and Platonic ideal that virtue should be its own reward. It is especially this hostility towards honor, public opinion, and the like that makes integrity somewhat stand out from the other virtues, and it is also this non-­conformist side of integrity that makes it closely related to much more modern virtues such as autonomy, authenticity, and sincerity, which are somewhat alien to military culture. As we have seen in

Integrity   105 Chapter 2, autonomy is not something the military furthers – Rousseau’s Emile would certainly not enlist (Welsh 2008). One could even argue that it is either honor, tied to public codes, or integrity, based on private codes (assuming such a thing is possible), but that the military cannot have both (Challans 2007: 88–9). Stressing internal honor – the actual presence of others is no longer needed, and the gaze of imaginary others suffices for honor to function – offers no way out. Although it at first sight does resemble integrity to a large extent, and notwithstanding the fact that integrity and honor are from time to time used as synonymous in the military (see Chapter 2), this internal honor works via an internalized other, and is thus still based on adherence to external norms. It is a bit doubtful, therefore, how serious and heartfelt the militaries’ commitment to integrity is (see also Robinson 2007b) – and how deep it in fact can be. Possibly, it is also this evident mismatch between military values and integrity in its common meaning that explains why integrity as defined by most militaries is somewhat idiosyncratic, yet somewhat indistinct at the same time. In the armed forces, for sure, we nonetheless do every now and then encounter examples of integrity in the sense of being true to one’s own principles and values. For instance, sailor Pablo Paredes’ refusal to be sent to Iraq – we encountered Paredes already in the chapter on courage – will be seen as an instance of integrity by some, possibly including himself. Instead of looking for a trouble-­ free way out, Paredes made a stance and went public with his desertion: “I knew I wasn’t going to do it. Rather than do it in a way that compromises my integrity, I’d rather just be honest about it” (cited in Weill-­Greenberg 2005). However, his integrity was not appreciated by his superiors. Similar cases can be found in recent years. Among them of course other soldiers and sailors who refused to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, but one can also think of the 27 Israeli pilots who wrote a letter on September 24, 2003 stating that they refused to conduct missions above Palestinian territory which could endanger civilians. Targeted assassinations of Hamas members had in fact killed tens of civilians in the preceding two years. Of these 27 pilots, the nine that were still on active duty were fired. These cases are clear examples of how someone truly acting from personal and deeply felt principles (if we accept the more principled reasons Paredes provided us with as the most genuine) can be somewhat of a problem to the military. Now, admittedly, these cases are maybe somewhat out of the ordinary in that they involve military personnel challenging military orders. Most soldiers understand very well they are to some extent instruments of politics, and do not necessarily have to believe in the causes they are fighting for. Perhaps, some in addition would argue that there is no sure way of telling whether for instance Paredes acted on principles or for self-­serving reasons, nor whether he is, in Williams’ words from the above, “a solitary bearer of true justice or a deluded crank.” Paredes’ integrity was in fact questioned by those who suspected a lack of physical courage behind his refusal to board. Other cases leave less room for skepticism, however. Among them is the case of Joe Darby, the sergeant who went to the US Army Criminal Investigation Command with the Abu Ghraib pictures and had to be taken into protective custody after Defense Secretary

106   Integrity Donald Rumsfeld had made his name public during a press conference. His case illustrates that soldiers who do not refuse to go on particular missions, yet want to do their work based on their own values, do not always fare well. It seems that they, too, sooner end up as martyrs for a good cause than as moral exemplars for an organization. Consider, as a last example, the case of Captain Lawrence Rockwood who in September 1994 was deployed to Haiti to remove a dictator, but also to end the gross violations of human rights that were taking place there – his story was the subject of an article in the very first issue of the Journal of Military Ethics. Rockwood, from a military family, had joined the military to protect the weak and defenseless. However, in Haiti he found that force protection was the main concern of both the US forces and, especially, the politicians that had sent them. Force was only to be used in self-­protection, not to protect the Haitians. Rockwood knew that in prisons political opponents of the regime were being tortured and killed, yet to his surprise his superiors proved reluctant to do something about it. Frustrated, Rockwell followed his conscience against orders, and hitchhiked, alone, to a nearby prison for inspection. By means of some bluff, and a bullet in the chamber of his rifle, he gained access to the facility. However, a US military attaché that was subsequently called for was able to convince him, not much later, to give up his desperate attempt to do something by himself. Rockwood underwent psychiatric evaluation and was found normal although somewhat tensed. Refusing to resign because in his opinion he had done nothing immoral, he was court marshaled for disobedience and conduct unbecoming an officer (Wrage 2002). As a witness for his defense appeared My Lai hero Hugh Thompson, Jr. (the helicopter pilot who tried to end the bloodbath) – another military man who stuck to his own values and paid the price for it. The case of Rockwood has been used at the US Naval Academy, though not necessarily as an example to be followed (Pierce 2002).

Conclusion As shown above, integrity, often paid lip service to by many a military organization, is in reality somewhat at odds with some of the defining characteristics of the armed forces. It, in its most common understanding, seems to require of us, both in the military and elsewhere, that we live according to our own personal principal values and principles, and assumes that we even have a moral obligation to do so. Up till now this chapter – in many aspects the reverse of the chapter on honor – has been criticizing the idea that integrity is a virtue. Most authors, on the other hand, who deem integrity a key virtue, are rather negative on the striving for honor, name, and reputation, and they might have a point, too. After having raised questions here about the role of integrity in the military up to now, it is now time to admit to the obvious fact that in some instances being principled is what is called for. Albeit a problematic virtue, integrity is also a virtue that aims high. One could say that someone’s integrity is tested when it is clear what is the right thing to do, yet with considerable pressure (from peers, or

Integrity   107 the prospect of furthering one’s own interest) to choose the wrong course of action (see Coleman 2009), as for instance Jim did. Now, in Lord Jim the pirate Brown seems to refer to the role of invisibility in Jim’s acting with his remark, quoted in the introduction of this chapter, about “saving one’s life in the dark.” As we have noted in Chapter 2, the question what someone would do if he or she were invisible has been a recurring theme since Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring. Integrity, in the sense of upholding one’s personal principles, is the virtue that can make that someone, provided his principles are morally sound, does the right thing even if there are no witnesses present and in spite of being tempted otherwise, as we now and then would like to see military personnel do. Yet, as we have seen in the previous section, persons of principle do not always fit into the military (although much depends on the principles they adhere to), for instance because of their alleged lack of loyalty to their colleagues and their organization. This is even more cause for concern, as integrity is the only virtue that appears regularly on the virtue lists of the different militaries that at least potentially gives due attendance to outsiders, whereas the other values are mainly directed towards the interests of the organization and colleagues (although it is somewhat telling that integrity, as defined by, for instance, the British Army, is also for the most part about being a trustworthy colleague). To put it somewhat dramatically: especially when no one is around, when those around are letting their moral standards go, or when the norms of a group are the wrong ones in the first place, sticking to one’s principles can be the only thing that stands between a soldier and a war crime. Without expecting military personnel to be men and women of principle to at least some extent, they could hide behind the fact that they just followed the group. The question is whether these principles should be self-­referential personal principles, in other words: originating from within, or personal principles originating in the outer world having been internalized. As we have seen in the above, the latter seems to be the more promising option. Integrity is overwhelmingly vague, and in its most common meaning much too subjective. One could even wonder whether integrity is really that outward looking and inclusive – the intention behind sticking to one’s own principles can be quite self-­serving, more about maintaining one’s own morals, the ability to look oneself in the mirror, and a certain self image, than about its possible benefits. Perhaps, the conscientious objector is not egocentric because he refuses to share the risks with his colleagues, as some of the critics of Paredes possibly suspected, but because his chief concern is not to compromise his own principles.13 If loyalty means giving priority to the interests of a particular individual or a group, integrity as a special kind of loyalty can be seen as in a certain manner giving priority to the interests of oneself. Furthermore, when asking for integrity one should always specify that this is, as we have seen, on the precondition that one’s personal principles are good – a quite odd and unsatisfying construction. (On second thought, the difference between integrity and honor is, in this aspect at least, not that big because with honor all depends on whether the norms of the honor group are the right ones, as we have concluded in Chapter 2).

108   Integrity Most of all, however, it is not clear what integrity has to offer that is not covered by virtues that are, in fact, always desirable, such as, for instance, moral courage, or justice – at present missing from all the militaries’ value lists. The latter was deemed the most complete virtue by Aristotle, because he who possesses it can make use of his virtue not only by himself but also in relation with his fellow men; for there are many people who can make use of their virtue in their own affairs, but who are incapable of using it in their relations with others. (Nicomachean Ethics 1029b) The best is not he “who practises virtue toward himself, but who practises it toward others, for that is a hard thing to achieve” (ibid. 1030a). Other candidates could be, for instance, respect for the dignity of all persons, as it appears in the Fundamentals of Canadian Defense Ethics (Robinson 2009: 42), or respect for human life, which has a place on the value list of the Israeli Defense Force (Robinson 2008: 6). Indeed, the latter, respect for human life, might be more in place than the somewhat narrower virtue of justice, as it seems to be in short supply every now and then. For instance, the rise of the number of civilian losses in Afghanistan caused by air power in recent years (Human Rights Watch 2008: 14), mentioned in the previous chapter, suggests that respect for human life is occasionally wanting. So, yes, there is a need for a virtue that is more inclusive and outward looking than the traditional military virtues. Integrity, however, is not the ideal candidate to perform that role (see also Challans 2007: 88). In fact, most exemplars of integrity are acted from principles and values lying outside the actors. Rockwood, notably, later stated in an interview that he had moral obligations surpassing the ones he owed his immediate superiors. These were not obligations to a personal principle, however, as his “cause was the professional and ethical integrity of the Armed Forces.”14 As an officer, Rockwood tried to emulate some carefully picked examples, such as his later defense witness Thompson and Hitler’s adversary and attempted assassinator Von Stauffenberg (Wrage 2002: 47). The latter, a champion of integrity in the eyes of many, was himself, too, not induced into action by personal values as set against those of Nazi Germany, but was, as we have already noted in the preceding chapter, motivated by perceived moral obligation to what Germany should be like. As a side effect, although perhaps not a desirable one in everyone’s opinion, justice or respect for human life as military virtues would provide selective conscientious objectors such as Paredes with a basis that is less overwhelmingly vague than integrity; the virtue that is now often seen as underlying the refusal to partake in a particular mission (compare Robinson 2009).

6 Respect

Introduction The previous chapter ended with the conclusion that the military stands in need of a value more comprehensive than, say, honor, courage, or loyalty, and that respect might just be a suitable candidate. As a virtue that benefits colleagues and outsiders alike, it seems to be in tune with today’s missions, where servicemen often operate among the people. In fact, although not per se a very martial virtue, respect is already present on the value lists of several militaries. While “respect for human life” makes an appearance on the value list of the Israeli Defense Force, and “respect for the dignity of all persons” can be found in the Fundamentals of Canadian Defense Ethics, respect as such is included in the value lists of, for example, the US Army and British Army, and Norway’s Armed Forces (Robinson 2008). In addition, the notion of respect figures prominently in some militaries’ codes of conduct. Nonetheless, this is not the concession to the present tasks of the military it seems; although “respect” certainly sounds comprehensive, and for instance more all encompassing than the already broad values of “respect for human life” and “respect for the dignity of all persons,” it is in fact not that inclusive at all, at least not in the way most militaries interpret it. What is striking is that their definitions limit respect to own personnel, and thus fail to take into account the new circumstances military personnel face today when deployed in faraway countries, especially the circumstance that they often will be doing their job amidst the local population. One of the quite rare articles that appeared on the subject of respect as a military value, “An Exploration of Respect in Army Leadership” in Military Review (H. Keller 2006), a piece on respect as a value for the US Army, does, for instance, not mention the need to respect outsiders in any way. Not that surprising, since the author has the express wish to go beyond respect as (narrowly) defined in the doctrine and leadership manuals on the one hand, yet still uses these documents as stepping stones. A choice that rules out a more inclusive definition of respect; military ethicist Timothy Challans relates, for instance, how early drafts of the Army’s 1999 leadership manual included the notion of respect; in fact, the key feature of respect was that of respecting the enemy

110   Respect on the battlefield. That idea did not survive the staffing process, and even a cursory check of the manual today will reveal that only Americans are mentioned as being recipients of this important value of respect. (2007: 163) At present, the US Army describes respect as, among other things, “trusting that all people have done their jobs and fulfilled their duty.” This definition seems to limit respect to colleagues, as it emphasizes that the Army is a team, and to oneself, as it also mentions self-­respect as a “vital ingredient.” The US Army is not atypical in this restricting of the scope of respect. The Dutch Defense Organization, for one, does not do a whole lot better; its current code of conduct, which we have already encountered in the chapter on loyalty, was introduced in 2007, and the content of it seems to be inspired, not so much by, for instance, the 2006 incidents in Iraq, also described in the chapter on loyalty, which involved outsiders to the organization, but by another incident that made the headlines in 2006: accusations of sexual abuse on the frigate Tjerk Hiddes and elsewhere in the armed forces. A government committee that investigated these incidents recommended that norms should be made explicit, and the new code was a follow-­up on this advice. Due to this background, the code only regulates the behavior of military personnel towards each other, not their behavior towards outsiders. A look at the accompanying explanation shows that even the use of the pronoun “everyone,” in the sentence “I treat everyone with respect,” refers exclusively to colleagues who should be safeguarded against pestering, sexual intimidation, or discrimination. Although it might be true that colleagues, not outsiders, are those who suffer most often from misconduct in the military, this exclusive attention for their well-­being seems a bit too one-­ sided. This is all the more so, given that respect is evidently not a constant-­sum game, meaning that respect for outsiders does not diminish the amount of respect left to show colleagues. Why exactly militaries are reluctant to include outsiders is therefore somewhat of a mystery, especially since respecting outsiders, besides being good in itself, would serve their – and, in the end, our – interests, too. (The Values and Standards of the British Army form somewhat of an exception in stressing the need to treat all people decently, “including civilians, detainees and captured enemy forces” – yet only after having emphasized that one should not harass or discriminate colleagues). As mentioned in the introduction, the “hearts and minds” approach is meant to benefit the local population as well as the militaries that are deployed in their country, and treating the local population with due respect is considered a very important element of that approach.1 To illustrate how this economy of respect works out (and sometimes does not work out) in practice, the next pages recount an argument that has in a certain sense a restricted scope, on the one hand, as it is mainly about the motives behind terrorism and insurgencies (for sure subjects large enough in themselves, though), yet, on the other hand, goes somewhat beyond the level of military operations because it attempts to see current missions in their broader, more

Respect   111 political perspective. The case at hand also illustrates how militaries today do not operate in a vacuum but, more than ever, in a sensitive and complex political environment. Compared to the foregoing chapters, the focus will be less exclusively on the behavior of military personnel and their sense of honor and loyalty, and more on how their behavior can affect outsiders – and their sense of honor. To be a bit more concrete, in recent years several authors have expressed the view that some insight into the way a, real or suspected, lack of respect, sometimes leading to (at times understandable, now and then unwarranted) feelings of humiliation, can influence human interaction, might lead to a somewhat better understanding of the mechanisms behind both today’s terrorism and the recent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. More specifically, these authors believe it is Western cultural and economic hegemony, foreign policies in general and the West’s handling of the Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict more in particular, and insensitivity to migrants at home, but also military presence on “sacred soil” and, on an even more concrete level, behavior of Western troops towards the local population in countries of deployment, that play a role here. Presumably, the resulting feelings of humiliation are among the root causes of the terrorist attacks we have witnessed in recent years in New York, Bali, London, Casablanca, and Madrid, but also, and in fact more often so, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where attacks on Western troops and local government personnel, such as teachers and police officers who are (perceived to be) working on behalf of the West seem to have turned into a daily routine. At this point, the difference between terrorism and insurgency (which are, of course, two different phenomena, as the former is a tactic while the latter involves a movement that either might, or might not, opt for that tactic) somewhat blurs. For us, the relevance of the humiliation-­leads-to-­terrorism line of argument is that, according to some, a similar line of reasoning can explain the strong resistance against Western military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least to some degree. In any case, many authors today hold that humiliation partly shaped the world military personnel enter, when they today disembark their plane or ship. According to some of these authors, they even contribute to the problem from the moment they deploy by their being there. To be able to explain the argument that a (real or perceived) lack of respect can lead to different types of violence, it must first be established what concepts such as respect, self-­respect, dignity, honor, and, especially, humiliation stand for. To a certain extent, of course, this will turn out to be a re-­engagement with some of the terms encountered in Chapter 2.

Respect, self-­respect, dignity, honor, and humiliation Respect, although sometimes listed as a virtue on virtue lists in the military, brings us in effect from virtue ethics to duty-­based ethics and, consequently, from Aristotle to Kant. For the latter respect (Achtung) was, as he stated in his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, something we owed to all rational beings because of their capacity of being free and autonomous, i.e., able to

112   Respect follow the moral law they set to themselves. In fact, this is the literal meaning of the word autonomous (and, incidentally, behind the German Bundeswher’s concept of Innere Führung). In their capacity of being able to lay down moral laws to themselves, these rational beings as envisaged by Kant (who most of the time avoided the term human beings for them, as he did not think that was the same thing) possess intrinsic dignity, that is, regardless of their social status and achievements, and it is on the basis of this dignity that they exact respect (Grundlegung BA 79). Such possessors of dignity are, as he himself famously put it in his second formulation of the categorical imperative, never to be treated as means only, but always, at least partly, as ends in themselves (ibid. 66–7). Where loyalty, although it always has an object, is in fact depending on the preferences and likings of a subject (the one who is loyal), respect is “object-­ generated,” which basically means that respect can be claimed by a person regardless of our own inclinations, attachments, and tastes (Dillon 2008). In that respect there is, of course, a first important difference between honor ethics and Kantian ethics, as honor is a hierarchical concept (see for a different view Welsh 2008), while respect is a fairly egalitarian one. That is, as long as we are talking about what is nowadays sometimes called “recognition respect,” due to all persons, and not about “appraisal respect,” based on conduct or character, and often called esteem (see Darwall 2006: 122). This still leaves somewhat unclear, however, what respect actually is, probably also to those who these days insist so much on getting it. First, there is another important difference between honor and respect, which is even more far-­reaching than the just-­mentioned difference between a hierarchical and an egalitarian virtue. If we say that someone possesses the virtue of honor, we in general mean that he or she behaves honorably, and claims his or her due share of honor for it. We do not mean that such a person is particularly good in honoring others. Respect, evidently, is a different matter: possessing the virtue of respect is, although those who demand respect the loudest might perceive this differently, not about claiming respect for oneself, but about having respect for others that do not necessarily belong to one’s own group. Where honor is about getting recognition from one’s peers, the virtue of respect is much more inclusive: it is about having respect for insiders and outsiders alike. For instance, respect, first of all, sets important limits on what we can and, much more so, cannot do to others; what it means to respect someone is often negatively formulated, and as a rule implies that this someone should not be discriminated, abused, harassed, etc. – the things military codes of conduct forbid, albeit sometimes solely with regard to colleagues. Second, more positively phrased, respect signifies giving proper attention to someone, and seeing him or her for what he or she is, as opposed to an attitude of indifference or even neglect (Dillon 2008), which can be considered disrespectful. The sequence here is not coincidental: one could say, and especially as far as the behavior of military personnel towards the local population is concerned, that the first meaning of respect is, although certainly not more laudable, of higher priority than the second, as it sets the absolute minimum one should at all times live by.

