Journal of Military Ethics (2004) 3(3): 199 /215

Squaring the Circle: Teaching

Philosophical Ethics in the
Military
J. Joseph Miller
Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Box 1510,
Pembroke, NC 28372-1510, USA.
Tel: /1 910 521 6314, Fax: /1 910 521 6518, E-mail: [email protected]

It is hard to overstate the importance that the military places on teaching

its soldiers to be leaders of character. Indeed, the military has developed a
sophisticated Aristotelian understanding of what it means to be a leader
of character, an understanding in which the virtues of a soldier are
defined by the practice of fighting wars successfully. Putting that

* *
theoretical model to work /that is, developing soldiers who possess
the right virtues /requires Socratic dialogue between instructors and
students. Unfortunately, the theory of Socratic dialogue often clashes with
the practice of military institutions as trainers of soldiers. The belief that
one must train soldiers to be virtuous can and often does result in an
atmosphere in which instructors present the dictates of morality as
revealed truth, an atmosphere which leads to knee-jerk moral certainty
and which actively discourages open discussion of ethics. Putting theory
into practice, then, requires that an institution reject the training
mentality in favor of Socratic inquiry. The author suggests two strategies
for achieving that goal: giving philosophers a greater role in designing
ethics curriculum and incorporating civilian academics into military
institutions more effectively.
KEYWORDS: Aristotle, Military Academy, pedagogy, professional ethic, virtue.

On 12 May 1962, a frail Douglas MacArthur delivered his final public speech to the
cadets at the United States Military Academy. A West Point graduate himself,
MacArthur served as Superintendent of the Academy between the World Wars,

ª 2004 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/15027570410006219

200 J. Joseph Miller

instituting changes that dragged a reluctant Academy into the twentieth century.
MacArthur had a clear vision for what West Point should be, and his 1962 speech
particularly resonates with West Pointers because it so eloquently and succinctly
captures that vision. Taking as his theme the Academy’s motto, ‘Duty, Honor,
Country’, MacArthur enjoins cadets to

Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government:
Whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long,
by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too
arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by
morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too
violent; whether our personal liberties are as firm and complete as they should
be (MacArthur 1962).

Cadets instead should remember that ‘These great national problems are
not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost
stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night: duty, honor, country’ (MacArthur
1962).
Inspiring cadets to live up to the ideals of duty, honor, and country is one of
West Point’s highest priorities, but that mission is not peculiar to the Academy.
While not all institutions specifically employ West Point’s slogan, the ideals of duty,
honor and country are fundamental to all modern militaries. As such, most military
institutions, especially military academies, devote a great deal of energy to shaping
soldiers’ ethical sensibilities, generating mountains of theoretical and quasi-
theoretical models for teaching professional ethics. Putting theory into practice
can prove somewhat harder, for many military institutions embrace a training
mentality that is fundamentally at odds with Socratic inquiry. When training
replaces Socratic dialogue as the method for transmitting ethics, the results are
not infrequently an uncritical, dogmatic moral certainty that is at times actively
hostile to challenge. If military institutions are to teach ethics effectively, they must
work to avoid the predominating training mentality and its often-resultant moral
certainty.

Ethics and the Military, the Theory

Many of today’s prominent accounts of ethics and the military can trace their roots
to Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State (1957). Defining soldiers */
and particularly officers */as professionals, Huntington argues that professionals
have moral responsibilities precisely because they are professionals. Indeed,
Huntington maintains that ‘social responsibility distinguishes the professional
 Squaring the Circle 201

man from other experts with only intellectual skills’ (1981: 13). What Huntington
calls the social responsibility of soldiers is often cashed out as a requirement
that a soldier be a ‘leader of character’, defined roughly as one who ‘seek[s] to
discover the truth, decide[s] what is right, and demonstrate[s] the courage to act
accordingly. . .always’ (Cadet 2001: 32). Of course, an actual moral code will need
to go beyond vague platitudes and offer some sort of substantive theoretical
framework. Such a framework is, unfortunately, usually lacking in actual military
publications.
But while official military documents might lack detail, quasi-official accounts
are far more explicit. Don Snider, widely acknowledged as one of the most
influential torch-bearers for the military professionalism approach, argues that
virtue for a professional soldier is grounded in the nature of soldiering as a
profession. Snider spells out this position most clearly in a 1999 monograph,
co-written with John Nagl, and Tony Pfaff. The thrust of Snider, Nagl and Pfaff’s
(SNP) position is that officers need to hold objective, non-relative values. In their
view, military officers ought to possess objective standards of behavior that apply to
them qua military officer and not qua American or Chinese, Catholic or Muslim.
SNP point out that ‘the ethical obligations of the officer are objective and are not
contingent on any desire held by any individual. The professional military ethic is
not a relative ethic’ (SNP 1999: 9).1 Instead, SNP argue, a professional military
ethic must be objective.
This objectivity is supposed to be given by the very nature of the profession
itself; in a professional ethic, ‘good and bad are determined, in part functionally, by
how the profession contributes to society’ (SNP 1999: 9). In other words, a
professional military ethic, like any other professional ethic, should be determined
by the goals and principles necessary for pursuing that profession.2 For the military,
then, the obligation to uphold the principles of the professional military ethic arises
‘because it is necessary if the profession is to be effective in its purpose of
warfighting’ (SNP 1999: 9). The moral principles that an officer should hold are just
those principles that are necessary for enabling a soldier to achieve his or her
purpose, that of fighting and winning wars.

