Media Release
A young Australian lieutenant is ordered to lead a highly questionable and potentially life-threatening patrol through a Taliban stronghold. Outnumbered and outgunned, he must decide to obey his commanding officer and risk the lives of his mates, or face criminal charges.
From Gallipoli to Afghanistan, ethical dilemmas have confronted Australian soldiers across the generations. This particular experience is one of several previously undocumented case studies revealed in the pages of Military Ethics, a new book authored by Dr Stephen Coleman from UNSW Canberra and being launched on Monday 26 November by General David Hurley AC DSC, Chief of the Australian Defence Force.
A renowned military ethicist, Coleman has compiled more than fifty historical and anecdotal cases that exemplify the wide-range of ethical dilemmas soldiers might encounter. Military Ethics looks at when it’s acceptable for states to engage in war, and analyses the principles that guide combatant behaviour across different military arenas, from counter insurgency to peace keeping.
“These are real, and very difficult situations that modern soldiers have to deal with – and the decisions they make at the time, many will go on thinking about for years afterward, questioning whether they did the right thing,” he says. “And some soldiers will never know.”
Coleman notes the distinction between what he terms a “test of integrity” – where someone is aware that an action is wrong but has trouble making the right decision – and ethical dilemmas, where a person genuinely doesn’t know the correct course of action for a given situation.
To illustrate the pervasiveness of these dilemmas, he points to a 2007 survey of more than 1,700 American soldiers and marines across all ranks: “Nearly a third of respondents admitted to being faced with an ethical situation in Iraq in which they did not know how to correctly respond,” says Coleman. “It’s a very large amount of soldiers.”
“The military is one of very few professions where ethical dilemmas are routine and numerous, particularly when personnel are deployed into difficult areas,” says Professor Michael Frater, Rector of UNSW Canberra. “The publication of this book is a perfect example of how UNSW is applying world-leading academic knowledge to real world problems.”
Published by Oxford University Press, Military Ethics has already been adopted by the Australian Defence Force Academy and the French Military Academy in Saint Cyr, and as of 2013, will become compulsory reading for cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs.
Dr Stephen Coleman is a senior lecturer in ethics and leadership and the Vincent Fairfax Foundation Fellow at UNSW Canberra. He spoke at TEDx Canberra on “The moral dangers of non-lethal weapons” in the military which has had more than 300,000 views online.