Respect   113 Next, the respect we owe to ourselves is self-­respect, which is, in John Rawls’ view, “perhaps the most important primary good” (A Theory of Justice §67; see also Margalit 1996: 124), and today, there are not that many authors who disagree with him on that particular point (see also Dillon 2008). In Chapter 2 it was noted that honor concerns both the value that someone allocates to himself and the value others place on him (Cooley 1922: 238), and we see this duality still present in Rawls’ view of this notion. In his often-­quoted definition, self-­respect “first of all includes a person’s sense of his own value,” yet self-­respect also rests on “finding our own person and deeds appreciated and confirmed by others” (ibid.; see also Margalit 1996: 124). Stressing the latter element, legal and moral philosopher Joseph Raz writes, somewhat politically correct, that “self-­respect requires the absence of shame (. . .). The self-­respect of those who are ashamed of their nationality, gender, sexual preference, or race, for example, is damaged” (1995: 24). In this aspect, self-­respect is thus somewhat akin to honor, in that they both are, at least partly, about being valued by others. Self-­respect should be distinguished from self-­esteem, however, a ranking concept based on the beliefs people have about their own achievements; a result of effort, or birth into a class or ethnic group (Margalit 1996: 44–8). As said, the basis for our claim to respect is, according to Kant, the already-­ mentioned notion of dignity, an etymological descendant of the Latin dignitas, or social honor; dignity replaced honor in its role of status in a hierarchically ordered society (Taylor 1994: 27; Berger 1984: 151). As we have already noted in Chapter 2, and somewhat similar to the difference between self-­respect and self-­esteem, dignity is different from dignitas (something not everyone shares and meaningless when evenly distributed) in the important aspect that it is inclusive and lacks degrees. Because of its hierarchical character, dignitas can be held to be the morally less relevant of the two, at least from a present-­day perspective (see for instance Margalit 1996: 42, 43, 51). According to Peter Berger, emphasizing its egalitarian character, dignity, contrary to its Roman predecessor, “relates to the intrinsic humanity divested of all socially imposed roles or norms. It pertains to the self as such, to the individual regardless of his position in society” (1984: 153). And regardless of merit, it could be added. The difference between both notions becomes even clearer if we remember, also from Chapter 2, how Coriolanus, Catiline, and Caesar all did their part in bringing the Roman republic to shambles with their opportunistic actions that were for the most part motivated by a concern for their dignitas. Although dignity, just like honor, can be a ground for action (Welsh 2008: 200), it as a rule will not lead to these kinds of exploits of which the sole aim is personal aggrandizement. Notwithstanding these differences, Berger writes, both dignity and honor bridge self and society, and they equally “require a deliberate effort of the will for their maintenance – one must strive for them, often against the malevolent opposition of others – thus honour and dignity become goals of moral enterprise” (1984: 153). Berger seems to point to another aspect of dignity here, one which does not so much refer to its “intrinsic” side, but has everything to do with dignity’s

114   Respect descent from honor and dignitas: dignity can also signify the external aspect of the self-­respect people feel for themselves as human beings (Margalit 1996: 51–2). Dignity, in this meaning, is somewhat less egalitarian, and seems to be the thing we refer to when we say that someone behaves with “great dignity.” Even though it is something external, people attach great value to their dignity in this sense too, and hurting it is often considered humiliating. With reason, because dignity, as the external aspect of self-­respect, “is not a show: it is not pretending to have self-­respect, but the demonstration of it” (ibid. 53). Honor, then, lies at the heart of self-­respect as a form of personal honor, and dignity as the classless descendant of social honor; both self-­respect and dignity are partly (though not exclusively) externally determined. It is especially this external aspect that is important in this context. One could say that it is the dependence of self-­respect and dignity on the opinions of others that makes people liable to humiliation (various characters of fiction spring to mind, from Achilles to Julien Sorel from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black). Conversely, someone without a sense of honor probably cannot be humiliated (a state of mind some Cynics and Christian hermits strived for). Emphasizing this external element, and testifying to honor’s close tie with humiliation (and for that reason quoted here instead of Chapter 2), Ian Miller defines, in his book on humiliation, honor as the keen sensitivity to the experience of humiliation and shame, sensitivity manifested by the desire to be envied by others and the propensity to envy the successes of others. To simplify greatly, honor is that disposition which makes one act to shame others who have shamed oneself, to humiliate others who have humiliated oneself. The honorable person is one whose self-­ esteem and social standing is intimately dependent on the esteem or envy he or she actually elicits in others. (1993: 84) This definition by Miller draws attention to the rather disturbing fact that people with a strong sense of honor might have a tendency to do whatever is necessary to even the score. Revenge, although leaving the situation more or less unaltered seeing that the underlying inequalities persist, can perhaps to some extent lift the dishonor felt. This hunger for retribution springs from what has been called “reflexive honor” (Bowman 2006: 6): the need to get back, if only because not doing so is humiliating in itself. Reflexive honor, probably a factor in some of the incidents involving military personnel described in the previous chapters (Haditha seems to be an example), should be distinguished from cultural honor, to be found in “the traditions, stories and habits of thought of a particular society” about, for instance, the proper use of violence (ibid.). Humiliation, clearly more sited in the domain of honor and shame than that of conscience and guilt, can subsequently be defined as the injury of someone’s self-­respect or dignity (either as “intrinsic humanity” or the external aspect of self-­respect). This definition comes, as much in this section, from Avishai

Respect   115 Margalit’s The Decent Society (1996: 9, 51), written from the perspective that honor and humiliation ought to be central in political thought because they are so in people’s lives (ibid. p.  ix). Humiliation is as a rule (though not always) about the social goods we are all equally entitled to in our quality of human beings, such as self-­respect and dignity, and thus not so much about the hierarchical notions of self-­esteem or dignitas. It is, for instance, on the basis of this distinction between dignitas and dignity that Margalit distinguishes mere insult from humiliation: the former “denotes injury to one’s social honor,” whereas the latter “injures one’s sense of intrinsic value” (ibid. 119–20). Humiliation often consists of rejecting a person from the human common wealth, for instance, by ignoring him or her, or treating him or her as subhuman (ibid. 100–12). Leaving aside the private sphere, this humiliation can be seen at two levels at least: within a society and on a global level. Margalit himself focuses on the former, where most authors central to this chapter mainly write about the latter. Writing about humiliation within a society, Margalit makes a distinction between humiliation in a normative and a psychological sense, which is, although admittedly problematic, of some relevance here: the former means having a sound reason to feel humiliated, the latter means feeling humiliated, and, although most authors stick to the second meaning, both meanings do not always apply to the same case (ibid. 9). As we will see, there is no reason to think that this distinction is less valid on the international level. In addition, Margalit stresses that not only persons but also conditions can humiliate, and he mentions the Arabs working in the occupied territories in Israel as an example of people in humiliating conditions, with colonialism as another case (ibid. 101–2, 150). The fact that conditions can humiliate also shows that intent to humiliate is not a prerequisite for humiliation to occur, although humiliation is always a result of human (in)actions (ibid. 9) – humiliating people by overlooking them is an example. A final distinction: the type of humiliation Margalit writes about – treating others as subhuman – will often amount to what can be called humiliation “with a big H,” as opposed to humiliation “with a small h.” The distinction is Ian Miller’s, who defines humiliation with a small h as the deflation of pretension, and as such it is “the consequence of trying to live up to what we have no right to” (1993: 133, 137, 145). Humiliation with a big H, on the other hand, also involves the deflation of pretension, but in that case, “the claim of the torturer, the concentration camp guard, the ideologies of ethnic, racial and religious genocide, is that the humanity of their victims is a pretense” (ibid. 165). It seems clear that those humiliated with a big H are, as a rule, a lot more justified in their complaints than those humiliated with a small h, if only because the former more often than not is accompanied by a lack of respect for the life of the humiliated – a point we will take up again later in this chapter. This distinction between two forms of humiliation somewhat nuances the aforementioned idea that humiliation in generally relates to dignity, and not to dignitas. Humiliation with a small h has, in fact, everything to do with breaches of someone’s status, or social honor, and thus does to some extent resemble the Roman notion of dignitas, whereas humiliation with a big H, of course, involves the morally considerably more important notion of human dignity.

116   Respect

Honor as a ground for action As we have seen in Chapter 2, honor, certainly insofar as it is seen as something that depends on the good opinion of others, has clearly lost much of its appeal in modern Western societies. The notion has allegedly become obsolete (Berger 1984), and the term itself has, at least outside the military (and some pockets of resistance at the periphery of society), all but disappeared from our moral vocabulary. The idea that terrorism and insurgencies could be a product of injured honor will appear improbable to those who deny all reality to the notion of honor and, consequently, to humiliation, reducing both to upshots of too vivid an imagination (however, remember from Chapter 2 that Mandeville, although he deemed honor a chimera, did not think he would react very philosophically if someone were to spit in his face). As we also have seen in Chapter 2, though, honor was deemed very important in the West all through the nineteenth century (and thus far beyond the enlightenment that supposedly brought the watershed between Western and Islamic civilization), while the honor-­driven practice of dueling – getting a shot at revenge after being disrespected – even persisted until the dawn of the twentieth century (and, not coincidentally, not in the least within the military). Although it is true that the word honor has since then lost its place to some extent, the notion itself is in all likelihood still important in the form of the need for dignity, status, recognition, and, not to forget, respect (Walzer 1983: 252). Numerous authors, for instance, have observed that, nowadays, it seems that some demand respect quite vehemently, and are in fact especially sensitive about being disrespected, i.e., being “dissed.” And as we also have already noted, honor definitely still has its role in the military. More relevant here: whether or not they are waning in the West, in the eyes of many observers the notions of honor and shame still appear to be important in most of the societies Western military personnel is deployed in; the reverse image of the consensus that guilt replaced shame in the West is the equally widely held view that, for instance, the Arab world is still a shame culture – that, too, appears to be beyond dispute these days.2 If this latter view is at least partly accurate, then it seems that there are, on second thought, good reasons to take honor and humiliation seriously as motivational factors, if only because honor is important to many people in the countries Western military personnel is deployed in. At present, some Islamists appear to underwrite many of these somewhat general observations, and especially the one that “the most basic sense of honor” has disappeared in the West, its permissiveness in their view being a clear sign of this (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 134).3 Different from some of today’s Western authors (such as those that made an appearance in Chapter 2), they do not see this loss of honor as a moral improvement. On the contrary, some of them hold that it is as a result of honor’s demise that Western culture can be characterized as an individualistic culture, where not only honor, but also a sense of community, and the related willingness to make sacrifices, are no longer present (Lewis 2003: 17) – a view that is shared by more conservative Western

Respect   117 authors. However, apart from the fact that the view that community and honor have disappeared from the stage in the West is not necessarily true, as we have just noted, this negative view of the West still does not explain the terrorist attacks we have witnessed in recent years: it seems unlikely that terrorism is the product of feelings of cultural superiority alone. For an explanation, its flip side should be considered too: sensitivity to honor and shame, whether or not it is enhanced by a sense of pre-­eminence, can make people vulnerable to feelings of humiliation. Margalit, for instance, writes about humiliation within pluralistic societies that a “vulnerable group with a history of humiliations and suspicion of its surroundings, especially suspicion of the dominant culture, is liable to interpret any criticism as humiliation” (1996: 181), while Miller points out that people with lower status even tend to feel humiliated more often than they actually have reason to (1993: 144). On this particular point, what holds true within a society might very well also be true on a worldwide scale: in today’s world, citizens of some non-­Western societies might fear they are the lower-­status people Miller is referring to. As said, some authors see in these notions of respect, dignity, honor, and humiliation, and the cultural differences that many see between the West and the rest of the world in the valuation of these notions, the key to understanding the deeper psychological mechanisms behind both terrorism and the intensity of the resistance met by Western troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least to some extent. Some even go a bit further than that. In his Arguing about War Michael Walzer writes that, whereas not many people are justifying terrorism, some go beyond merely looking for explanations, and are finding excuses as well. To be exact, they suggest that terrorism, a concept that is probably “essentially contested,” yet by most accounts does involve the killing of innocent civilians (Primoratz 2004), under certain circumstances, for instance as a “last resort,” can be pardonable. Although terrorism is almost universally condemned, writes Walzer, this practice of finding excuses is not, and its wrongfulness, which lies in the fact that it “undercuts our knowledge of the evil,” has to be argued (2004: 52). As Walzer sees it, “the real cause of terrorism is the decision to launch a terrorist campaign” (2004: 62; see for a similar view Elshtain 2007). In fact, as we will see below, most authors clearly do their best to stay aloof from explicitly excusing terrorism, looking only for causes in an attempt to explain it. Nevertheless, explaining can sometimes border on implicitly excusing. For instance, in the case of terrorism doing so in the guise of identifying causes now and then appears to deny the terrorist’s free will, absolving him somewhat from his responsibility. (We saw a similar phenomenon in the discussion of the scientific view of courage in Chapter 3: trying to explain why some soldiers break down reduces the blameworthiness of it to some extent.) That, now, appears to bring us on some rather slippery ground.4 As soon as one accepts that humiliation and insult are important motivational factors, main causes of terrorism even, part of the responsibility for at least some of the recent terrorist attacks aimed at the West suddenly seems to lie at the doorstep, not of the terrorist, but of the West itself (see also Bowman 2006: 232). Although one could, in response to Walzer, simply state that “learning what motivates enemies does not

118   Respect mean sympathising with them,” and urge one’s critics “to stop confusing justification with explanation” (Burke 2005a; see also Saurette 2006: 518–19), this presents a source of possible confusion, nonetheless. Understanding is a somewhat ambiguous term, which can mean anything ranging from acquiring an insight into, to accepting, or even supporting, something – say, terrorist attacks. Looking for explanations for a seemingly wrongful act, excusing that act, and justifying it are, evidently, three different undertakings, although not always easy to tell apart. While it is more or less clear what explaining signifies, i.e., looking for causes, the difference between excusing and justifying is possibly somewhat more elusive. Essentially, excusing means that an act is wrong, for instance killing an innocent civilian, yet in light of the circumstances is only deemed blamable to a certain extent, for example when the killing of the innocent civilian was necessary to rescue many others. The example is of course debatable (and has been extensively debated in moral philosophy and military ethics alike; see for instance Nagel 1972; Murphy 1973), and that is illustrative of the complexities attached to drawing a line between what can be excusable on rare occasions, and what under no circumstances. For instance, debates on the “justifiableness” of torture seem, in reality, to center around that same distinction between excusable (and hence not justified) and not excusable (Davis 2005), although the Bush government did try to lend some legitimacy (and thus justifiableness) to “torture lite” and “enhanced interrogation.” Truly justified deeds form a more straightforward category: an act is justified when it is not wrong in the first place, which implies that there is no blame to be attributed to begin with (see also Woodruff 1982) – as is the case when someone kills his or her attacker (or when a state resorts to war) in self-­defense, for example. Interestingly, these distinctions surface in discussions on military ethics and terrorism alike. The focus here is first on terrorism; as said, it appears that some authors see recent instances of terrorism as partly brought about by Western policies.5 Evidently, the idea that humiliation is behind recent terrorist attacks, whether as a view harbored by Western observers as an explanation or by terrorism’s perpetrators as a justification, is open to quite some objections – the latter variety of course much more so than the former. The focus, one could say, therefore has to be on the former, explaining variety, since its problematical character, especially insofar as it borders on excusing, is less apparent and for that reason needs some more “systematic critique” (Walzer 2004: 52) than the justifying type. It is, to mention just one objection, not at all clear whether or not the majority of terrorists actually act out of feelings of humiliation. A host of other (though sometimes related) reasons, for instance, envy, personal failure, or the wish for self-­glorification, may well play an important role, of course (see for instance Borowitz 2005; Goldhagen 2007).6 For example, “the hundreds of groups, cells, movements, even individuals, lumped together under the rubric ‘Islamic Terrorism’ is enormously diverse. Individuals and groups turn to terrorism for a variety of reasons, some of which, though not all, may be shared by others” (Burke 2004a: 24). Still, even the author of this passage, the Observer’s Jason Burke, holds the view that humiliation is one of the reasons shared by many terrorists, and many others seem to agree.