1
Snider, Nagl, and Pfaff are hardly breaking new ground here. Just war theorists from Augustine to
Walzer have been nearly unanimous in proclaiming that the moral rules for soldiers apply to all soldiers
regardless of their nation of origin.
2
Doctors, for instance, are bound by the Hippocratic Oath as well as by the American Medical
Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics. Both sets of codes are specific to doctors as a profession,
specifying those things (such as patient confidentiality, honesty to patients, and providing care in
emergencies) that are peculiar to the profession of medicine. The American Bar Association provides
similar requirements for attorneys, many of which apply to lawyers because of the role that they play
(e.g., not being obligated to reveal their client’s guilt). Most professions are bound by similar codes, some
less formalized than others.
202 J. Joseph Miller

This notion of deriving one’s ethics from a consideration of the role that one
plays is hardly new; Aristotle recommends just such an account.3 In the
Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle argues that every practice aims at some good, with
the goods being defined by the constraints of the practice itself. Alisdair MacIntyre
(1981) elaborates on Aristotle’s position, calling a practice

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human

activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in
the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are
appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result
that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends
and goods involved, are systematically extended (MacIntyre 1981: 187).

Thus, for MacIntyre, specific kinds of actions are not practices: planting cabbage is
not a practice, but farming is. Perhaps an example will clarify the point. The aim of
someone who sets out to play baseball is to be a good baseball player; however, we
know what counts as a good baseball player only by looking at the practice of
baseball itself, by looking at what it is that baseball players are called upon to do. To
be a good baseball player, then, requires that I have a particular set of skills, for
example strong and quick wrists, good hand/eye coordination, patience, aggres-
siveness, and a good memory. These skills are, for the baseball player, virtues that
those aspiring to become good baseball players will work to cultivate. Soldiers, and
particularly officers, would likewise have a similar set of characteristics, virtues that
are necessary for them to carry out their task of fighting wars. Accordingly, the U.S.
Army has specified seven virtues that are necessary for the task of soldiering. Those
virtues, massaged into the acronym LDRSHIP, are loyalty, duty, respect, selfless
service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.4
Undoubtedly, this is an attractive and highly intuitive list of virtues, and when
grounded in Aristotelian virtue ethics, the whole account has much to commend it.
Military institutions do well to expect that soldiers inculcate these virtues. West

3
SNP do not actually mention Aristotle. Their account is drawn mainly from research into the social
sciences; as such, their argument is grounded largely in a pragmatist approach (i.e., what sorts of
systems will get me the result I most want?) rather than a purely philosophical approach (i.e., what is
the nature of virtue and how do I go about incorporating it?). As a result, one is left with the
uncomfortable feeling that for SNP, if acting virtuously were not necessary to successful soldiering, they
would abandon all pretense of moral education. One especially troubling possibility is that if, as some
American officials have allegedly suggested, the Geneva Convention prohibitions against torture are
‘quaint’ and if torture turns out to be effective in preventing terrorist attacks, then the SNP account
might very well be used to justify the activities at Abu Ghraib.
4
The attempt to compress complex problems into simple acronyms carries its own particular set of
dangers. Timothy Challans, from whose work the acronym arose, writes that he resisted the efforts to
turn the Army’s values into an acronym largely because it destroyed the conceptual relationships
between the different values (1999). While militaries are prone to over-use acronyms, they are by no
means the worst offenders in this regard. One need only browse through the multitude of business/
leadership self-help books to find hundreds of complex problems squashed into silly mnemonic devices.
 Squaring the Circle 203

Point, for instance, goes so far as to issue each cadet a wallet-sized card listing these
traits, together with a brief description of each. The Academy is hardly alone in this
respect; many organizations, military and civilian, make lists of values, create
snappy acronyms, and promulgate them via cards, posters and ad campaigns.
Unfortunately, memorizing lists and descriptions does little good without some
understanding of context. What, for instance, counts as displaying respect? If we
mean by ‘respect’ just that subordinates will salute superiors and call one another
‘sir’, then respect is pretty clearly a traditional part of soldiering. But the Army
means by ‘respect’ much more. According to the Army manual FM 22-100 Army
Leadership ,

Respect denotes the regard and recognition of the absolute dignity that every
human being possesses. Respect is treating people as they should be treated.
Specifically, respect is indicative of compassion and consideration of others,
which includes a sensitivity to and regard for the feelings and needs of others
and an awareness of the effect of one’s own behavior on them. Respect also
involves the notion of treating people justly. Respect is the value that informs
the Army leader on those issues related to equal opportunity and the
prevention of sexual harassment (Army 1990).

