"Lucas' book competently brings Whitehead's philosophy into dialogue with "analytic" philosophy. This is a topic of great originality and considerable potential importance for the field of philosophy.

What significance does "ethics" have for the men and women serving in the military forces of nations around the world? What core values and moral principles collectively guide the members of this "military profession?" This book explains these essential moral foundations, along with "just war theory," international relations, and international law. The ethical foundations that define the "Profession of Arms" have developed over millennia from the shared moral values, unique role responsibilities, and occasional reflection by individual members the profession on (...) their own practices - eventually coming to serve as the basis for the "Law of Armed Conflict" itself.This book focuses upon the ordinary men and women around the world who wear a military uniform and are committed to the defense of their countries and their fellow citizens. It is about what they do, how they do it, what they think about it, how they behave when carrying out their activities, and how they are expected to behave, both on and off the battlefield - and what everyone needs to know about this. The book also examines how military personnel are treated and regarded by those whom they have sworn to defend and protect, as well as how they treat and regard one another within their respective services and organizational settings. Finally, the book discusses the transformations in military professionalism occasioned by new developments in armed conflict, ranging counterinsurgency warfare and humanitarian military intervention, to cyber conflict, military robotics, and private military contracting. From China to Russia, author George Lucas effectively sheds light on today's military ethics in existence throughout the world. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. (shrink)

What is the history of philosophy? What exactly is this the history of and how is that history to be understood in relationship to philosophy itself? Can philosophy's history, on any of a number of diverse descriptions, ever be said in its own right to constitute a unique and genuine source of philosophical wisdom or insight? George Lucas sweeps aside the constraints of traditional methodological and cultural boundaries to reflect broadly on a variety of answers to these questions, as posed (...) by many of the major philosophical figures of the past century. Inviting a re-consideration of the work of scholars as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Danto, Martha Nussbaum, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, Keith Lehrer and Jerome Schneewind, Lucas ranges widely over the history of philosophy itself in search of original, probing answers to these profound and perennial issues. (shrink)

Whatever else one might say concerning the legality, morality, and prudence of his actions, Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, is right about the notion of publicity and informed consent, which together constitute the hallmark of democratic public policy. In order to be morally justifiable, any strategy or policy involving the body politic must be one to which it would voluntarily assent when fully informed about it. This, in essence, was Snowden's argument for leaking, in June 2013, (...) the documents that revealed the massive NSA surveillance program: So long as there's broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there's a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision.... However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that's a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of “governing in the dark,” where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input. (shrink)

From North Korea's recent attacks on Sony to perpetual news reports of successful hackings and criminal theft, cyber conflict has emerged as a major topic of public concern. Yet even as attacks on military, civilian, and commercial targets have escalated, there is not yet a clear set of ethical guidelines that apply to cyber warfare. Indeed, like terrorism, cyber warfare is commonly believed to be a war without rules. Given the prevalence cyber warfare, developing a practical moral code for this (...) new form of conflict is more important than ever. In Ethics and Cyber Warfare, internationally-respected ethicist George Lucas delves into the confounding realm of cyber conflict. Comparing "state-sponsored hacktivism" to the transformative impact of "irregular warfare" in conventional armed conflict, Lucas offers a critique of legal approaches to governance, and outlines a new approach to ethics and "just war" reasoning. Lucas draws upon the political philosophies of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas to provide a framework for understanding these newly-emerging standards for cyber conflict, and ultimately presents a professional code of ethics for a new generation of "cyber warriors." Lucas concludes with a discussion of whether preemptive self-defense efforts - such as the massive government surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden - can ever be justified, addressing controversial topics such as privacy, anonymity, and public trust. Well-reasoned and timely, Ethics and Cyber Warfare is a must-read for anyone with an interest in philosophy, ethics, or cybercrime. (shrink)

This volume begins with important critical, comparative, and historical assessments of the contemporary problems in metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, social thought, and philosophy of religion, of history, and ...

The Routledge Handbook of Military Ethics is a comprehensive reference work that addresses concerns held in common by the military services of many nations. It attempts to discern both moral dilemmas and clusters of moral principles held in common by all practitioners of this profession, regardless of nation or culture. Comprising essays by contributors drawn from the four service branches as well as civilian academics specializing in this field, this handbook discusses the relationship of ethics in the military setting to (...) applied and professional ethics generally. Leading scholars and senior military practitioners from countries including the US, UK, France, China, Australia and Japan, discuss various national cultural views of the moral dimensions of military service. With reference to the responsibilities of professional orientation and education, as well as the challenges posed by recent technological developments, this handbook examines the difficulties underpinning the fundamental framework of military service. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war theory, ethics philosophy, sociology, war and conflict studies, and security studies. (shrink)