Respect   119

Humiliation and terrorism: the global level It is, indeed, humiliation by Western dominance in the world, but, as indicated above, also Western foreign policies and military presence in several Arab countries, that are said to have contributed to the rise of especially Islamist terrorism over the last few decades (see for instance Lewis 2003: 16) as well as to the intensity of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some authors who cite humiliation as an important motive claim that this is a factor which is generally overlooked. Thomas Friedman, for instance, writes that if he has “learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation” (2003; see for somewhat similar remarks Bowman 2006: 22; Saurette 2006: 496). However, as a matter of fact, quite a number of authors that have been looking for “a root cause” behind the terrorist attacks of recent years have put forward the view that humiliation plays an important role here, and that at least some of the terrorists feel that their culture is superior to Western individualism, yet at the same time fear that in today’s world their way of life is threatened and that their honor is at stake. This line of thought has developed into a broadly shared point of view. In addition to Friedman himself, Samuel Huntington (in his The Clash of Civilizations), Dominique Moïsi (The Clash of Emotions), historians of Islam Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (in their Occidentalism), Al Qaeda expert Jason Burke, and, probably foremost, Harvard University’s terrorism specialist Jessica Stern, among many others, have dwelled with different amounts of empathy (although always staying clear of excusing, let alone justifying) on this relationship between humiliation and violence, turning the idea that such a relationship exists into something close to accepted knowledge. Huntington, for instance, rather bluntly stating that it is not Islamic fundamentalism that poses a problem to the West, but Islam, writes about Islam as a civilization whose people “are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power” (1996: 217). They share this sense of superiority with the West, together with a conviction of universality, and a desire to expand (ibid. 217–18). Yet, despite its diminishing role in the world, the West is still able to sustain this feeling of superiority (ibid. 218). In Muslim countries, on the contrary, according to a number of authors lagging behind in more than one respect (see for instance Lewis 2003: 87–92; Hanson 2002: 270; see also Moïsi 2007: 10), “the modern successes of Christian empires were felt as an intolerable humiliation” (Buruma and Margalit 2004: 40). As a result, some Islamists supposedly feel that their way of life is threatened by Western culture, which is seen as inferior, morally degenerate, and, consequently, weak, but also as seductive at the same time (Huntington 1996: 213). According to the already-­mentioned Burke (probably best known for his book Al Qaeda), writing in general with somewhat more nuance (and empathy) than Huntington and focusing more explicitly on the relationship between humiliation and the rise of radicalism, the motives that lie beneath the rise in Muslim radicalism and Islamist terrorism are more political than religious (2004a: 24–6; see also Pape 2005: 16–17). In his view, “the mother lode of resentment underlying the appeal of radical Islam” is

120   Respect the profound sense of humiliation, disenfranchisement and emasculation felt by hundreds of millions of young Muslim men faced with the apparent military, political and, increasingly, cultural dominance of the West. This is increased by a collective memory of the past glories of Islamic civilization. (2004b) Elsewhere, Burke states that the perception that a belligerent West is set on the humiliation, division and eventual conquest of the Islamic world is at the root of Muslim violence. The militants believe they are fighting a last-­ditch battle for the survival of their society, culture, religion and way of life. (2004c) Looking back on her interviews with terrorists for her book Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, terrorism researcher Stern has stated somewhat similarly that she came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was not poverty or human-­rights abuses, but perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied – leaders and followers. (2003) As Stern sees it, the “purpose of terrorist violence, according to its advocates, is to restore dignity. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers but the perpetrators and their sympathizers” (2004a). The intellectual backers of terrorism she refers to here are, of course, not so much explaining or excusing terrorism by referring to humiliation, seeing it as a cause, as justifying it, presenting humiliation as a valid reason. It is at this juncture that the explainers and the justifiers part company, the first as a general rule (though not always) doing considerably less than excusing, the latter clearly a lot more. Although they seem to follow roughly the same line of reasoning by underwriting the popular thesis that it is humiliation that causes terrorism, they go considerably further than merely explaining when they invoke humiliation, stating, for instance, that violence “restores the dignity of humiliated youth” (Stern 2003). According to at least one observer Osama bin Laden, for instance, “seized on the notion of honor,” blaming corrupt rulers supported by the West “for robbing the Muslims of their honor and dignity,” and suggesting violence as the only solution (Ahmed 2004: 57–9).7 As Stern sums it up: The “New World Order” is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims’ pride in the face of humiliation. (2003)8

Respect   121 However, even if humiliation can “explain” terrorism to some extent, this of course does not justify terrorism, just like injured family honor does not amount to a legitimate reason for honor killings, no matter how important the family honor is to the murderer. Margalit, although writing on humiliation, nonetheless depicts physical cruelty as the greater evil (1996: 148), and it is this evil terrorists have taken refuge to. As Walzer writes in his Just and Unjust Wars, “the moral significance of [notions about the honor of states] is dubious at best. Insults are not occasions for war, any more than they are (these days) occasions for duels” (1992: 81).9 Although Walzer refers to states here, there is no compelling reason why terrorists should have more leeway in this. One could even say that terrorism, furthered by humiliation or not, might itself very well amount to humiliation, as its perpetrator denies “the peoplehood and humanity of the groups among whom he or she finds victims” (Walzer 2004: 59).10 In spite of these arguments, injured honor seems to play a role in the motivation of at least some terrorists; there will always remain a handful who consider themselves to have a very sound reason to feel humiliated, and, notwithstanding the fact that humiliation forms no legitimate ground for terrorism, are not able or willing to react in any other way than a violent one.11 More often than not, revenge seems to be the motivation (Moïsi 2007: 10). The question whether or not that is something explainable, excusable, or even justifiable, is, although interesting, also fairly academic, since it will not alter the results very much. In the final chapter of her book on terrorism, Stern states that she considers humiliation an “important risk factor” for the future (2004b). Having said that, it seems clear that the vast majority of Muslims (although they may feel humiliated by, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, or the presence of Western troops elsewhere in the Muslim world) have no sympathy for the Islamist cause, do moreover not sympathize with the terrorists’ methods, and reject their extremism (Burke 2004a: 35). Especially attacks like the one in Madrid on March 11, 2004, taking innocent victims but with the attackers making sure not to be killed in the process, might alienate moderate Muslims from the radical ones, diminishing the number of supporting sympathizers terrorists are depending on for support, money, and a safe refuge (Burke 2005b).

Humiliation and insurgency: the local level Even if it is true, however, that some terrorists take action from feelings of humiliation, this, of course, still does not mean that they actually have much of a reason to feel humiliated in the first place. It seems, for instance, that not all humiliation they might suffer amounts to humiliation with a big H. Although a number of them might feel that they are treated as sub-­human – Stern holds that people who join religious terrorist groups “start out feeling humiliated, enraged that they are viewed by some other as second class” (2004b: 281–2) – part of the frustration underlying Islamist terrorism appears to be a consequence of not being able to live up to the pretension of being a superior civilization.12 The founder of the Kashmiri militant group Muslim Janbaz Force, for instance, told

122   Respect Stern that he started the movement because “Muslims have been overpowered by the West. Our ego hurts. We are not able to live up to our own standards for ourselves” (2004a). Evidently, this deflation of pretension is humiliation with a small h, resembling a breach of someone’s dignitas in older times. It touches on someone’s self-­esteem more than on his or her self-­respect.13 It seems, all things considered, that most of those who bring up humiliation when they justify the therapeutic violence which aims to restore dignity are at worst humiliated in a rather indirect way, being treated, or considering themselves being treated, as second class as a group, by something as abstract as the West, i.e., the humiliation at the level of civilizations that has been referred to often in recent years and that was also central in much of the argumentation of terrorism’s explainers. To many, this humiliation on an international level would probably seem somewhat too abstract, and, moreover, now and then rather hard to relate to. What’s more, it is more likely to form a motive for terrorism than for the recent (and in the context of this book more relevant) insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are, however, also those who have undergone very direct forms of humiliation of the kind that would probably bring any person to despair, regardless of whether one belongs to a shame culture or a guilt culture, and that are not so easy to ignore as the “global humiliation” both terrorism’s backers (such as bin Laden and al-­Zawahiri) and its explainers are referring to. Leaving the global level for the more concrete, when she writes about “real or perceived national humiliation by Israeli policies,” Stern makes the important observation that even “repeated, small humiliations” can “add up to a feeling of nearly unbearable despair and frustration, and a willingness on the part of some to do anything – even commit atrocities – in the belief that attacking the oppressor will restore their sense of dignity” (2004b: 62). The proverbial young Palestinian at an Israeli checkpoint who has to undergo some indignities before being allowed through seems to be a case in point; John Elster has observed that “most writers on the Palestinian suicide bombers emphasize the intense resentment caused by the daily humiliations that occur in interaction with the Israeli forces” (2005: 245; see also Moghadam 2003: 73; Held 2008: 26; Buruma and Margalit 2004: 138). These remarks bring us on somewhat more familiar ground, as it brings to mind the presence of large numbers of Western military personnel manning checkpoints, patrolling, and searching houses in faraway countries, and it has to be feared that the “repeated, small humiliations” Stern refers to are by now possibly also familiar to, for instance, some Iraqis and Afghanis, which might increase the likelihood that they resort to violence. Without a doubt, however, possible offensive behavior of Western troops in their dealings with the local population is often unintentional (see also Fontan 2006). In Iraq this unintentional humiliation consisted, for example, of the fact that it was allied troops that had to do what the Iraqis themselves could not, doing away with the Saddam Hussein regime – as one Iraqi put it: “The greatest humiliation of all was to see foreigners topple Saddam, not because we loved him, but because we could not do it ourselves” (ibid. 220). And “there is no greater shame than to see your country occupied,” said an Iraqi insurgent to the

Respect   123 Observer (Burke 2004d). Later, there were stories of rape of Iraqi women by other Iraqis – but perceived to be a result of the failure of coalition troops to provide the Iraqis with a reasonably secure environment (Fontan 2006: 223).14 Some of the more specific instances of unintended humiliation by occupying forces in their dealings with the local population might very well be a result of not having enough knowledge of local sensitivities, and thus the consequence of “a lack of cultural relativity in their occupation ‘technique’” (ibid: 219). These are, what Friedman calls, “the daily slights and miscommunications that come with any occupation” (2003). In other instances, though, for example when interrogating prisoners in Iraq, it has been a deliberate tactic, based on the handbook assumption (also held by those who explain terrorism by referring to humiliation) that Arab culture is a shame culture, making use of supposed taboos on dogs, nudity, and homosexuality (see also Saurette 2006: 509). The resulting injuries to, for instance, the Iraqis’ and Afghans’ personal and social honor are, evidently, humiliating to them, and it is likely that, as some have claimed, misconduct by Western military personnel strengthens the resentment against the West and makes recruitment easier for both the insurgency and the terrorist groups the coalition troops are trying to fight. “The word humiliation, alas, is now coming up in Iraq as well,” Stern wrote in an essay published seven months after the invasion of Iraq, which in her view only strengthened local terrorist groups (2003; see also Bergen and Lind 2007). Three years later, she described how subsequent incidents such as those in Haditha and at Abu Ghraib had made those terrorist groups even stronger (2006a), while “interrogation techniques intended to extract information by humiliating the enemy help our enemies ‘prove’ that humiliating Muslims is our goal” (2006b). Political scientist Victoria Fontan, posing the question “why a growing majority of Iraqis has chosen to resort to violence in order to bring an end to the occupation of Iraq” (2006: 220), provides us herself with an answer along similar lines by pointing to humiliation as an important catalyst for the growth of the insurgency (ibid. 218). Partly based on participant observation in Fallujah in 2004, Fontan claims that (also in her view in most cases unintended) humiliation by occupying troops contributed to the rise of the insurgency in Iraq in significant ways. In Stern’s view, “events in Iraq have shown that a war cannot be prosecuted against terrorists without giving some thought to what motivates new recruits to the terror cause” (2004d), and in her opinion humiliation is the biggest factor in it. As Challans describes it in his Awakening Warrior, no doubt thinking about the Iraq war, “each war spawns new threats of largely its own creation” (2007: 116). This view is underlined by the bipartisan US Senate Armed Services Committee’s report, which states that the harsh treatment of prisoners “increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies” (US Senate Committee on Armed Services 2008: p. xii).15

124   Respect

Explaining (not excusing) disrespectful behavior: the situational view According to that same committee, however, many in Abu Ghraib felt that their techniques to “soften up” prisoners were permitted, among other things because of the Department of Justice’s redefinition of torture, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s decision in December 2002 to allow the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay (such as the removal of clothing and the use of fear of dogs), and President Bush’s memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. For these reasons, the detainee abuse that harmed the West’s cause in Iraq so much was probably not, as some maintained, a matter of “a few bad apples” (ibid.). That same phrase was, incidentally, also used, equally unfounded (in that it likewise disregards the organizational context), regarding the Canadian Airbornes who killed the Somali teenager Shidane Arone, an incident described in Chapter 3. Seeing that the information extracted from prisoners by using harsh interview techniques has time and again proven to be unreliable (see also Shue 2006; Miles 2006: 7–13), it has to be feared that most of the ill-­treatment of prisoners in recent years never was intended to serve any real purpose to begin with; the sheer possession of power is, under certain circumstances, sometimes by itself enough to induce people to misuse it. Such was shown in social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford prison experiment of 1971 in which a team of researchers divided a group of undergraduates in two groups, one playing the role of prisoners, the other that of guards. Within days the latter got so absorbed in their roles that the experiment had to be stopped because they started humiliating prisoners in ways that were in fact, according to Zimbardo at least, very reminiscent of the images that many years later would come out of Abu Ghraib (2007: 328). Zimbardo argues, and quite convincingly, not only that some of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators had never showed any signs of being morally substandard prior to the scandal, but also that it was most likely the hopeless situation (understaffed in an overcrowded prison, with daily mortar and rocket attacks, and pressure from above to break prisoners who were said to be responsible for attacks on American troops “outside”) they found themselves in that made disaster close to unavoidable (2007: 324–443). Although most people tend to take a “dispositional view,” a “situational view” (essentially also the view taken by those who seek to explain terrorism) might sometimes be more in place (ibid. 6).16 In this case, for instance, “the military and civilian chain of command had built a ‘bad barrel’ in which a bunch of good soldiers became transformed into ‘bad apples’” (ibid. p.  x). Although not failing to mention that his sympathies were with Abu Ghraib whistleblower Joe Darby, Zimbardo nonetheless acted as a defense witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who, despite Zimbardo’s efforts, was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the scandal. In addition, there is, as Zimbardo’s colleague Albert Bandura has argued, the connected problem that people with high ethical standards can behave unethi-

Respect   125 cally because they find ways to justify their behavior, and as a result are able to avoid feelings of guilt or shame that would normally follow not living up to one’s ethical standards (that, as such, do not necessarily erode). According to Bandura, “there are many social and psychological manoeuvres by which moral self-­sanctions can be disengaged from inhumane conduct” (1999: 194). Such maneuvers include moral justification (it is for a good cause), advantageous comparison (the other side behaves worse), the displacement and diffusion of responsibility (basically the problem of the many hands – something that has gotten a new relevance with the emergence of network-­centric warfare), the dehumanization of enemy forces during wartime, and the use of euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” “servicing the target” (ibid. 195–203), and, at present, “torture lite” and “enhanced interrogation” (Wolfendale 2009: 53–4). Zimbardo, in turn, showed how many of these maneuvers played a role in the Abu Ghraib abuse, although here, as is the case with terrorism, a search for causes “does not negate the responsibility of these MPs, nor their guilt; explanation and understanding do not excuse such misdeeds” (2007: 445). Especially dehumanization, a notion fairly similar to humiliation, often plays an important role in making unethical conduct easier, and in fact consists of purposely disrespecting people in that they are not seen for what they are, but for something less, e.g., gooks for communist soldiers during the Vietnam War, or cockroaches, as Tutsis were called by Hutu extremists (see also Slim 2007: 218). An unpublished US Army general’s report on Haditha found that statements made by their chain of command “had the potential to desensitize the Marines to concern for the Iraqi populace and portray them all as the enemy even if they are noncombatants” (Bargewell 2007). Some hold that dehumanization is a policy in the Israeli-­occupied territories, too. In the conclusions of the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, the much debated Goldstone report (about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that lasted from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009), we read that there appears to have been an assault on the dignity of the people. This was seen not only in the use of human shields and unlawful detentions sometimes in unacceptable conditions, but also in the vandalizing of houses when occupied and the way in which people were treated when their houses were entered. The graffiti on the walls, the obscenities and often racist slogans, all constituted an overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population. (United Nations Human Rights Council 2009: 407) The most effective remedy for who wants to prevent unethical conduct, according to Bandura, consists of “humanization,” a not so clearly defined concept that, not surprisingly, seems to be the opposite of humiliation, as it includes the affirmation of common humanity, instead of distancing oneself “from others or divesting them from human qualities” (1999: 202–3). Basically, as was also shown by the famous Milgram experiments on obedience, it is difficult to be

126   Respect cruel, or indifferent, as long as the other has a face. At a time when unmanned aerial vehicles take out insurgents from afar, with someone at the remotes in Qatar someone who thinks that his job is “like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool” (P. W. Singer 2009: 332), that face is most probably not always there. It’s hard to imagine how one can respect the local population, as said a vital element of the hearts and minds approach, from, for instance, a control room in Nevada (where the pilots of Predators and Reapers mostly work from). With such a distance – physical, but also psychological – between a soldier and the horrors of war, it has to be feared that killing might get a lot easier (see also ibid. 395–6). That latter remark brings us, briefly, from respect per se to respect for human life. Evidently, the latter, respect for something, is very different from respect per se, which normally signifies the respect we show to our fellow humans, and which was central to most of the above. As far as “respect for something” is concerned, it is clear that one can have respect for virtually everything, ranging from traffic rules and people’s religious feelings to the global environment. Respect for human life, however, although obviously different from respect as such, nonetheless does seem to border on it in its negative formulation (i.e., insofar it is about what we cannot do to others) at least to some extent, if only because one cannot plausibly claim to respect someone without respecting his right to life. The already-­mentioned Goldstone report seems to point to that relation between respect, and respect for life, when it states that, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead numerous civilians who came into contact with the Israeli armed forces during the military operation recounted shocking stories of humiliation that would certainly be in stark contravention of the principle of respect for human dignity, which forms the core of all human rights and fundamental freedoms. (United Nations Human Rights Council 2009: 232) This remark comes just after having described how blindfolded and handcuffed civilians were forced to enter houses that might be booby-­trapped. One more illustration of not respecting the right to life of civilians (a right, incidentally, certainly not respected by Hamas) in this war forms the in itself legal yet, it seems, rather careless and indiscriminate use of white phosphorous munitions, be it as an obscurant or as an incendiary weapon, in densely populated areas in the final days of the campaign, killing at least twelve civilians (ibid. 194–6; Human Rights Watch 2009: 5). Despite the fact that, in general, wars seem to be fought more ethically than in earlier days, such instances that testify of a lack of respect for human life or dignity are obviously very far from being a thing of the past. Which brings us to the following.

