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I am someone who works with tries to work on ethics from a variety of interdisciplinary interdisciplinary perspective,

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looking at a variety of different disciplines. And I focus in recent years in particular on ethics of war and peace and on military ethics.

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And I'm going to talk tonight about some work in neuroscience and psychology that I think is suggestive.

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Certainly, I'm not prepared to say it's definitive, but I think it may suggest some interesting lines of inquiry,

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both for scholars, but also perhaps for the military and thinking about ethics, training and so on.

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Let me begin with an incident in November 2005 in Anbar province, Iraq,

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where a convoy of four U.S. Marine vehicles containing Marines and friendly Iraqi soldiers was returning to base after resupplying a checkpoint.

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And the leader, the non-commissioned officer.

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In charge of the group was Sergeant Frank Wuterich.

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He's a 24 year old Marine who'd been an infantry instructor back home.

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This was his first deployment to Iraq and in fact, his first deployment in a combat theatre.

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Haditha is located in Anbar Province, which was a stronghold of Sunni resistance at the time.

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Marines and suffered suffered heavy casualties in the months before Wuterich's arrival,

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including six Marines who had been ambushed, tortured and killed, all of which was uploaded on the Internet.

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So shortly after 7 a.m., as Wuterich later recalled, an explosion louder than anything I have ever heard rocked the entire convoy.

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An improvised explosive vehicle and IED in the road had detonated beneath a vehicle about 35 metres behind Wuterich.

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The vehicle was blown into the air, killing one Marine, seriously wounding another.

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Wuterich immediately pulled his vehicle over to the side of the road,

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and the first thing he saw about 30 seconds or so later were five young men standing about ten metres away by the side of a car.

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They were unarmed. They made no move to advance toward him, nor did they exhibit any hostile behaviour.

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Wuterich later described what happened next. I took a knee in the road and fired.

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Engaging was the only choice. The threat had to be neutralised and this was the result.

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The five men whom Wuterich killed were four college students and a driver they had hired to take them to classes.

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No weapons were found in the car. Less than a minute had occurred between the IED explosion and when Wuterich opened fire.

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Now, the rules of engagement in the theatre required, quote,

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reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target, close quote, in order to use lethal force.

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And that meant that anyone who exhibited hostile action behaviour or hostile intent.

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Could be engaged with lethal force. So the question naturally is how could Wuterich have regarded these men as meeting this standard?

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So one natural account with which I certainly have some sympathy of what happened is that

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Wuterich's response reflected a failure of reason to temper powerful emotions of anger,

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fear, desire for revenge. Right. Ideally, reason would have slowed him down, would have led him to take more time,

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to look more closely at the men to make sure they were, in fact, hostile.

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But on this account, he was overcome by emotion. Right.

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And I certainly think this account captures some, but not necessarily all of what happened.

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And I want to suggest in my remarks that recent research for neuroscience and psychology suggests

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that we can also described Wuterich's actions as a failure to respond with the right emotions.

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Right. Now to appreciate this contrast Twitter reaction with the reaction of Hugh Thompson,

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the helicopter pilot who intervened to stop the slaughter at My Lai and to rescue innocent civilians.

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Thompson responded immediately to what he saw was anger in Thompson's own words.

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He said, I said, Damn it, it ain't going to happen. They ain't going to die.

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I was hot, I'll tell you that. I was hot. Those who received his radio message that day reported his voice was choked with emotion.

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He swore obscenities first and pleaded with the air crew to come down and help rescue the civilians.

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Thompson ordered his helicopter crew to open fire on any U.S. soldiers who tried to stop the rescue.

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All right. Now, I think we can say Thompson exhibited the right emotion under the circumstances.

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And research suggests that the right emotion can not only signal the presence of a morally salient feature of a situation.

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It can move us to act. That is, to take the appropriate steps in response.

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In this sense, it can be a source of moral motivation. You Thompson's emotional response led him to stop the massacre at considerable personal risk.

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It guided his moral perception of what was going on and motivated him to take morally praiseworthy action.

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For Wuterich, we might say responding with the right emotion would mean that he responded not only with anger and fear.

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Which were certainly virtually unavoidable, but also perhaps with a visceral,

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emotional immersion aversion to the prospect of killing innocent civilians.

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This could have led him to take just another minute or less to seek additional information about them in looking more closely.