This account of respect raises an important question: namely, is respect, so

understood, really necessary for a well-functioning military, as the SNP account
would require? Indeed, sexual harassment has historically been widespread in the
American military. Some in fact would argue that it persists to this day, resisting
sustained and direct efforts to eradicate it. Despite this fact, the American military is
remarkably effective in fighting wars. Might it thus be possible that respect for
women is not really necessary to fighting wars? One could make similar points
about many of the other virtues we want to require of military professionals; they
are unquestionably valuable, but the justification for them is not obviously
grounded in a simple understanding of military effectiveness.
These kinds of questions need to be addressed by putting issues into context.
We want to argue that an officer’s having ‘compassion and consideration for
others’, including a ‘sensitivity to and regard for the feelings and needs of others’, is
necessary for effectively fighting wars, even though, for example, some of West
Point’s most prominent graduates did not display such traits. William T. Sherman
was an unashamed racist, regarding both Blacks and Native Americans as
subhuman. Ulysses Grant’s anti-Semitism is legendary.5 George Patton struck a
subordinate. None of these actions seem to speak of tolerance or of respect, yet all
three men were astonishingly effective officers. The obvious response here is that the
men in question were good soldiers in spite of their flaws and not because of them,

5
See ‘General Orders Number 11’ in which Grant proclaims ‘The Jews, as a class, violating every
regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby
expelled from the Department.’
204 J. Joseph Miller

and that their lack of respect actually hindered them from attaining even greater
things. Moreover, historical circumstances were such that, during the Civil War, a
general could be a racist and remain an effective general, whereas such a
combination is impossible in today’s military.
One can, I think, make parallel arguments for sexism and homophobia.
The modern military is coming to grips with the idea that treating women as
equals is morally required and does not in any way detract from a military’s
ability to fight a war successfully. Some would argue that the day when the
American military must confront that same truth about homosexuals is not
far off. The point here is not to establish a conclusive position on sexual harass-
ment and its connection to effective fighting; rather, my aim is to show that
such discussions need to take place. To put it another way, military institutions
need open and honest discussion about which traits actually are necessary for
fighting and winning wars, and about what it is that those traits actually entail.
Recognizing the need for real discussion, most militaries require both that
officers receive a (mostly) liberal-arts college education and that their
education must involve some discussion of military ethics. Moreover, many of
those same institutions maintain that the best way to teach ethics is through
dialogue. West Point, for example, even goes so far as to cite, in its Cadet Leader
Development Workbook, Socrates’ famous dictum that ‘The unexamined life is not
worth living’.

Ethics and the Military, the Practice

Aristotle offers his own methods for teaching the virtues; in Book II
of the Nichomachean Ethics , he specifies that virtues are acquired in stages.
Initially, we learn to perform virtuous actions via pleasure and pain,
being rewarded for performing virtuous acts and punished for vicious acts.
Because reward and punishment ultimately cannot do more than train a person
to follow lists of rules, Aristotle argues that we must eventually adopt role
models, emulating the actions of the virtuous. After enough practice
performing virtuous acts, we will develop a habit of acting virtuously, and for
Aristotle, having the habit of acting virtuously just is to be virtuous (Aristotle 1985:
33 /53).
Military institutions, and military academies especially, generally do an
exemplary job both in providing rewards and punishments and in offering role
models. At military academies, for example, virtuous behavior can lead to
promotions and awards, the latter including the most-treasured of privileges: extra
off-post passes. Punishments for failure to perform adequately can range from the
loss of free time, to demotion and even to repeating an entire year. But military
academies do more than provide lists of rules and regulations; they also provide role
models for cadets to emulate. Cadets spend their days surrounded by noncommis-
sioned, senior company-grade, and field-grade officers, all of whom are told
 Squaring the Circle 205

repeatedly that their job is both to instruct and to serve as role models for cadets.6
Militaries are, in fact, ideally suited for imparting the first two of Aristotle’s stages of
virtue acquisition. Aristotle, however, requires that virtue education go beyond
rules and role models. It is not enough simply to do the right action; one must
perform the right action for the right reasons.
For certain types of tasks, one can acquire right reason with very little
discussion simply by watching others who have already mastered the task;
thus, watching an experienced engineer at work will teach me both how to build
a bridge and why to build it that way, namely, because building it the right way
prevents it from falling. Still, even learning to build a bridge does require more than
just observation; for example, without some discussion between master an
apprentice, the apprentice will be completely unable to distinguish structurally
necessary features from artistic embellishments. Learning ethics is similar; a cadet
can learn to be a moral officer by emulating other moral officers. But modeling
behavior on role models will not necessarily result in soldiers who perform the right
action for the right reasons. Without some further dialogue, a cadet will remain
unable to distinguish between moral qualities that need to be emulated and
idiosyncrasies that stem more from personality types. Moreover, officer candidates
who slavishly emulate their role models will be incapable of determining when a
particular characteristic is no longer appropriate; after all, if every officer had simply
adopted all of Sherman’s qualities, the American Army would be flooded with
racists.
So for Aristotle (as it should also be for us), to be a truly virtuous person one
must come to understand why certain character traits, certain virtues, are good
ones to have. That part of the process requires the sort of Socratic dialogue that
most military institutions emphasize in their literature on ethics. Unfortunately,
while rules and role models are easy for military institutions to provide, Socratic
dialogue is much harder. Thinking about right and wrong requires that we examine
our intuitions, probe the reasons that we give to justify those responses, and test
those justifications against other intuitions until we arrive at some general
principles that we think we can accept; that is the process of Socratic inquiry.
But that process is often messy, and often enough it does not lead to a simple or
uniform set of answers.
Military institutions, I submit, are generally reluctant to embrace the
messiness of philosophical inquiry. Whether this feature is a contingent part of
military culture or an inevitable result of some aspects of the military function, it is
nonetheless true that for all of the explicit commitments to the importance of

