I am someone who works with tries to work on ethics from a variety of interdisciplinary interdisciplinary perspective,
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.
And I'm going to talk tonight about some work in neuroscience and psychology that I think is suggestive.
Certainly, I'm not prepared to say it's definitive, but I think it may suggest some interesting lines of inquiry,
both for scholars, but also perhaps for the military and thinking about ethics, training and so on.
Let me begin with an incident in November 2005 in Anbar province, Iraq,
where a convoy of four U.S. Marine vehicles containing Marines and friendly Iraqi soldiers was returning to base after resupplying a checkpoint.
And the leader, the non-commissioned officer.
In charge of the group was Sergeant Frank Wuterich.
He's a 24 year old Marine who'd been an infantry instructor back home.
This was his first deployment to Iraq and in fact, his first deployment in a combat theatre.
Haditha is located in Anbar Province, which was a stronghold of Sunni resistance at the time.
Marines and suffered suffered heavy casualties in the months before Wuterich's arrival,
including six Marines who had been ambushed, tortured and killed, all of which was uploaded on the Internet.
So shortly after 7 a.m., as Wuterich later recalled, an explosion louder than anything I have ever heard rocked the entire convoy.
An improvised explosive vehicle and IED in the road had detonated beneath a vehicle about 35 metres behind Wuterich.
The vehicle was blown into the air, killing one Marine, seriously wounding another.
Wuterich immediately pulled his vehicle over to the side of the road,
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.
They were unarmed. They made no move to advance toward him, nor did they exhibit any hostile behaviour.
Wuterich later described what happened next. I took a knee in the road and fired.
Engaging was the only choice. The threat had to be neutralised and this was the result.
The five men whom Wuterich killed were four college students and a driver they had hired to take them to classes.
No weapons were found in the car. Less than a minute had occurred between the IED explosion and when Wuterich opened fire.
Now, the rules of engagement in the theatre required, quote,
reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target, close quote, in order to use lethal force.
And that meant that anyone who exhibited hostile action behaviour or hostile intent.
Could be engaged with lethal force. So the question naturally is how could Wuterich have regarded these men as meeting this standard?
So one natural account with which I certainly have some sympathy of what happened is that
Wuterich's response reflected a failure of reason to temper powerful emotions of anger,
fear, desire for revenge. Right. Ideally, reason would have slowed him down, would have led him to take more time,
to look more closely at the men to make sure they were, in fact, hostile.
But on this account, he was overcome by emotion. Right.
And I certainly think this account captures some, but not necessarily all of what happened.
And I want to suggest in my remarks that recent research for neuroscience and psychology suggests
that we can also described Wuterich's actions as a failure to respond with the right emotions.
Right. Now to appreciate this contrast Twitter reaction with the reaction of Hugh Thompson,
the helicopter pilot who intervened to stop the slaughter at My Lai and to rescue innocent civilians.
Thompson responded immediately to what he saw was anger in Thompson's own words.
He said, I said, Damn it, it ain't going to happen. They ain't going to die.
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.
He swore obscenities first and pleaded with the air crew to come down and help rescue the civilians.
Thompson ordered his helicopter crew to open fire on any U.S. soldiers who tried to stop the rescue.
All right. Now, I think we can say Thompson exhibited the right emotion under the circumstances.
And research suggests that the right emotion can not only signal the presence of a morally salient feature of a situation.
It can move us to act. That is, to take the appropriate steps in response.
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.
It guided his moral perception of what was going on and motivated him to take morally praiseworthy action.
For Wuterich, we might say responding with the right emotion would mean that he responded not only with anger and fear.
Which were certainly virtually unavoidable, but also perhaps with a visceral,
emotional immersion aversion to the prospect of killing innocent civilians.
This could have led him to take just another minute or less to seek additional information about them in looking more closely.
In other words, could have saved their lives. Responding with the right emotion, in other words,
could have countered other emotions that prompted him to perceive the men as a threat and to open fire on them so quickly.
