Military Leadership and Ethics (original) (raw)
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Military Ethics and Leadership
2017
Most books and articles still treat leadership and ethics as related though separate phenomena. This edited volume is an exception to that rule, and explicitly treats leadership and ethics as a single domain. Clearly, ethics is an aspect of leadership, and not a distinct approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership. This holds especially true for the military, as it is one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Military leaders have to deal with personnel who have either used or experienced violence. This intertwinement of leadership and violence separates military leadership from leadership in other professions. Even in a time that leadership is increasingly questioned, it is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the thin line between legitimate force and excessive violence. Table of contents 1. Introduction. Peter Olsthoorn; 2. Armouring Against Atrocity: Developing Ethical Strength in Small Military Units. Lieutenant Colonel Tom McDermott DSO and Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Stephen Hart RM; 3. Ethical Leadership in the Military: The gap Between Theory and Practice in Ethics Education. Miriam C. de Graaff, Peter W. de Vries, Walter J. van Bijlevelt and Ellen Giebels; 4. ABCA Coalition Operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond: Two Decades of Military Ethics Challenges and Leadership Responses. David Whetham; 5. Military Leaders, Fragmentation, and the Virtue of Integrity. Nathan L. Cartagena and Michael D. Beaty; 6. Military Integrity: Moral or Ethical? Patrick Mileham; 7. Soldiers’ Autonomy and Military Authority. Mihaly Boda; 8. The concept of Innere Führung: Dimensions of its Ethics. Angelika Dörfler-Dierken; 9. Intervening as a Moral Duty: Michael Walzer versus a Multilateralism Approach. Arseniy Kumankov; 10. When International Dialogue about Military Ethics Confronts Diverse Cultural and Political Practices: ‘Guilt And Confession’ as a Case in Point. George R. Wilkes; 11. Moral Judgement in War and Peacekeeping Operations: An Empirical Review. Miriam C. de Graaff, Femke D.A. den Besten, Ellen Giebels and Desiree Verweij; 12. The Disenchantment of Victory and Ethical Dilemmas For Military Leadership: Sovereignty, the Spell of War and Elusiveness of Victory. Boris Kashnikov; 13. Special Forces and Ethics: A Preliminary Assessment of the Leadership Challenge. Deane-Peter Baker.
Military and Ethics: How are Ethical Leaders Produced?
CONTEMPORARY MILITARY CHALLENGES
Ethics is an important element of military professionalism, and a factor in military work and behaviour, especially during operations. Studies and surveys show that ethical military leaders are crucial in promoting ethical conduct within the armed forces. This article presents the work of the Science and Technology Organization’s research team on Factors Affecting Ethical Leadership, which focuses on the study of military ethics, ethical education and training, national practices of teaching ethics in the armed forces, the documentation of relevant ethical cases, and surveying the opinions of military personnel with regard to ethical military leadership.
Military Ethics and Leadership, 2017
Scandals in business (such as Volkswagen’s dieselgate and, earlier, the Enron scandal), politics and the public sector (the Petrobas affair in Brazil, for in-stance), sports (think of the corruption charges against fifa’s Sepp Blatter) and the military (Abu Ghraib springs to mind) have brought the matter of ethical leadership to the forefront. But although this increased attention has had the collateral benefit that most handbooks on leadership now pay more attention to the importance of leading ethically, this will generally still be in a separate chapter. To make thing worse, that chapter on leadership is more often than not one the last chapters of the book, perhaps followed by a chapter on, say, diversity. This all testifies to the fact that leadership and ethics are ha-bitually treated as related though separate spheres. It would be much better, of course, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is clearly an aspect of leadership, and not a separate approach that ex-ists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc.. Interestingly, this thinking and writing about ethical leadership as just one approach among many other leadership styles appears to be a relatively recent invention. In the works of Plato, Plutarch, Machiavelli and Locke, for example, we see (political) leadership and ethics dealt with as a single subject. It was not before the twentieth century that we saw the rise of a separate leadership industry. Its results are largely unimpressive; it has not made leaders necessarily more effective, let alone more ethical.
2010
This thesis presents selected works investigating the relation between leadership and morals. Given the multitude of moral challenges and the grave consequences of moral transgressions in military operations, we have chosen a military context to frame our research. Transformational leadership and the full range of leadership model (FRLM) are key constructs in this investigation, as this leadership concept has been shown to be related to operational effectiveness in military as well as other organizational contexts. However, the relationship between such leadership and morals has been questioned in leadership literature. The first study investigated whether officers’ self-importance of moral identity and their activation of moral justice schemas were related to effective leadership. The second study investigated whether sleep deprivation, which is a condition of high prevalence in military operations, affected leaders’ activation of moral justice schemas, and, consequently, their abi...
Leaders of Character: The USAFA Approach to Ethics Education and Leadership Development
Journal of Academic Ethics
We describe the educational character and leadership development processes used by the United States Air Force Academy that other educational institutions may find useful. Our processes include an integrated educational curriculum designed to complement and integrate the experiential learning that results in achieving specific organizational outcomes, co-curricular activities in cadet living, and a specific focus on the ethical development of leaders’ respect for human dignity and cultural competency as well as the mechanisms to assess and refine our processes.
What Does Ethics Have to Do With Leadership
Accounts of leadership in relation to ethics can and do go wrong in several ways that may lead us too quickly into thinking there is a tighter relationship between ethics and leadership than we have reason to believe. Firstly, these accounts can be misled by the centrality of values talk in recent discussions of leadership into thinking that values of a particular kind, are and sufficient for leadership. Secondly, the focus on character in recent leadership accounts can lead to a similar error. The assumption here is that because good character is often a locus of descriptions of leaders, such character is necessary and sufficient for leadership. Thirdly, we can fall victim to an observer bias that colours our accounts of the leaders we admire and thus wish to either have or be, which in turn leads to the fourth way in which accounts of leadership can go wrong in their description of the role of ethics in leadership. Through inattention or through wishful thinking accounts of leadership can become merely prescriptive and stipulate that ethics is requisite and at least partly constitutive of leadership. Keeping in mind these ways in which accounts of leadership commonly go astray we can say that any adequate account of leadership must, at least in the first instance be able to differentiate not only between leadership and good ethical character, but also between leadership and power, authority, influence, managerial ability, and charisma. Taking a closer look at some of the ways that the relation between leadership and ethics is misconstrued is necessary to better understanding both leadership and its connection to ethics. It is, however, just a first step. Asking whether we have reason to think of leadership as an Aristotelian virtue should, we think, enable us to give a more accurate and useful account of the complexity of the relation. It also captures underlying reasons for wanting to see the two as intrinsically connected.