6
Indeed, American military academies rely on a large percentage of military officers to teach academic
courses even though most of those officers are both less well trained than their civilian counterparts
(most military faculty have only a master’s degree in their subjects) and more expensive than civilians.
The fact that such officers can serve as role models to cadets, both by showing students that academics
and soldiering are perfectly compatible and by demonstrating positive examples of officership, offsets the
lack of training and the expense.
206 J. Joseph Miller

Socratic dialogue, many military institutions retain a culture that is deeply rooted in
a much different pedagogical model, one that views teachers as experts whose job is
to impart knowledge to students. There is, I think, a tendency in military
institutions for faculty to adopt the position that, ‘There are things that you need
to know and I am going to tell you those things’.7 There is, in other words, some
sense in which military institutions have a tendency to carry a training mentality
into higher education. When that training mentality carries over into moral
education, it results in a setting in which ‘knee-jerk’ moral certainty is far more
common than the settled certainty and nuanced understanding that results from
Socratic inquiry.
Take for example West Point’s ‘values education training’ (or VET) classes.8 In
these classes I discern problems that I suppose are typical of ethics education
programs in military institutions (and perhaps other large, bureaucratic organiza-
tions as well). West Point’s VET classes consist of volunteer officers and civilian
faculty (although ideally only civilians with military experience) who ‘foster
discussion, answer questions and assist in cadet character development by sharing
with the cadets their own experiences and lessons learned’ (First 2002: 4). The
Academy publishes a VET guide which contains lesson plans and discussion
suggestions for each VET class. These sessions are designed to be open, rational
discussions of ethical issues. Primarily, the lessons consist of multiple case studies in
which cadets are asked to analyze the situation and provide a solution to the ethical
problems being posed. While the goal of these classes is eventual conformity */in
that each cadet is, by the end of his or her career at West Point, ultimately supposed
to accept the Army’s values */the classes are specifically not to be indoctrination
sessions. Indeed, the official VET guidance offered by the Simon Center specifies that
discussions should be open, respectful, and nonjudgmental.
Achieving that outcome, however, can be difficult, especially for those who are
more accustomed to training officers than they are to engaging in Socratic dialogue.
Informal, off-the-record discussions with cadets find them reporting that VET classes
consist almost entirely of cadets repeating the company line. Indeed, most claimed
that the ‘best’ way to approach a VET class was simply to begin by giving the

7
To give one particular sort of example, Ph.D. faculty at West Point are openly referred to as ‘subject
matter experts’, the assumption being that a faculty member with a doctorate in some particular
discipline is ipso facto qualified to teach any course in that field.
8
At West Point, VET classes themselves disappeared after the 2002 /3 academic year. Unfortunately,
their content has not; now faculty are to incorporate parts of the VET classes into traditional academic
courses, so that, say, a plebe engineering course will now spend some time talking about the importance
of respect and honor. Because engineering professors lack extensive background in moral education, the
Academy is recycling the information from the VET guides to help professors develop their lessons. West
Point is not unique in offering such classes; the U.S. Air Force Academy offers similar seminars through
its Character and Leadership Development Education Division, and the U.S. Naval Academy offers
Leader of Character Seminars through its Character Development Division. At Sandhurst, a ‘moral
education package’ is taught through the chaplain’s corps. I am not, of course, in any position to
comment on the effectiveness of those programs, but they would seem to be at least potentially subject
to the same sorts of problems that plague West Point’s VET classes.
 Squaring the Circle 207

answer that they knew the officer in charge was looking for and hope to get released
from the class early. Several cadets report having been berated by officers for voicing
views out of line with the ‘approved solution’. Most claimed that any time
discussions were actually ‘interesting’, that is, any time that there was actual
disagreement over the correctness of a solution to a particular moral problem, an
officer would step in, halt the discussion, and provide the ‘correct’ answer. Perhaps
more disturbing, though, are the reports of officers who use VET classes as a bully
pulpit for their own idiosyncratic views. Cadets in one company reported that an
officer spent one entire VET class warning cadets of the dangers of allowing women
to join the Army.
All of these worries are of course purely anecdotal; at best, they show only that
some of the people tasked to teach in the VET program are not doing what they are
supposed to be doing. But I would argue that to the extent that these sorts of
incidents occur and to the extent that the institution’s leadership is aware of it, the
moral certainty that some of the officers teaching in the VET program display is
being tacitly supported by the institution itself. The official VET guide, typical of
many training-style documents, lends itself to this same sort of non-Socratic
approach. In the lesson on moral reasoning, for example, the VET guide provides a
minute-by-minute outline of the lesson in which the instructor is to convey the
approved ethical reasoning process:9

1. Define the problem.

2. Know the relevant rules.
3. Develop and evaluate possible courses of action.
4. Choose the course of action that best suits Army Values.

