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How philosophy helped one soldier on the battlefield (ethics training)

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https://aeon.co/essays/how-philosophy-he...attlefield

EXCERPT: When I attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2002-3, the leadership training was excellent. It included discussion of the British Army’s values and the laws of armed conflict. However, I received no ethics training for the occasions when neither values nor laws would fully prepare me to make complex moral decisions in faraway fields populated by people with very different cultural norms.

[...] My first operational tour was to Northern Ireland during a quiet period in the province. [...] The importance of understanding local context became clear. It was the first time I had a tiny insight in to what it might feel like to be looked at with prejudice. I would later read the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who in *After Virtue* (1981) describes humans as narrative beings, who need to ask ourselves ‘of what stories do I find myself a part?’ For MacIntyre:

we all approach our circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity … I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation … As such I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts … and obligations.

This was something that I began to grasp from the looks I received patrolling [...] I was a stranger in uniform who represented more than I understood. As this dawned on me, I might have taken heart from reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book *Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers* (2006), where he writes: ‘the great lesson of anthropology is that when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end.’ Hopefully, Northern Ireland will continue to be held up as evidence that Appiah is right on this.

My second tour was to Iraq in 2004 as the Sunni insurgency was escalating. [...] During that tour, I would have benefited from reading the early Greek skeptics such as Pyrrho of Elis. Their approach of questioning everything, even the importance of the Western notion of ‘truth’, would have helped me to understand the situation better. We were operating in an oral culture where custom and manners mattered more than the ‘truth’ as I understood it. [...]

Stoicism [...] has long been popular among military leaders. [...] Since 2009, the US Military has taught [...] soldiers to focus on what they can control, and to become comfortable with what they cannot – the central message that the former slave and early Stoic Epictetus emphasised. This would have been most useful in Basra in 2005, sitting in the back of poorly protected Land Rovers when the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was high. [...]

I worked on two kidnap cases in Iraq. [...] Later, reading Gray, Sigmund Freud, Herman Melville and Friedrich Nietzsche helped me to understand how the kidnappers came to be like that, and how we all have the capacity for extreme cruelty. [...] With the second hostage case, we had no leads and we never found out what happened. [...] Reading the American philosopher Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the *Afterlife* (2016) a few years later helped me to understand why. He examines how many in the West, despite not believing in life after death, care very much about the memory of our loved ones living on past their death. We are also narrative creatures, and we care deeply what the end of our story is, even if we are not going to be around to hear it. [...]

By the time I went to Afghanistan in 2007, I’d started to read philosophy [...] There, the need to make sense of the local context was even greater, and we didn’t understand it anywhere near enough. [...] The trolley problem is criticised for lacking the elements faced by soldiers on the ground – personal biases, physical discomforts, psychological pressures – the sweaty, confused, dirty reality. But while understanding the local context was essential, including the context of my relationships and associated duties, I found it useful to take some dilemmas out of the context in which I was operating and look at them again through a different lens, focusing on the principles behind them. It helped me to understand that the military, with its focus on the mission (with the caveat of ‘within the law’), was essentially consequentialist. This means that the military’s way of operating encourages an ‘end justifies the means’ approach, as described by the 19th-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and more recently by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. By understanding the criticisms of consequentialism, I could try to conduct myself as ethically as possible and to some extent step back from that utilitarian model of thinking.

[...] In Afghanistan, for instance, if faced with a local contact who wouldn’t tell coalition forces where a certain bomb-maker was located, Bentham would have encouraged us to deal with the problem as the Pashtun tend to settle their scores: with blood-shedding. However, Bentham’s near-contemporary Immanuel Kant would have urged against killing the bomb-maker. Kant believed that every rational agent is an end in himself. You should never treat another person as a means to an end, and you cannot make exceptions for yourself, whatever the ends. Realising this helped me to re-enforce laws that could have been undermined by the understandable desire to stop the production of murderous IEDs at all costs....

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