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In other words, could have saved their lives. Responding with the right emotion, in other words,

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could have countered other emotions that prompted him to perceive the men as a threat and to open fire on them so quickly.

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Right. In fact, it could have slowed his response just enough to allow reason to begin to gain more influence,

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indeed, without this immediate non-conscious emotion.

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There might well be little prospect that reason could gain any influence with victory.

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So saying that Wuterich failed to respond with the right emotion is consistent with research that suggests that

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what we traditionally call emotional processing can play a role in some types of moral perception and judgement.

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And the work begins. Or is based on, I should say,

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a substantial body of research that offers an account more generally of emotion and cognition in which neural

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structures associated with emotion can play a crucial role in the activation of sensibilities that we tend to,

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at least in common parlance, to think of as moral.

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The work builds on research that indicates that our in general, our ability to make good decisions in a practical sense that further well-being or.

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Dependent in many ways on activity in portions of the brain that are associated with emotional processing.

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Now, I should say I don't like this next slide very much, but I'm going to do it just because it sort of does provide some simplification.

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Right. A neural structure that seems to play a key role in this process is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

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Right. And in particular, the orbitofrontal portion of the system.

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Now, I don't like this for many reasons, but one is it sort of suggests two discrete regions as opposed to neural networks.

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Right. But just to sort of orient you and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex typically is associated with more deliberate, abstract sort of reasoning.

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And research suggests that individuals with damage to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex generally retain abstract reasoning capabilities,

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but they lack the ability to gauge the prospective, practical consequences of different courses of action.

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They make really bad decisions, right? Antonio Damasio suggests that this reflects the fact that normal decision making is guided

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by what he calls emotional or somatic responses that signal the affective valence.

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Of potential future states. These operate, he argues,

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to bias an individual toward or away from potential responses to a situation based on

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the anticipated emotional consequences of choosing one course of action or another.

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As he puts it, this occurs even before the subject becomes aware of the goodness or badness of the choice she is about to make.

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So for a patient, as he and a co-author put it,

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with impaired emotional processing knowledge without emotional signalling leads to dissociation between what no one knows and how one decides to act.

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Now, the emotional signal involved in this process, DiMaggio and others suggest,

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is the product of a complex process in which described very generally and certainly in oversimplified terms,

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neural structures in different areas, and inputs to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that express positive and negative.

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Affective values associated with emotionally salient features of situations that an individual's confront confronts or one structure,

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for instance, processes information about others anticipated emotional states, another that ascribes belief and intentions to others.

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And these affective values reflect perception of the anticipated.

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Presence of rewards or penalties, if you will, from different courses of action.

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In other words, the anticipated emotional response, researchers argue, is what guides behaviour in many instances.

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Right. And this reflects an ongoing process of learning from experience in which positive and negative

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affective valence has become associated with certain objects or situations or activities.

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And at the same time, these vacancies are only probabilistic, right?

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Since the presence of these rewards or penalties are only predictive of what we associate with different people,

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different kinds of situations, different objects. These probabilities are adjusted on an ongoing basis as we gain more experience.

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So there's a comparison of the anticipated and the actual emotional consequences of certain kinds of behaviours and or choices.

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And then there is in essence feedback in which there is a learning process that goes on.

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There's also adjustment of the intensity of the emotional states that are associated with different outcomes.

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So again, comparing anticipated with actual emotional experiences.

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Right. And research suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex computes these values and converts them into a signal that represents sort of an,

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all things considered, set of positive or emotional or a negative affective valence associated with choosing different courses of action.

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And all this occurs without what we think of as deliberate, logical reasoning, but that is it occurs non consciously.

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It occurs very rapidly. That's not to say that neural structures associated with deliberate reasoning play

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no part in the process structure such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

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for instance, appear to modulate the stimuli received by the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and thus the signal that it generally generates.

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But research at least, suggests that those inputs don't so much override emotion as modulate emotional processing.

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And the philosopher Jim Woodward suggests that good,

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practical decision making is the product of what we traditionally think of as both emotion and logical deliberation.

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But he suggests that this distinction itself may be misleading.

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What he suggests is, if by emotional, we mean structures that are affective involved in evaluation.

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That is appraisal of what ought to be the case and in motivation than structures like the VM, PFC are indeed involved in emotional processing.

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But this does not mean that they are non representational,

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impervious to influence from learning or by cognitive structures or passive in

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the sense of not involved in modulation and control of other neural structures.

