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769Risks and Robots – some ethical issuesArchive International Society for Military Ethics, 2011. 2011.While in many countries the use of unmanned systems is still in its infancy, other countries, most notably the US and Israel, are much ahead. Most of the systems in operation today are unarmed and are mainly used for reconnaissance and clearing improvised explosive devices. But over the last years the deployment of armed military robots is also on the increase, especially in the air. This might make unethical behavior less likely to happen, seeing that unmanned systems are immune to what are con…Read more
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1579Dual Loyalties in Military Medical Care – Between Ethics and EffectivenessIn Herman Amersfoort, Rene Moelker, Joseph Soeters & Desiree Verweij (eds.), Moral Responsibility & Military Effectiveness, Asser. 2013.Military doctors and nurses, working neither as pure soldiers nor as merely doctors or nurses, may face a ‘role conflict between the clinical professional duties to a patient and obligations, express or implied, real or perceived, to the interests of a third party such as an employer, an insurer, the state, or in this context, military command’. This conflict is commonly called dual loyalty. This chapter gives an overview of the military and the medical ethic and of the resulting dual loyalty pr…Read more
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403Honor as a motive for making sacrificesJournal of Military Ethics 4 (3): 183-197. 2005.This article deals with the notion of honor and its relation to the willingness to make sacrifices. There is a widely shared feeling, especially in Western countries, that the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good has been on a reverse trend for quite a while both on the individual and the societal levels, and that this is increasingly problematic to the military. First of all, an outline of what honor is will be given. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, stating that honor is a nec…Read more
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1140Intentions and consequences in military ethicsJournal of Military Ethics 10 (2): 81-93. 2011.Utilitarianism is the strand of moral philosophy that holds that judgment of whether an act is morally right or wrong, hence whether it ought to be done or not, is primarily based upon the foreseen consequences of the act in question. It has a bad reputation in military ethics because it would supposedly make military expedience override all other concerns. Given that the utilitarian credo of the greatest happiness for the greatest number is in fact agent-neutral, meaning that the consequences t…Read more
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227Integrity, Moral Courage and Innere FührungEthics and Armed Forces 3 (1): 32-36. 2016.The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the somewhat related notions of integrity, moral courage, and Innere Führung (the leadership concept used by the German military) as a means of making military personnel behave ethically. Of these three notions, integrity is mentioned most often within military organizations, and the largest part of what follows is therefore devoted to a description of what integrity is, and what the drawbacks of this notion are for the military. This will le…Read more
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203The Ethics Curriculum at the Netherlands Defence Academy, and Some Problems with its Theoretical UnderpinningsIn Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee & Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military, Ashgate. pp. 119-130. 2008.
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4040This book examines the role of military virtues in today's armed forces. Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, an…Read more
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2712Virtue Ethics in the MilitaryIn S. van Hooft, N. Athanassoulis, J. Kawall, J. Oakley & L. van Zyl (eds.), The handbook of virtue ethics, Acumen Publishing. pp. 365-374. 2014.In addition to the traditional reliance on rules and codes in regulating the conduct of military personnel, most of today’s militaries put their money on character building in trying to make their soldiers virtuous. Especially in recent years it has time and again been argued that virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character building, provides a better basis for military ethics than deontological ethics or utilitarian ethics. Although virtue ethics comes in many varieties these days, in many te…Read more
Peter Olsthoorn
Netherlands Defence Academy
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Netherlands Defence AcademyAssociate Professor
Leiden University
PhD, 2000
Rotterdam, ZH, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Military Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Military Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |