Emotion, Ethics, and Military Virtues

ABSTRACT

It is common to think of warfare as a setting in which emotion can lead combatants to engage in unethical behavior. On this view, it is natural to conceptualize the aim of military ethics training as quelling the influence of emotion in combat in order to reduce the risk that military personnel are vulnerable to its influence. Recent research, however, indicates that what is called “emotion processing” is connected in important ways with moral judgment and behavior. In this view, acting ethically is not simply a matter of subordinating emotion to reason, but of responding with appropriate rather than inappropriate emotion. In this respect, such research challenges the powerful “rationalist” account of moral judgment and behavior. More fundamentally, it calls into question the distinction between reason and emotion as a way to understand our moral sensibilities. This article describes this research and discusses work on naturalistic decision-making and neuroscience that provide support for its insights. It then suggests ways in which such research is consistent with Aristotelian notions of character and virtue. Finally, it identifies ways in which some military training implicitly draws on lessons from this body of research, and suggests how it might do so more deliberately.

KEYWORDS:

• Military virtues
• moral psychology
• military ethics training
• ethical decision-making
• moral judgment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mitt Regan

Mitt Regan is McDevitt Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Center on National Security at Georgetown Law Center. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a member of an expert group advising the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on legal and ethical dimensions of AI applications in military operations. He works in the fields of international law on the use of force, international human rights law, international criminal law, and military ethics. He is the author most recently of Drone Strike: Analyzing the Impacts of Targeted Killing (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), and co-editor of Between Crime and War: Hybrid Legal Frameworks for Asymmetric Conflict (Oxford University Press 2023).

Kevin Mullaney

Kevin Mullaney is a Naval officer who has served on four submarines and completed seven strategic and tactical deployments. Since his selection as a Permanent Military Professor at the United States Naval Academy and completion of studies as an Industrial/Organizational psychologist, he is an active educator, leadership coach, researcher, and chair of the Leadership, Ethics, and Law Department. He is one of the primary authors of the Marshall Center’s Partnership for Peace Consortium’s leadership and ethics reference curriculum and supports NATO partner countries with leadership curriculum development. His primary academic interest is the cognitive representation and experience of emotions and values and the role that these representations play in consciousness and ethical decision-making.