As I am heading off this summer to be trained as a Chaplain in the U.S. Navy, and I consider myself to be just shy of a pacifist, I am highly interested in questions of military ethics. I deal very often with both inward and outward doubts about the possible hypocrisies involved in becoming a piece of the infrastructure of a machine whose actions I may often disagree with. In the end I have my reasons as to why I'm still going through with it and I will have to deal with the specific dilemmas as they come. What I will be able to take from this class, I think, is a well structured rubric as to when I personally feel military intervention is allowable, if not absolutely necessary. How this will help me I'm not sure, except to say that being able to explain and understand my position clearly, while working in a community that is predominantly hawkish and right-wing, might allow me to retain my sanity and stay useful to my
My thinking is primarily a synthesis of Hans Jonas and G.E.M. Anscombe, but it has been influenced by nearly every author we have considered. Obviously I have in my life been influenced on the subject by a great many sources not covered in this class, for the purposes of this paper, I will consider only a handful of outside sources. Writing this paper as a seminarian, I will be unapologetic about my Christian perspective, but will illustrate my clear agreement with Juergen Habermas that we must, as individuals and governments seek to resolve conflicts in the logos, outside of our religious perspectives .
My personal distaste for violence, and therefore the use of military force comes as much from a sense of pragmatism as ethical forbearance. Nothing creates enmity like violence; this robs both the aggress ...