After providing the pre-approved model for moral reasoning, the guide offers a case
study in which a soldier ponders whether or not he should illicitly help his friend
pass a test so that the friend can then receive a much-needed certification. Cadets
are then asked to resolve the case using the approved four-step process. At each
step, instructors are provided with the ‘correct’ response. The guide specifies, for
instance, that the problem is defined as an ethical dilemma involving a conflict
between loyalty and integrity. Instructors are then warned that characterizing the
problem as a conflict between friendship and integrity is incorrect, as friendship is
an interest and not an ethical value. That response, of course, begs countless
questions. Why are loyalty and integrity ethical values while friendship is not? Why
think that interests are irrelevant to ethics? Why characterize the problem as a
dilemma at all rather than as a matter of calculating utilities or of testing
universalizability? Not surprisingly, the training-style VET guide fails to raise any of
these issues.

9
Tellingly, the approved process is taken directly from one of the Army’s training manuals, FM 22-100,
Army Leadership.
208 J. Joseph Miller

Like much that is done at all the American military academies, the VET guide
relies on what I will call the technician’s method to resolve problems.10 Indeed, the
technician’s method lends itself nicely to the military’s training mentality;
technicians learn protocols or standard operating procedures. These protocols
come in the form of rules that can then be taught to students, and the students’
success at mastering those rules is relatively easy to measure. In short, technicians
can be trained in a way that scientists and humanists cannot.
The claim that the technician’s method lends itself to training in ways that the
sciences and the humanities do not is not intended as a slight; there is much power
in this method, and it is ideally suited for answering certain sorts of problems.
Because the technician’s method synchronizes so nicely with a training mentality,
military institutions sometimes forget that there are multiple methods for solving
problems and that different types of problems call for different methods of solution;
in other words, not all problems are engineering problems. To oversimplify grossly,
one might say that the technician’s method is best suited to answering ‘how’
questions (How do I do build a safe bridge? How do I get my employees to be more
efficient?); the scientific method is best suited to answering ‘what’ questions (What
is the speed of light? What makes the earth go around the sun? What causes
cancer?); and the philosophical method is best suited to answering ‘why’ questions
(Why should I be concerned about efficiency? Why does gravity work as it does
rather than some other way?). When applied to the correct kinds of questions, each
method works extremely well; apply a method to the wrong kind of question and
the results are less reliable. Thus one finds very few ‘natural philosophers’ anymore;
after natural philosophers discovered that questions about gravity and electro-
magnetism are better answered via the scientific method, they all became physicists.
When the distinction between different methods is lost and all problems are
addressed by the technician’s method, then every question becomes a ‘how’
question. Conflating methods can have far reaching implications for both the
sciences and the humanities; in teaching ethics, the results can be devastating.
Rather than asking philosophical questions like ‘Why be moral?’ or ‘Why is it
wrong to kill noncombatants?’ a technician’s approach to ethics would ask ‘How do
I become a good officer?’ and ‘How do I decide at whom to aim?’ When a moral
question becomes a technical question, students will often assume that the issue can
be resolved by (a) finding all of the variables involved, (b) choosing the equation
that incorporates all of those variables, and (c) plugging in the variables and
churning out a solution. The implicit danger in shoehorning complex moral
problems into a technician’s model is that the technician’s method would seem to
entail that there is exactly one fairly straightforward answer */an ‘approved
solution’ */to every moral problem.
The belief that there are approved solutions to moral problems, solutions that
are both clear-cut and relatively easy to determine, can result in a rather unhappy

10
All of the American service academies began exclusively as engineering schools, and while all offer a
variety of majors today, all of the Academies remain primarily engineering schools.
 Squaring the Circle 209

sort of moral certainty. After all, if there is but one answer and that answer is easy
to determine, then there really is little purpose in ‘wasting’ time discussing
alternatives. I suspect that this is exactly the sort of assumption at work when
values education is done poorly, using the wrong methods. It is indeed a powerfully
seductive assumption, one to which even those trained in philosophy are not always
immune. In designing practical ethics courses, including those at military
academies, there are those who feel that a good course should not spend too
much time focusing on primary texts like Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. The argument
contends that students would be better served by a text that distilled virtue ethics,
Kantianism and utilitarianism to their essences and then concentrated on showing
students how to ‘apply’ those theories. Why bother with studying Kant himself
when what really matters is producing students who are able to pick out maxims,
universalize them, and act only on the universalizable ones?11 While there is much
to be said for showing students how to use Kant or Mill or Aristotle to answer a
moral problem, a soldier who does only that has not fulfilled Aristotle’s dictum that
we do the right action for the right reasons. A soldier who, for example, decides
to apply rule-utilitarianism to a problem needs to understand, or at least have
thought about, why happiness and only happiness matters, and why rule-
utilitarianism is the best way to maximize happiness. That sort of understanding
requires a close and careful reading of Mill and some sort of discussion about what
Mill actually is claiming. There are no mechanical procedures for reaching such an
understanding.
Besides impacting the way in which ethics is taught, a method that aims for
unreflective moral certainty can also lead to an unwillingness to engage with views
that lie outside of the accepted mainstream. This phenomenon is not restricted to
military institutions. Consider the furor at Evergreen College and at Antioch College
at the invitation of death-row resident and anti-capital punishment advocate
Mumia Abu-Jamal as a commencement speaker or the more recent protest at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when incoming freshmen were required
to read a book on Islam. Nor is it restricted to cultural conservatives. Witness here
the protests several years ago at Barbara Bush’s commencement address at
Wellesley College.12 If civilian institutions find themselves tempted to suppress

