ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapter of this book. The book discuses the role responsibilities of military officers and begins with, officers must consistently reinforce what the military organization as a whole should be teaching, namely, the centrality to military identity of adherence to the received rules of war. The book maintained that officers are not professionally responsible for ensuring that their subordinates fight only in justified wars. That, rather, is a responsibility, directly, of our political leaders and, indirectly, of all of us, especially in a democracy. It sails against the tide of recent philosophical work on the ethics of war, which is largely non-consequentialist in character. It has succeeded in advancing plausible and perhaps compelling answers to the basic ethical questions of war; this will redound to the credit of utilitarianism, enhancing its claim to be considered a cogent and defensible general account of right and wrong.