Respect   127

What is to be done? The above is not only of theoretical interest. Of course, if the humiliation as felt by, for instance, potential terrorists and insurgents is often more perceived than actual (and if actual, more often unintentional than intentional), and given the fact that humiliation does not justify terrorism nor excuse it in any case, an easy conclusion would be that it is not really the West’s problem. Yet, the fact that, in spite of the obvious truth that it does not legitimize a resort to violence, humiliation continues to be a factor behind both terrorism and the growth of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years, makes it the West’s problem too. It should therefore be no surprise that sometimes governments base their policies, both foreign and domestic, on the assumption that humiliation can be a source of violence. For instance, it was fear of terrorist reprisals, ranging from a boycott of Dutch products to terrorist attacks on Dutch soil and on Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and the recent memory of the Danish cartoon crisis that led to numerous deaths around the world, that formed the rationale behind the public appeal made on February 29, 2008 by Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende to Member of Parliament Geert Wilders not to circulate his critical film on Islam and the Qur’an, Fitna.17 If Wilders released the film nonetheless, and violent reactions ensued, this would be partly Wilders’ responsibility. According to the prime minister, pointing that out was the government’s responsibility.18 At the end of the day, Wilders’ film eventually led to protests around the world, though in general not as violent and widespread as some had feared.19 Despite its peaceful ending, cases such as this one nicely illustrate how today even basically domestic political issues can have a bearing on missions abroad. For instance, one Taliban spokesperson claimed, in an interview with the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet in October 2008, that Danish troops in Afghanistan had become a principal target because of the publication of the cartoons that led to the 2006 cartoon crisis, while Dutch casualties in Uruzgan shortly after the release of Fitna were actually, according to the Taliban, to be seen as retaliation for it. Although according to most accounts that latter claim is unsubstantiated in this particular instance, it is of course possible that words and deeds that can be perceived as humiliating, or very disrespectful, and that are widely aired in the media could impose risks on Western military personnel deployed around the world. As to the policy question of what is to be done, the aforementioned distinction between humiliation with a small h and with a big H cannot always clarify things in cases like these, not in the least because the character, extent, and genuineness of the humiliation felt as a result of films or cartoons is difficult to assess from where a third-­person is standing. For similar reasons, Margalit’s distinction between normative and psychological humiliation is probably not of much more use here, although it does seem clear that those who take offense at a film or cartoon are not personally harmed, and that it is quite possible to avoid being confronted with a cartoon or film (many people wanting to see Fitna on the Internet

128   Respect experienced quite some difficulties doing so) while, on the other hand, the authors of these works most of the time do aim at contributing to an ongoing societal debate. Giving in to the demands of those who feel offended by a film or drawing seems therefore not the best of ideas, since there is probably no end to that. More difficult even are the cases in which feelings of humiliation cannot be avoided by looking in another direction, for instance because they are the result of foreign policies or, more specifically, military presence in, for example, Arabic countries, time and again labeled as part of a “crusade” by bin Laden and the likes. Regarding the question whether the West has any business invading countries where Islam is the dominant religion (or any other country, for that matter), it could be argued that the fact that a military intervention is, among other things, likely to be considered humiliating by many, and that this in turn can have adverse effects, should at least be taken into consideration (see also Bergen and Lind 2007). More so if the aim of the intervention is actually to fight terrorism; by now it has, for instance, become clear that since the invasion in Iraq in 2003 the number of terrorist attacks has in all probability increased rather than decreased. As Burke writes about his home country, we need to recognise that doing things that enrage millions, even if we feel that anger is wrong-­headed and misdirected, will make us more of a target. Before the invasion of Iraq the UK was fairly low down the target list for the militants. (2005a) In fact, most people do seem to be aware of that; the “official” view in a number of Western countries that their militaries fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan so that they do not have to fight them at home, has long lost its credibility for most people. Possibly, they consider it rather unlikely that plotters of terrorist attacks need the Afghan desert for their scheming – the September 11 attacks, for instance, were mainly planned “not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States” (Pillar 2009).20 On the other hand, the double standards of the West, both in politics and in the media, in tolerating regimes with a very bad human rights record, such as the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Lybia, Algeria, and, until recently, Afghanistan and Iraq, something that would never be accepted in the West, suggest that the peoples subjugated by those regimes are seen by Western countries as having “neither concern nor capacity for human decency” according to at least one author (Lewis 2003: 80), and that can perhaps be seen as just as humiliating as invading a country. This perception of being treated as subhuman might form an explanation for feelings of humiliation with a big H. It also clearly meets Margalit’s definition of humiliation as rejecting people “as beings capable of freedom, since it is freedom that makes them humans rather than things” (1996: 119). Here, too, it could be said that giving in to the demands of political Islamists is a dead end street because “no conceivable concessions, short of

Respect   129 acquiescence to their scheme of expunging Western influence from the Islamic world and bringing Taliban-­like regimes to power throughout it, can appease bin Laden, his followers, and his allies” (Bergen and Lind 2007). However that may be, the reality is that Western militaries are present in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a good number of other countries, and (notwithstanding the withdrawal of most Western combat troops from Iraq) they probably will remain so for some time to come (if only in the role of trainers and advisers). What should therefore be the focus of attention is the behavior of military personnel in these countries. Clearly, some of the humiliation caused by their presence, especially insofar as it is unintended, is hard to avoid. For instance, it seems that the (also by most Iraqis) much-­wished-for regime change in Iraq was, as said before, impossible to attain without involving foreign troops (see also Friedman 2003). That does not alter the fact that dependency, as Richard Sennett has described in his book Respect (2003), erodes self-­respect. To the extent that some specific occurrences of this unintended humiliation are, however, the result of a lack of knowledge of local sensitivities, it seems likely that a lot can already be won by enhancing cultural awareness, making military personnel more conscious of local sensitivities, etc. Respect is to some extent a matter of manners and etiquette, and these can be learned (see also Darwall 2006: 143), at least to some degree. Good-­quality intercultural training, if not already a part of predeployment training, might therefore be helpful – although many probably will remain at a loss about what to think of Iraqis who feel offended by a female police officer directing traffic (Fontan 2006: 219), or, even worse, the Iraqi insurgent who told Jason Burke that “to have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation” (2004d). To the extent that detainees are still intentionally humiliated, for example as part of a policy to “soften up” prisoners before investigation (to do some euphemistic labeling), as has been the case in Abu Ghraib Prison, Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and other facilities, it would without a doubt be a wise decision to end it. Aside from human rights being violated, enough of a reason by itself, the gains clearly do not outweigh the losses. The “ticking time bomb” scenario that is so often called upon in this context has probably never existed outside the minds of those who hold that inhumane treatment is on occasion excusable, or even justified (see also Shue 2006). Lastly, there is the matter of codes of conduct and value lists. As far as peacekeepers are concerned, Paolo Tripodi, drawing on the dark experiences with peacekeeping in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the mid-­1990s, has for instance proposed that the core value of a peacekeeper’s ethical code should be respect for human life. The development of such a code will ensure that peacekeepers restrain from an excessive use of force (which could harm innocent civilians). Similarly, the consolidation of respect for human life will ensure that peacekeepers will be prepared to employ a decisive use of force if civilians become the target of violence. (2006: 219)

130   Respect For sure, this might be somewhat optimistic, as the influence of value lists and codes of conduct is known to be limited (Verweij et al. 2007). As said, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF ) has included respect for human life on their value list, yet, despite its claim to be the most moral force in the world, the just-­ mentioned operation in Gaza took the lives of over 1,300 Palestinians (and 13 Israelis), among them many civilians, and a lot of them as a result of intense bombardments and the use of armed drones during the early days of the campaign. (Notwithstanding efforts from the Israelis to prevent civilian casualties by warning inhabitants of soon-­to-be-­bombed buildings in advance by telephone.) Still, we should not underestimate the role of value lists and codes of conduct since military (ethics) training and education is often based on them. Moreover, taking the situational view again, they have a symbolic value that should not be underrated, as they convey an apparent message about what an organization deems important – it would indeed perhaps be a good idea for that reason alone if these lists and codes would, next to including respect for all (and not only colleagues), also stress the importance of respecting human life; it, for more than one reason, appears to be something that deserves to be listed as an important military value, especially nowadays.

Conclusion As we have seen in Chapter 2, today’s military is still a more collective than individualistic institution and honor fulfills a prominent role in it up to the present moment. In this chapter it became apparent, perhaps not too unexpectedly, that, on the surface, soldiers share with many people in most of the societies they are deployed to a worldview that can be characterized as somewhat conservative and critical of modernity. Something that explains why the notion of honor has a stronghold in some of today’s countries of deployment and the military alike. Although some might for that reason expect that military personnel are quite understanding as far as honor within the local population in these countries is concerned, as both have motivations that for the most part spring from thick loyalties, and lie at the conventional level (a “less advanced” Kohlberg level from the ethicist point of view), in practice this is not always the case. Paradoxically, yet also probably unavoidably because honor is predominantly a group phenomenon, and basically limits respect to members of that group (see also Welsh 2008: 4, 10), the military’s dependence on honor has a possible downside in, at least on occasion, a lack of respect for the sense of honor and dignity of outsiders (see also Wyatt-­Brown 2005: 449–50). In the chapters on honor and on courage, for instance, we saw that the way today’s militaries realize the willingness to run risks and endure hardship among their personnel, by means of taking recourse to the old honor ethic in the form of social cohesion, is often not in the interest of the people whose hearts and minds are to be won or lost, as they will often be considered outsiders that are deemed somewhat less worthy of respect and protection. As Robinson warns us: “in so far as honour is a relative good, the easiest way to go up is to push others down.

Respect   131 Honour can thus encourage people to humiliate those over whom they acquire power” (2009: 264). On the other hand, to show someone respect is to humble oneself at least somewhat, and this, as Mandeville already noted (see Chapter 2), does not always come easy. In view of that it is not so surprising, though nonetheless still rather sobering, that only 47 percent of the American soldiers and 38 percent of the marines in Iraq are of the opinion that non-­combatants should be treated with dignity and respect (Mental Health Advisory Team 2006). That marines are even less likely to believe that non-­combatants in Iraq are worthy of respect than soldiers can in all likelihood be explained by the fact that group ties among them are stronger than among average military personnel. In view of the fact that respect does not always come naturally, it is all the more regrettable that some militaries limit their definition of the virtue of respect to respect to colleagues (and the earlier described loyalty to colleagues and the organization in all probability plays a role in it), and more often than not fail to mention in their codes and value lists the need to respect outsiders as well. The need to point that out is fairly evident, as we have seen. Although respect costs nothing, it seems to be in short supply nonetheless, and this scarcity is, as Sennett writes, man-­made (2003: 3). It can have serious consequences, too. Although humiliation does not even come close to being a justification for the use of unlawful violence (something insurgencies often, and terrorism always, amounts to), is not an excuse, and is probably too easily invoked as an explanation, the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to the above must be that especially blatant cases of direct humiliation in the end do make violence more likely to occur. For that reason, and for many others, the measure that lies most at hand, as stated above, is incorporating both respect and respect for human life in value lists and codes of conduct, or, if respect is already there, to define it in such a way that it also includes those outside the military.

7 Conclusion

The moral standing of the military These days, military personnel are now and then depicted in the literature on military ethics as possessing a higher caliber of virtue than the average man or woman, sometimes even as a moral beacon to society. A closer look learns that this applies especially to the articles and books that are written by authors with a background in the armed forces. This, however, does not necessarily mean that military personnel are perceived to be morally flawless by these authors; what seems more to be the case is that there is a permanent worry within the military that it is in larger society that virtues and values, mainly as a result of individualism and materialism, have rapidly faded away over the last few decades. In the end, some fear, this is bound to have its adverse effects on the moral fiber of military personnel (see for instance Toner 1995: 75; 2000: 44). The fact that the underlying sentiment – that things used to be better – was already present in the work of, for instance, Cicero and Sallust (both made an appearance in Chapter 2), puts this fear somewhat into perspective, however. At the same time, many authors who write on military ethics, employed outside the armed forces, seem less convinced of the military’s moral eminence, and are, for instance, worried about the number of civilian casualties in for example Iraq and Afghanistan, though possibly also about the ensuing damage to the image of the liberal democracies of the West. They might even have concerns about increased chances of terrorist attacks as a result of Western military presence around the world, and more specifically of the behavior of military personnel towards the local population. As for the latter element, there is some legitimate concern these days that troops who are trained for combat, in today’s missions sometimes experience difficulties in adjusting to the less aggressive ways of working needed to win the hearts and minds of local populations, something that is bound to impede their mission in the longer run. A fear that, of course, has for instance been fed by incidents in Somalia in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan (Abu Ghraib and Haditha spring to mind), which, even though involving only a very small percentage of military personnel, might have tarnished, in the eyes of many observers in both deploying countries and countries that (involuntarily or not) host military personnel from abroad alike, the reputation of the military for some time to come.

Conclusion   133 The reason for the gap between the positive image of military personnel as a moral enclave in a morally footloose world on the one hand, and the criticisms on the military by others on the other hand, might partly be the result of the discrepancy between the more martial virtues the military up till now has adhered to, and the softer qualities (basically Tocqueville’s “quiet virtues” from Chapter 2) prized by larger society. Some might argue, in view of that, that today’s missions call for virtues that are more inclusive than the traditional virtues – such as honor, courage, and loyalty, which seem to be mainly about military success in regular warfare – yet a convincing case can be made that interpreting these traditional virtues in somewhat more comprehensive ways would already be a big improvement. Traditional as they may be, virtues such as the ones just mentioned do come in many varieties, and although it is obvious that in today’s militaries there is still a clear need for them, it is just as obvious that not all varieties are equally suited for today’s circumstances. A look at recent experiences, some of which have been described in the above chapters, does in fact suggest that the more conventional readings of the time-­proven military virtues, giving central place to military effectiveness, might no longer be adequate, if only because that what is effective from a military point of view is not always the same as what is effective from a political standpoint. In the current understanding of the virtues mentioned above there is, to name one thing, little which regulates the conduct of military personnel towards those they are to protect, nor is it easy to apply these virtues to the new constraints military personnel are facing today, as a result of, for instance, critical public opinion, an increased moral sensitivity, or extensive media coverage. For these reasons, in this book an effort has been made to come up with more up-­to-date interpretations of some of these traditional virtues, instead of proposing new virtues to replace the old ones. To take just one example from the preceding chapters: although loyalty is a fundamental military virtue by most accounts, it is doubtful whether loyalty in the military really is always that beneficial, since it usually takes the shape of group loyalty – a form of loyalty that gives priority to the interests of an individual or a group – and not that of loyalty to principle or, somewhat in-­between, a profession; types of loyalty that are morally more sound since they have a wider scope and include more than just the interests of colleagues or an organization. However, whether it is new virtues, or new interpretations of the old ones that we need, they may bring the military somewhat closer to larger society. It might also bring the ethic of the military somewhat more in alignment with the political ideals underlying many of today’s operations that are not primarily about winning a war. Such a development is likely to enhance the military’s moral repute in the eyes of those who are rather critical about the military, whereas some others, often not holding larger society’s morality in too high a regard, are probably going to lament the – in their view – inevitable decrease in military effectiveness that will ensue. In the meantime, however, the question what kind of virtues are best suited for today’s missions leaves unresolved the prior question whether promoting virtues is in fact the best way to tackle the ethical issues today’s militaries are struggling with in the first place.

134   Conclusion

Does educating virtues work? Although, perhaps, being moral is a matter of training and education, and at its most basic level “a form of social conditioning” (Coker 2007: 137), it is as yet undecided how much educating virtues can contribute to military personnel behaving morally. More specifically, there seem to be two problems here. First of all, even if we assume for the moment that military virtues can be of use for military personnel in assisting them to do their work in a morally sound manner, it is still not clear to what extent virtues can, in fact, be taught to them. It is an assumption of virtue ethics that they can, but is this really the case? And if so, how should they be taught? And, not insignificant, at what age? – if character is formed before one reaches the age of 18, as some think, this presents a problem for the defense force that bases its ethics curriculum on virtue ethics. What’s more, virtues are supposedly developed by practicing them (although we have already seen in Chapter 3 that in the case of courage this seems somewhat doubtful), yet how much room is there for practicing virtues in for instance the academic curriculum as followed by most future officers, or the ethics training (if existent) in the school battalions for the rank and file? Even though there seems to be some agreement that “the modeling of conduct through the examples of others” and the “literary heritage of culture” can have a positive role in moral education based on virtue ethics (Carr and Steutel 1999: 253; see also Bonadonna 2008; see for a different view Challans 2007: 29–72), one might wonder whether in practice ethics education based on virtue ethics does not often consist of teaching about virtues (and virtue ethics) rather than teaching virtues, which is something different altogether. Knowledge of a virtue is not the same as possessing it, as Aristotle already wrote, going against Plato’s claim to the contrary. Second, a focus on virtues implies a focus on the individual, and to some observers a virtue ethics approach might very well suggest that incidents such as described in the previous chapters are, in fact, the result of moral flaws at the individual level (see also Robinson 2007a: 31). This “dispositional view” is not necessarily correct because, as has been suggested a few times in the above, unethical behavior is as often the result of what is now and then called the “ethical climate” as it is shaped by the larger organization and, certainly in the case of the military, the political leadership. As we have also noted earlier, people with high ethical standards can behave unethically provided they are able to find ways to justify their behavior. If there is some truth in this “situational view,” this essentially means that, even if ethics education can teach virtues, it might be the case that the influence of a virtuous disposition, notwithstanding Aristotle, is at times, and possibly in particular when needed most, as limited as the influence of codes of conduct imposed by the organization; codes that at least to some degree shape the ethical climate within the military. Ethics education, for that reason, should probably not only aim at promoting virtues, but also, with the situational view in mind, at giving insight into the factors that make unethical conduct more likely to take place. The products of social science, too, and not only philosophical texts, should have their place in any military ethics

Conclusion   135 curriculum. Reading Bandura’s article on moral disengagement (1999), for instance, or a showing of the video of the Milgram experiments on obedience, might be helpful. These difficulties bring us to the more general problem of how effective ethics education for the military is, regardless of its theoretical underpinning. Describing the situation at the US Air Force Academy, Martin Cook seems to capture the state of affairs at both his and many similar institutions adequately: What one sees is a fundamentally incoherent and confused welter of programs justified, if at all, by the belief that if ethics is important, throwing lots of resources at the subject from any number of angles and approaches must somehow be doing some good. (2008b: 57) Meanwhile, the British armed forces take a very different route, and in fact “conduct very little in the way of formal ethics training, but claim that their methodology works. There is no evidence that British service men and women behave worse than soldiers of other countries with more formal systems” (Robinson 2007a). Hence, today’s cadets and midshipmen (if not British) are introduced into notions such as just war theory, virtue ethics, and the Kohlberg levels, which is, notwithstanding Cook’s reservations, probably a good thing in itself. Yet, although a meta-­analysis of some years ago indicated that there is moderate correlation between ethics education and moral judgment (Rest 1986: 79), and an equally moderate correlation between moral judgment and conduct (ibid. 178), to what extent elaborate ethics education for military personnel has any tangible beneficial effects is not entirely clear, as there is at best circumstantial evidence that it does. There is, consequently, hardly any evidence of best practices, as it has never been properly established what works and what does not. Despite these doubts, ethics education in all probability does increase the moral awareness of military personnel who receive it, but, in line with the social psychologist’s finding that there is no one-­on-one relationship between having high moral standards and acting morally (1982: 9), this does not necessarily mean that it also contributes to better behavior in a very straightforward manner. Possibly, the beneficial effects of ethics education for military personnel are not so much to be found in a direct influence on conduct as in an indirect influence: one could speculate that providing formal ethics education for all military personnel, or at least for all officer cadets, is bound to improve the ethical climate and, thus, in a roundabout way, in the long run also the behavior of military personnel. This is mere conjecture, however, and given the amount of time and effort spent on ethics education, the question whether it works would deserve more consideration. Two recent studies, Verweij et al.’s survey into the effect of education in military ethics (2007) and Thomson et al.’s research into the effects of moral exemplar training on moral judgment and decision making (2008), are steps in that direction.