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So processing in these structures, he argues,

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seems to involve an interim mixture of elements we associate with information processing and with affect.

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And so we think of this as emotional processing.

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And Woodward suggests that this greatly enhances behavioural flexibility and modification of behaviour

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as a result of learning and enables humans to move beyond fixed input output patterns in response.

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So emotional states research suggests or not simply brute instinctive, unmediated experiences sentiments but through the product of neural processing,

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processing that actually features a type of representation, calculation and learning regarded as typical of more delivered cognitive processes.

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Now, what might this have to do with moral decision making?

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Well, here I think this is more speculative,

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but I think it's it's worth I think pursuing the possibility that this general sort of emotional processing that occurs may play at least some role,

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perhaps in some kinds of decision making that we think of as moral.

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Certainly not positing that, you know, there is a single system within the brain engaged in what we think of as moral

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processing or that there are a multiplicity of of different types of moral judgements.

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Right. I mean, Walter SYNNOTT Armstrong was here argues that the whole notion of morality is not really a unified concept,

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that there's sort of a series of sort of disaggregated and maybe more localised sort of assessments, which I tend to agree with.

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But in any event, one important aspect of morality, again, I'll use the term in general terms,

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although perhaps colloquially at least maybe unified, is that it's concerned with guiding our conduct in interactions with others.

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That's not the that doesn't exhaust all morally salient aspects of the world, but that's certainly an important dimension of it.

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These interactions can be an especially significant source of reward or pain, right?

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They often present us with situations that involve a considerable amount of uncertainty in navigating this complex and fluid.

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Social terrain requires probabilistic judgements about others intentions, their values, their emotional states,

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their likely responses to our actions, and other considerations that are relevant in determining how to act in a given situation.

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This generally requires quite rapid recognition and assessment of subtle social cues for

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which non-conscious emotional processing is more suitable generally than deliberative.

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Cognitive processing. This enables us very quickly to anticipate such how to read others write.

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We've all had this experience right to anticipate the likely positive or negative.

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Emotional or affective consequences associated with responding in different ways in a social situation.

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Right. And at least some research suggests that the verb PFC plays an important role in processing these complex social emotions,

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such as guilt, embarrassment, empathy, resentment, and more generally recognising emotional emotions in others.

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Right. And research also suggests that at least some moral learning relies on this process of

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reflecting on the emotional states we experience as a result of our behaviour toward others.

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The perception is attuned to others. Experience guided by appreciation of their mental states can lead us to identify pain or distress while empathy.

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Empathy, of course, can generate negative emotional signals that lead us to want to relieve it.

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Right. Now, ideally, this process of more learning begins early in life.

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So a child may hit another child, whereupon an adult may say, How would you like it if he did that to you?

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Right. This ideally induces an empathic response in the first child, an aversion to what she has done and more.

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Learning over time consists of the association of that aversive emotion with the transgressive behaviour that elicited it.

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That's communicated in the future through an affective signal by the V the PFC that biases an individual away from such behaviour.

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Right. People also learn from moral instruction,

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often in the form of stories and illustrations in which they learn to have adverse or favourable reactions

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to various sorts of behaviour without actually engaging in that behaviour through the process of imaginative

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experiencing and support for at least some relationship between social and moral learning comes from the

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fact that the neural areas activated when subjects have at least certain kinds of moral intuitions,

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then involve response to complex, multifaceted,

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moral decisions that involve moral dilemmas seem to be just the areas active in aspects of social cognition involving automatic affect,

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leading processing and considerable research suggests that when these areas are damaged,

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there is adverse impact on the ability to engage effectively in what we think of as moral reasoning,

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at least of the type that are that are presented in the scenario.

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So one implication of this, and Jim Woodward, among others,

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has suggested this is that there may well not be neural structures that we think of as sort of dedicated, if you will.

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To moral cognition, if you want to call it that.

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Woodward argues, for instance, that. We may well engage in certain neural processing in situations that involve other people.

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And that some types of judgements that we think of as moral may be a subset of this more basic sort

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of neural processing that involves sort of mapping or reading and responding to the social world.

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That's at least one one possible thesis. In any event, this potential role of emotional processing also suggests that enduring,

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strong affective valence is associated with features of situations that that have more really salient moral

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salience may be especially likely to bridge the gap between moral decision making and moral behaviour.