This article, an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics devoted to emerging military technologies, elaborates the present status of certain predictions about the future of warfare and combat made by postmodern essayist, Umberto Eco, during the First Gulf War in 1991. The development of military robotics, innovations in nanotechnology, prospects for the biological, psychological, and neurological ?enhancement? of combatants themselves, combined with the increasing use of nonlethal weapons and the advent of cyber warfare, have operationalized (...) the diffuse, decentralized, ?neoconnectionist? vision of warfare in the post-Clausewitzian, postmodern world that Eco first prophesied. On the one hand, such technologies threaten to make war ever more ubiquitous as the path of least resistance, rather than the option of last resort, for the resolution of political conflict. On the other hand, these same technologies offer prospects for lessening the indiscriminate destructive power of war, and enhance prospects for the evolution from state-centered conventional war, to discriminate law enforcement undertaken by international coalitions of peacekeeping forces. (shrink)

Abstract This article evaluates the ?drive toward greater autonomy? in lethally-armed unmanned systems. Following a summary of the main criticisms and challenges to lethal autonomy, both engineering and ethical, raised by opponents of this effort, the article turns toward solutions or responses that defense industries and military end users might seek to incorporate in design, testing and manufacturing to address these concerns. The way forward encompasses a two-fold testing procedure for reliability incorporating empirical, quantitative benchmarks of performance in compliance with (...) formalized and programmable rules of engagement, and a conception of ?due care? in product liability. This would be designed in analogy with procedures currently followed by well-intentioned governments and militaries with their own (human) military personnel, both to ensure against failure, and to accept responsibility and compensate victims of inadvertent and unintended accidents. The procedure is designed specifically to address objections first posed by Robert Sparrow (2007) and Noel Sharkey (2007), and echoed in P.W. Singer's critically acclaimed Wired for War (2009), that lethal autonomous systems cannot be meaningfully held accountable for commission of war crimes, and thus the development, manufacture, and deployment of such systems would constitute a violation of international law. (shrink)

Although the use of military force for humanitarian ends seems utterly divorced from the use of such force to combat terrorism, both uses answer to similar descriptions. Both appear to encourage nations that are not necessarily themselves under attack to set aside the reigning conventions of national sovereignty and territorial integrity for the overriding purposes of international law enforcement and protection of vulnerable noncombatants. Both involve offensive rather than purely defensive uses of military force. Both answer to criteria of justification (...) that can be derived more readily from the normative moral principles of the classical just war tradition than from purely descriptive revisions of the 'legalist paradigm' in international relations, because the latter is deeply wedded by precedent to notions of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and a purely defensive use of military force. Most significantly, the justification for both kinds of military action depends essentially upon a notion of 'the international community' that is inchoate and urgently in need of rigorous reformulation. In this paper, I attempt to formulate criteria for the justifiable use of military force for these non-defensive purposes, with attention to the nuances of internationalism that several of the resulting criteria entail. Challenges to the de facto role of the United Nations as the sole authoritative representative of this community, and alternatives to its authority in legitimating the use of military force for purposes of international law enforcement, are considered. (shrink)

This book-cover's announcement of a “new theory” of just war is likely just publisher's editorial hyperbole. The author, however, does not in the end require such outside assistance. From the outse...

This is the second installment in a series that reports on the progress of some of the more interesting discoveries emerging from ongoing work on the new and comprehensive critical edition of Whitehead being published by Edinburgh University Press. This installment deals, as the subtitle indicates, with the emergence of Whitehead’s metaphysics from 1925 until 1929. The first installment appeared in Process Studies 45.1.

(2014). Ethics and Cyber Conflict: A Response to JME 12:1 (2013) Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 20-31. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2014.908012.

While Professor Miller claims that just war theory cannot "provide sufficient guidance" on the question of Afghanistan, his concerns actually fall squarely within its purview, and do not suggest its inability to critique proposals to prolong the American and NATO presence in Afghanistan.

