Philosophy

This chapter explores a dilemma arising from interveners’ competing duties to respect authorization and to enforce necessity. Even in cases where an intervener could defend an agent more effectively and less harmfully, there is still good reason (within limits) for interveners to refrain from enforcing necessity and to allow or encourage agents to fight for themselves. Borrowing from the works of Statman and Frowe, the chapter argues that “defense of one’s honor” can serve as an independent moral reason justifying one’s use of defensive force, even in cases where necessity appears not to be met. It then considers what implications such analysis holds for interventions at the international level, arguing that political communities may gain extra moral permissions when fighting on behalf of an emergent impersonal good over and above the community’s individual members. Despite this claim, it does not commit one to collectivism.

Given the moral exploitation of soldiers, the last chapter explores several institutional prescriptions and remedies. In particular, the chapter looks at (1) reforms to recruitment and military compensation, (2) a return to a citizen-soldier model of military service, and (3) granting military veterans more official say in warfighting and foreign policy decision-making. After having entertained these institutional prescriptions, the chapter argues for a return to a citizen-soldier or skin in the game model of military service. We do not claim that these possible prescriptions and remedies would wholly mitigate the harms and disfunction apparent in the present civil-military relationship in the United States. Indeed, some form of moral exploitation may be endemic to large nation-states fielding militaries, even if only for the strict purpose of national defence. However, these prescriptions could potentially go a long way towards reducing the harms of the moral exploitation of soldiers.

This chapter investigates classical philosophical accounts of the state, as well as notions of citizenship and duty to country. The chapter argues that citizens have a prima facie duty to country for reasons of contractualism and inheritance. The chapter then goes on to consider how the concept of moral exploitation stands up against instances where soldiers seem to take on supererogatory moral risk for the sake of the body politic at large. If one holds that a military institution is both necessary and serving on behalf of a minimally just state, then the moral risks of military service seem similarly necessary for some subset of the body to take on. The implications of both the basic duties citizens have towards their state and the need for moral risks to be undertaken by some subset of that state are significant.

This chapter outlines key theoretical accounts of the phenomenon of exploitation. Specifically, the chapter looks at theoretical conceptions of vulnerability, excessive benefit, wrongful versus mutually beneficial exploitation, and transactional versus structural accounts of exploitation. After having outlined these theoretical frameworks, the chapter introduces the novel concept of “moral exploitation,” the notion that a person or group can be wrongfully exploited by being pressured to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and/or moral residue (i.e., dirty hands). This particular species of exploitation lays the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of our work in this book and explicates what we take to be occurring among a significant subportion of the US military population.

Building on Chapter 1 and the concept of moral exploitation, this chapter outlines the ways in which many American military recruits are vulnerable to “normal” exploitation as well as moral exploitation. In particular, the chapter examines key demographic and statistical numbers related to age, race, sex, socioeconomic class, geographic region, and familial lineage. The chapter then goes on to investigate several military anecdotes and explain several ways in which the moral burdens of warfighting have been disproportionately outsourced onto American servicemembers, particularly Special Forces soldiers. This chapter effectively ties the conceptual work from chapter 1 into its direct application for military personnel. If this application of moral exploitation to military members is correct, then the implications of the relationship between the military and the broader American society will be significant, as is explored in Chapter 3.

Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America’s professional service members been uniquely exploited insofar as they have disproportionately carried the moral weight of America’s collective warfighting decisions since the inception of the all-volunteer force post-Vietnam and particularly since 9/11? In this work, Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser argue that many of American soldiers have indeed been exploited in this unique way. By offering their original normative theory of “moral exploitation”—the notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and exposure to “dirty hands”—Robillard and Strawser make the case that such a state of affairs describes America’s present relationship with its military. By offering a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recr...

This chapter presents an overview of some of the major ethical arguments for and against the use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). More specifically, this chapter looks at the set of contingent arguments as well as the set of in principle arguments for and against their use. After summarizing these various views, the chapter argues that AWS do not pose new or novel ethical problems. If we think an AWS makes actual decisions in the ‘strong AI’ sense, then by virtue of being a decision-maker, that entity would therefore have rights and interests worthy of our moral concern. If we, however, think an AWS does not make actual decisions, but is instead just an institutional proxy for the collective set of human decisions comprising it, then we ought to treat an AWS, both morally and metaphysically, like we would treat any other collective action problem.