Military Training and Revisionist Just War Theory’s Practicability Problem
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21700868 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Regina Sibylle Surber (0000-0001-8916-2636, University of Zurich, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-25 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Ethics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1382-4554 • E-ISSN: 1572-8609 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10892-023-09439-4 |
| OpenAlex | W4381855509 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 42 |
This article presents an analytic critique of the predominant revisionist theoretical paradigm of just war (henceforth: revisionism). This is accomplished by means of a precise description and explanation of the practicability problem that confronts it, namely that soldiers that revisionism would deem “unjust” are bound to fail to fulfil the duties that revisionism imposes on them, because these duties are overdemanding. The article locates the origin of the practicability problem in revisionism’s overidealized conception of a soldier as an individual rational agent analogous to the aggressor or defender in a case of lethal self-defense, who is capable of reflecting on the morality of his status in war and of the killing he performs and thus of recognizing his revisionist duties. Revisionism, however, ignores the following fact: Killing in war is not a natural human behavior. This is why training soldiers to kill is—and arguably always has been—a necessity for the existence of war and the killing that occurs in it. Moreover, this training involves a certain level of moral desensitization to violence whose goal is to prevent soldiers from thoroughly reflecting on the morality of the killing they engage in. Hence, war and killing can only exist if soldiers are trained in such a way that they do not reflect on whether they could be addressees of revisionist duties in the first place. This means that military training is a “constitutive condition” of soldiers and war, which is why it cannot excuse their noncompliance with revisionist duties, thus making these duties categorically overdemanding. The argument here draws on the paradigmatic example of modern US military killing conditioning (MC), but embeds it into a broader military-historical perspective that describes how soldiers have always needed to be mentally and morally influenced in order to enable war and killing. The article’s explanation of revisionism’s practicability problem has a constructive consequence for future theory-building in the ethics of war: It implies that a potentially revised ethical theory of war must necessarily analyze the institutions that allocate belligerent resources, if it aims to morally assess battlefield behavior in a practicable manner
Excuse · Just war theory · Morality · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Torture, Ethics, and Law · War, Ethics, and Justification
War in the tribal zone
Just and Unjust Wars
The Ethics of Self-Defense
War and Self-Defense
Cosmopolitan War
Killing in War
The Combat Soldier
Defensive Killing
The Ethics of Killing in War
Defusing the Demandingness Objection
Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships
Torture and the Military Profession
I.—A Plea for Excuses
Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War
Dangerous Victims
On the Moral Equality of Combatants
War as Self-Defense
Battle Tactics of the Civil War
Beyond War
The origins of war
The persistence of sexual assault within the US military
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |