The U. S. Army Future Concept for the Human Dimension

3-3. Moral and Ethical Development

Institutional and Professional Values and Principles

When you put young people, eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, in a foreign country with weapons in their hands, sometimes terrible things happen that you wish never happened. This is a reality that stretches across time and across continents. It is a universal aspect of war, from the time of the ancient Greeks up to the present.
Stephen E. Ambrose

Americans at War

In light of the unconstrained methods employed by many of our current and future adversaries, critics argue that ethical considerations are meaningless and may even hurt the Army’s ability to operate effectively.⁸⁰ However, a credible ethical culture is an essential foundation for unit effectiveness and combat power, to include institutional reliability. Ethical systems are components of culture that guide behavior and human interaction by defining the values and actions that are acceptable and unacceptable.
Maintaining a sense of good morale, esprit de corps, and cohesion in Soldiers requires a collective effort from initial socialization to on-going integration into units and extended service. Such efforts integrate the strong institutional and professional values that make up the moral-ethical content of Soldiers’ development. They also involve efforts to sustain those values across the Soldier’s period of service until they become ingrained characteristics. Experiences and individual understanding of those experiences must reinforce fundamental institutional and individual values. More importantly, the objective of moral development is the practice of the military and civic virtues and the internalized dispositions to live by those values all day, every day, professionally and in the Soldier’s private life. This is what integrity is all about—aligning individual and professional values in such a way that beliefs and behaviors are internally consistent.
Military culture differs from that of the larger society. If Soldiers are to function in an environment of moral ambiguity and chaos, they are dependent on an ethical culture that enables them to persevere in accomplishing missions while protecting their sanity and character. The Army has the responsibility to develop Soldiers of character who adhere to enduring standards of conduct that are part of Army’s heritage that can be and have been passed on from past to future generations of Soldiers. The Army instills in its members a deep commitment to these professional values as nonnegotiable conditions of membership. Americans trust their Army largely because of its collective adherence to these professional values.
Perhaps more than ever before, Soldiers participating in future operations must have a well developed moral compass to navigate the increasingly ambiguous and complex situations they will encounter. It will not always be clear what threat they face or who the enemy is. These situations will often present morally laden dilemmas with no clear solutions that require immediate responses. If Soldiers are to have the moral resources necessary to make good decisions, they need to approach life and their role in the Army with a strong, well grounded moral and ethical foundation.
Inculcation of values and virtues involves more than training or education to establish cognitive understanding. It is more than simply following the rules. Rigid codes are not useful if they are not sufficiently adaptable to support Soldiers in ambiguous situations. Simply following rules or performing required duties will not ensure avoidance of moral dilemmas. Well developed virtues rather than fear of punishment must guide Soldier conduct. More importantly, in the complex, dynamic, ambiguous, and lethal environment of the future, there is great potential to do harm, or commit criminal acts, and there is often insufficient time to apply rules self-consciously, or calculate the consequences of wrongdoing. Therefore, soldierly conduct must involve the practice of values and virtues until doing the right thing becomes a habit. Habitual virtuous conduct takes on the qualities of duty; an obligation willingly accepted and performed at the right times and for the right reasons.⁸¹
A key factor affecting Soldier internalization of values and virtues requires modeling by respected leaders and the creation of an environment of consistent expectations. It requires encouragement and reinforcement, both to practice the professional virtues and to model the military virtues to others. The desired result is Soldiers adopting and living as an individual self-identity as virtuous warriors who experience personal disappointment at failure as part of the wider process of self-actualization addressed earlier.
Moral soundness is the essence of integrity. It is defined here as wholeness, especially honesty. Moral soundness is also a developed sense of individual responsibility for one’s actions and inactions, a dedication to others before self, an inspired or deeply held warrior’s ethos, a high sense of self-discipline, and a personal propensity to do what is required or to refrain from doing the forbidden, in all circumstances, regardless of personal cost. It requires the capability for moral sensitivity and reasoning. Courageous, competent, morally sound Soldiers form cohesive and competent units.
Building Morally Sound Soldiers—a Framework for Moral Development⁸²

For war is the hardest place: if comprehensive and consistent moral judgments are possible there, they are possible everywhere.