136   Conclusion An additional point of attention, or worry even, is that most of the efforts in educating ethics are directed at officer cadets, not at soldiers or NCOs. One could argue, at this point, that it is first and foremost the officer who should stand between his or her men and a war crime, yet in the era of what has been called the strategic corporal (Krulak 1999), with NCOs functioning with a relatively high degree of autonomy, this argument no longer seems to hold water. On an international level, we see a somewhat similar phenomenon: although ethics education is nowadays quite elaborate at most Western military academies, the overwhelming majority of today’s peacekeepers, for instance, come from non-­OECD countries, which in general pay considerably less attention to the subject of military ethics in their academies, and do not always have a clean human rights record. Add to this the fact that in Iraq and Afghanistan there are more civilian contractors than military personnel present, and the sobering conclusion has to be that the majority of those doing the work in these countries (or in any other conflict area) received no, or little, ethics education.

Rules and outcomes In addition to all these uncertainties, it should be noted that – although in much of the above it was stressed that military virtues are mainly directed towards colleagues and the organization, and consequently less to the needs of outsiders – there is, on a more theoretical level, something inherent to virtue ethics that makes it, in a way, even less comprehensive than that which militaries aim for when they promote their versions of the virtues. In unadulterated virtue ethics, namely, it is the agent, his character, and his “human flourishing” that are central, and not so much the interests of others, whether it is colleagues or outsiders. Aristotle’s idea of virtue as lying in-­between excess and deficiency, for instance, is on the whole a lot less considerate of others (in fact, they are not mentioned, with the virtue of justice as the obvious exception) than Kant’s categorical imperative, or Bentham’s notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. For Aristotle, the good life took precedence over the moral life (Nagel 1986: 195, 197). In that sense, and notwithstanding the fact that we in general reserve the epithet “virtuous” for behavior that is socially beneficent (as, among others, Mandeville and Hume have pointed out), virtue ethics is somewhat self-­ regarding (something utilitarianism is now and then mistakenly accused of ), and it therefore is probably a good idea to balance it with elements from other strands of thought. Undiluted adherence to one school, whether it be virtue ethics, duty-­ based ethics, or consequentialist ethics, might be common in academia, yet in real life most people, although most likely without giving much thought to it, tend to see a role for both virtues and rules, and are also inclined to take the consequences of a course of action into consideration when judging it (ibid. 166). Despite the fact that academics tend to consider this “confused,” they are probably quite right in doing so, which is something worthwhile pointing out in the concluding chapter of a book on military virtues.

Conclusion   137 In defense of an admittedly somewhat rudimentary (since we for a moment disregard the purity of the intention) form of duty-­based ethics, and as a result descending to the lower steps of Kohlberg’s ladder of moral development instead of climbing to a higher level, it could for instance be argued that pointing out what is permitted and what is not, and what the consequences of transgressing these rules are, should also have a role in the ethics education for military personnel. One main reason is the fact these rules are there, and that not adhering to them can have a high price – something that is possibly overlooked in, for instance, the ethics education of military personnel to the extent that it focuses on character development. Furthermore, there will always be a few who not only have not reached the highest Kohlberg level, but even fall short of the conventional level, residing on the lowest level instead; which implies that sanctions have to dissuade them from doing wrong. Although it might be true that the chances of being caught for a war crime are not that high, it is surely not true that international law only works after the fact, as some have argued; it can, of course, also have a preventive effect (see also Slim 2007: 282–3), assuming that it is generally understood what is allowed and what is not. It is, in view of that, important to convince officers and enlisted personnel alike that they have to play by the rules, regardless of whether or not the adversary is doing so. Even though general wisdom has it that normative rules that are followed because of rewards and punishment will often not suffice, because rules are then not followed when no one is around (see for instance Martinelli-­ Fernandez 2006), dismissing law as a way to prevent war crimes because it only steers behavior and not the underlying conviction seems a bit hasty for these reasons. Another problem, that universal rules lack flexibility, is in fact not a problem in every instance; in the case of torture, for instance – at present under every circumstance forbidden by international law – it is probably a good thing, seeing that any flexibility on this point will, as we have seen in recent years, bring us on a slippery slope astonishingly quickly. As one author has argued, “history does not present us with a government that used torture selectively and judiciously” (Shue 2006: 234; see also Fiala 2005). Likewise, the use of some types of weapons is forbidden, and for good reasons. We do not leave the decision on these matters to the individual soldier, however virtuous he or she might be. In a similar vein, there is something to be said in defense of utilitarianism (and its modern heirs that go under the banner of consequentialism), too. As we have seen in the chapter on loyalty, and similar to the denunciation of duty-­based ethics, the negative verdict on utilitarianism as a basis for military ethics may also be a bit too premature. It is not without reason that Adam Smith called our tendency to judge by consequences (despite the fact that we do not have them under our control), instead of intentions, a “salutary and useful irregularity in human sentiments concerning merit or demerit, which at first sight appears so absurd and unaccountable” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments II.iii.3.2). However, consequences for whom? To return to the example of torture, we see that it is not only the arguments for lifting the ban on torture that are always based on

138   Conclusion expediency, but that the defense of it is also often based on a fairly pragmatic argumentation (though with a somewhat wider scope). In support of the prohibition of torture it has, for instance, been argued that torture yields information of questionable quality; would alienate the local population, the public at home, and one’s allies; and has the effect of strengthening the resistance to one’s cause. Although such an argumentation seems a utilitarian one, it in fact does not represent what utilitarianism really is about, of course, since utilitarianism is not an ethic that prescribes that people should maximize their own utility, as some authors seem to hold, but the utility (or happiness) for the greatest number, as we also have seen in Chapter 4 of this book (see also Goodin 1995). The just-­ mentioned rationales for the ban on torture are as self-­serving as those put forward by the defenders of torture, and therefore do not really amount to a moral argument since, from a consequentialist perspective, moral reasoning (and being moral) is all about placing ourselves, one way or another, in the position of someone else for a moment, as for instance Thomas Nagel asks us to do in his famous The View From Nowhere (1986; see also Welsh 2008: 204). The view from nowhere – that is, in fact, the view from where Hume’s judicious spectator and Smith’s impartial spectator were standing. Although such an impartial view may be expecting too much in a regular war in defense of one’s own country, in many of today’s operations, in general of a rather different character, one probably should be able to do so a bit more easily, at least to some extent. What is, finally, of some relevance here is the fact that in the military virtues are promoted, and characters are built, with a view to having either military effectiveness or preventing misbehavior to the local population, something which probably means that a virtue ethicist would hesitate to call it virtue ethics that is practiced here in the first place. Promoting certain character traits because they are beneficial to others, be it within or outside one’s own organization, amounts to what is sometimes (although admittedly not very often) described as, in fact, character consequentialism. This is not a novel position, however. Cicero, for instance, already claimed in his De Officiis that there exists no contradiction between what is virtuous and what is expedient (without offering convincing substantiation, however, and for that reason possibly more based on hope than on anything else). Also for Hume, as will be remembered, what was virtuous and what was useful (with both notions being more or less equal to what is praised and what is praiseworthy) often boiled down to essentially the same thing, namely acting in the public interest. It therefore seems that there is, at least in theory, some convergence between what militaries expect from advancing their virtues and consequentialism, i.e., good outcomes. In practice, on the other hand, there is an important difference: military virtues in their current understanding aim mainly at good outcomes for the military (to phrase it in character-­consequentialist terms), whereas consequentialism is all about giving equal weight to the interests of all parties involved. To account for this difference we probably have to go back once more to the subject of Chapter 2 (and turning up in most of the other chapters too): honor.

Conclusion   139

Honor one more time While it is, obviously, impossible to offer straightforward solutions to the problems today’s militaries struggle with, or to come up with a panacea that will prevent incidents such as those witnessed in recent years and described in the preceding chapters, it seems that honor in its many forms (and under many names) is the key to both understanding what sometimes goes wrong when armed forces are deployed in faraway countries, and to finding ways to improve matters. In fact, a sense of honor, put to use correctly, might just be the thing to induce military personnel (and most other people) to do what is right, if necessary against their immediate self-­interest. If we, on the other hand, do not give due attention to the pre-­eminence of honor in its different appearances, we may also fail to address the sometimes serious downsides that come with the conventional ethic that guides most of the military men and women (and many others), which is especially troublesome in today’s missions that hardly resemble the wars of the past. It is not by coincidence, for instance, that in most of the previous chapters some attention was paid to the possible adverse effects of too much emphasis in military training and culture on military honor (and group loyalty), especially in its modern guise of social cohesion and peer pressure. To summarize some of the suggestions for improvement made in the preceding chapters, it seems that conventional ethics will work out properly as long as the values and norms of the group are the right ones. In the case of the military, this means that they should be aligned with, or at least not go directly against, the goals the troops are supposed to further. It is, for instance, likely that undue force protection, and negative views of outsiders, are in the longer run detrimental to what today’s missions try to achieve. The military ethic should in a way be somewhat more outward looking than at present is often the case, with military personnel capable of, to some extent, transcending the group view, and now and then taking a more “objective,” impartial view instead, to ensure that those who matter to military personnel are not limited to the peer group and colleagues. Of course, this is probably easier said than done. Nonetheless, stressing social cohesion somewhat less than currently is the case, furthering loyalty to a professional ethic instead of group loyalty, and promoting a form of respect that is not limited to colleagues but also includes outsiders, would seem feasible steps in that direction. Finally, it is noteworthy that, at a time when autonomy and authenticity are considered such important values by nearly everyone, the majority of the virtues that were subject of the preceding chapters are for an important part about face and reputation. Honor, the pivotal military virtue though not a virtue in the strict sense, is of course almost by definition all about how others see us, but as we saw, courage, too, is contingently so, as one of the prime motives behind it is peer pressure. Loyalty might appear to be an exception to some extent, but, as we have noted in Chapter 4, to be disloyal is often perceived as being dishonor­ able too, in that it is perceived to be a betrayal of the honor group. Integrity is also about how people view each other, though by default, as it asks them not to

140   Conclusion be led by how others judge their actions. This virtue, consequently, appears to be more aligned with current ideals subscribed to outside the military. Respect, last of all, is not so much about how others see us, but about how we see them. Given the limited way most military personnel define their honor group, and the strong bonds within that group, they now and then tend to see others as outsiders, and have difficulty seeing them as entitled to equal respect. That the overcoming of peer pressure and group loyalty does not always come easy for most military personnel is, in light of the extent to which honor and loyalty are stressed in the military, however not very surprising (and therefore possibly excusable, though not justifiable). It is, in truth, very much the question to what extent military personnel, in their concern for reputation and wish to belong to something bigger than themselves, are really that different from the rest.

Notes

2  Honor   1 Locke held that: he who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong motives on men to accommodate themselves to the opinions and rules of those with whom they converse seems little skilled in the nature or history of mankind, the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or the magistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God’s laws some, nay, perhaps most men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many, whilst they break the law, entertain thoughts of future reconciliation and making their peace for such breaches. And as to the punishments due from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves with the hopes of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of their censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the company he keeps and would recommend himself to. (Essay I.iii.12)   2 However, as classicist Douglas L. Cairns wrote in Aidos, his book on honor and shame in Greek literature, it would be wrong to focus too closely on the supposed distinction between failure and transgression; any transgression of a boundary is a failure to observe it, and a failure to achieve a goal can be a transgression of an interdiction. (1993: 20)   3 This is, incidentally, rather the opposite of the current state of affairs in the US, according to Charles Moskos, who sees the sons and daughters of the present-­day elite almost absent in the military and, as a logical consequence, in the armed conflicts the US is involved in (2002: 76–85).   4 The Greeks were less inclined to the view that virtue needs a reward. Plato, for instance, held in The Republic that the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, for they are not covetous of honor. (347b) In the concluding sections of that work Plato wrote that just conduct will be rewarded in this life with a good name (ibid. 612–13), yet this reward is not presented as an

142   Notes important incentive. Name and reputation are necessary incentives, however, in his Laws (738, 740d, 754e–5a, 764a, 784d, 926d), which was meant as a more realizable ideal. Also, it has to be noted that Aristotle did consider honor the most important of the secondary goods (Nicomachean Ethics 1123b).   5 Hobbes agreed with Aristotle, though: Grief for the discovery of some defect of ability is shame, or the passion that discovers itself in blushing, and consists in the apprehension of something dishonourable; and in young men is a sign of the love of good reputation, and commendable: in old men it is a sign of the same; but because it comes too late, not commendable. The contempt of good reputation is called impudence. (Leviathan I.6) A modern-­day author following Aristotle on this point is Reed Bonadonna (1994: 19).   6 In one of his pleas we read that “magnanimity looks for no other recognition of its toils and dangers save praise and glory; once rob it of that, gentlemen, and in this brief and transitory pilgrimage of life what further incentive have we to high endeavour” (Pro Archia Poeta 28). What’s more, deep in every noble heart dwells a power which plies night and day the good of glory, and bids us see to it that the remembrance of our names should not pass away with life, but should endure coeval with all the ages of the future. (ibid. 29)   7 Cicero also held that it is “on account of the similarity between moral worth and renown” that “those who are publicly honoured are considered happy, while those who do not attain fame are thought miserable” (De Legibus I.XI). Elsewhere, Cicero argued that the wisdom of the statesman brings fame and is therefore preferable to the wisdom of the philosopher (De Re Publica III.iii.5).   8 According to Charles Taylor, “we find this [critique] with Hobbes as well as with Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Molière” (1992a: 214). Taylor, however, also notes that the negative arguments in these writers are not new. Plato himself was suspicious of the honour ethic, as concerned with mere appearances. The Stoics rejected it; and it was denounced by Augustine as the exaltation of the desire for power. (ibid.)   9 Somewhat similar to Locke, Mandeville wrote in his Fable of the Bees that “it is certain, that nothing (. . .) has a greater influence upon children, than the handle that is made of shame” (vol. II 78; see also, for a comparable remark, Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments VI.iii.46). 10 Mandeville prepared the ground for later moral philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith (see also Hayek 1985: 264), although for instance the latter would speak of “true glory” in a way the former would never do. Mandeville did not get the credit, however; Smith maintained that it is the great fallacy of Dr. Mandeville’s book to represent every passion as wholly vicious, which is so in any degree and in any direction. It is thus that he treats everything as vanity which has any reference, either to what are, or to what ought to be the sentiments of others: and it is by means of this sophistry, that he establishes his favourite conclusion, that private vices are public benefits. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments VII.ii.4.12) As Smith saw it, “some popular ascetic doctrines which had been current before his time, and which placed virtue in the entire extirpation and annihilation of all our passions, were the real foundation of this licentious system” (ibid. 13). Smith concluded, however, that “some of the articles, at least, must be just, and even those which are

Notes   143 most overcharged must have had some foundation, otherwise the fraud would be detected even by that careless inspection which we are disposed to give” (ibid. 14), and that the Fable would not have made such an impact, “had it not bordered upon the truth” (ibid. 13). 11 What happened is, in the words of Charles Taylor, what Nietzsche called a “transvaluation of values.” The new highest good is not only erected as a standard by which other, ordinary goods are judged but often radically alters our view of their value, in some cases taking what was previously an ideal and branding it a temptation. Such was the fate of the warrior honour ethic at the hands of Plato, and later of Augustine, and later still in the eyes of the modern ethic of ordinary life. (1992a: 65) Richard Sennett wrote in his The Fall of Public Man that, nowadays, “the real self is the self of motivations and impulses; it is the active self. But it is not active in society; instead a passive ‘me’ exists there” (1977: 331). 12 Locke wrote: For since nothing can be more natural than to encourage with esteem and reputation that wherein everyone finds his advantage, and to blame and discountenance the contrary, it is no wonder that esteem and discredit, virtue and vice, should in a great measure everywhere correspond with the unchangeable rule of right and wrong, which the law of God has established. (Essay II.xxviii.11) 13 As Forbes put it in his book on Hume: “Men seek approval and will for the most part fashion themselves and behave in such a way as to win it; they will act and feel and judge in accordance with the prevailing norms of their society” (1975: 107). Stewart, in his book on Hume: These passions, our feelings about ourselves and others, based on comparisons with the standard of worthiness prevailing within our society, are outstanding as causes of behaviour, and, therefore, are of great importance to the moral, economic, and governmental institutions of every group and nation. (1963: 60) 14 In his essay Of Moral Prejudices we read that, according to Hume, too many of his contemporaries copied the Stoics, whose philosophy he regarded as utterly unsound (see for a similar opinion Bentham An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation XI.xvi). 15 In his An Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding Hume wrote that “the fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed” (Sect. I). However, “Hume did not seem unhappy with this state of affairs” (Gay 1973: 105). No wonder, as “Hume talks of mankind and the species feeling this or that, as though all men felt and thought like a civilized eighteenth-­century gentlemen inspired by Cicero and the models of classical antiquity” (Forbes 1975: 109). 16 In his essay Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature Hume wrote likewise that it has always been found, that the virtuous are far from being indifferent to praise; and therefore they have been represented as a set of vain-­glorious men, who had nothing in view but the applauses of others. (. . .) But vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture, than any other kinds of affection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. (. . .) To love the glory of virtuous deeds is a sure proof of the love of virtue.