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That is, it's well known that there's a difference between.

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Engaging in deliberation and coming to a conclusion about what is morally, morally appropriate and actually acting on that.

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Right. And some suggest that emotion.

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May enhance our ability in moving us to behave in ways that we have concluded are moral.

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If those conclusions are the product of aversion to or attraction to particular courses of action, one source of aversion or attraction,

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for instance, may be the role of emotional processing in simulating the mental and emotional states of others.

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Since, as one scholar suggests, the simulation works by our actually undergoing.

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Aspects of the processing underlying the mental state that we are detecting affective process.

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This may help in providing the motivation to act on the moral confusion that we reach.

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So there's a bit of a hint of humour here, although there are certainly some significant differences with you.

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So in any event, research suggests that individuals in at least some cases,

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may engage in rapid and non-conscious decision making about situations that have some dimensions that we think of as moral in some way.

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And that neural structure is associated with emotional processing.

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Right. May play a role in both perceiving what I would call moral perception and in moral assessment of different courses of action.

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And indeed, then in moving us to act in accordance with our assessment of those different courses of action.

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So. What I want to do now is go back to Sergeant Wuterich at Haditha and at least think about how we might reconstruct what he did.

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In the terms that I've just described. Right. And my hope here, obviously, is not to provide by any means a definitive reconstruction,

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but at least to see whether it is plausible to think of what he did in these terms and what the implications of that might be.

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So what I want to do is think of his.

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Perceptions and his implicit deliberation one minute before the IED went off.

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And one minute after the IED went off.

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And work on non-conscious decision making suggests that in any situation our perception is shaped very much by our concerns,

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our goals, our aims in that setting. This narrows us to focus on cues in the environment we regard as relevant to those interests,

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which we then in turn organise into larger patterns that define, if you will, the situation.

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For us, these patterns are infused with emotional significance and which is transmitted, as I mentioned earlier, through this,

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these various neural systems, among other places, to the V and PFC, which engages in this emotional processing.

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So we accept that is a very broad and very general sort of description.

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So one minute before the the the explosion,

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the salient goal in Wuterich's mind was to travel safely back to home base or avoiding the most likely threats,

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which were IEDs and ambushes, where his main orientation, we could say,

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was vigilance was focussed on cues in the environment most likely to signal to indicate possible danger.

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Okay. From an emotional standpoint, this orientation of vigilance was prompted naturally by strong.

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Anticipated negative emotions associated with the prospect of being attacked.

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Right. Obviously, we can see these emotions as reflecting a basic desire for self-preservation.

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What would he have regarded as morally salient features of the situation as he saw it?

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Well, at least one important element of a perception that a situation has morally salient features is, as James Rist has put it,

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the awareness that something one might do or is doing can affect the welfare of someone else, either directly or indirectly.

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So if we at least focus on that aspect of morality to think about what might be morally salient in Wuterich's universe, if you will,

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a minute before the explosion, one group of people, obviously, who would be affected by what he did were the men in his squad, right?

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As a leader of the squad, he had a moral responsibility to bring them back safely.

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The prospect of failing to do so would have elicited anticipated emotional distress.

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In this respect, his vigilance in identifying possible threats right had a moral dimension.

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You might say it wasn't purely self-preservation.

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I'll leave self-preservation and morality aside for the moment.

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Another group of people who would be affected by Wuterich's actions was, of course, the local population.

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He had a moral responsibility not to harm those who posed no danger to his squad.

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And in distinguishing those who could and could not be harmed, he was guided by the rules of engagement,

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which said someone had to exhibit hostile, hostile action or hostile intent.

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Right. In order to be harmed. Okay. Now, ideally, Wuterich would have taken care to distinguish innocent from hostile persons.

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Because of anticipated emotional distress from the prospect of killing an innocent person.

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Aversion to this distress would be based on, I think, normal moral sensibilities.

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And there's no medication that would. It was a typical in any sense and military training that that reinforced it.

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So in this posture of vigilance, the prospect of opening fire on five and our men standing by a car likely would

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have triggered anticipated vigilance as he was travelling back to home base,

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not being under attack, simply scanning the environment.

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Had he seen five men standing by a car without weapons, no overt sort of exhibition of hostility?

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It's unlikely he would have done what he later did.

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All right. Now. He probably would have taken more time to look more closely for any indications of whether they had hostile intent.