Michael Walzer

Just and Unjust Wars
Character and moral soundness requires development of moral reasoning abilities with the instinct and fortitude for moral action. The Army expects and requires moral reasoning consistent with the moral principles that shape the American professional military ethic. These principles include the moral imperative to be competent in conducting operations, and faithful in observance of the laws of war and responsibilities to the values of American society.⁸³ The moral landscape in future full spectrum operations may be more challenging when battling asymmetric enemies unconstrained by accepted convention. While there are obviously no set formulas, moral reasoning will involve the process of recognition, judgment, intention, and behavior. Soldiers must be able to recognize the moral implications in a given situation, reason through the situation to form a moral judgment, develop the intent to act, and finally, summon the courage and conviction to carry through with the intended behavior. A breakdown or inability to carry through with any one of these steps can result in inaction or the wrong action.
The ability to interpret and learn from moral experiences is essential to prepare for the complexity of the future operating environment. Through training, education and life experiences, Soldiers broaden their understanding of moral issues, learn to process, and expand their knowledge when facing situations that contain new and complex moral issues or dilemmas. Exposure to different moral conflicts helps improve moral reasoning by providing opposing views and arguments that challenge core beliefs and basic assumptions.
Leaders may also improve moral development of their subordinates by establishing a climate that requires and supports moral behavior. By deliberately integrating ambiguous moral situations into training, the Army can help Soldiers to develop their understanding of moral issues. Leaders also serve as moral exemplars by their conduct and assist Soldiers to make sense of the moral issues they encounter and thereby improve their moral decisionmaking skills.
Simply reasoning through complex moral dilemmas is insufficient by itself. Soldiers must take action. This requires development of the sense of individual responsibility and the motivation to do the right thing, always. This means taking personal responsibility not only for one’s own moral conduct and but also refusing to tolerate immoral acts in fellow Soldiers or leaders. It is especially critical for leaders to set the moral climate within their units. Soldiers cannot remain passive when they determine that an immoral act has occurred or is going to occur. This includes the ability to foresee the logical consequences one’s actions and the actions of others.
The Army must develop Soldiers who have the autonomy and capacity to challenge unethical decisions and address ethical dilemmas regardless of the will of their subordinates, peers, or superiors. When making moral judgments in complex situations followers normally defer to the higher authority. Disengagement from the responsibility to act explains why subordinates serving under immoral leaders did not intervene to prevent the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib abuses in Iraq. It is through moral disengagement that people find excuses for not doing the right thing, often rationalizing that it is not their responsibility (“I was following orders” or “everyone else is doing it”), and an almost natural tendency to dehumanize the enemy or local populace through racial slurs or other derogatory terms. Soldiers do not have the option to recognize moral wrongdoing and then fail to take action. Soldiers with well developed sense of moral agency are better able to recognize the moral implications present in a situation, determine the right thing to do, take responsibility, and summon the courage to do the right thing.
Having the confidence, courage, and resilience to act when faced with a moral dilemma requires moral strength to overcome strong social or command pressures, to “choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never be content with the half truth when the whole can be won.”⁸⁴ Sometimes doing what is right results in threats, ostracism, and alienation from fellow Soldiers and leaders. To face such pressure requires moral confidence and courage.
Moral confidence comes from the belief that one has the capability to act successfully in the face of a moral dilemma. It also includes the ability to intervene effectively, using strong interpersonal skills to communicate the dilemma to others and overcome any potential resistance to doing the right thing. These skills develop through frequent and deliberate exposure in training to complex and realistic moral dilemmas followed by open discussion in advance of deployment. As Soldiers increase their experience through these situational exercises they refine their judgment, which further builds self-confidence. Once deployed, when Soldiers experience actual moral dilemmas, leaders must continue discussing the circumstances, decisions, and outcomes in order to help Soldiers make sense of their experiences, improve moral reasoning skills, and build confidence. Over time these experiences transform Soldiers into confident moral individuals better able recognize and make judgments on complex moral issues, who possess the confidence and personal moral courage to act in difficult circumstances.
The attributes of moral confidence and individual moral courage can thrive only in organizations with a strong leadership climate supportive of subordinates’ moral development. Soldiers should learn to challenge ethical decisions or report immoral or illegal acts without fear of retribution. Those who report such acts should be recognized, rewarded, and celebrated by the unit. The impact of such an environment on Soldier morale and psychological resilience as well as unit cohesion is self-evident.
The moral development of Soldiers is a complex subject. The rules of engagement carefully established for every operation still cannot foresee all the situations that Soldiers and their leaders will face. The moral dilemma’s faced by Soldiers in future full spectrum operations are like those Soldiers have always faced in battle; morally ambiguous situations where there appears to be no clear solution. In order for the Army to be a moral organization, it is essential for Soldiers to understand the moral reasoning process, moral recognition, moral judgment, moral intent, and moral behavior. More than understanding, Soldiers must repetitively exercise their moral judgment while making decisions and taking actions consistent with professional military values. To navigate through this process with confidence and courage requires developing early and continuously in Soldiers the three key capabilities of dealing with moral complexity, accepting moral agency and achieving moral efficacy. This triad of capabilities is the foundation of moral development.
The Army must provide for the strong ethical grounding of its members and particularly its leaders. A check-the-block program of annual briefings, or en mass generic character guidance sessions, is not adequate. Every transformational experience or “trigger point” in individual development must have ethical content integrated to insure attachment of its proper meaning (understanding) and internalization of principals by the subject.⁸⁵ In line units, ethical leadership is a chain of command function. Institutionally, at every level of formal individual development, units must allocate time and resources in proportion to the institutional costs of individual and collective ethical failure. Though in ethical terms such failures have always borne their costs, in this period of instant global visibility ethical lapses can have extraordinary strategic costs to mission accomplishment and America’s reputation.