Military Virtues and Moral Relativism (original) (raw)

This introductory chapter wants to look at moral relativism from the perspective of virtues, especially military virtues. 4 Owing to the increased interest for virtues as an alternative to rule-based ethics, military virtues are increasingly seen as the best way to underpin the ethics education of military personnel. Virtues are typically described as stable character traits that are worth having, often working as correctives to our self-regarding inclinations. 5 Where duty-based ethics focuses on the act, that is, on what is wrong, right, permitted, or obligatory, the emphasis in virtue ethics is on terms that describe the actor, such as good and praiseworthy. This focus on the kind of person one wants to be makes that it has a much broader range than rule-based ethics. Being friendly, for instance, is a virtue, but it is not a duty. 6 Motives, emotions, character formation, personality and emotions are important in virtue ethics, something until recently allegedly overlooked by other schools in moral philosophy. That does not mean that there is anything radically new about an approach that centers on virtues, though. Most virtue ethicists draw on Aristotle, who held that performing virtuous acts makes us virtuous. Doing courageous deeds grows courage, for instance. It is this Aristotelian view on virtues that also underlies most literature on military virtues. What makes virtue ethics especially interesting for the military is its concern with character formation. It assumes that character can be developed, and that virtues are not to be understood as inborn or God-given qualities, but as dispositions that can be acquired through training and practice. Such an approach also fits the tendency of many Western militaries to move away from a largely functional approach towards a more aspirational approach that aims at making soldiers better persons, mainly based on the view that bad persons are not likely to form morally good soldiers-although they could still be effective ones. 7 A question that lies at hand in the context of this volume is whether what counts as (military) virtues is place and time dependent, and at first sight a convincing case can be made that it is not. Some virtues are valued in all times and places 8-mainly because they perform an important function in society. The disposition to tell the truth and keep our promises, for instance, has important beneficial consequences. Justice is another example of a universal virtue, but so is the more martial virtue of courage, because justice is of little value if we lack the courage to defend it. 4 David Whetham already briefly sketched what utilitarianism and deontology have to say on the topic. D. Whetham, 'The challenge of ethical relativism in a coalition environment,'