WHAT IS REALLY MILITARY ETHICS (AND WHAT THEY THINK IT IS IN THE WEST)?
WHAT IS REALLY MILITARY ETHICS (AND WHAT THEY THINK IT IS IN THE WEST)?

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author considers a recent proposal to understand “military ethics” as a species of the genus “professional ethics”. This contention is rejected on the grounds that “professional ethics” are not a matter of ethics but policy, and it is argued that “military ethics” properly belongs to applied ethics, as a branch of moral philosophy instead. The article proceeds by offering an account of the notion of “reflexivity in normativity” in order to argue against the practice of using “just war” theory as a moral doctrine. A distinct feature of the current production in military ethics by Western scholars and publicists is their reliance on “just war” theory. Two considerations are offered aimed at ending this practice. First, the author uses Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between “activism in scholarship” and “activism with scholarship” to demonstrate that the postCold War uses of the ‘just war’ theory could amount only to pseudo-scholarship. Second, and most disturbing, the author shows how this practice has two unsettling consequences: regarding the ad bellum (moral) justice, it leads to the decriminalization of aggression, the supreme crime in international law; and regarding the in bello (moral) justice to the decriminalization of actual war crimes committed by the “good guys”.

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