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So water vigilance that morning prompted him to engage in tactical manoeuvres to minimise danger.

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He changed the normal route back to the base as the convoy turned on to the road where the explosion later occurred.

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Wuterich also moved his vehicle to the left side of the road, and then the attack occurred.

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The IED blew up. The vehicle behind him was thrown into the air.

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One person was killed and then the men in the squad organised these situational cues

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into a pattern that defines the situation as one in which they're under attack.

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Right. And Marines have standard procedures to follow after an IED attack.

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As one said, we call those remedial action. What would happen if there is a close ambush for ambush, an IED?

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We run through these every single briefing so it becomes memorised in your head so that if it does happen, you can react without thinking.

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For an IED, it's always get out of the kill zone. Cordoned off the area.

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Look for a trigger man. And Wuterich said later, at this point, I realised my mission had changed.

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Okay. So prior to the explosion, he's trying to get back to the base safely.

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He's in this orientation of vigilance. Now he's under attack.

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We had practised this scenario before on whiteboards, in classrooms, in front of superior subordinates peers.

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My training would take over from here. So Wuterich now is in a new situation whose most relevant features are.

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One of his men has been killed. And his squad is under attack.

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Emotionally, the first feature of the situation likely triggers anger and perhaps a desire for revenge.

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The second. Largely triggers fear, an emotional aversion to the prospect of not bringing his men back safely to the base, not to mention himself.

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So he focuses on locating the IED trigger man and identifying who is attacking.

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There were some reports of small arms fire after the IED, which was a common sort of tactic that was used.

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And his cues and looking for maybe attacking they have moral salience for the reason I suggested earlier,

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because someone out there killed one of his men and maybe trying to kill him in his squad.

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But at the same time, the responsibility not to harm innocent civilians remains a morally salient feature of the situation.

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He also should be experiencing some emotional aversion to the prospect of violating this responsibility.

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This should lead him to engage in accurate, positive identification of hostile action or hostile intent.

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So right after the IED goes off, Woodward pulls to the side.

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He sees the five Iraqi men. He said, the first thing I noticed outside my vehicle was a white four door sedan to the Southwest.

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He said. So my immediate thought is, okay, maybe this was a car bomb.

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Okay, maybe these guys had something to do with the IED.

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So Wuterich regards the presence of the men itself as a possible cue of hostile action and intent.

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The IED and the men themselves are associated very closely in his mind.

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He then says there were military age males that were inside that car.

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The only thing that was Iraqi was them. I notice the term military age males, right?

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He didn't say there were five young men. There were five people of college age.

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These are military age males. He regards this as an additional cue that inclines him to interpret them as hostile.

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And then one of his colleagues, Sergeant Dela Cruz, was yelling at them in broken Arabic to get down on the ground.

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We said they were not complying.

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In fact, they were starting to run in the opposite direction, away from where Corporal Dela Cruz was approaching them.

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Twitter regards this as the final cue necessary to positively identify the men as hostile.

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He then opens fire and kills all of them. And this again in the span probably of less than a minute.

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Okay. So I think it's plausible to suggest Wuterich sense of what was morally salient in this situation.

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Was dominated. By his desire to find who had triggered the IED and to protect himself and his men is a process of what we might call interpretation.

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His reading of the cues was not sufficiently influenced by anticipated emotional distress from the prospect of killing innocent civilians.

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He did not, in other words, experience an emotion strong enough to slow.

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This rapid sort of. Um, information processing he was undergoing.

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And the direction that it led him, which was governed by emotions of anger and fear.

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Right. What could have interrupted this? Well, you might say.

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Well, had he just. Formed of self and taking more time to deliberate rationally.

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This would have led him to realise that what he was seeing couldn't on its face.

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Suffice. To fire on them, he would need to look more closely.

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But he was unlikely under these circumstances to draw at least fully on this faculty of rational deliberation.

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I would argue what was more likely to interrupt his rapid information processing and interpretation was an emotional response.

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Again anticipated emotional aversion to killing innocent civilians.

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That would have tempered. The other emotions that were leading him in a certain direction.

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I had had that anticipated response.

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Involve greater emotional and aversion.

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This could have led him to take just another minute or less to seek additional information about the men.

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Had anyone seen them before the explosion? In fact, someone had seen them in the convoy and had waved them over to the side.

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That's how they ended up where they were.

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Instead of relying on his colleagues broken Arabic, he could have turned to the Iraqi soldiers in his unit to communicate with the men.

