36 found
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  1. Fighting Justly: The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Usefulness of Morality.Peter Olsthoorn - 2024 - In Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War. Leiden: Leiden University Press. pp. 385-395.
    War is almost always conducted with various restrictions in the form of rules, rituals, and taboos. Many of the norms that regulate warfare can be found in the tradition of just war. This tradition seeks to provide a middle ground between an unrealistic (at least for politicians) pacifism that does not even allow war in self-defence and a too realistic realism that claims there is no place for ethics in war. The tradition of just war does not have the force (...)
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  2. Situations and Dispositions: How to Rescue the Military Virtues from Social Psychology.Peter Olsthoorn - 2017 - Journal of Military Ethics 16 (1-2):78-93.
    In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue (...)
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  3. Military ethics and virtues: an interdisciplinary approach for the 21st century.Peter Olsthoorn - 2010 - New York: Routledge.
    This book examines the role of military virtues in today's armed forces. -/- Although long-established military virtues, such as honor, courage and loyalty, are what most armed forces today still use as guiding principles in an effort to enhance the moral behavior of soldiers, much depends on whether the military virtues adhered to by these militaries suit a particular mission or military operation. Clearly, the beneficiaries of these military virtues are the soldiers themselves, fellow-soldiers, and military organizations, yet there is (...)
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  4. Honor as a motive for making sacrifices.Peter Olsthoorn - 2005 - Journal of Military Ethics 4 (3):183-197.
    This article deals with the notion of honor and its relation to the willingness to make sacrifices. There is a widely shared feeling, especially in Western countries, that the willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good has been on a reverse trend for quite a while both on the individual and the societal levels, and that this is increasingly problematic to the military. First of all, an outline of what honor is will be given. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, (...)
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  5. Military Leadership and Ethics.Peter Olsthoorn - 2023 - Handbook of Military Sciences.
    Leadership and ethics are habitually treated as related to separate spheres. It would be better, perhaps, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is an aspect of leadership and not a separate approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc. This holds especially true for the military, one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Today, most militaries opt for a character-based approach for (...)
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  6. Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy.Peter Olsthoorn - 2015 - New York: State University of New York Press.
    In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military (...)
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  7. Dual Loyalties in Military Medical Care – Between Ethics and Effectiveness.Peter Olsthoorn, Myriame Bollen & Robert Beeres - 2013 - In Herman Amersfoort, Rene Moelker, Joseph Soeters & Desiree Verweij (eds.), Moral Responsibility & Military Effectiveness. Asser.
    Military doctors and nurses, working neither as pure soldiers nor as merely doctors or nurses, may face a ‘role conflict between the clinical professional duties to a patient and obligations, express or implied, real or perceived, to the interests of a third party such as an employer, an insurer, the state, or in this context, military command’. This conflict is commonly called dual loyalty. This chapter gives an overview of the military and the medical ethic and of the resulting dual (...)
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  8. Eva van Baarle and Peter Olsthoorn (2023) Resilience : a care ethical Perspective. Ethics and Armed Forces.Peter Olsthoorn - 2023 - Ethics and Armed Forces 2023 (1):30-35.
    Not only the direct physical experiences of deployment can severely harm soldiers’ mental health. Witnessing violations of their moral principles by the enemy, or by their fellow soldiers and superiors, can also have a devastating impact. It can cause soldiers’ moral disorientation, increasing feelings of shame, guilt, or hate, and the need for general answers on questions of right and wrong. Various attempts have been made to keep soldiers mentally sane. One is to provide convincing causes for their deployment, which (...)
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  9. Lethal Military Robots: Who is Responsible When Things Go Wrong?Peter Olsthoorn - 2018 - In Rocci Luppicini (ed.), The Changing Scope of Technoethics in Contemporary Society. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. pp. 106-123.
    Although most unmanned systems that militaries use today are still unarmed and predominantly used for surveillance, it is especially the proliferation of armed military robots that raises some serious ethical questions. One of the most pressing concerns the moral responsibility in case a military robot uses violence in a way that would normally qualify as a war crime. In this chapter, the authors critically assess the chain of responsibility with respect to the deployment of both semi-autonomous and (learning) autonomous lethal (...)
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  10. Honour, face and reputation in political theory.Peter Olsthoorn - 2008 - European Journal of Political Theory 7 (4):472-491.