11
This penchant for providing students with mechanisms for determining right and wrong often leads to
curious imbalances in ethics syllabi. At West Point, for example, virtue ethics, with its lack of clear
action-generating mechanisms, generally receives only about two days of attention (for comparison,
divine command ethics receives the same amount of time). Utilitarianism and Kantianism receive two-
to-three times as much attention. The slight to Aristotle is particularly odd in light of the clear
connections between Aristotelian thought and the Army’s virtue-centered professional ethics.
12
I do not intend to imply that every person should be embraced as public speakers by educational
institutions regardless of the content of his/her ideas; it is not clear, for example, that it would be
inappropriate to complain about the invitation of a flat-earther to lecture on geology or even that it
would be wrong to protest if a state institution invited a priest to say a public mass; the former would
be making claims that are demonstrably false while the latter would raise separation of church and
state issues.
210 J. Joseph Miller

unpopular views, military institutions */with their clear institutional norms (e.g.,
the U.S. Army’s seven values) */seem especially in jeopardy.

Theory into Practice

Moral certainty does have its proper place in the world; the evilness of Nazism or the
wrongness of female genital mutilation is clear. The danger for military institutions,
with their clear and developed behavioral expectations, is that moral clarity
degenerates into a ‘knee-jerk’ moral certainty, one that is born of unreflective
institutional, religious and political biases, ungrounded in reasons and overtly
hostile to any challenge. Rather than endorsing the sort of reflection required to
make a real Aristotelian virtue ethics possible, military institutions may tend to rely
upon what Timothy Challans (1999) calls instrumental moral methods. Designed
for generating easy, mechanical answers, instrumental moral methods often
appropriate the language of dilemma as a problem solving tool. All moral problems
are couched as moral dilemmas with but two choices */follow the order or refuse;
help my friend or refuse. Lost in dilemma language is the truth that very few moral
problems truly constitute dilemmas; indeed, philosophers must work quite hard to
construct cases that are true moral dilemmas.13 Instead, instrumental moral
methods conflate epistemological dilemmas wherein actors do not know what to do
with moral dilemmas wherein only two choices are available. By positing (false)
dilemmas, instrumental methods can seduce practitioners into leading what
Challans calls the quasi-reflective life. Chief among the defects of the quasi-reflective
life is that it relies upon moral judgments that are inadequately grounded in
theoretical commitments. Those leading the quasi-reflective life make moral
decisions about false dilemmas using mechanical decision matrices that are based
on partially formed and poorly understood intuitions. Theirs is not a completely
unreflective life, for they must use their procedure to generate a result. But neither is
theirs a reflective life. The difference between a reflective reasoner and a quasi-
reflective reasoner is the difference between a mathematician, and a student who
can solve a math problem when given an equation and all of the variables.
Instrumental moral methods are, unfortunately, seductive for military institutions,
for such methods can be taught through the kinds of training techniques that
modern militaries have mastered.
Challans identifies, correctly I think, a quasi-reflective bent in the system of
moral education in militaries in general and their military academies specifically.

13
Judith Thomson’s (1986) trolley cases and Bernard Williams’ (1963) Jim and Pedro case come to mind
as some of the more successful attempts to construct dilemmas. Indeed, criticisms of utilitarianism are
rife with dilemmas of this sort. But even well-constructed dilemmas pose some risk; R. M. Hare (1981,
ch. 3) points out that, in the process of generating cases that truly leave but two options, the cases
become so unlikely that it is unclear whether our intuitions really should count as a reliable guide.
 Squaring the Circle 211

While Challans may well be right that the U.S. military is falling short in its
programs for moral education (evaluating that claim is beyond the scope of this
paper), I think that most of the issues to which Challans points demonstrate failures
in execution rather than failures in theory. The Aristotelian model of virtue
sketched above provides an underlying theoretical account for understanding
ethics. Thus, unlike a true quasi-reflective reasoner, a soldier does have a general
standard for determining what virtues he should have, namely those traits
necessary for fighting and winning wars. But moving from a justificatory principle
to a specific list of virtues requires work, and all too often those responsible for
teaching ethics in a military setting do not do the hard work that the theory
requires. A full and proper understanding of the Aristotelian model needs to
supplement the simple training method. I would suggest that one particularly
attractive alternative is the marriage of the military’s virtue-based account to a
modern version of Socratic dialogue, Rawlsian reflective equilibrium.14
Reflective equilibrium, as understood by Rawls (1971 and 1993), is a process
of reconciling moral principles with our considered moral judgments. For Rawls, a
considered moral judgment is a judgment about which we are confident and one
that is free from common errors such as factual ignorance or hasty or emotion-
driven reasoning. Reaching reflective equilibrium requires that we entertain
arguments for alternatives to our considered moral judgments. By reflecting on
all of the available alternatives, starting with simple, basic beliefs (e.g., courage is
good), and accepting the good arguments and rejecting the bad, we can adjust both
our considered moral judgments and the various alternatives, bringing them closer
into line with one another. Sometimes the counterarguments will require that we
adjust our considered moral judgments.15 If we are to reach true reflective
equilibrium, nothing can be privileged; all of our principles and beliefs must be
open to revision, including the background beliefs that underlie our principles.
When done properly, reflective equilibrium allows individuals to develop nuanced
moral beliefs; by reflecting on our considered moral beliefs, questioning those beliefs
in light of new facts or arguments, we avoid a dogmatic, unreflective conservatism,
what MacIntyre calls a dead tradition (MacIntyre 1981: 221 /222).