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He could have taken a few seconds to consider anyone triggering an IED likely would be moving away from the convoy, not approaching it.

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So responding with the right emotion, in other words.

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Based again on this anticipated emotional distress would have slowed his response enough to allow reason to gain more influence.

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Indeed, I think without this immediate non-conscious emotion, there might be little prospect that reason actually could have much influence.

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So what was necessary was for him somehow to retain a strong enough.

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Visceral, emotional aversion to the prospect of killing innocent civilians when the situation changed from one of vigilance to being under attack.

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Right. So conclude with what implications there might be for military ethics training.

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Right. Certainly Wuterich was familiar with the Geneva Conventions.

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He had been briefed on the rules of engagement in the theatre. Right.

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What could have strengthened this visceral, emotional aversion that I describe that might have led him right to not to open fire on the men?

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Research suggests that at least two mechanisms might trigger a morally appropriate emotional aversion.

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One is what's called outcome aversion. This reflects a first person.

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I'm sorry. Yeah, a first person perspective on outcome aversion is contrasted with action aversion, which is a.

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A perspective, actually, of the perpetrator. Let me give you an example.

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Researchers illustrate this by using the example of one person hearing about.

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Another person slicing the throat of someone.

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The outcome, a version model, maintains that the emotional response to hearing about this scenario is grounded in empathy for the victim.

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And the distress caused by imagining the suffering of the victim.

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And naturally, empathy plays a significant role in that process.

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In this way, as Don Pizarro has suggested, empathic arousal operates as a first alert signalling moral relevance.

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So thinking back to Wuterich,

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what could military training have done other than make sure he knew he knew the Geneva Conventions and the rules of engagement?

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Well. It's not uncommon for service members in situations such as Iraq.

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To have indifference or even resentment toward the local population.

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The sense that they're not cooperating. The sense that maybe they're, in fact, assisting the enemy.

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Right. And I've heard people talk about the importance of unit squad leaders, unit leaders, different levels of educating.

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Forces about the lives of people who are caught in these conflicts.

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You know, they don't represent the standard sort of fully autonomous chooser that we tend to think of ourselves as being right.

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They're enmeshed in a very complex web of relationships that may subject them to danger from a variety of different sources.

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Right. To the extent I have heard at least that one appreciates this, that may trigger at least some degree of empathy and therefore a greater.

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Emotional aversion to killing someone who is, in fact, innocent.

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Action aversion involves.

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An emotional response that puts oneself in the shoes of the perpetrator rather than the victim.

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Right. So in my in the example, how would it feel to slice someone's throat?

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Right. And research suggests that the result of the distress that results may be the roots of this may be empathic,

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but that over time this may be internalised. So that emotional distress occurs even with the knowledge that no one is being hurt.

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So someone hears about someone throat being slashed with a rubber knife.

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Right. Or the prospect of firing a toy gun at someone.

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Actually, it can elicit emotional distress, even knowing that no one is going to be harmed because one has internalised this.

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Am I the sort of person who does this? Right. And that's what's known as action aversion.

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And for action aversion. You know, one way maybe of harnessing the appropriate what I would call an emotional response.

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Right. Could be to foster a greater sense of professional duty.

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That. Focuses on protecting innocent people.

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Right.

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There are a sense of professional identity in which there is distress at the prospect of violating this professional duty to protect the innocent.

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Right. That you know, this is just this is the sort of thing we don't do.

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We're here to protect these people. Right. And your duty, you can you could undermine the mission.

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That's a more pragmatic right sort of argument. But, you know, that's not who we are.

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That's that's not what we do. We take steps to try to avoid that point.

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So as I say, this is all to me certainly quite suggestive.

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You'll see at the bottom there a reference to Aristotle, and that's even more speculative and even more suggestive.

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But it does seem to me that to the extent we focus on trying to inculcate the propensity to respond with the right sort of emotion,

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there is at least some resemblance to Aristotle's notion of habituation.

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Right. And so I can't go very far because I haven't thought certainly hadn't thought deeply about this.

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But it does seem to me that sort of cultivating the right kinds of emotion bears some resemblance to what what he was talking about.

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So again. I'm really more or less at the beginning of this research project.

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I think there are some interesting avenues of inquiry.

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I think there are also probably some challenges. But thank you for your attention, and I welcome your comments and questions.