    Until fairly recently it was not uncommon for political theorists to hold the view that people cannot be expected to act in accordance with the public interest without some incentive. Authors such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, for instance, held that people often act in accordance with the public interest, but more from a concern for their honour and reputation than from a concern for the greater good. Today, most authors take a more demanding (...)
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  11. Virtue Ethics in the Military.Peter Olsthoorn - 2014 - In S. van Hooft, N. Athanassoulis, J. Kawall, J. Oakley & L. van Zyl (eds.), The handbook of virtue ethics. Durham: Acumen Publishing. pp. 365-374.
    In addition to the traditional reliance on rules and codes in regulating the conduct of military personnel, most of today’s militaries put their money on character building in trying to make their soldiers virtuous. Especially in recent years it has time and again been argued that virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character building, provides a better basis for military ethics than deontological ethics or utilitarian ethics. Although virtue ethics comes in many varieties these days, in many texts on military (...)
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  12. Military Virtues for Today.Peter Olsthoorn - 2021 - Ethics and Armed Forces 2021 (2):24-29.
    How can military personnel be prevented from using force unlawfully? A critical examination of typical methods and the suitability of virtue ethics for this task starts with the inadequacies of a purely rules-based approach, and the fact that many armed forces increasingly rely on character development training. The three investigated complexes also raise further questions which require serious consideration – such as about the general teachability of virtues. First, the changing roles and responsibilities of modern armed forces are used to (...)
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  13. Ethics for Drone Operators: Rules versus Virtues.Peter Olsthoorn - 2021 - In Christian Enemark (ed.), Ethics of Drone Violence: Restraining Remote-Control Killing. Eup. pp. 115-129.
    Until recently most militaries tended to see moral issues through the lens of rules and regulations. Today, however, many armed forces consider teaching virtues to be an important complement to imposing rules and codes from above. A closer look reveals that it is mainly established military virtues such as honour, courage and loyalty that dominate both the lists of virtues and values of most militaries and the growing body of literature on military virtues. Although there is evidently still a role (...)
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  14. The ethics of border guarding: a first exploration and a research agenda for the future.Peter Olsthoorn - 2018 - Ethics and Education 13 (2):157-171.
    Although the notion of universal human rights allows for the idea that states (and supranational organizations such as the European Union) can, or even should, control and impose restrictions on migration, both notions clearly do not sit well together. The ensuing tension manifests itself in our ambivalent attitude towards migration, but also affects the border guards who have to implement national and supranational policies on migration. Little has been written on the ethics that has to guide these border guards in (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Leadership, Ethics, and the Centrality of Character.Peter Olsthoorn - 2017 - In Military Ethics and Leadership. Leiden & Boston: Brill. pp. 1-15.
    Scandals in business (such as Volkswagen’s dieselgate and, earlier, the Enron scandal), politics and the public sector (the Petrobas affair in Brazil, for in-stance), sports (think of the corruption charges against fifa’s Sepp Blatter) and the military (Abu Ghraib springs to mind) have brought the matter of ethical leadership to the forefront. But although this increased attention has had the collateral benefit that most handbooks on leadership now pay more attention to the importance of leading ethically, this will generally still (...)
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  16. Loyalty: a Grey Virtue.Peter Olsthoorn & Marjon Blom - 2022 - In Désirée Verweij, Peter Olsthoorn & Eva van Baarle (eds.), Ethics and Military Practice. Leiden Boston: Brill. pp. 40-52.
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  17. Educating for Restraint.Peter Olsthoorn - 2022 - In Eric-Hans Kramer & Tine Molendijk (eds.), Violence in Extreme Conditions: Ethical Challenges in Military Practice. Springer. pp. 119-130.
    Today, many armed forces consider teaching virtues to be an important complement to imposing rules and codes from above. Yet, it is mainly established military virtues such as courage and loyalty that dominate both the lists of virtues and values of most militaries and the growing body of literature on military virtues. Some of these virtues, however, may be less suited for today’s missions, which more often than not require restraint on the part of military personnel. This chapter looks into (...)
