Collective Responsibility and the Career Military Officer’s Right to Public Dissent

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1):41-59 (2019)
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Abstract

Current norms among professional military officers that govern obedience and dissent strongly discourage officers from offering public criticism of policy enacted by civilian authorities, even if that policy is immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional. We identify a set of circumstances that create a moral imperative for an officer to take action and we leverage prevailing ethical guidelines to argue that in certain cases, even individual officers not directly involved in the execution of the policy have moral standing to offer public criticism of it. We consider the consequences of relaxing norms prohibiting public dissent and explore the trade-off between tolerating immoral policy and the likelihood of mistakenly criticizing appropriate policy. Finally, we offer evidence that current military-civilian relations in the United States are such that placing higher value on dissent would benefit professional military officers and may improve policy.

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The Theory of Moral Sentiments.Adam Smith - 1759 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya.
Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age.Christopher Kutz - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ethical absolutism and the ideal observer.Roderick Firth - 1951 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12 (3):317-345.
Collective responsibility.Joel Feinberg - 1968 - Journal of Philosophy 65 (21):674-688.
Collective Responsibility and the State.Anna Stilz - 2011 - Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2):190-208.

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