At this writing, late in 2023 and on the eve of 2024, we are approaching the seventy-fifth anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984 and its many quotable passages such as “WAR IS PEACE.” Like 1949, the coming year will witness nihilists at home and abroad abuse language similarly with their cries of “FAKE NEWS,” “DENAZIFICATION,” and the like.
Among JME’s guiding principles is respect for the power of truthful and precise language as our community of readers and contributors grapples with challenging issues in military ethics. A paradoxical corollary of this respect is uncertainty. Far from claiming to solve once and for all the problems they encounter, the scholars, policy-makers, and members of the military who make up the majority of our contributors think and write in the spirit of Plato, whose Socrates and other interlocutors admit when important questions remain open despite their best efforts to find answers.
The intellectual twins we find in Plato, honesty and humility, combine to be the single most important factor in a successful transition from classroom talk to battlespace walk, from what we claim to know about military ethics to what we actually do in the field or the war cabinet meeting. That transition, after all, is the goal of teaching and writing applied ethics. And it is an urgent, life-or-death business. Imagine the grade any genius villain in fiction, from Professor Moriarty to Hannibal Lecter to Khan Noonien Singh (whose wrath targeted Admiral James T. Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise), would earn in an applied ethics course – an A, of course. But what would these villains do at a real-life moral crossroads?
That haunting question signals why applied ethics classrooms and journals are high-wire acts in which an abyss of lazy relativism lies on one side and a canyon of blindered overcertainty on the other. At their best, applied ethics courses and journals communicate that moral analysis and behavior are attentive to situational factors but never wholly determined by them. And the best of courses and journals avoid the seductive aspect of book learning that has not been tested. On that score, Plato again offers a relevant warning in the person of Cephalus, the elderly host of the conversation many English-speakers know as the Republic. In the first book of the dialogue, Cephalus attributes a clean conscience to his lifelong wealth. He approaches death having avoided moral temptations that beset the less well-to-do. Even casual readers will sense a false equivalence here. One who has not committed a certain kind of wrongdoing is not therefore virtuous, for how could one know one’s own character unless it has been tested? Imagine Tolkien’s trilogy reduced to a classroom discussion in which Frodo Baggins confidently affirms that he understands why power corrupts and intends to avoid its seductions. The End.
If the prophylactic elixir that wards off both relativism and overcertainty is a solution of honesty and humility, shaken or stirred, then may the following pages and the coming issues of JME honor Orwell.
Happy seventy-fifth birthday, 1984!