Interview on Trinity/UofT's major program in Ethics, Society, and Law, its undergraduate journal Mindful, interdisciplinarity, the Afghanistan war, and just war theory. (original) (raw)

Philosophical Books, 2007

The literature in ethics and international affairs has increased enormously in recent years, and any brief survey must begin by narrowing the subject matter. I shall limit myself here to three topics that seem to me especially important in recent work in this area: war (and just war theory); humanitarian intervention; and global justice. I shall discuss the first two topics loosely as a single group, given (what I believe to be) the important role played by central elements of just war theory in philosophical discussion of these topics. 1

Military ethics and Afghanistan. Peter Olsthoorn and Desiree Verweij. In 'Mission Uruzgan: Collaborating in Multiple Coalitions for Afghanistan,' eds Robert Beeres, Jan van der Meulen, Joseph Soeters, Ad Vogelaar (eds), Pallas Publications – Amsterdam University Press.

For many of today's armed forces, peacekeeping, humanitarian, and rebuilding missions are becoming increasingly important. In these missions militaries are dutybound to exercise self-control, trying to practice a non-threatening style that is respectful with the local population, and characterized by minimal use of force (Van Baarda and Verweij, : ). Clearly, the rationale behind such hearts-and-minds approaches, and the restraint exercised, is to a large extent self-serving: winning over the local population is essential for the success of today's missions, something that as a rule can only be reached by limiting the number of civilian casualties as much as possible. A rising civilian death toll fuels resistance to one's own military personnel, while a restrained approach is thought to yield better information and more cooperation from the local population, and thus, in the end, increased security for the troops. at these rationales are self-serving seems to suggest that consequences to the local population might count for less if the expediency argument would no longer hold. At rst sight, that might seem a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Yet, as it stands, and notwithstanding all good intentions to reduce the number of civilian casualties, the largest part of military codes, military oaths, value systems, and culture seem antagonistic to the idea that the life of a local civilian counts for the same as that of a Western soldier; military e ectiveness and the interests of organizations and colleagues still hold central place in the military ethic (Robinson, ). is ethic took shape, however, at a time in which the interests of the local population played a lesser role, as the main task of Western militaries was the defence of the own territory. What we see today is that there is, as a result of the aforementioned shift of tasks, an increasing pressure on military personnel to take the interests of others than just the organization and colleagues into account, in recent years more so than ever before. is poses questions and dilemmas for them that they were not likely to encounter in earlier days. It is not always clear, for instance, how they are to deal with situations in which con icting values -the safety of oneself and one's colleagues versus the safety of the local population, but possibly also between military virtues and more civilian ones -impose con icting demands