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199Killing from a Safe Distance: What Does the Removal of Risk Mean for the Military ProfessionWashington University Review of Philosophy 2 103-113. 2022.Unmanned systems bring risk asymmetry in war to a new level, making martial virtues such as physical courage by and large obsolete. Nonetheless, the dominant view within the military is that using unmanned systems that remove the risks for military personnel involved is not very different from using aircrafts that drop bombs from a high altitude. According to others, however, the use of unmanned systems and the riskless killing they make possible do raise a host of new issues, for instance the q…Read more
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165Yvonne Chiu: Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 344.) (review)The Review of Politics 82 (4): 658-660. 2020.Clausewitz made the intuitively appealing claim that wars tend to “absoluteness,” and that all limitations imposed by law and morality are in theory alien to it. Clausewitz of course knew that there are in practice many limitations to how wars are fought, but he saw them as contingent to what war is. Since then, however, historians such as John Lynn (Battle: A History of Combat and Culture [Westview Press, 2003]), John Keegan (A History of Warfare ([Random House,1993]) and Victor Davis Hanson (T…Read more
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148Military engagement in civilian healthcare; an ethical perspectiveIn Robert Beeres, Jan van der Meulen, Joseph Soeters & Ad Vogelaar (eds.), Mission Uruzgan: Collaborating in Multiple Coalitions for Afghanistan, Amsterdam University Press. pp. 251-264. 2012.
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146Eva van Baarle and Peter Olsthoorn (2023) Resilience : a care ethical Perspective. Ethics and Armed Forces.Ethics and Armed Forces 2023 (1): 30-35. 2023.Not only the direct physical experiences of deployment can severely harm soldiers’ mental health. Witnessing violations of their moral principles by the enemy, or by their fellow soldiers and superiors, can also have a devastating impact. It can cause soldiers’ moral disorientation, increasing feelings of shame, guilt, or hate, and the need for general answers on questions of right and wrong. Various attempts have been made to keep soldiers mentally sane. One is to provide convincing causes for …Read more
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130Courage in the Military: Physical and MoralJournal of Military Ethics 6 (4): 270-279. 2007.The first section of this article argues that the best-known definition of physical courage, stemming from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is less than fit for today's military. Having done so, a short outline is given of more scientific approaches to physical courage, drawing mainly on insights offered by psychologists, and of the problems that are inherent to these approaches. Subsequently, the article turns to a topic that is often paid lip service to in the military, yet remains somewhat har…Read more
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104Fighting Justly: The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Usefulness of MoralityIn Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War, Leiden University Press. pp. 385-395. 2024.War is almost always conducted with various restrictions in the form of rules, rituals, and taboos. Many of the norms that regulate warfare can be found in the tradition of just war. This tradition seeks to provide a middle ground between an unrealistic (at least for politicians) pacifism that does not even allow war in self-defence and a too realistic realism that claims there is no place for ethics in war. The tradition of just war does not have the force of law; it provides, above all, a voca…Read more
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101Military Robots and the Question of ResponsibilityInternational Journal of Technoethics 5 (1): 01-14. 2014.Most unmanned systems used in operations today are unarmed and mainly used for reconnaissance and mine clearing, yet the increase of the number of armed military robots is undeniable. The use of these robots raises some serious ethical questions. For instance: who can be held morally responsible in reason when a military robot is involved in an act of violence that would normally be described as a war crime? In this article, we critically assess the attribution of responsibility with respect to …Read more
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40A Critique of Integrity: Has a Commander a Moral Obligation to Uphold his Own Principles?Journal of Military Ethics 8 (2): 90-104. 2009.Integrity is generally considered to be an important military virtue. The first part of this article tries to make sense of integrity’s many, often contradicting, meanings. Both in the military and elsewhere, its most common understanding seems to be that integrity requires us to live according to one’s personal principal values and principles we have a moral obligation to do so, and it is a prerequisite to be able to ‘look ourselves in the mirror.’ This notion of integrity as upholding personal…Read more
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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 |