144   Notes 17 Adam Smith was “a Roman Eclectic in modern dress” (Gay 1973: 54–5), who “counseled that we should follow the practice of the ancients” (Larmore 1987: 17). Smith stated about Epicureanism, however, that “this system is, no doubt, altogether inconsistent with that which I have been endeavouring to establish” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments VII.ii.2.13). 18 Hume wrote, somewhat similarly, that “men have, in general, a much greater propensity to overvalue than undervalue themselves; notwithstanding the opinion of Aristotle” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals VIII). 19 Smith further realized that we are not always able to conform to the verdict of the impartial spectator. Especially when our passions are overwhelming and our partiality to ourselves is strong, this may ask too much from us (The Theory of Moral Sentiments III.4.5–6). In these instances we should follow the “general rules” of society: we know through “our continual observations upon the conduct of others” that some actions could render us “the objects of universal disapprobation” (ibid. III.4.7). We therefore lay down to ourselves, firstly, as a general rule “that all such actions are to be avoided, as tending to render us odious, contemptible, or punishable, the objects of all those sentiments for which we have the greatest dread and aversion.” And, second, the general rule to perform those actions that are generally honored and rewarded, exciting the love, gratitude and admiration of mankind we all desire (ibid.). Only with those general rules are we able to correct “the misrepresentations of self-­love concerning what is fit and proper,” while without such rules, “there is no man whose conduct can be much depended on” (ibid. III.5.2). 20 An example of Rawls’ disregard for “the science of human nature” forms his view on honor and status. Although general opinion has it that an egalitarian distribution of honor and status would render these notions meaningless, Rawls takes a different stance: because status is no longer a necessary incentive after the education for autonomy has been successfully completed, inequalities in status do not have to occur in a just society: The account of self-­respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us. But in a well-­ordered society the need for status is met by the public recognition of just institutions, together with the full and diverse internal life of the many free communities of interests that equal liberty allows. The basis for self-­esteem in a just society is not then one’s income share but the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. And this distribution being equal, everyone has a similar and secure status when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society. (A Theory of Justice §82; see also Williams 1973: 47) According to Ian Miller, in Rawls’ “view self-­esteem (and thus apparently honor too) is a primary good. But Rawls ignores that the whole point of honor is to distinguish oneself from others (. . .). No distinction, no honor” (1993: 129). Margalit writes that “social honor given equally to everyone will be empty” (1996: 42). According to Finley, “when everyone attains equal honour, then there is no honour for anyone” (1993: 118). 21 To name three canonical examples: Cooley (1922) and Goffman (1958) both saw humans as essentially led by pride, shame and the fear of losing face, while Riesman (1950) portrayed the modern employee as other-­directed. 22 Walzer writes that the struggle for honor that raged among the aristocrats, and that played such a large part in early modern literature, is now entered by everyman. It is not, however, aristocratic honor that everyman is after. As the struggle has broadened, so the social good at issue is infinitely diversified, and its names are multiplied. Honor, respect, esteem, praise, prestige, status, reputation, dignity, rank, regard,

Notes   145 admiration, worth, distinction, deference, homage, appreciation, glory, fame, celebrity: the words represent an accumulation over time and were originally used in different social settings and for different purpose. (1983: 252–3) Bernard Williams writes in his Shame and Necessity that “it is accepted that the world of Homer embodied a shame culture, and that shame was later replaced, in its crucial role, by guilt.” However, he continues, “these stories are deeply misleading, both historically and ethically” (1993: 5). 23 Elsewhere, Fukuyama stated that “the satisfaction we derive from being connected to others in the workplace grows out of a fundamental desire for recognition” (1995: 6). He then continues, writing that beyond subsistence levels, economic activity is frequently for the sake of recognition rather than merely as a means of satisfying natural material needs. The latter are, as Adam Smith pointed out, few in number and relatively easily satisfied. Work and money are much more important as sources of identity, status, and dignity, whether one has created a multinational media empire or has been promoted to foreman. This kind of recognition cannot be achieved by individuals; it can come about only in a social context. (ibid. 7) Smith held that social climbing is the “great purpose of human life,” and because the basic needs are met by the wages of “the meanest labourer,” it is evident that “it is chiefly from this regard for the sentiments of others that we pursue richness and avoid poverty” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments II.iii.28). In the view of Donald Winch, in Smith’s work ambition is mainly about “respect and admiration, the satisfaction of our desire to emulate those above us on the social ladder, and the gratification of our vanity and craving for social esteem” (1978: 91). According to Charles Taylor, the honor ethic “is still alive for some people today” (1992a: 20) and “the fierce competition for this kind of dignity is part of what animates democratic politics” (ibid. 25). 24 For Adam Smith, a founding father of economic theory, self-­interest was “not directed solely by pecuniary motives towards economic ends: honour, vanity, social esteem, love of ease, and love of domination figure alongside the more usual considerations of commercial gain as motives in economic as well as other pursuits” (Winch 1978: 167). However, “as greater rigor permeated the theory of consumer demand, variables like distinction, a good name, or benevolence were pushed further and further out of sight” of most of today’s economists, according to economist Gary Becker (1996: 163). 25 Elsewhere, Mandeville wrote that “pride is that natural faculty by which every mortal that has any understanding over-­values, and imagines better things of himself than any impartial judge, thoroughly acquainted with all his qualities and circumstances, could allow him” (Fable vol. I 125). As a result, “every individual values itself above its real worth” (ibid. vol. II 134). 26 The original fable appeared in 1714, in the subsequent years two volumes of elucidation saw the light – only adding to Mandeville’s notoriety. 27 However, only “children and fools will swallow personal praise, but those that are more cunning, must be managed with greater circumspection; and the more general the flattery is, the less it is suspected by those it is levelled at” (Fable vol. I 37). 28 Joseph Blake and Suellen Butler, on the other hand, have suggested that in Vietnam enlisted men sometimes did make sacrifices for their comrades in a way that did not serve their own survival (1976). 29 A gentleman, however, is by his station the distinguished member of a great society, who attends to every part of his conduct, and who thereby obliges him to attend to every part of it

146   Notes himself (. . .). He dare not do anything which would disgrace him or discredit him in it. (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations V.i.g.12) 30 Strictly speaking, today’s use of honor as a substitute for having to subscribe to the cause one is fighting for, as appears to be the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, would make it to a certain extent, according to Cicero, when in one of his Stoic moods, a form of “false” honor. 31 A possible example of more recent times is Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who, offended after General Eisenhower took over Ground Forces Command against Montgomery’s wish, in his pursuance of personal glory according to some accounts took irresponsible risks with the failed Operation Market Garden, which should have brought him back to the top position, yet in fact cost the lives of many soldiers. 32 Smith noticed, for instance, that the rich and powerful often receive respect and admiration “due only to wisdom and virtue,” while their follies and vices are looked upon with some forgiveness. The poor man, meanwhile, is ashamed of his poverty, and feels that it either “places him out of the sight of mankind” or is looked upon with contempt. Whether overlooked or disapproved of, he is equally mortified; “as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most keen desire, of human nature” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments I.iii.2.1; compare Hume Treatise II.ii.v.). 33 A similar ambiguity is present in Smith’s view on ambition. Ambition, he wrote, is “a passion, which when it keeps within the bounds of prudence and justice, is always admired in the world, and has even sometimes a certain irregular greatness, which dazzles the imagination” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments III.6.7). However, Smith also noted that place, that great object which divides the wives of alderman, is the end of half the labours of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult and bustle, all the rapine and injustice, which avarice and ambition have introduced into this world. (ibid. I.iii.2.8) 34 Hume held that though this progress of the sentiments [of justice] be natural, and even necessary, it is certain, that it is here forwarded by the artifice of politicians, who, in order to govern men more easily, and preserve peace in human society, have endeavoured to produce an esteem for justice, and an abhorrence of injustice. (Treatise III.ii.ii.) This does not imply, however, that the esteem for justice is an invention of politicians, because “if nature did not aid us in this particular, it would be in vain for politicians to talk of honourable or dishonourable, praiseworthy or blameable” (ibid.) and had not men a natural sentiment of approbation and blame, it could never be excited by politicians; nor would the words laudable and praiseworthy, blameable and odious be any more intelligible, than if they were a language perfectly known to us, as we have already observed. (ibid. III.iii.i) Possibly, Hume was thinking of Mandeville, who wrote that man, after being tamed by “the skilful management of wary politicians,” was prepared to call every thing, which, without regard to the public, man should commit to gratify any of his appetites, vice; if in that action there could be observed the least prospect, that it might either be injurious to any of the society, or even render himself less serviceable to others: and to give the name of virtue every performance, by

Notes   147 which man, contrary to the impulse of nature, should endeavour the benefit of others, or the conquest of his own passions out of a rational ambition of being good (Fable of the Bees vol. I 34) Also, “when we pronounce actions good or evil, we only regard the hurt or benefit the society receives from them, and not the person who commits them” (ibid. 274). 35 Hume, for instance, wrote in his essay Of the Independency of Parliament that “in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.” Somewhat similar: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary” (Madison et al. Federalist Papers 51). 36 Smith, for instance, would in all probability have favored a distribution of honor that was detached from the distribution of wealth (see for instance The Theory of Moral Sentiments I.iii.3.2–4), more according to merit, and with a stage for everyone, yet would not have thought it possible, and – his era being less aristocratic than Cicero’s though considerably more than ours – no doubt it was not. With today’s more egalitarian ordering, however, Michael Walzer deems a redistribution of honor realizable (1983: 257). Honor as public recognition could, for instance, serve as compensation for work that is important and socially useful yet not abundantly rewarded money-­wise, provided that people can be brought to see this kind of work – not so much dishonored as disregarded – as honorable. This in turn depends on the possibility to detach honor at least to some degree from professional status and other social goods (ibid.). It is, for sure, legitimate that professional status does draw a certain amount of esteem, albeit not in the amount it gets nowadays, and Walzer sees a role for “public honor” in educating “ordinary citizens to look beyond their prejudgments and to recognize desert wherever it is found, even among themselves” (ibid. 266). However, despite his optimism on this point, it remains rather difficult to imagine how such a redistribution of honor could actually be achieved. Walzer, though, is of the opinion that such a redistribution can be reached without a “gigantic increase in social control” (ibid. 257). 37 Hume “assumed that the basic division in the fields of knowledge is that between physical and moral subjects. (. . .) Moral subjects are what we, for lack of better terms, probably would call, ‘the humanities’ and the ‘social sciences’ ” (Stewart 1963: 10). Today, though, “the fact-­value distinction is taken as a given by almost everyone today, no matter whether they are behavioral scientists or committed revolutionaries” (Bloom 1980: 118). 3  Courage 1 That soldiers do not primarily fight for abstract causes is something now and then overlooked in most discussions on military desertion and conscientious objection (see for instance Patterson 2005: 11–25). One could, of course, argue, as for instance Jeff McMahan does in his Killing in War (2009), that soldiers nonetheless should deliberate on the causes they are sent out to fight for. 2 On the other hand: similar to the way a person without fear of bodily injury is not really physically courageous (because there is no fear to overcome), one could argue that the person who does not care at all about how others think of him is not, in fact, morally courageous. 3 The interview can be read at www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/navy3545.pdf. 4 Group cohesion is difficult to accomplish in the mixed units that are often used in the expeditionary era. Officer rotation policies, aiming at providing as many officers as possible with necessary experience, can also have a negative impact on group cohesion and on the morale of NCOs and enlisted personnel (Gabriel and Savage 1978: 13; Thomas and Castro 2003: 140).

148   Notes 5 Philosophers opt for a different solution, of course. Not unlike du Picq, Smith spoke in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments of “the dread of death” as “the great poison to the happiness” (I.I.i.13). According to Montaigne, we can, however, overcome that dread by means of virtue. In his essay To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die, he writes that “one of virtue’s main gifts is a contempt for death, which is the means of furnishing our life with easy tranquility, of giving us a pure and friendly taste for it; without it every other pleasure is snuffed out.” This idea goes back to a dictum of Socrates, and is also present in Aristotle’s view on courage. 6 Interestingly, some see a similar difference between community and association in the military: Like every theory, the [institutional/occupational] thesis contains an implicit understanding of motivation. Is motivation rational or subjective, oriented toward moral concerns of altruism, strongly affected, perhaps, by internal emotional concerns, or is it efficient and rational, concerned primarily with objective calculation? The problematics of action are concerned with the relative weight of idealism and materialism. In philosophic terms, it is as old as the struggle between romantics and utilitarians. (Moskos and Wood 1988a: 25) 7 Harry F. Noyes makes a similar point: the sociological view is a half-­truth, an incomplete cliché, cynical, and dangerous (1989: 23–7). In a reaction to Noyes, Mike Fisher pointed out that the evidence provided by Noyes to substantiate his claim did not amount to much (1991: 12–14). 8 Where Lynn sees more differences between the different cultures and eras than Hanson, fellow military historian Martin van Creveld draws attention to what is common to all traditions, and argues that it was “very largely to counter the fear of death that the culture of war was created many, many millennia ago and has been maintained ever since” (2008: 411). 9 See www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2008/02/mil-­080201-nns04.htm. 4  Loyalty   1 According to Mill, “in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility” (1987b: 288).   2 Elsewhere, Barry writes that there is “a gap between acknowledging that some rule, universally adhered to, would advance one’s conception of the good and having a motive (based on nothing but the pursuit of one’s conception of the good) for adhering to the rule” (1995: 45).   3 On closer inspection, Vitoria’s precondition and Walzer’s reformulation might boil down to the same thing (Coady 2008: 144–5).   4 According to Sandhurst’s Stephen Deakin, for instance, the utilitarianism ethic often does not work in a military community. It is not the ethic of a virtuous person desiring to do good in every circumstance (. . .). Rather, it is the ethic of a highly educated rational calculator who is constantly considering whether an action is harmful to the Army or not, and, inevitably, what he can get away with. (2008b: 24)   5 His remark is also in line with the Dutch security policy, as laid down in 2004: The Netherlands strives towards a stable and peaceful international environment, with good international relations and effective security institutions. (. . .) An active security policy also includes a willingness to intervene at an early stage in crisis situations in other parts of the world, obviously within an international context. The aim is to resolve conflicts without resorting to military force. (MoD: 2004)

Notes   149 Like more middle-­sized countries, the Netherlands has shown more confidence in international institutions than in the use of military force (De Wijk 2004: 149–50). In recent years, policymakers have come to shun the term Dutch approach, claiming that all countries involved use the same method. The reality they have to deal with, however, is that, as a 2004 opinion poll showed, 70 percent of the Dutch population does not want special forces fighting in violent conflicts, while 60 percent would like to see the armed forces used only for humanitarian missions (cited in Koelé and Ramdharie 2004). Notwithstanding this peaceful inclination, and contrary to the so-­called body bag hypothesis, opinion polls show that more casualties will not necessarily mean the end of public support for the mission in Afghanistan. In August 2009, for instance, no more than 31 percent of the population were of the opinion that in case of casualties Dutch soldiers should be withdrawn from Afghanistan, whereas 42 percent thought the opposite (MoD 2009). These figures may indicate a certain ambiguity towards violence amongst the population; apparently, there is both a reluctance to resort to the use of the military in risk operations, and at the same time a clear wish not to be regarded as cowardly by the outside world. Somewhat illustrative perhaps of the doubts the Dutch have on this point is that when in October 2007 it became apparent that Ghurkhas would assist the Dutch in Uruzgan, this led to some cheery stories in the press about their courage, which never failed to quote the Ghurkha motto “it’s better to die than to be a coward” (a motto rather similar, by the way, to the unofficial US Marines’ credo “death before dishonor”).   6 That the required moderation does not come naturally, is something that became apparent when a few years ago newly started cadets of the Netherlands Defence Academy were confronted with pictures of evidently cruel treatment of prisoners, probably harsher than the above-­described treatment inflicted by the Dutch intelligence officers in Iraq, although with no information on the context. More than half of the new cadets thought the techniques used – threatening prisoners with dogs, putting prisoners in stress-­positions, putting bags over prisoners’ heads – were not out of order per se, all depending on the circumstances. Only a minority begged to differ and stated that it was immoral; however, none of the students referred to the illegality of these methods for Dutch military personnel.   7 Similarly, the Code of the US Fighting Force also fails to mention the interests of local populations, and is mainly devoted to how an American soldier should behave when taken into captivity. See www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/pdf/p360_512.pdf.   8 See www.goarmy.com/life/living_the_army_values.jsp.   9 See www.army.mod.uk/documents/general/v_s_of_the_british_army.pdf. 10 See, for instance, the duties of a doctor as listed by the British General Medical Council at www.gmc-­uk.org/guidance/good_medical_practice/duties_of_a_doctor.asp. 11 See http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/police-­reform/policing-­values-letter? view=Binary. 12 Huntington makes the same distinction (1957: 16), yet he sees it not as fundamental: all professionals perform functions essential to society (ibid. 9). 13 See www.army.mod.uk/join/terms/3111.aspx. 14 Interestingly enough, however, when students of the NLDA were asked what their ideals as professionals were, honesty (33 percent), contributing to peace and security (33 percent), and (mutual) respect (30 percent) were mentioned most often, whereas the more established values such as discipline (15 percent), integrity (14 percent), and loyalty (8 percent) ranked considerably lower. Other traditional values, such as courage and honor, were rarely mentioned and did not make the list of the seventeen most often mentioned values (Verweij 2007). 15 Parallel to the increase in joint operations, military academies are increasingly conferring with fellow academies about their ethics programs, trying to learn something of how things are undertaken elsewhere during conferences and workshops. The Military Ethics Education Network (MEEN), founded in May 2008, for instance, not only aims

150   Notes at comparing and examining the values and virtues emphasized by Western militaries, assessing the various approaches and methods of ethical education adopted in the different institutions and gauging their effectiveness, but also at producing textbooks and case studies. The network might come to function as a professional organization equally found in other professions. 5  Integrity   1 Rousseau clearly takes sides with the Stoics, at least in some aspects: Richard Vernon speaks of Rousseau’s evident debt to Stoic writers (. . .) perhaps most especially to Seneca. The critique of sophistication, vanity, and luxury; the loss of original “humanity” under the weight of artifice; the corrupting consequences of slavery; the identification of reason with the capacity of autonomy; the appeal to “man, of whatever country you are”: all these are Stoic themes. (1986: 40) According to Peter Gay, “the key to Emile is the Stoic injunction that man must live according to nature; it was Rousseau’s genius to harness this idea, derived from Seneca, to the idea of human development” (1979: 542).   2 According to William A. Galston, for Rousseau, the central phenomenon is pride, the desire for reputation or the esteem of others, which is the prime motive for the development of both the social virtues and of the natural faculties (the arts and the sciences). In his account, pride is responsible for the greater part of human misery, of unnecessary endeavor, and of unnatural needs; it operates, moreover largely in opposition to genuine social morality (1975: 96) Gay adds that “Rousseau, in his two Discourses, was inclined to hold pride responsible for civilization with all its glaring flaws” (1979: 192). However, Edmund Burke called Rousseau “the philosopher of vanity” (cited in Mansfield 1987: 689). Referring to Rousseau’s autobiography, Burke thought it was this vanity that caused Rousseau “to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents” (ibid.).   3 Riesman disagreed with Fromm on some points, however: The “humanistic conscience” which Erich Fromm describes as “man’s recall to himself,” is, to be sure, an inner voice. It can be silenced by external authority. But it can also be muted when other people refuse to remind the individual how his conduct looks to them. (1950: 304) As far as the bigger picture is concerned, Fromm and Riesman were likeminded, however. According to the latter, “the characterological struggle that holds the center of the stage today is that between other-­direction and inner-­direction, as against a background in which tradition-­direction gradually disappears from the planet.” And there is a clear winner: all power, not merely some power, is in the hands of the actual or imaginary approving group, and the child learns from his parents’ reactions to him that nothing in his character, no possession he owns, no inheritance of name or talent, no work he has done is valued for itself but only for its effects on others. (ibid. 49)

