Michael Robillard

This chapter concludes the book and summarizes and reviews some of the primary take-aways in the book’s attempt to articulate the various moral and political issues and concepts surrounding the moral exploitation of soldiers. In particular, we emphasize that the core issue at the heart of the present situation for how American society treats its soldiers revolves around an unfair, or uneven at any rate, distribution of the various harms and burdens of warfare—including and especially the moral burdens. The chapter challenges civilians to reconsider their relationship towards the soldiers who wage war on their behalf, and asks all to reconsider how we should prioritize these moral relationships.

Given the moral exploitation of soldiers, the last chapter explores several institutional prescriptions and remedies. In particular, the chapter looks at (1) reforms to recruitment and military compensation, (2) a return to a citizen-soldier model of military service, and (3) granting military veterans more official say in warfighting and foreign policy decision-making. After having entertained these institutional prescriptions, the chapter argues for a return to a citizen-soldier or skin in the game model of military service. We do not claim that these possible prescriptions and remedies would wholly mitigate the harms and disfunction apparent in the present civil-military relationship in the United States. Indeed, some form of moral exploitation may be endemic to large nation-states fielding militaries, even if only for the strict purpose of national defence. However, these prescriptions could potentially go a long way towards reducing the harms of the moral exploitation of soldiers.

This chapter investigates classical philosophical accounts of the state, as well as notions of citizenship and duty to country. The chapter argues that citizens have a prima facie duty to country for reasons of contractualism and inheritance. The chapter then goes on to consider how the concept of moral exploitation stands up against instances where soldiers seem to take on supererogatory moral risk for the sake of the body politic at large. If one holds that a military institution is both necessary and serving on behalf of a minimally just state, then the moral risks of military service seem similarly necessary for some subset of the body to take on. The implications of both the basic duties citizens have towards their state and the need for moral risks to be undertaken by some subset of that state are significant.

In this chapter we explore several related political and moral concerns connected to the moral exploitation of soldiers as well as the strained American civil-military divide. In particular, we explore issues of veteran moral injury, suicide, and PTSD, future military technologies and future warfare, and the so-called global war on terror. All of these related moral concerns and issues, and more, often either contribute in some way to the central thesis of this book – the moral exploitation of the American soldier – or are partial consequences of that exploitation itself, even if they are not immediately caused by it. These issues constitute a network of inter-related themes which collectively point to the many downstream negative effects of our present civil-military relationship in the United States.

This chapter outlines key theoretical accounts of the phenomenon of exploitation. Specifically, the chapter looks at theoretical conceptions of vulnerability, excessive benefit, wrongful versus mutually beneficial exploitation, and transactional versus structural accounts of exploitation. After having outlined these theoretical frameworks, the chapter introduces the novel concept of “moral exploitation,” the notion that a person or group can be wrongfully exploited by being pressured to shoulder an excessive amount of moral responsibility, moral risk, and/or moral residue (i.e., dirty hands). This particular species of exploitation lays the conceptual groundwork for the remainder of our work in this book and explicates what we take to be occurring among a significant subportion of the US military population.

Building on Chapter 1 and the concept of moral exploitation, this chapter outlines the ways in which many American military recruits are vulnerable to “normal” exploitation as well as moral exploitation. In particular, the chapter examines key demographic and statistical numbers related to age, race, sex, socioeconomic class, geographic region, and familial lineage. The chapter then goes on to investigate several military anecdotes and explain several ways in which the moral burdens of warfighting have been disproportionately outsourced onto American servicemembers, particularly Special Forces soldiers. This chapter effectively ties the conceptual work from chapter 1 into its direct application for military personnel. If this application of moral exploitation to military members is correct, then the implications of the relationship between the military and the broader American society will be significant, as is explored in Chapter 3.

In this introductory chapter, we outline the main themes of the book and motivate the overall research project on the moral exploitation of American soldiers. We first contextualize the present moment modern soldiers find themselves in relationship to the broader society and highlight the feelings of discomfort many soldiers have with displays of gratitude towards them by civilians and various institutions, businesses, sporting events, and more. We then go onto to describe descriptions of this unease that we have heard from countless soldiers and contend that we believe this feeling of discontent and related phenomena can be at least partially explained through the concept of moral exploitation. We cose the chapter with an important caveat about what we call the “veteran paradox” wherein work such as ours runs the risk of either valorizing or victimizing veterans; we intend to do neither.

This chapter explores a dilemma arising from interveners’ competing duties to respect authorization and to enforce necessity. Even in cases where an intervener could defend an agent more effectively and less harmfully, there is still good reason (within limits) for interveners to refrain from enforcing necessity and to allow or _encourage_ agents to fight for themselves. Borrowing from the works of Statman and Frowe, the chapter argues that “defense of one’s honor” can serve as an independent moral reason justifying one’s use of defensive force, even in cases where necessity appears not to be met. It then considers what implications such analysis holds for interventions at the international level, arguing that political communities may gain extra moral permissions when fighting on behalf of an emergent _impersonal_ good over and above the community’s individual members. Despite this claim, it does not commit one to collectivism.

Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's war-fighting decisions since the inception of an all-volunteer force? In this volume, Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser, who have both served in the military, examine the question of whether and how American soldiers have been exploited in this way. Robillard and Strawser offer an original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'--the notion that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral weight. They make the case that this exploitation accurately describes the relationship between the United States and the members of its military, and offer a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recruitment, the moral burdens soldiers often bear, and the stifling effect that a 'Thank You for Your Service' and 'I support the troops' culture has had on serious public engagement about America's ongoing wars. Robillard and Strawser offer a piercing critique of the pernicious divide between military members and the civilians who direct them. They conclude by arguing for several normative and prudential prescriptions to help close this ever-widening fissure between the U.S. and its military, and within the U.S. itself. In so doing, their work gives a much needed and urgent voice to America's soldiers, the other 1%.

There have been two recent strands of argument arguing for the pro tanto impermissibility of fully autonomous weapon systems. On Sparrow's view, AWS are impermissible because they generate a morally problematic ‘responsibility gap’. According to Purves et al., AWS are impermissible because moral reasoning is not codifiable and because AWS are incapable of acting for the ‘right’ reasons. I contend that these arguments are flawed and that AWS are not morally problematic in principle. Specifically, I contend that these arguments presuppose an incoherent conception of an AWS as somehow making genuine decisions but not being morally responsible for those very same decisions. Rather than conceiving of AWS in this way, I argue that an AWS is either a socially-constructed institution that has been physically instantiated or it is a genuine agent. If it is the former, then we should treat AWS as we do any other collective action problem. If it is the latter, then we should treat AWS as responsibility-bearers, but also as bearers of rights and/or interests. To reject this disjunction is not only conceptually incoherent but also potentially morally dangerous.

ABSTRACTThe profession of arms is distinct from other professions for many reasons. One reason which is not so obvious is that, unlike members of other professions, soldiers may go their entire careers preparing for a day that never arrives. All things considered, we should think this to be a very good thing. For soldiers, however, this can feel somewhat odd, since there is a natural desire to want to feel useful and to see one’s role and purpose find realization. Accordingly, the common soldier is forced to adopt a rather paradoxical mindset, one of longing for peace, and therefore for uselessness, while at the same time longing to be useful, which would entail that there be a war. This latter desire to be useful and to vindicate one’s identity as a soldier can sometimes take on an unhealthy life of its own. The pull of wanting too strongly to live up to a warrior identity, I argue, can sometimes skew a soldier’s ability to assess risk rationally. This article will therefore investigate how a soldier’s c...