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  18. The Ethics Curriculum at the Netherlands Defence Academy, and Some Problems with its Theoretical Underpinnings.Peter Olsthoorn - 2008 - In Paul Robinson, Nigel De Lee & Don Carrick (eds.), Ethics Education in the Military. Ashgate. pp. 119-130.
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  19. Honor and the Military.Peter Olsthoorn - 2006 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (1):159-172.
    This article deals with the notion of honor and its role in today’s military as an incentive in combat, but also as a check on the behavior on both the battlefield and in modern “operations other than war.” First, an outline will be given of what honor is and how it relates to traditional views on military courage. After that, the Roman honor-ethic, stating that honor is a necessary incentive for courageous behavior and that it is something worth dying for, (...)
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  20. Killing from a Safe Distance: What Does the Removal of Risk Mean for the Military Profession.Peter Olsthoorn - 2022 - Washington University Review of Philosophy 2:103-113.
    Unmanned systems bring risk asymmetry in war to a new level, making martial virtues such as physical courage by and large obsolete. Nonetheless, the dominant view within the military is that using unmanned systems that remove the risks for military personnel involved is not very different from using aircrafts that drop bombs from a high altitude. According to others, however, the use of unmanned systems and the riskless killing they make possible do raise a host of new issues, for instance (...)
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  21. Military Virtues and Moral Relativism.Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - In Michael Skerker, David Whetham & Don Carrick (eds.), Military Virtues. Havant: Howgate Publishing.
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  22. Bernard Mandeville on Honor, Hypocrisy, and War.Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - Heythrop Journal 60 (2):205-218.
    Authors from Cicero to Smith held honor to be indispensable to make people see and do what is right. As they considered honor to be a social motive, they did not think this dependence on honor was a problem. Today, we tend to see honor as a self‐regarding motive, but do not see this as problematic because we stopped seeing it as a necessary incentive. Bernard Mandeville, however, agreed with the older authors that honor is indispensable, but agreed with us (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Risks, Robots, and the Honorableness of the Military Profession.Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - In Bernhard Koch (ed.), Chivalrous Combatants? The Meaning of Military Virtue Past and Present. Münster: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. pp. 161 - 178.
    1. Introduction 2. What honor is 3. Honor in the military 4. The use of robots and the honorableness of the military profession 5. Conclusion.
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  24. Intentions and consequences in military ethics.Peter Olsthoorn - 2011 - Journal of Military Ethics 10 (2):81-93.
    Utilitarianism is the strand of moral philosophy that holds that judgment of whether an act is morally right or wrong, hence whether it ought to be done or not, is primarily based upon the foreseen consequences of the act in question. It has a bad reputation in military ethics because it would supposedly make military expedience override all other concerns. Given that the utilitarian credo of the greatest happiness for the greatest number is in fact agent-neutral, meaning that the consequences (...)
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  25. Dual loyalty in military medical ethics: a moral dilemma or a test of integrity?Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps 165 (4):282-283.
    When militaries mention loyalty as a value they mean loyalty to colleagues and the organisation. Loyalty to principle, the type of loyalty that has a wider scope, plays hardly a role in the ethics of most armed forces. Where military codes, oaths and values are about the organisation and colleagues, medical ethics is about providing patient care impartially. Being subject to two diverging professional ethics can leave military medical personnel torn between the wish to act loyally towards colleagues, and the (...)
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  26. Ethiek voor Cyberkrijg en Cyberkrijgers.Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 111 (1):95-109.
    Although some claim that the term cyber war is merely metaphorical, there are good reasons to see cyber war as a form of warfare ‐ even if it is not war as we have hitherto known it. This poses the question whether the principles of the Just War Tradition, which claims to offer an alternative for pacifism and realism, apply to this specific kind of war too. This article argues that the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality are (...)
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  27. Civilian Care in War: Lessons from Afghanistan.Peter Olsthoorn & Myriame Bollen - 2013 - In Gross Carrick (ed.), Military Medical Ethics forthe 21st Century. pp. 59-70.
    Military doctors and nurses, employees with a compound professional identity as they are neither purely soldiers nor simply doctors or nurses, face a role conflict between the clinical professional duties to a patient and obligations, express or implied, real or perceived, to the interests of a third party such as an employer, an insurer, the state, or in this context, military command (London et al. 2006). In the context of military medical ethics this is commonly called dual loyalty (or, less (...)
