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847Civilian Care in War: Lessons from AfghanistanIn Michael Gross & Don Carrick (eds.), Military Medical Ethics forthe 21st Century, Ashgate. pp. 59-70. 2013.Military doctors and nurses, employees with a compound professional identity as they are neither purely soldiers nor simply doctors or nurses, 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 (London et al. 2006). In the context of military medical ethics this is commonly called dual loyalty (or, less …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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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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3085Honor in Political and Moral PhilosophyState University of New York Press. 2015.In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, t…Read more
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754Honour, face and reputation in political theoryEuropean Journal of Political Theory 7 (4): 472-491. 2008.Until fairly recently it was not uncommon for political theorists to hold the view that people cannot be expected to act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Authors such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, for instance, held that people often act in accordance with the public interest, but more from a concern for their honour and reputation than from a concern for the greater good. Today, most authors take a more demanding view, maintaining…Read more
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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
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 |