Five Myths about Military Ethics

Pfaff, C. Anthony

doi:10.55540/0031-1723.2754

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…As they directly represent the planning, execution, and assessment of military operations for reaching (pre)defined goals, important legal, ethical, and social aspects need to be considered for minimizing harm to civilians and protecting combatants based on previous experience. Additionally, the technological development is beneficial (Pfaff, 2016) since it allows building the capacity of (effectively and efficiently) modelling and simulating different activities, actions, and aspects. Among these can be mentioned the achievement of objectives established and the effects produced while providing accurate predictions having different degrees of autonomy for military decision-making support.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tackling Uncertainty Through Probabilistic Modelling of Proportionality in Military Operations

Maathuis

Chockalingam

2023

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Just as every neuron in a biological neural network is a reinforcement learning agent, thus a component of a large and advanced structure is de facto a model, the two main components forming the principle of proportionality in military operations can be seen and are as a matter of fact two different entities and models. These are collateral damage depicting the unintentional effects affecting civilians and civilian objects, and military advantage symbolizing the intentional effects contributing to achieving the military objectives defined for military operation conducted. These two entities are complex processes relying on available information, projection on time to the moment of target engagement through estimation and are strongly dependent of common-sense reasoning and decision making. As a deduction, these two components and the proportionality decision result are processes surrounded by various sources and types of uncertainty. However, the existing academic and practitioner efforts in understanding the meaning, dimensions, and implications of the proportionality principle are considering military-legal and ethical lenses, and less technical ones. Accordingly, this research calls for a movement from the existing vision of interpreting proportionality in a possibilistic way to a probabilistic way. Henceforth, this research aims to build two probabilistic Machine Learning models based on Bayesian Belief Networks for assessing proportionality in military operations. The first model embeds a binary classification approach assessing if the engagement is proportional or disproportional, and the second model that extends this perspective based on previous research to perform multi-class classification for assessing degrees of proportionality. To accomplish this objective, this research follows the Design Science Research methodology and conducts an extensive literature for building and demonstrating the model proposed. Finally, this research intends to contribute to designing and developing explainable and responsible intelligent solutions that support human-based military targeting decision-making processes involved when building and conducting military operations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tackling Uncertainty Through Probabilistic Modelling of Proportionality in Military Operations

Maathuis

Chockalingam

2023

eccws

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“…For military veterans, one consequence of dramatic structural, normative, and cultural differences between military and civilian life is that the average nonveteran American sees veterans predominantly as veterans, as opposed to complex individuals with other identities (Shepherd et al, 2019(Shepherd et al, , 2021. Despite the significant number of veterans who have been created from 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans' attitudes toward activeduty personnel and veterans are not based on close contact with them, and the public is generally unaware of what military life is like (Hines et al, 2015;Liebert & Golby, 2017;Pfaff, 2016). This may contribute to the public's reliance on stereotypes to understand veterans.…”

Section: Stereotyping and Military Veteransmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heroization and ironic funneling effects.

Stanley¹,

Shepherd²,

Kay³

2023

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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In recent years, much of the American public has venerated military veterans as heroes. Despite overwhelmingly positive public attitudes toward veterans, veterans have experienced higher rates of unemployment and underemployment than their nonveteran peers. The current research leverages theory and research on positive stereotypes to shed light on this seeming inconsistency between the heroization of veterans and their heightened rates of unemployment and underemployment. We conceptualize the hero label as a pervasive positive stereotype, and we employ complementary methods and designs (correlational, quasi-experimental, experimental, and mediational) to investigate the consequences and implications of attaching this label to military veterans. We then extend our theorizing to other heroized groups (e.g., firefighters, paramedics, teachers, and social workers). The results across studies suggest that heroization leads the American public to funnel heroized individuals and groups into a limited set of lower paying jobs, organizations, and careers associated with selflessness. This research not only offers insights into an important real-world problem but also offers a first experimental investigation of the consequences and implications of labeling a group of people as heroes.

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What Is It Good For? Towards A Millian Utility Model for Ethical Terrorism Coverage

Todd¹

2020

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Journalism, the "first draft of history" (i.e. Barth, 1943, p. 667), often drafts a history of tragedy and violence -"the oldest kinds of stories" (Coté & Simpson, 2000, p. 3). Throughout history, war and storytelling are intractably linked: "Because of the far-reaching effects of war, we want to know as much about it as possible. For that … we turn to media" (Copeland, 2005, p. xvii). However, because war "has no equivalent in a settled, civil society " (Walzer, 1977, p. 127), historians and journalists alike perennially struggle to find a framework suitable for investigating and reporting it. In much of the ongoing public discourse surrounding war -as well as its coverage -arguments on both issues often resonate with the philosophy of utilitarianism. More than 150 years after its publication, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism continues to exert a perennial influence in philosophical musings on both war and journalism. Utilitarian arguments appear especially in discussions of just war theory (JWT), a consequentialist tradition that demands that wars must be justifiable in why they start, how they are fought, and how they end. Most recently, William H. Shaw (2011) synthesized disparate elements of debate into what he called a new utilitarian war principle (U WP) for considering recourse to war. Increasingly, war coverage focuses more on the experience of those fighting and less on why and how they fight. In 2004, The New York Times published an unprecedented apology for failing to do enough of the latter in its coverage leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq the previous year. Reviewing Mill's Utilitarianism, and building on recent Millian scholarship, this paper reacts to this confessed failure by proposing a more utilitarian model for how journalists might more comprehensively cover the wars we wage -especially when terror is a tactic, and the media itself risks complicity in amplifying the effect of the action.

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Five Myths about Military Ethics

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Tackling Uncertainty Through Probabilistic Modelling of Proportionality in Military Operations

Tackling Uncertainty Through Probabilistic Modelling of Proportionality in Military Operations

Heroization and ironic funneling effects.

What Is It Good For? Towards A Millian Utility Model for Ethical Terrorism Coverage

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