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  28. Risks and Robots – some ethical issues.Peter Olsthoorn & Lambèr Royakkers - 2011 - Archive International Society for Military Ethics, 2011.
    While in many countries the use of unmanned systems is still in its infancy, other countries, most notably the US and Israel, are much ahead. Most of the systems in operation today are unarmed and are mainly used for reconnaissance and clearing improvised explosive devices. But over the last years the deployment of armed military robots is also on the increase, especially in the air. This might make unethical behavior less likely to happen, seeing that unmanned systems are immune to (...)
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  29. military engagement in civilian healthcare; an ethical perspective.Peter Olsthoorn, Myriame Bollen, Sebastiaan Rietjens & Masood Khalil - 2012 - In Robert Beeres, Jan van der Meulen, Joseph Soeters & Ad Vogelaar (eds.), Mission Uruzgan: Collaborating in Multiple Coalitions for Afghanistan. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 251-264.
    This chapter attempts to identify some ethical concerns evoked by military engagement in healthcare reconstruction. By bringing empirical evidence to the ongoing debate in military and development communities we aim to shed some light on the central question if and how, from a military ethical point of view, military should be involved in healthcare reconstruction during stabilization and reconstruction operations in Uruzgan.
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  30. Integrity, Moral Courage and Innere Führung.Peter Olsthoorn - 2016 - Ethics and Armed Forces 3 (1):32-36.
    The aim of this paper is to examine the usefulness of the somewhat related notions of integrity, moral courage, and Innere Führung (the leadership concept used by the German military) as a means of making military personnel behave ethically. Of these three notions, integrity is mentioned most often within military organizations, and the largest part of what follows is therefore devoted to a description of what integrity is, and what the drawbacks of this notion are for the military. This will (...)
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  31.  49
    Loyalty A Grey Virtue.Peter Olsthoorn & Marjon Blom-Terhell - 2022 - In Désirée Verweij, Peter Olsthoorn & Eva van Baarle (eds.), Ethics and Military Practice. Leiden Boston: Brill.
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  32. Military Ethics and Leadership.Peter Olsthoorn (ed.) - 2017 - Leiden & Boston: Brill.
    Most books and articles still treat leadership and ethics as related though separate phenomena. This edited volume is an exception to that rule, and explicitly treats leadership and ethics as a single domain. Clearly, ethics is an aspect of leadership, and not a distinct approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership. This holds especially true for the for the military, as it is one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Military leaders have to deal with personnel (...)
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  33. Ethics and Military Practice.Désirée Verweij, Peter Olsthoorn & Eva van Baarle (eds.) - 2022 - Leiden Boston: Brill.
    Democratic societies expect their armed forces to act in a morally responsible way, which seems a fair expectation given the fact that they entrust their armed forces with the monopoly of violence. However, this is not as straightforward and unambiguous as it sounds. Present-day military practices show that political assignments, social and cultural contexts, innovative technologies and organisational structures, present military personnel with questions and dilemma’s that can have far-reaching consequences for all involved – not in the last place for (...)
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  34. Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War, written by William H. Shaw. [REVIEW]Peter Olsthoorn - 2019 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 16 (2):251-254.
    Utilitarianism has a fairly bad reputation in military ethics, mainly because it is thought to make military expedience override all other concerns. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a famous instance of such a skewed utilitarian calculation that “the rules of war and the rights they are designed to protect” should have stopped (Walzer 1992: 263-8). Most of its critics seem to think that utilitarianism is not bad per se, but prone to be misapplied in a self-serving way. (...)
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  35. Yvonne Chiu: Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 344.). [REVIEW]Peter Olsthoorn - 2020 - The Review of Politics 82 (4):658-660.
    Clausewitz made the intuitively appealing claim that wars tend to “absoluteness,” and that all limitations imposed by law and morality are in theory alien to it. Clausewitz of course knew that there are in practice many limitations to how wars are fought, but he saw them as contingent to what war is. Since then, however, historians such as John Lynn (Battle: A History of Combat and Culture [Westview Press, 2003]), John Keegan (A History of Warfare ([Random House,1993]) and Victor Davis (...)
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  36. Honor: A Phenomenology. [REVIEW]Peter Olsthoorn - 2015 - Contemporary Political Theory 14 (1):e31-e33.
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