Description
Ethics of war scholarship today reflects a general concern that exposure to experience will contaminate, not benefit, our efforts to think ethically about war. Hence contemporary ethics of war scholarship has come to prize detachment and abstraction, modes of reasoning that ostensibly enable us to look beyond our own circumstances and to reflect on matters in an impartial, dispassionate and objective manner. Yet there is a problem with this way of proceeding. Namely, it excises the human element from the ethics of war. By bracketing lived experience from the task of thinking ethically about war, scholars risk losing contact with the bloody realities of violent conflict, and, consequently, speaking past the very object they are ostensibly addressing. If we wish to avoid this outcome, and to instead ensure that our ethical thinking connects in a meaningful way to the realities of combat, we must engage with, rather than insulate ourselves from, the lived experience of war. This paper examines how we might set about this task.