Right. In fact, it could have slowed his response just enough to allow reason to begin to gain more influence,
indeed, without this immediate non-conscious emotion.
There might well be little prospect that reason could gain any influence with victory.
So saying that Wuterich failed to respond with the right emotion is consistent with research that suggests that
what we traditionally call emotional processing can play a role in some types of moral perception and judgement.
And the work begins. Or is based on, I should say,
a substantial body of research that offers an account more generally of emotion and cognition in which neural
structures associated with emotion can play a crucial role in the activation of sensibilities that we tend to,
at least in common parlance, to think of as moral.
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.
Dependent in many ways on activity in portions of the brain that are associated with emotional processing.
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.
Right. A neural structure that seems to play a key role in this process is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Right. And in particular, the orbitofrontal portion of the system.
Now, I don't like this for many reasons, but one is it sort of suggests two discrete regions as opposed to neural networks.
Right. But just to sort of orient you and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex typically is associated with more deliberate, abstract sort of reasoning.
And research suggests that individuals with damage to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex generally retain abstract reasoning capabilities,
but they lack the ability to gauge the prospective, practical consequences of different courses of action.
They make really bad decisions, right? Antonio Damasio suggests that this reflects the fact that normal decision making is guided
by what he calls emotional or somatic responses that signal the affective valence.
Of potential future states. These operate, he argues,
to bias an individual toward or away from potential responses to a situation based on
the anticipated emotional consequences of choosing one course of action or another.
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.
So for a patient, as he and a co-author put it,
with impaired emotional processing knowledge without emotional signalling leads to dissociation between what no one knows and how one decides to act.
Now, the emotional signal involved in this process, DiMaggio and others suggest,
is the product of a complex process in which described very generally and certainly in oversimplified terms,
neural structures in different areas, and inputs to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that express positive and negative.
Affective values associated with emotionally salient features of situations that an individual's confront confronts or one structure,
for instance, processes information about others anticipated emotional states, another that ascribes belief and intentions to others.
And these affective values reflect perception of the anticipated.
Presence of rewards or penalties, if you will, from different courses of action.
In other words, the anticipated emotional response, researchers argue, is what guides behaviour in many instances.
Right. And this reflects an ongoing process of learning from experience in which positive and negative
affective valence has become associated with certain objects or situations or activities.
And at the same time, these vacancies are only probabilistic, right?
Since the presence of these rewards or penalties are only predictive of what we associate with different people,
different kinds of situations, different objects. These probabilities are adjusted on an ongoing basis as we gain more experience.
So there's a comparison of the anticipated and the actual emotional consequences of certain kinds of behaviours and or choices.
And then there is in essence feedback in which there is a learning process that goes on.
There's also adjustment of the intensity of the emotional states that are associated with different outcomes.
So again, comparing anticipated with actual emotional experiences.
Right. And research suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex computes these values and converts them into a signal that represents sort of an,
all things considered, set of positive or emotional or a negative affective valence associated with choosing different courses of action.
And all this occurs without what we think of as deliberate, logical reasoning, but that is it occurs non consciously.
It occurs very rapidly. That's not to say that neural structures associated with deliberate reasoning play
no part in the process structure such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
for instance, appear to modulate the stimuli received by the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and thus the signal that it generally generates.
But research at least, suggests that those inputs don't so much override emotion as modulate emotional processing.
And the philosopher Jim Woodward suggests that good,
practical decision making is the product of what we traditionally think of as both emotion and logical deliberation.
But he suggests that this distinction itself may be misleading.
What he suggests is, if by emotional, we mean structures that are affective involved in evaluation.
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.
But this does not mean that they are non representational,
impervious to influence from learning or by cognitive structures or passive in
the sense of not involved in modulation and control of other neural structures.
So processing in these structures, he argues,
seems to involve an interim mixture of elements we associate with information processing and with affect.
And so we think of this as emotional processing.
And Woodward suggests that this greatly enhances behavioural flexibility and modification of behaviour
as a result of learning and enables humans to move beyond fixed input output patterns in response.