14
See Rawls (1971: 19 /21) for an initial description of reflective equilibrium. The concept receives
substantially greater importance in Rawls (1993).
15
Rawlsian reflective equilibrium reflects between principles of action and our moral intuitions. That sort
of action-oriented ethics might not sit well with the Academy’s character-oriented approach. Although
I think that virtue ethics must be subordinate to action ethics, I lack the space to argue for that point
here. Instead, I note that reflective equilibrium might have a virtue-centered counterpart in the sorts of
judgments that Alisdair MacIntyre endorses in After Virtue . There MacIntyre argues that individuals
engaged in their quest for the good life must integrate new insights into their traditions. MacIntyre’s
account is perhaps less cognitivist than is Rawls, and the theoretical differences between Rawls’
vaguely Kantian reflective equilibrium and MacIntyre’s vaguely Aristotelian judgments are important.
Still, MacIntyre’s methods are similar enough to reflective equilibrium that substituting MacIntyre’s
model for Rawls’ would not affect the main thrust of my suggestions.
212 J. Joseph Miller

Using Rawlsian reflective equilibrium as part of a full Aristotelian virtue ethics

puts into place all of the tools necessary for a serious discussion of ethics.
Unfortunately, putting the tools into place is of value only if those responsible for
teaching ethics are willing to use them. To that end, I would sketch two
suggestions, with the caveat that both require considerably more argument than
I can provide here. First, military institutions would do well to note that teaching
ethics through a process of reflective equilibrium is a skill that must itself be
developed. Many military academies make the mistake of assuming that being a
morally upstanding person is both a necessary and sufficient qualification for
teaching ethics; consequently, much of the ethics instruction is placed in the hands
of experienced officers on the assumption that anyone who knows how to be a
moral officer can thereby teach others how to be the same.16 Undoubtedly
experienced officers can be extremely effective as role models for officer candidates,
and in that role, they fill a vital function. But teaching ethics requires more than
being a role model: teaching ethics requires that we ask why certain qualities are
good ones to have, and in asking that question, we must open up the possibility that
some quality might not be a good one to have. Since experienced officers
presumably do have the qualities that students are being asked to question, the
process of reflective equilibrium really boils down to allowing 20-year-olds to openly
criticize the behavior of 20-year veteran officers. Very little in the career of an
experienced officer will prepare him/her for such an enterprise; I suspect that in
general few second lieutenants are invited to critique, say, a battalion XO in front of
all the other second lieutenants in the battalion. Learning to manage open, Socratic
dialogue effectively without imposing one’s own views is an acquired skill, and it is a
skill that many officers have not had the opportunity to acquire.
Philosophers */broadly defined here as anyone whose discipline makes
extensive use of the Socratic method */have been using the Socratic method to
teach moral reasoning for at least 2500 years. Indeed, a not inconsiderable part of
the process of becoming a philosopher is learning how to use the Socratic method
effectively. Just as, say, drill instructors specialize not just in being good soldiers but
also in teaching new recruits how to become good soldiers, so too do philosophers
specialize in teaching via the Socratic method. So while all soldiers have a role to
play in moral education, namely that of serving as role models, it is trained
philosophers who have the skills necessary to facilitate the theoretical and
dialectical components of a soldier’s moral education. Military institutions should

16
At the U.S. Naval Academy, for instance, the required ethics course consists of weekly lectures on
moral theory taught by civilian philosophers and twice-weekly discussion sections led by senior naval
and marine officers. But the Naval Academy differs from, say, large state universities that employ a
similar system in that the ‘teaching assistants’ at Annapolis are not graduate students in philosophy,
but are instead drawn from all departments at the Academy. To be fair, though, the military’s belief
that any responsible professional can teach ethics differs little from other professions. Most of the staff
ethicists at large hospitals, law firms and corporations are, first and foremost, doctors, lawyers, and
business people respectively.
 Squaring the Circle 213

