ABSTRACT
Ethics training should not be a substitute for moral leadership. Even the best instruction, conducted according to the best thought out principles, will count for nothing if soldiers can see that their commanders do not in fact value what they say they value. Nor should ethics training allow commanders to close their eyes to the systemic failings of their institutions. One of the pitfalls of the military’s favoured approach to ethics training – virtue ethics – is that because the emphasis is on character development, ethical failures may well be interpreted purely in terms of the character flaws of the individuals involved. As one presenter told the 2007 International Symposium on Military Ethics, thousands of people are subjected to stressful conditions, and work within systems which are dysfunctional, and the vast majority of them do not commit crimes. On the other hand, everybody is capable of immoral actions if placed in the right conditions. As Christopher Browning has pointed out, the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes were not for the most part especially ‘evil’ persons with noticeably deficient characters; they were thoroughly ‘ordinary men’ (Browning 2001). Leaders must accept responsibility for creating the circumstances in which virtue can flourish. They must continually assess the institutions which they lead, the missions which they undertake, and the tasks which they ask their subordinates to perform, to ascertain if these are well suited to encouraging ethical behaviour.