So emotional states research suggests or not simply brute instinctive, unmediated experiences sentiments but through the product of neural processing,
processing that actually features a type of representation, calculation and learning regarded as typical of more delivered cognitive processes.
Now, what might this have to do with moral decision making?
Well, here I think this is more speculative,
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,
perhaps in some kinds of decision making that we think of as moral.
Certainly not positing that, you know, there is a single system within the brain engaged in what we think of as moral
processing or that there are a multiplicity of of different types of moral judgements.
Right. I mean, Walter SYNNOTT Armstrong was here argues that the whole notion of morality is not really a unified concept,
that there's sort of a series of sort of disaggregated and maybe more localised sort of assessments, which I tend to agree with.
But in any event, one important aspect of morality, again, I'll use the term in general terms,
although perhaps colloquially at least maybe unified, is that it's concerned with guiding our conduct in interactions with others.
That's not the that doesn't exhaust all morally salient aspects of the world, but that's certainly an important dimension of it.
These interactions can be an especially significant source of reward or pain, right?
They often present us with situations that involve a considerable amount of uncertainty in navigating this complex and fluid.
Social terrain requires probabilistic judgements about others intentions, their values, their emotional states,
their likely responses to our actions, and other considerations that are relevant in determining how to act in a given situation.
This generally requires quite rapid recognition and assessment of subtle social cues for
which non-conscious emotional processing is more suitable generally than deliberative.
Cognitive processing. This enables us very quickly to anticipate such how to read others write.
We've all had this experience right to anticipate the likely positive or negative.
Emotional or affective consequences associated with responding in different ways in a social situation.
Right. And at least some research suggests that the verb PFC plays an important role in processing these complex social emotions,
such as guilt, embarrassment, empathy, resentment, and more generally recognising emotional emotions in others.
Right. And research also suggests that at least some moral learning relies on this process of
reflecting on the emotional states we experience as a result of our behaviour toward others.
The perception is attuned to others. Experience guided by appreciation of their mental states can lead us to identify pain or distress while empathy.
Empathy, of course, can generate negative emotional signals that lead us to want to relieve it.
Right. Now, ideally, this process of more learning begins early in life.
So a child may hit another child, whereupon an adult may say, How would you like it if he did that to you?
Right. This ideally induces an empathic response in the first child, an aversion to what she has done and more.
Learning over time consists of the association of that aversive emotion with the transgressive behaviour that elicited it.
That's communicated in the future through an affective signal by the V the PFC that biases an individual away from such behaviour.
Right. People also learn from moral instruction,
often in the form of stories and illustrations in which they learn to have adverse or favourable reactions
to various sorts of behaviour without actually engaging in that behaviour through the process of imaginative
experiencing and support for at least some relationship between social and moral learning comes from the
fact that the neural areas activated when subjects have at least certain kinds of moral intuitions,
then involve response to complex, multifaceted,
moral decisions that involve moral dilemmas seem to be just the areas active in aspects of social cognition involving automatic affect,
leading processing and considerable research suggests that when these areas are damaged,
there is adverse impact on the ability to engage effectively in what we think of as moral reasoning,
at least of the type that are that are presented in the scenario.
So one implication of this, and Jim Woodward, among others,
has suggested this is that there may well not be neural structures that we think of as sort of dedicated, if you will.
To moral cognition, if you want to call it that.
Woodward argues, for instance, that. We may well engage in certain neural processing in situations that involve other people.
And that some types of judgements that we think of as moral may be a subset of this more basic sort
of neural processing that involves sort of mapping or reading and responding to the social world.
That's at least one one possible thesis. In any event, this potential role of emotional processing also suggests that enduring,
strong affective valence is associated with features of situations that that have more really salient moral
salience may be especially likely to bridge the gap between moral decision making and moral behaviour.
That is, it's well known that there's a difference between.
Engaging in deliberation and coming to a conclusion about what is morally, morally appropriate and actually acting on that.
Right. And some suggest that emotion.
May enhance our ability in moving us to behave in ways that we have concluded are moral.
