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ABSTRACT
In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue ethics is currently the most popular underpinning for ethics education in the military, it is important to know to what extent the claim situationists make is correct. Fortunately, a closer look indicates that an interactionist perspective, with our character and the situation interplaying, is more accurate than the situationist perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Peter Olsthoorn is Associate Professor in Military Leadership and Ethics at the Netherlands Defence Academy. Besides leadership and ethics, he teaches on armed forces and society, war and media, and on ethics and fundamental rights in the European Joint Master’s in Strategic Border Management. His research is mainly on topics such as military virtues, military medical ethics, drones, and the ethics of border guarding. Among his publications are Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy (State University of New York Press 2015) and Military Ethics and Virtues: An Interdisciplinary Approach for the 21st Century (Routledge 2010).
Notes
1 Is the position of the virtue ethicist always superior to that of the deontologist, or even the utilitarian? A well-known example of duty-based reasoning is the one against torture. Torture, most deontologists think, should be absolutely forbidden regardless of the stakes involved. A utilitarian who opposes torture would point out that the harm the use of torture does outweighs the benefits. That other utilitarians are able to argue the exact opposite probably explains the bad reputation that utilitarianism has in military ethics. A virtue ethicist, in turn, would shun such calculations and highlight instead that the most important matter is to be the kind of person who would under no circumstances commit torture. The virtue ethicist seems thus more concerned about the moral integrity of the interrogator than about the physical integrity of the interrogated. But does someone that stands a chance of being tortured really care about the motives and character of the potential torturer? Those who might be rescued by torturing a suspect are probably equally indifferent about the interrogator’s motives. That virtue ethics is mainly about the agent makes it somewhat self-regarding. The aim of virtue ethics is human flourishing – but especially the flourishing of the possessor of virtues.
2 Earlier research (Moran Citation1945) revealed that courage is not a matter of “habituating [ourselves] to disdain frightening things and to endure them,” as Aristotle had put in in his Nicomachean Ethics (1104a36, in Aristotle Citation2012, 29). In fact, such alarming or frightening situations erode our courage (Moran Citation1945, x, 67–71).
3 Gone are the days when leading philosophers could proudly declare that their moral psychology did not originate “in the science of human nature,” as that science was thought to offer little beyond “such bits of wisdom as not relying too much on scarce motives and abilities” (Rawls Citation1993, 86–7).
4 “Milgram’s experiments show that most people appear to be acting morally, in the few occasions when they are called upon to do so, simply because they have been lucky enough not to be put into situations where external factors exert great pressures to the contrary” (Athanassoulis Citation2000, 220).
5 Berghaus and Cartagena (Citation2013) argue that militaries can further fragmentation by separating the soldier’s professional identity from his or her personal identity, and that virtue ethics can offer a way out, as it aims for a more comprehensive sense of identity that recognizes (and aligns) both professional and personal values and identities.
6 Military ethicist Stephen Coleman has convincingly argued that some of the moral dilemmas military personnel face are in fact not really dilemmas at all, but tests of integrity: it is clear what is the right thing to do, yet there is considerable pressure (from peers, for instance) to choose the wrong course of action (Citation2009, 105–6).
7 Other factors were habituation, depersonalization, drunkenness, and (sadistic) leadership (Citation1992, 83–7). Different from what was the case in My Lai or Haditha, Browning (Citation1992, 160–1) says the atrocities committed by the Nazis followed from government policies, and were thus not the result from frustration, casualties among comrades, fatigue, an invisible enemy, etc.
8 Somewhat similarly, later critics of Arendt’s banality of evil thesis have pointed out that there was nothing banal about Eichmann’s devout anti-Semitism (see Lipstadt Citation2011).
9 Even if obedience is not a virtue, it is clearly a character trait and, according to Milgram, a very common one at that.
10 Per Sandin (Citation2007) argues that ascribing virtues to collectives, in general less fickle than individuals, forms another way out.
11 Neitzel and Welzer (Citation2012) reach a similar conclusion about German violence during the Second World War: atrocities were facilitated by the situation, for instance by the dehumanization of Jews and Russian soldiers, but it was individual differences that made the violence actually happen; it was the more violence-prone characters that initiated the violence.
12 Zimbardo, however, acted as a defense witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick, who, in spite of Zimbardo’s efforts, was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the ill-treatment of detainees (see Mastroianni Citation2011 for a critique of Zimbardo’s acting as a defense witness).
13 The competing view is the so-called merit-based view of moral responsibility: praise and blame are in place if an actor “deserves” such praise or blame (Eshleman Citation2009). This is the view that Doris and Harman hold. Hayek, the economist turned moral philosopher, wrote that “we assign responsibility to a man, not in order to say that as he was he might have acted differently, but in order to make him different” (Citation1990, 75). Often, the debate between situationists and virtue ethicists seems another – newer – variety of the debate about determinism versus moral responsibility; determinists argued that if our conduct is determined by our character and circumstances, then moral responsibility evaporates. The main difference between determinists and situationists is that the latter do not see much of a role for character (determinists do, but see character as the product of our genes and early experiences). The question is how important that difference is; both situationists and determinists hold that people cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.
14 Sergeant Robert Jones did not report the incident, but did confront one of the other perpetrators, Sergeant Ivan Frederick (Mestrovic Citation2016, 129).
15 Interestingly, many textbooks on (social) psychology do not mention the recent criticism on the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo (Griggs Citation2014; Griggs and Whitehead Citation2014, Citation2015). These same textbooks increasingly fail to mention that in Asch’s famous conformity tests a majority gave the independent, correct answer (Griggs Citation2015).
16 Another reason is that leaders above the junior level are, although responsible for the ethical climate in which atrocities can happen, not that often involved in the actual committing of atrocities.
17 As Cook and Syse write: “papers in which philosophers argue with the positions of other philosophers, no matter how interesting they may be by the canons of the discipline, are not really military ethics in our sense” (Citation2010).