Christensen, a founding member and the first president of the Hegel Society of America, offers a substantial analysis and critique of the two most formidable metaphysical thinkers in the late modern period. The task is enormous, and is divided by the author into two subvolumes: a “somewhat Whiteheadian perspective” on Hegel’s understanding of “the concrete,” and a “somewhat Hegelian perspective” on Whitehead’s search for concreteness. The adjective “somewhat” apparently signals that the author wishes not merely to expound on each of (...) these two philosophers, but to read them in a critical, independent fashion in the larger task of constructing his own systematic metaphysical position, revolving around the notions of concreteness, “self-evidence,” and “critical method” in philosophy. (shrink)

Recent interest in the “continental” dimensions of Whitehead’s philosophy in Europe has prompted a number of international conferences there devoted to his thought. At the first of these, in Bonn in 1981, the participants agreed that some form of “scholarly exchange” between Hegelkenners and Whiteheadians would be extremely timely and beneficial. However, such an exchange, they argued, ought not to occur in Europe, owing to the present somewhat anomalous status of Hegel scholarship in Europe, as well as to the dominant (...) role that Hegel’s thought already plays in contemporary European philosophy generally. (shrink)

Richard Dien Winfield’s most recent work, Reason and Justice, is truly remarkable in its scope, ambition, and thoroughness. In the course of his investigation, Winfield offers challenging evaluations of the political and social thought of a number of contemporary thinkers, including Rawls, MacIntyre, Dworkin, Nozick, Habermas, Apel, Gadamer, Strauss, and Arendt. Simultaneously, he engages in a historical dialogue with the classical political and economic theories of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Adam Smith, Marx, and most of all, Hegel, in order to forge (...) his own system of justice. (shrink)

This book examines the importance of 'military ethics' in the formulation and conduct of contemporary military strategy. Clausewitz's original analysis of war relegated ethics to the side-lines in favour of political realism, interpreting the proper use of military power solely to further the political goals of the state, whatever those may be. This book demonstrates how such single-minded focus no longer suffices to secure the interest of states, for whom the nature of warfare has evolved to favour strategies that hold (...) combatants themselves to the highest moral and professional standards in their conduct of hostilities. Waging war has thus been transformed in a manner that moves beyond Clausewitz's original conception, rendering political success wholly dependent upon the cultivation and exercise of discerning moral judgment by strategists and combatants in the field. This book utilises a number of perspectives and case studies to demonstrate how ethics now plays a central role in strategy in modern armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations. in strategy in modern armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of just war, ethics, military strategy, and international relations. (shrink)

The third edition covers topics of recent interest in the twenty-first century, such as Heroic Medicine, Gender Identity, Wealth Inequality, LGBTQ Issues, and more. This encyclopedic work includes more than 1,000 essays organized by broad categories related to ethical issues.

Anthropologists in Arms traces the troubled history of social scientists' collaboration with national military, security, and intelligence organizations and analyzes the moral and ethical debates provoked by the rise of "military anthropology"—particularly the practice of embedding anthropologists with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Against critics who range from Husserl and Heidegger to Rorty and Foucault, Harris presents a renewed justification of the importance of systematic metaphysical inquiry along the lines advocated by R. G. Collingwood. Surveying the writings of Augustine, Kant, McTaggart, Husserl, Heidegger, and Adolf Grünbaum, Harris illustrates the importance of such "classical" metaphysical inquiry in coping with the familiar, but still unresolved, canon of conundrums associated with the problem of time.

This volume contains twelve papers and selected replies originally delivered at the Tenth Biennial Meeting of the Hegel Society of America, held at Loyola University of Chicago, October 7-9, 1988. The choice to focus that meeting on interpretations of Hegel’s logic presented the contributors to this volume with a formidable challenge. It is one thing to find new ways to interpret Hegel’s thought in the light of contemporary or perennial philosophical problems, or in comparison with the work of other major (...) philosophers. Such themes seem to offer almost limitless and inexhaustible possibilities. Attempting, by contrast, to say something original and important about the Logic constitutes a labor of Sisyphus, in light of the extensive exegesis and interpretation of these texts already undertaken by virtually all of the outstanding Hegel scholars during the past century and a half. (shrink)

Originally presented at a forum sponsored by Concerned Philosophers for Peace at the Eastern Division annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, this essay discusses two ethical challenges in foreign policy likely to be confronted by the new U.S. presidential administration. The increased reliance on private military contractors, including security contractors, poses a number of difficulties, the most troubling of which is the erosion of civil-military relations. Modern military campaigns cannot be waged without some degree of reliance on the logistical (...) support such contractors provide, but their use makes it easier for governments to hide the true risks and costs of modern war from the electorate, serving to undermine key conceptions of “just war” principles like “legitimate authority” and “public declaration” of war. On the other hand, the dramatic increase in maritime piracy forces an unpleasant choice between either increasing defense spending on appropriate weapons systems and personnel during a global economic crises in order to provide enhanced maritime security, or else, ironically, relying even more on private security contractors to protect global shipping and transportation. Both these and similar foreign policy challenges focus attention on the need for “ethical interoperability,” the ability to share common notions of military ethics, public service, and professional responsibility among coalition military forces otherwise drawn from a variety of disparate national, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. (shrink)