Notes   151 Not everyone agreed with that, either: Riesman believed American society, and in its wake Western Europe, was moving from an inner- to an other-­directed condition. The sequence should be reversed. Western societies are moving from something like an other-­directed condition to an inner-­directed condition – except that in the midst of self-­absorption no one can say what is inside. (Sennett 1979: 5)   4 This somewhat resembles the words of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte: “Merke auf dich selbst: kehre deinen Blick von Allem, was dich umgibt, ab und in dein Inneres” (cited in Furst 1969: 58).   5 The historian of ideas John Pocock wrote that “classical man tends to assume that he has an identity and to inquire what can be done with it (. . .). Romantic man tends to assume that his identity requires to be asserted or discovered” (1971: 275).   6 According to Rousseau, however, integrity presupposes goodness; one cannot be “whole” and integrated, and immoral at the same time (Grant 1997: 86). Cox et al. take a similar position in their book on integrity (2003: 8–9). They are rather alone in holding this view, as they themselves admit, and do not offer much to substantiate their view on top of that. Margalit writes that “our hesitation about calling Eichmann a man of integrity stems not from any conceptual considerations” (1996: 49).   7 Ironically, Rawls’ own work is, according to Allan Bloom, almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. (1987: 30) Elsewhere, Bloom wrote that “Rawls’s man cannot withstand unfavorable public opinion. Rawls tries to provide him with esteem no matter what his life plan may be; Rawls’s man is in every way dependent, ‘other-­directed’” (Bloom 1990: 328). Rawls does, indeed, state that “for the purpose of justice [we are to] avoid any assessment of the relative value of one another’s way of life” (A Theory of Justice §67).   8 Although Richard Sennett sees a somewhat similar problem here. Nowadays, “expression is made contingent upon authentic feeling, but one is always plunged into the narcistic problem of never being able to crystallize what is authentic in one’s feeling” (1979: 259).   9 Allan Bloom, however, is rather critical of this idea of a unique manner: The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating one’s own “life-­style,” of which there is not just one but many possible, none comparable to another. He who has a “life­style” is in competition with, and hence inferior to, no one, and because he has one he can command his own esteem and that of others. (1987) 10 “Man möchte hier sagen: richtig ist, was immer mir als richtig erscheinen wird. Und das heißt, daß hier von >richtig< nicht geredet werden kann” (Philosophische Untersuchungen §258). Elsewhere in the Untersuchungen, he writes: Darum ist >der Regel folgen< eine praxis. Und der Regel zu folgen glauben ist nicht: der Regel folgen. Und darum kann man nicht der Regel >privatum< folgen, weil sonst der Regel zu folgen glauben dasselbe wäre, wie der Regel folgen. (ibid. §202; see also Kripke 1982: 3; Johnston 1993: 211–20)

152   Notes 11 Mill continues: We have a right (. . .) to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance) (. . .). We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him (. . .). 12 According to Ruth Grant, in her book on integrity, “hypocrisy is a regular feature of political life, and the general ethical problem of hypocrisy and integrity is quintessentially a political problem” (1997: 3). However, integrity lies within the reach of the soldier because he is dealing with either friends (in the form of colleagues) or foes, and with both categories one can be candid. Politicians, on the other hand, have often to do with intermediate categories, forcing them to build coalitions and compromise, which requires being less than truthful on occasion (ibid.). 13 Rawls, for that reason, rejects the “doctrine of the purely conscientious act,” which holds, first, that the highest moral motive is the desire to do what is right and just simply because it is right and just, no other description being appropriate; and second, that while other motives certainly have moral value, for example the desire to do what is right because doing this increases human happiness, or because it tends to promote equality, these desires are less morally worthy than that to do what is right solely in virtue of its being right. (A Theory of Justice §72) 14 The interview is part of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program of the University of Florida and can be found at www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?b=UF00005614&v=00001. 6  Respect   1 To give an example, a few years ago some Dutch military personnel used a few disrespectful terms in their weblogs to describe local Afghans, something psychologist and author on moral disengagement Albert Bandura would probably label as dehumanization (1999: 200). Without a doubt to the complete surprise of the soldiers involved this led to quite some tumult in the media. In all likelihood, the commotion was not only a result of fears of hurt feelings on the part of the Afghans in case they would find out about it, but also because it might impede the mission if they did.   2 Although Islam is, like Christianity, a universalistic religion, according to some authors loyalty to the own honor group is becoming even more important, not less, in much of the Muslim world. According to anthropologist Akbar Ahmed, for instance, “the failure to create a just and compassionate society leads people to fall back to ideas of tribal honor and revenge” (2004: 6–7). Ahmed then, somewhat somber, continues that divisions in society deepen on the basis of blood and custom. Killing and conflict are encouraged. The honor of the group and – if it is attacked – the need to take revenge become more important than worshiping God in peace and engendering compassion in society. (ibid.) This emphasis on group loyalty, always stronger in collectivist cultures than in individualistic cultures, can become excessive, and those outside the group are accused of dishonorable behavior (ibid.). In the view of another author, Arab society today is characterized by strong group loyalties and exaggerated forms of shame (Lynn 2003: 313). Most authors hold that this is not a matter of religion: honor and shame might be alien to Christianity, but they are not markedly important in the Qur’an either.

Notes   153 Nevertheless, many hold that these concepts are not foreign to most societies where Islam is the dominant religion, something that predates the rise of this religion (see for instance Firestone 1999: 30–1). What, on the other hand, seems to be unfamiliar to these societies, is, as Margalit words it, the Christian idea that pride is the most deadly sin, and humility a virtue (1996: 11). However, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out in a thorough article on the host of, sometimes hostile, books on Islam that have seen the light since September 11, writing about Islam, and Islamic culture, in such general terms will inevitably oversimplify matters to some extent. It often does not do justice to the differences between the different creeds of Islam (and Islamism), and the different cultures and peoples that are among its believers (2003). Dominique Moïsi, for example, writes rather sweepingly about the Muslim world’s “culture of humiliation,” as opposed to the West’s “culture of fear,” and Asia’s “culture of hope” (2007).   3 The ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood Sayyid Qutb, for instance, influentially (and famously) wrote about the noisy materialism and, in his view, ill-­advised sexual freedom he witnessed traveling in the US in 1948–50 (see for instance Qutb 2006).   4 Ground that seems to be stepped on by, for instance, the president of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Evelin Gerda Lindner (see for instance Lindner 2001: 59–68; 2006).   5 Terrorism researcher Jessica Stern now and then seems to blame US foreign policies (see for instance Stern 2004a), as do some others (see for instance Challans 2007: 182).   6 It might be wondered, even, if there is not a certain amount of naivety in taking the terrorists’ word for it when they state that they are motivated by feelings of humiliation, and not by more profane reasons such as those mentioned above. Possibly, some terrorists claim to act out of feelings of humiliation because that’s what they have heard and read in the media, providing them with grounds that sound remotely legitimate. In that aspect, they might to some extent resemble the German prisoners of war (whom we encountered in Chapter 3) interviewed about their motivation, and answering that it was group cohesion and not Nazi ideology that kept them going. Poverty and lack of opportunity, on the other hand, do not seem to play an overriding role in the motivation behind terrorism; somewhat disturbingly, most perpetrators of these attacks of recent years were of well-­educated, middle-­class backgrounds, and quite often of Western origin (Bergen and Lind 2007).   7 Osama bin Laden said in his October 7, 2001 videotape – in defense of the September 11 attacks – that Muslims had suffered humiliation by the West for almost 80 years, i.e., since the defeat of the Ottoman sultanate in 1918 (Lewis 2003: p. i). A year later he declared in his Letter to America (2002) that the governments of the Arabic countries are agents of America, and that they humiliate their subjects. In an earlier fatwa, Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places (1996), he had already avowed that the “walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets,” and that “without shedding blood, no degradation and branding can be removed from the forehead.”   8 That the New World Order is humiliating to Muslims is something Al Qaeda’s second man Ayman al-­Zawahiri claimed (Stern 2004b: p. xviii; see also Stern 2004c). In his view, fighting the New World Order “frees the oppressed youth from his inferiority complex, despair and inaction, making him fearless and restoring his self-­respect” (Stern 2004d). Stern therefore warns that prominent Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayman Zawahiri, the intellectual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Al Qaeda, respectively, argue that violence is a way to cure Muslim youth of the pernicious effects of centuries of humiliation at the hands of the West. (2004b: 285)

154   Notes   9 It is, however, probably a bit optimistic to think that where individuals sometimes act from injured honor, states never do. Thucydides, for instance, held that honor was one of the main reasons that made states go to war, and in his time, democratic Athens was as concerned about its reputation as was oligarchic Sparta. According to Rawls, however, we do not have much to fear from the liberal, democratic nations as these peoples (. . .) are not swayed by the passion for power or glory, or the intoxicating pride of ruling. These passions may move a nobility and lesser aristocracy to earn their social standing and place in the sun; yet this class, or caste rather, does not have power in a constitutional regime. (1999: 47) In all probability, a preoccupation with ought leads him to forget about is. Former US President Bush, for instance, in his statements in response to the September 11 attacks, “clearly linked honor and the need to redeem it through revenge,” writes anthropologist Akbar Ahmed (2004: 60). Although the United States is supposedly a society of the sort in which “traditional ideas of honor are irrelevant or rejected,” and in that sense is unlike tribal Afghanistan (or Iraq), the notion of honor does still seem to play a role here (ibid.) Notwithstanding Rawls’ views, there even seems to be a growing agreement that in our day, honor and reputation still play a role in the relations between states (see for instance O’Neill 1999; Kaplan 2002: 131–2; Wyatt-­ Brown 2005: 445–9; Saurette 2006: 495–522; Bowman 2006), democratic or not, although here, too, the term itself has become slightly out of date. 10 This same perpetrator, it has to be feared, will consider it a humiliation with a small h – the deflation of the pretension to be invulnerable (Saurette 2006: 518). Terrorism is “expressive violence” and all about shame, Christopher Coker writes (2008: 117). Especially the September 11 attacks have been interpreted as a humiliation of the West – “Bin Laden realised that many were pleased to see the US wounded and humiliated” writes Burke (2005b) – which has led to a “policy of counter-­humiliation” by the US and its allies, according to at least one author (Saurette 2006: 518–21). The subsequent invasions in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq, are thought to have brought about the strengthening of terrorist groups referred to by Stern and others. 11 For these few who do consider violence to be a legitimate way of restoring dignity, thereby somewhat echoing Jean-­Paul Sartre’s defense of violence as a last resort for young Algerians (2001), there remain some “obvious and crippling questions” (Walzer 1992: 205). Addressing Sartre’s notorious remark, made in defense of Algerian terrorism, that “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, doing away with oppressor and oppressed at the same time: what remains is a dead man and a free man” (2001: 148), Walzer raised the question whether a one-­to-one relationship – one European for one Algerian – is necessary. In that case, there might not be enough Europeans (1992: 205). 12 Some Muslims, writes Islamologist Bassam Tibi, “have a worldview that entitles them to dominate.” In fact, however, “they are dominated by others, to whom they feel – thanks to their divine revelation – superior” (2002: 61). 13 What complicates matters here is that we seem to be dealing with a case of perceived humiliation by one party, but probably without any intent to humiliate on the side of the other party, Western society. However, as we have noted, intent to humiliate is not a necessary condition for humiliation to occur. The West’s foreign policies, position in the world, military presence abroad, etc. can therefore be a cause of humiliation without the West having any intention of doing so. It is for this reason that, in the case of humiliation, blame can always be attributed. Although an intention to humiliate is not a must for humiliation to take place, in this case, however, complicating things even further, it seems that the position in the world held by Islamic societies, seen as humiliating by Islamists, is, as some observers have stated, partly of their own doing, or to be more precise: of their malfunctioning governments’ doing (see for instance

Notes   155 Lewis 2003). To the extent this holds true, the West is not even a prime cause of the Islamists’ humiliation. 14 Abu Musab al-­Zarqawi, however, goes considerably further, and in his addresses to the Muslim audience, in an attempt to justify kidnappings and beheadings, “picks one of the single most emotive issues in the Islamic world: the supposed imprisonment, and abuse, of Muslim women by non-­Muslim men” (Burke 2004b). 15 The report cites Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora stating to the committee that there are serving U.S. flag-­rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. (US Senate Committee on Armed Services 2008: p. xii) 16 Richard A. Gabriel has remarked that possessing a virtue and behaving ethically are not the same thing: virtues are about character, ethics is about conduct. The possession of a virtue is a disposition to behave well, and although Aristotle maintained that there exists no virtue that is only potential, yet, according to Gabriel, this disposition in itself is not sufficient to guarantee that someone will always behave ethically when most needed (1982: 8–9, 150, 152). 17 Interestingly, Syrian Grand Mufti Ahmad Badr al-­Din also saw it as his responsibility to tell Wilders that he would be responsible for possible bloodshed and violence that would result from Fitna. The controversial film Fitna (Arabic for ordeal) had been a predicament for the Dutch government long before it was out, especially since rumor had it that Wilders (who has always been critical about the mission in Uruzgan) was going to desecrate the Qur’an in it. All Dutch television networks, with the notable exception of the Dutch Muslim Network, indicated that they would not provide Wilders with a platform for his film. Attempts by the Netherlands Islamic Federation to have the film banned were, however, rejected by a Dutch court. Yet, on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 a Dutch appeal court ruled that Wilders should be prosecuted for discrimination and inciting hatred, a decision partly based on an analysis of the contents of Fitna. 18 The government’s reaction differed a great deal from the course chosen by the Danish government in the Danish cartoon crisis that sparked off after the newspaper Jyllands-­ Posten published 12 cartoons critical of Mohammed in September 2005. The Danish government took the position that, as long as the cartoons were within the limits of the law, it saw no reason to interfere, nor did it have the ability to do so. Several Danish newspapers reran the cartoons when a terrorist plot to kill one of the cartoonists was thwarted in February 2008 – that was around the time the debate about the still-­to-be-­released Fitna was at its highest. Whether or not the Dutch government was right in holding Wilders responsible for possible violent reactions following his film is hard to say. However, the way the Dutch government dealt with the Fitna crisis, and especially the appeal not to release it because of the possible consequences for Wilders himself and others, was the subject of heated dispute. Some were of the opinion that the Prime Minister should have taken a stance against Wilders and Fitna at a much earlier stage, or should even have gone to court to have it banned. Others, on the other hand, felt that he gave in much too easily with his appeal not to release the film, “selling out” basic civil liberties in an ill-­guided attempt to reach an “appeasement” with the “islamofascists” (terms also used by Wilders) within the growing Islamic community in the Netherlands. When the short and indeed highly critical film, equating Islam with terrorism and anti-­Semitism, was nonetheless released via the Internet site LiveLeak, on March 27, 2008, the government distanced itself (in the Dutch, Arabic, and English language) from its contents because it served “no purpose other than to cause offence.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-­Moon also condemned it, “in the strongest terms,” and

156   Notes thought it offensive too, while Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, called Fitna a humiliation of Islam. Mr. Balkenende’s remarks can be read at www.government.nl/News/Press_releases_and_news_items/2008/February/Remarks_ by_Prime_Minister_on_Wilders_film and www.government.nl/News/Press_releases_ and_news_items/2008/March/Government_s_reaction_to_Wilders_film. 19 In the Netherlands reactions among Muslims were moderate, bordering on the indifferent. Wilders complimented them for keeping their cool better than the government. In retrospect, it seems that the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (since August 2009 Secretary General of NATO, despite strong Turkish misgivings because of his role in the cartoon crisis) did well when he sided with the cartoonists, while the Dutch government at first glance perhaps somewhat overreacted. Without hindsight, it is not so easy to say which course is the better: the debate about Fitna, and about what the Dutch government’s reaction should be, took place against the background of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004, who was killed because of his critical Islam film, Submission. Pinned to his chest was a letter from his murderer to the writer of the script of the film, at that time Dutch Member of Parliament, and friend of Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, blaming her for “terrorizing” Islam with her remarks. She has been living under heavy security surveillance ever since. In that light, the choice between the careful Dutch approach, and the bolder Danish line, is a more difficult one. 20 In the Netherlands, for example, only 7 percent of the population is of the opinion that Dutch military presence in Uruzgan diminishes the chances of a terrorist attack on Dutch territory, while the rest thinks otherwise (MoD 2009).

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Index

Abu Ghraib Prison 53, 63, 81, 91, 105, 123–4, 129, 132 Afghanistan 74, 77, 128; civilian casualties 77; Dutch experience 78–80; thick and thin moralities in 78–81 After Virtue (MacIntyre) 4, 27 airstrikes, political impact 80–1 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 74 Algeria 128 All Volunteer Force 30 altruism 6, 28 The American Soldier (Stouffer) 33, 55 Amnesty International 53 Ancien Régime 61 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 100 Anscombe, G. E. M. 4 Arguing about War (Walzer) 117 aristocratic honor 16, 22–3, 29 Aristotle 4, 30–1, 108, 134, 136 Arone, Shidane 52, 124 atomic bombs 77 Aurelius 25 Australia 83 authority, Milgram experiments on obedience to 125, 135 autonomy: economy and in the military 30–2; and honor 17 Awakening Warrior (Challans) 123 Baader-Meinhof Group 98–9 Bacon, Francis 20, 36 Balkenende, Jan Peter 127 Bandura, A. 124–5, 135 Barry, B. 73 Battle (Lynn) 61 Battle Studies (du Picq) 62 Becker, G. S. 31 Benedict, R. 27 Bentham, J. 73, 136

Berger, P. 113 bin Laden, Osama 59, 122, 128–9 Bloom, A. 31 Bonadonna, R. 142n6 Bowman, J. 98 Braudy, L. 15, 26 British deserters, posthumous acquittal 47, 49 Burke, J. 59, 118–23, 129 Buruma, I. 59, 119; and Margalit, A. 59 cannon, and the fate of chivalry 20 Castro, C. A. 48, 53 categorical imperative, Kant’s 72, 112, 136 censure, as punishment 11 Challans, T. 109, 123 chevauchée 61 chivalry, honor in medieval code of 19–20 Christian ethic 32–3 Cicero 16–20, 22–7, 30–2, 34–8, 77, 95–6, 132, 138 citizen-soldier 29–30, 45–6, 61 civilian casualties: acceptability of 75; and bias toward the safety of military personnel 3, 74–5, 77; Human Rights Watch report on 80; and human shields 76; Israeli prevention attempts 130; and public opinion 2; reductions 81; and Taliban support 81; tripling of by use of airpower 80; and utilitarianism 77 civilian contractors, in Iraq and Afghanistan 136 Clash of Civilizations, The (Huntington) 119 Clash of Emotions, The (Moïsi) 119 Clausewitz, Carl von 62 Code of the Warrior, The (French) 40 codes of conduct: Dutch 86; impotence of 4; limited use 4; the notion of respect in

