This anthology is the report of an applied ethicist hired to serve as the Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy from 2001 to 2003. Roger Wertheimer's principal job was to advise the Naval Academy's leadership on the state of the midshipmen's ethical education. From his perch at Annapolis, he was able also to assess the state of ethics education at West Point and the Air Force Academy, as well as within the American profession of arms more broadly. Wertheimer's assessment is partly hopeful, but it is mostly—in his words—candid, sometimes unkind, and harsh.

Empowering Our Military Conscience makes two substantive contributions to the study of military ethics. First, Wertheimer provides six lively essays (presented as brown-bag lectures at Annapolis during his tenure) whose depth and range enable a penetrating exposure to cutting-edge arguments about why and how we fight. Such exposure is critical if military cadets and officers are to counter the prevalent, simplistic attitude typified by General Norman Schwartzkopf's quip such that “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is to do it” (p. 9).

In Part I, “Jus Ad Bellum,” Michael Walzer traces just-war theory (JWT) from its confines within religious institutions to its employment among left critics of U.S. Vietnam policy. JWT's vernacular, now secularized and fit for departments of philosophy and political science, has become so familiar that politicians and generals can comfortably deploy its terms. Nonetheless, JWT retains value as an instrument of immanent critique, particularly given the prevalence of such insufficiently theorized topics as humanitarian interventions and the preemptive-preventive distinction. Despite its several cleavages, JWT is “a doctrine of radical responsibility, because it holds political and military leaders responsible, first of all, for the well-being of their own people, but also for the well-being of innocent men and women on the other side” (p. 22).

George Lucas draws attention to instances of “vigilante justice” (some applauded, most derided) wherein a nation or coalition engages in preventive wars or humanitarian interventions in violation of international law. Since neither moral theory nor law can mitigate vigilantism, Lucas desires a world wherein states, substituting conditional sovereignty for absolute sovereignty, undertake a “constitutional convention” to write a stronger United Nations Charter. Whereas Lucas prefers a legal solution, Richard Miller dismisses recourse to legal reform. Instead, he first urges the cultivation of a prejudice against all interventions save to stop wholesale massacres. He then asserts that a philosophically informed consideration of the detailed circumstances and injustices at play in any one case ought to lead a politician to override the presumption against intervention.

In Part II, “Jus In Bello,” T. M. Scanlon attacks the Doctrine of Double Effect insofar as it requires practitioners and theorists to consider an agent's intentions in discerning the permissibility of an action. Intentions are irrelevant when evaluating a decision to, say, bomb a factory. All that matters is whether there are good reasons to bomb a factory. Intentions matter only in assessments of character, not in assessments of permissibility. Jeffrey Reiman, still hewing to intentionality, argues that the rule against killing noncombatants shifts from a Kantian to a utilitarian gear the more that lives are at stake. If many lives hang in the balance, soldiers may target noncombatants just in case “their belief in the justice and gravity of the cause” is reasonable and they attempt to minimize the amount of harm (p. 106). Richard Schoonhoven attacks the principle that good soldiers need only fight justly without regard to a war's justice. He argues that a soldier has no extraordinary epistemic disadvantage that justifies the neglect of jus ad bellum considerations.

The volume's essays enjoy the combined merit of offering students various handles by which to grasp the nuances of modern JWT. It is, therefore, an efficient text for students of JWT and (one would hope) cadets, military professionals, and politicians. But Wertheimer's second and unique contribution is to place the ethics of JWT within the broader context of the military professional's moral education. Too few ethicists specify the ideational background that informs how an aspiring soldier or military professional will read Walzer or study leadership.

In Parts I and II, Wertheimer provides samples of the philosophical rigor he brought to Annapolis. In Part III, “Jus Ante Bellum,” he describes that emergent mixture of attitudes and tensions that precede and shape demonstrations of ethical slicing and dicing in the classroom. A cadet's moral education entails not only philosophy but also curricular instruction on leadership, as well as an implicit socialization into what Wertheimer suggests is a conflicted and (at times) simplistic understanding of both the profession of arms and the morality of its ethos.

Professionalism is an attempt to exploit the “Enlightenment spirit of scientific rationality to improve technical proficiency.” Yet attendant to this spirit is a rejection of dogma, the epistemic authority of tradition, and organizational authority (p. 143). An irresolvable tension arises between that authority integral to military life and the military's institutional preference to see itself as a profession like any other—that is, technically competent and trusted. The rub lies insofar as civilian professionals are admired to the extent that they apply their skills toward a noble end. Yet military professionals (and many ethicists) dismiss this stricture, hoping that the expert management of violence, regardless of the war's nobility, will be enough.

The chief aim of military education in ethics is to place this ambivalence smack at the forefront of every military professional's thinking: “[A] warrior with an open mind or a healthy human heart is vulnerable to the thought that his life might be befouled by his killing people for reasons he cannot respect. That thought is not antithetical to military professionalism. It is elemental to the ambivalence inherent in its ethos” (p. 139).

Wertheimer is hopeful insofar as his initiatives as the ethics chair seem to have taken hold. Indeed, in March of 2010, Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, declared in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State University that “Precise and principled force applies whether we are attacking an entrenched enemy or securing the population. In either case, it protects the innocent. We protect the innocent. It's who we are” (emphasis added). Similarly, the Strategic Studies Institute and the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic are jointly publishing a Professional Military Ethics Monograph Series.

Wertheimer has valid concerns, too. Too much about moral education often goes unexamined: for example, the “juvenile hope” in the necessary relationship between good character and effective leadership; or the relationship between the inculcation of discipline, understood as the immediate response to orders, and the need to question authority; or the neglect of arguments positing contemporary failures of just-war principles. Moreover, how many officers will confront the arguments in Wertheimer's book? Civilian scholars are writing volumes about military ethics, tactics, and strategy. Yet at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where midcareer officers receive the education that will inform their next 10 years of service, JWT and other relevant scholarship is nowhere in the core curriculum. It must be snuck in the back door.

Today's military professional is no longer simply a manager of violence but also a cooperative, political agent operating within the context of counterinsurgency and stability operations. In these endeavors, lethal missions are merely a supporting effort, whereas infrastructural improvements, economic development, the provision of essential services, and governmental membership compose the main effort. If the soldier is to be both a warrior and a creator, it is essential that ethical enquiry and professional self-reflection occupy a more central place in military education.