draw upon some of that collective expertise by making sure that their moral
education programs include sustained work with philosophers.
Second, and this is much harder, those responsible for teaching ethics to the
military must be willing to back away from a training model and embrace*/or at
least make room for */Socratic dialogue. That task will not be at all easy; modern
militaries have become superb training institutions, and every single soldier must
pass through that training. Most soldiers, in fact, train repeatedly; soldiers often
claim (with some level of seriousness) that they spend a third of their career in
various military schools. Unfortunately, that training mentality is often carried over
into academic settings, resulting in institutions that are far better at training second
lieutenants than they are at educating college students.17 Although there are likely
a number of ways of mitigating the training impulses of officer faculty at military
institutions, I submit that one way would be to utilize civilian academics,
particularly those skilled in these methods, more effectively.
Because most military academies require that their officer faculty members
accumulate significant command experiences prior to graduate school and a
teaching assignment, many officers simply lack the time to absorb a real feel for the
open, free-wheeling inquiry of the academic life.18 Moreover, in the United States at
least, officers attending graduate school are prohibited from serving as teaching or
research assistants; consequently, most arrive at their institutions with a brand new
degree and no classroom experience. Lacking any experience teaching via Socratic
dialogue, new officers tend to fall back on the experiences they do have, namely that
of training soldiers. Darkened rooms lit only with powerpoint slides and broken up
by pro forma discussions are perhaps very effective in explaining to soldiers which
buildings they must capture, how they go about detecting submarines, or what
anti-aircraft capabilities to avoid; such methods are not, however, conducive to
analyzing Shakespeare, appreciating Mill, or coming to a deep understanding of the
moral life for a military officer. The problem is exacerbated when many of the officer
faculty are themselves graduates of the very academies at which they are now
teaching and whose own undergraduate experiences consisted largely of ‘experts’
imparting information by way of an overhead projector. Because the military

17
To cite but one example, West Point’s proudest academic achievement */its remarkably high number
of Rhodes Scholars */is tainted by the training impulse. Each year, West Point puts its best students
through a special course that preps the cadets for the Rhodes Scholar selection process. Volunteers
from the faculty hold classes to help cadets hone their essays, and to absorb a sort of cocktail-hour level
of understanding of current research in a dozen different fields, this latter to help them through the
various social events during the interviewing process and to provide them with nuggets of wisdom for
their interviews. In short, the Academy trains its best and brightest in the art of impressing Rhodes
Scholar selection committees.
18
As an alternative, one might also develop military academics the way that the American military
develops its chaplains. Officers might be allowed to retire, fund their own graduate educations (by
serving as teaching assistants, etc.), proceed at their own pace, and, upon graduation, accept a
recommissioning to serve in academic positions. One might also simply commission civilian academics
as the American medical and legal corps do.
214 J. Joseph Miller

faculty have no other examples of academe available, they are often entirely
unaware of the unusualness of the academic climate at their institutions.
So again, the full inclusion of civilian academics might provide a counter-
balance to what might otherwise become an inbred military faculty. Because they
are not required to divide their time between military duties and academics,
civilians typically will have far more experience in academic settings than will
officers and can thus use their considerable outside teaching experience to stimulate
an open exchange of ideas*/provided, of course that they are used appropriately.
Simply hiring some civilians and sending them into a classroom will not change the
academic culture from a training environment to a Socratic one, particularly if
the civilians are simply placed under the complete control of the officers at the
institution. If they are to act as counterweights, civilians must be permitted into
leadership roles (e.g., as senior tenured faculty or department heads or directors of
courses). At the U.S. Naval Academy, for example, a civilian serves as academic
dean and most department chairs are civilians. The Virginia Military Institute
moves even further in that direction, hiring mostly civilian academics (though they
put a premium on civilian academics with prior military service).
At the risk, then, of drawing grand conclusions from this fairly brief discussion
of teaching ethics in the military, I would submit that there are two lessons to be
drawn from this study. First, the good news: military institutions have at their
disposal a sophisticated model for teaching ethics, one that combines an Aristotelian
understanding of virtues as being embedded in practices and that allows for a
Rawlsian reflective equilibrium as a method for picking out the ‘soldierly’ virtues.
The bad news is that militaries, by virtue of their emphasis on training, have a
tendency to turn philosophical problems into technical problems to be solved by the
technician’s method. That defective approach to moral reasoning lends itself to a
dogmatic and unreflective moral certainty, and to an institutionalized tendency to
work, sometimes actively, to stifle discussion and disagreement. In institutions
where a training mentality predominates the ethics curriculum, I see little likelihood
of successfully integrating theory into practice.

Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited enormously from the comments of several people. I am
grateful to Steve Johnson, Tony McGowan, and Daisy Miller as well as the
participants at the 2002 Utopian Studies Conference for their comments on an
earlier version of the paper. I am also indebted to several of my former colleagues
and many of my students at the United States Military Academy for the numerous
discussions that gave rise to this essay. Finally, and not least, the paper has been
significantly improved thanks to the comments of Carl Ficarrotta and three
anonymous reviewers at Journal of Military Ethics .
 Squaring the Circle 215

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Biography
J. Joseph Miller (Ph.D, University of Virginia, 2001) is Assistant Professor of
Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Recent published
work includes ‘J.S. Mill on Plural Voting, Competence and Participation’ (History
of Political Thought 24 (4): 647 /667). ‘Jus ad bellum and an Officer’s Moral
Obligations: Invincible Ignorance, The Constitution and Iraq’ (Social Theory and
Practice) , is forthcoming.