170   Index codes of conduct continued 109; omission of outsiders 86; superiority of virtues development to 4 “collateral damage” 125 combat motivation: in Iraq 12–13, 34; and opinions about justness 12–13; Stouffer study 33, 55; studies of WWII 54; US Army study 54–5; Vietnam study 34 community, dwindling of Western sense of 12 comradeship 12, 56, 60 Conrad, J. 98 conscientious objectors: integrity of 107; loyalty of 69; moral courage of 50; penalization of 67 consequentialism 5, 71–2, 77–8, 136–8 Cook, M. 74, 135 Cooley, C. E. 14 courage: Aristotle’s definition 44; as capital 46; cultural perspectives 57–60; definition 4; du Picq on 62; ethicist view 44–6; and fear 47; importance of in traditional military ethics 12; narrowness of Aristotle’s definition 45; peer pressure and 46, 58; place in lists of military virtues 44; scientific view 47–9; social cohesion and 53–7; Sontag on 48 cover-ups, and social cohesion 52–3 Daddis, G. A. 48, 56 Danish cartoons 127 Darby, Joe 53, 91, 105, 124 De Officiis (Cicero) 138 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius) 17 The Decent Society (Margalit) 115 dehumanization 125 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 22 democratic honor 22–3, 29 dependency, and the erosion of self-respect 129 desertion: loyalty and 69; Pablo Paredes’ 105; posthumous acquittal of British soldiers executed for 47, 49 detainees, abuse of 82, 86; see also Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo Bay; Haditha Dewey, John 72 dignitas 22, 36, 113–15, 122 dignity: vs dignitas 113, 115; external determination 114 discipline, du Picq on the purpose of 58 disloyalty 67, 69 Dodds, E. 27 Dollard, J. 46 Doorn, J. A. A. van, and Hendrix, W. 67

double standards of the West, on human rights 128 du Picq, A. 57–8, 62 Dutch East Indies 66 duty-based ethics 5–6, 10–11, 14, 32, 111, 136–7 Egypt 61 Elster, J. 122 England, army tactics 61 “enhanced interrogation” 118, 125 enlistment, motivations for 12; see also combat motivation An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume) 25 An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (Mandeville) 32 Epictetus 25 Epicurean perspectives 17, 26, 30 Erik O., shooting incident 82–3 esprit de corps 39 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 10–11 Ethics and War in the 21st Century (Coker) 78 ethics education: effectiveness of 135; targets of 136 Etzioni, A. 102 “An Exploration of Respect in Army Leadership” (Military Review) 109 extremism, Muslim rejection 121 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville) 20, 33 The Fall of Public Man (Sennett) 143n11 firearm, importance of the invention of the 60 Fitna (Wilders) 127 Fontan, V. 122-3 Forbes, D. 143n13 force protection 37, 74–5, 80, 106 Fossum, M. A. and Mason, M. J. 14 ‘fragging’ 55 France, army tactics 61 Frederick, Ivan “Chip” 124 French, S. E. 40 French revolutionary wars 61 Friedman, T. 119, 123 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy) 15 Fukuyama, F. 23 Fundamentals of Canadian Defense Ethics (Robinson) 108–9 Gabriel, R. A. 15

Index   171 Galston, W. A. 36 Gandhi, Mahatma 32 Gaza 74 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft 60 Geneva Conventions 40 Ghurkha motto 149n5 golden rule 72 Goldstone report 125 Goodin, R. E. 6, 77 Grant, R. 152n12 greatest-happiness principle 73 Greek War of Independence 63 Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp 81, 86, 124, 129 guilt and conscience 14, 27 Gyges’ ring, Plato’s tale 10, 35, 107 Haditha incident 52, 81, 114, 123, 125, 132 Haig, Douglas 49 Haiti 106 Hamas 81, 126 Hammerskold, Dag 90 Handbook of Military Psychology (Noy) 49 Hanson, V. D. 58–60, 74 harsh interview techniques, reliability of information extracted through 124 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 98 hearts and minds approach 2, 110, 126 Hendrix, W., Doorn J. A. A. van and 67 Hermes 74 Herodotus 60 high altitude bombardments 74 Highway of Death 91 Hiroshima and Nagasaki 77 Hobbes, T. 20, 30 Hollow Man (Verhoeven) 10, 35 Homer 19, 36, 38, 57 Honor and Grace in Anthropology (Peristiany/Pitt-Rivers) 36 Honor: A History (Bowman) 98 honor: aristocratic 16, 22–3, 29; conclusions about 139–40; vs conscience and dignity 13; Cooley’s definition 14; definitions 14–15, 114; demise of 116–17; democratic 22–3, 29; drawbacks 35–7; as a form of selfinterest 19–22; functions of 14; Gabriel’s definition 15; Galston on vanity and 36; as group phenomenon 73; as a guide in matters of morality 13; Hobbes’ critique 20; and humiliation 114–15; Mandeville on 20–1, 33, 36; in

medieval code of chivalry 19–20; and the military ethic 29–30; Miller’s definition 114; Petrarch’s declaration 20; Pitt-Rivers’ definition 14; place in Western militaries 116; as public recognition 15; reflexive 114; respect vs 112; as reward for virtue 20; the Roman ethic 16–19; self-respect and 14, 114; shortcomings 35–7; as social cohesion 32–4; solutions to the drawbacks 38–40; the Stoic view 26–9; in West Point credo 15 Hueting, J. E. 67 human life, respect for 94, 108–9, 126, 129 human rights: core principles 126; Haitian violations 106; and military integrity 104; political perspective 74; Princen’s fight for 66 Human Rights Watch 53 Hume, D. 24, 28, 35, 39, 72–3 humiliation: and courage 50; definitions 114–15, 128; honor and 114–15; vs Humiliation 127; insult vs 115; and insurgency 121–3; in interrogation techniques 122–3; and the Israeli– Palestinian conflict 122, 125–6; and lack of cultural knowledge 122; levels of 115; Margalit on 115, 117, 127–8; Miller on 114–15, 117; as motivation for terrorism 111, 116–18, 119–21; normative and psychological distinctions 127; as policy 129; and the rise of radicalism 119–20; Stanford prison experiment 124; unintentional 122, 126, 128; and Western military presence 128 Hundred Years War 61 Huntington, S. 119 Hutcheson, F. 72 Ignatieff, M. 39–40 Iliad (Homer) 36, 57 Indonesia, struggle for independence 66–7 inhumane treatment, justifiability of 129 inner voice 13, 96–7, 102 Innere Führung (inner guidance), German Bundeswher’s concept 112 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith) 23, 35 insurgencies 37, 55, 110–11, 116, 119, 122, 123, 127, 131 integrity: definitions 94–5, 102–4; Dutch military perspective 103; Israeli pilots 105; Joe Darby case 105–6; and loyalty

172   Index integrity continued 94–5, 95–8, 98–102; and obedience 104; Paredes case 105; relationship between other virtues and 104–5; the Rockwood case 106; as upholding personal principles and the military 104–6 interrogation: military medical personnel’s presence during unlawful 85; reliability of information extracted through aggressive 124 interrogation techniques: humiliation in 123; Rumsfeld’s allowance of aggressive 124 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham) 73 Iraq: civilian casualties 77, 81; consequences of unit cohesion 37; Dutch shooting incident 82–3; legitimizing the invasion of 12; restraints for military personnel 1; social cohesion in 55–6; soldiers’ motivations 12–13, 34; Stern on humiliation and events in 123 Iraqi prisoners, allegations of torture against 82 Islam, Huntington on 119 “Islamic Terrorism” 118 Israel 74, 83 Israeli Defense Force 34, 56, 108–9, 130 Israeli–Palestinian conflict: casualties 130; dehumanization as policy 125; Operation Cast Lead 125; use of humiliation in 115, 122, 126; the West’s handling 111 Janowitz, M. 12; Shils E. and 54 joining up, reasons for 12; see also combat motivation Julius Caesar 16 Just and Unjust Wars (Walzer) 121 just war theory 5, 70 Kant, I. 5, 23, 27–8, 136 Keegan, J. 40, 58, 63 King, Martin Luther 32 Kohlberg, L. 5, 31–2 Kosovo War 74 Kümmel, G. 91 Laden, Osama bin 59, 122, 128–9 Lebanon 59 levée en masse 61 Leviathan (Hobbes) 20 Lewis, B. 119

Locke, J. 10–11, 23–4 Lord Jim (Conrad) 93–4, 98, 107 loyalty: basic varieties 94; conscientious objection, whistleblowing and 67, 69; definition 68; group 69–71, 74, 94, 99, 104, 133; and Hume’s “narrowness of soul” 73; inclusion in armed forces’ lists of values 86; institutional 88; integrity and 94–5, 95–8, 98–102; intentions and consequences 75–8; locating 86–8; and military effectiveness 74; misplaced 68, 87; oaths and codes 85–6, 88; and obligations to strangers 71–3; organizational vs professional 83–5; Poncke Princen’s story 66–7, 69–70; to principle 69–70; Rorty on 70; thin and thick morality and 74, 78–81; universalistic ambitions vs group 74; US Army perspective 87 loyalty to principle 87 Lucretius 17 Lybia 128 Lynch, Jessica 49 Lynn, J. A. 61 Machiavelli, N. 27, 57 MacIntyre, A. 4, 27 Mandeville, B. 16, 20, 32–3, 36, 116 Marathon 1, 58 Margalit, A. 114–15, 117, 119–21, 127; Buruma I. and 59 Marshall, S. L. A. 33–5, 54 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 29 Mason, M. J., Fossum M. A. and 14 Men Against Fire (Marshall) 33 Milgram experiments on obedience 125, 135 military: conclusions on the moral standing of the 132–3; economy and autonomy in the 30–2 military behavior, Miller and Moskos’ research 54 Military Courage (Castro) 48 military personnel: bias toward the safety of one’s own 3, 74–5, 77; perceptions of moral eminence 132–3 Mill, J. S. 73, 101–2 Miller, I. 44, 49, 114–15 Miller, L. L. and Moskos, C. C. 54 misconduct, and social cohesion 52 Modern Moral Philosophy (Anscombe) 4 Moïsi, D. 119 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de 22

Index   173 moral autonomy 13, 15, 28–31 moral courage: of conscientious objectors 50; exclusion from Aristotelian view of courage 45; and the military 51–3; Miller on 49–50; My Lai example 51; vs physical courage 49–51; shame and 51; social cohesion’s impact on 52, 56 moral development: basis of Rawls’ account 30; Kohlberg’s influential model of 31 moral duty, Singer on 71 moral education, value of 134 moral inspiration, military as potential source of 103 moral principles, Lockean perspective 11 moral standing of the military, conclusions on 132–3 morality: agent-neutral 78; honor as a guide in matters of 13; and military effectiveness 133; and social conditioning 134; thick vs thin 70, 74, 78–81 Moran, C. 51 Moskos, C. C. 29, 34; Miller L. L. and 54 motivation: behind courage 45–6, 52, 54, 56; behind just conduct 24–5; combat see combat motivation; institutional vs occupational 29 My Lai massacre 51, 67, 81, 89, 106 My Own Life (Hume) 25 The Mystery of Courage (Miller) 44 Nagel, T. 71, 76, 78, 118, 138 Napoleonic wars 63 Nasser, Abdel 61 Netherlands: Afghanistan experience 78–80; colonial perspective 66–7; Erik O. case 82–3; respect in military code of conduct 110; war crimes allegations 67 Nevada, control room 64, 125 The New Western Way of War (Shaw) 1, 74 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 44, 108 Noy, S. 49 O., Erik 82–3 oaths, medical vs military 85, 88 obedience: integrity and 104; Milgram experiments on 125, 135 obligations to strangers, loyalty and 71–3 occidentalism 60 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Buruma/Margalit) 59, 119 occupational model, armed forces evolution toward an 89–90

Ontsporing van Geweld (The Escalation of Violence) (Doorn/Hendrix) 67 Operation Cast Lead, Gaza 125–6, 129 Operation Restore Hope, Somalia 90 Operations Other Than War 82, 90 Osama bin Laden 59, 122, 128–9 Ottoman Empire 59 Pakistan 74 Paredes, Pablo 50–1, 105, 107–8 Patton, George S. 47 peace, Stoic view of 19 peacekeeping: Hammerskold on 90; impact of warrior strategies during 90; and “respect for human life” 129 peer pressure: armed forces’ use of 34; courage and 46, 58; effect of crumbling 34; and good behavior 10, 32; and local populations’ interests 37; role of in keeping silent 52 Peloponnesian War 62 Peralta, Rafael 50–1, 56 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Kant) 23 personal principles 95, 98, 103–4, 107–8 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch) 20 The Philosophy of Courage (Porter) 49 Piaget, J. 30 Pitt-Rivers, J. 14; Peristiany, J.G. and 36 Plato 10, 47, 107 Pogany, Georg Andreas 49 Political Liberalism (Rawls) 28 Porter, H. 49, 51 post-traumatic stress disorder 47, 49 Predators and Reapers 64–5, 74, 126 Princen, Poncke 66–7, 69–70, 89 principle, loyalty to 89 The Professional Soldier (Janowitz) 12 professional soldier, motivations 31; see also combat motivation professionalism 83–5, 90 The Psychology of Conflict and Combat 48 public interest 24, 73, 138 punishment 4, 10–11, 19, 32, 46, 58, 137 quiet virtues, democratic honor and the 22–3 Rail Gun 65 Rawls, J. 5–6, 14, 28, 30–1, 98–9, 113 Raz, J. 113 Reapers, Predators and 64–5, 74, 126 The Red and the Black (Stendhal) 114 reflexive honor 114

174   Index Renaissance 20 Respect (Sennett) 129 respect: Challans on 109–10; and dignity 112–13; and distance 126; in Dutch code of conduct 110; vs honor 112; Kantian perspective 111–12, 113; presence on militaries’ value lists 109; restriction of the scope of 110; situational view 124–6; US Army description 110; in Values and Standards of the British Army 110 “respect for human life” 94, 108–9, 126, 129-30 “respect for the dignity of all persons” 108–9 Responsibility to Protect doctrine 89 restraints, impact of on military personnel 1–3 Ring of Gyges, Plato’s tale 10, 35, 107 risk-transfer 75 Robinson, P. 6 robots, military use 64–5 Rockwood, Lawrence 106, 108 Roman honor ethic 16–19 Rorke’s Drift 58 Rorty, R 70 Roughead, Gary 65 rules and outcomes, conclusions about 136–8 Rumsfeld, Donald H. 63, 106 Rwanda 77, 129 sacrifices, willingness to make 12 Salamis 58 Sallust 16, 19, 114 Saudi Arabia 128 Second Treatise on Government (Locke) 10 self-respect: dependency and the erosion of 129; dignity as the external aspect of 114; external determination 114; and honor 14, 114; Rawls’ definition 113; vs self-esteem 113, 121; in US Army codes 110 Seneca 21, 34 Sennett, R. 129 September 11 attacks 3, 48, 65, 76, 128 “servicing the target” 125 Seven Core Army Values (US Army) 87 Shalit, B. 48 shame: Arabic culture of 61, 116, 122; and courage 33; emphasis on the painful side of 27; honor and 14, 27, 114; internalization of 38; Japanese culture of 46; and moral courage 51; moral

overtones 27; self-respect’s requirement of the absence of 113 Shame and Necessity (Williams) 38 Shaw, M. 74 Shils, E. and Janowitz, M. 54 Singer, P. 71, 75 Six-Day War 61 Skinner, Q. 23 sleep deprivation 3, 82, 86 Smith, A. 23, 25, 35–8, 96, 137 Snider, D. 88, 103 social cohesion: and combat motivation 54–5 (see also combat motivation); courage and 53–7; honor as 32–4; impact on moral courage 52, 56; Stouffer’s findings 56 social conditioning, morality and 134 Socrates 47 soldiers, motivations 12–13; see also combat motivation “Soldier’s Creed,” of the US Army 63 Somalia 39, 52, 54, 59, 77, 90, 132 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke) 10–11 Sontag, S. 48, 65 Sources of the Self (Taylor) 102 Srebrenica 129 Stanford prison experiment 124 Stauffenberg, Claus Schenk von 108 Stern, J. 119 Stockdale, James 103 Stoic perspectives 17–19, 21, 24–8, 30, 37–8, 96–7, 104 Stouffer study, into combat motivation 12, 33–4, 55–6; see also combat motivation stress positions 3 Sudan 128 suicide attacks 59 SWORDS unmanned vehicles 64 Syria 128 Taliban 3, 61, 76, 78–81, 127 Taylor, C. 31, 102 Tenochtitlán 58 Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Stern) 120 terrorism: Baader-Meinhof group 98; explanations for 116–18; and intentional killing of civilians 75–6, 117; in medieval warfare tactics 61; September 11 attacks 3, 48, 65, 76, 128; Sontag’s remarks 48, 65; Walzer on 117 terrorist attacks 3, 76, 111, 117–19, 126–8, 132

Index   175 A Theory of Justice (Rawls) 28, 98, 100 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 25, 37–8, 96, 137 thick morality, characteristics 81 thin morality, thick vs 70, 74, 78–81 Thompson, Hugh C., Jr 51, 89, 106 Thomson, M. H. et al. 135 Thucydides 57 Tjerk Hiddes 110 To Serve with Honor (Gabriel) 15 Tocqueville, A. de 22–3, 26, 29, 31, 35, 39 Tolstoy, L. 100 Tönnies, F. 60 torture: accusations of Dutch 82; debates on the “justifiableness” of 118; selfserving rationales for banning 138; see also interrogation torture allegations 82 ‘torture lite’ 118, 125 ‘transcendental humanism’ 89 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 24–5, 40, 73 trench warfare 62 Tripodi, P. 129 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero) 18 Understanding Fear’s Effect on Unit Effectiveness (Daddis) 48 unethical conduct: Cicero on sanctions for 95; Doorn and Hendrix on 67 unlawful interrogation, military medical personnel’s presence 86 unmanned vehicles 64, 74, 126 Uruzgan 78–9 US Army, adoption of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 29 utilitarianism 72–3, 77, 136–8 vanity, Galston on 36 Verweij, D. et al. 135 Vietnam War 31, 34, 49, 55, 59, 67, 125

The View From Nowhere (Nagel) 138 virtue, Aristotle’s definition 4 virtue ethics 3–4; conclusions about rules and outcomes 136–8; main alternative to 5–6; self-regarding nature of 136 virtues development, superiority over codes of conduct 4 virtues education, conclusions on the value of 134–6 virtues in a military context, scarcity of literature on 6 Vitoria, Francisco de 75 von Stauffenberg, Claus Schenk 108 Walzer, M. 5, 70, 75, 117, 120 war crimes, accusations of Dutch 67 war on terror, civilian casualties 76 “warrior”, in military ethics literature 90 waterboarding 3 Waziristan 64 Wealth of Nations (Smith) 23, 35 Wehrmacht, motivation study 34, 54 West Point Honor Code 15 Western tradition, discontinuities 61–3 Western Way of War (Hanson) 1 Western Way of War: appeal of the notion of 63; Greek influences 57–8, 61, 63; old vs new 74; truth behind the notion of 62 whistleblowers 67, 69, 91 white phosphorous munitions 126 Wilders, Geert 127 Williams, B. 30, 38, 101 World War I 62 World War II 33–4, 45–7, 54, 58, 60, 62, 66, 70 The Worm Revisited: An Examination of Fear and Courage in Combat (Horn) 48 al-Zawahiri, Ayman 74 Zimbardo, P. 124