ABSTRACT

Warfare is ever changing and the moral requirements of the military, both individually and collectively, are changing with it. This chapter introduces the idea of military ethics and military ethics education, in particular. Military ethics is a branch of applied ethics which comprises elements of meta-ethics and normative ethics; successfully teaching ethics to the military has to reflect this. The chapter addresses the matter of establishing the most effective means by which those persons and educational establishments with responsibility for 'making the (modern) military moral' can train and educate the trainee troops in their charge to engage in moral reasoning. Military ethics education presupposes not that already possess a properly working moral compass but that need to construct a moral compass for use on specifically military terrain. A utilitarian approach is reductive in the sense that it seeks to ground all moral reasoning in a single principle.