If those conclusions are the product of aversion to or attraction to particular courses of action, one source of aversion or attraction,
for instance, may be the role of emotional processing in simulating the mental and emotional states of others.
Since, as one scholar suggests, the simulation works by our actually undergoing.
Aspects of the processing underlying the mental state that we are detecting affective process.
This may help in providing the motivation to act on the moral confusion that we reach.
So there's a bit of a hint of humour here, although there are certainly some significant differences with you.
So in any event, research suggests that individuals in at least some cases,
may engage in rapid and non-conscious decision making about situations that have some dimensions that we think of as moral in some way.
And that neural structure is associated with emotional processing.
Right. May play a role in both perceiving what I would call moral perception and in moral assessment of different courses of action.
And indeed, then in moving us to act in accordance with our assessment of those different courses of action.
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.
In the terms that I've just described. Right. And my hope here, obviously, is not to provide by any means a definitive reconstruction,
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.
So what I want to do is think of his.
Perceptions and his implicit deliberation one minute before the IED went off.
And one minute after the IED went off.
And work on non-conscious decision making suggests that in any situation our perception is shaped very much by our concerns,
our goals, our aims in that setting. This narrows us to focus on cues in the environment we regard as relevant to those interests,
which we then in turn organise into larger patterns that define, if you will, the situation.
For us, these patterns are infused with emotional significance and which is transmitted, as I mentioned earlier, through this,
these various neural systems, among other places, to the V and PFC, which engages in this emotional processing.
So we accept that is a very broad and very general sort of description.
So one minute before the the the explosion,
the salient goal in Wuterich's mind was to travel safely back to home base or avoiding the most likely threats,
which were IEDs and ambushes, where his main orientation, we could say,
was vigilance was focussed on cues in the environment most likely to signal to indicate possible danger.
Okay. From an emotional standpoint, this orientation of vigilance was prompted naturally by strong.
Anticipated negative emotions associated with the prospect of being attacked.
Right. Obviously, we can see these emotions as reflecting a basic desire for self-preservation.
What would he have regarded as morally salient features of the situation as he saw it?
Well, at least one important element of a perception that a situation has morally salient features is, as James Rist has put it,
the awareness that something one might do or is doing can affect the welfare of someone else, either directly or indirectly.
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,
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?
As a leader of the squad, he had a moral responsibility to bring them back safely.
The prospect of failing to do so would have elicited anticipated emotional distress.
In this respect, his vigilance in identifying possible threats right had a moral dimension.
You might say it wasn't purely self-preservation.
I'll leave self-preservation and morality aside for the moment.
Another group of people who would be affected by Wuterich's actions was, of course, the local population.
He had a moral responsibility not to harm those who posed no danger to his squad.
And in distinguishing those who could and could not be harmed, he was guided by the rules of engagement,
which said someone had to exhibit hostile, hostile action or hostile intent.
Right. In order to be harmed. Okay. Now, ideally, Wuterich would have taken care to distinguish innocent from hostile persons.
Because of anticipated emotional distress from the prospect of killing an innocent person.
Aversion to this distress would be based on, I think, normal moral sensibilities.
And there's no medication that would. It was a typical in any sense and military training that that reinforced it.
So in this posture of vigilance, the prospect of opening fire on five and our men standing by a car likely would
have triggered anticipated vigilance as he was travelling back to home base,
not being under attack, simply scanning the environment.
Had he seen five men standing by a car without weapons, no overt sort of exhibition of hostility?
It's unlikely he would have done what he later did.
All right. Now. He probably would have taken more time to look more closely for any indications of whether they had hostile intent.
So water vigilance that morning prompted him to engage in tactical manoeuvres to minimise danger.
He changed the normal route back to the base as the convoy turned on to the road where the explosion later occurred.
Wuterich also moved his vehicle to the left side of the road, and then the attack occurred.
The IED blew up. The vehicle behind him was thrown into the air.
One person was killed and then the men in the squad organised these situational cues
into a pattern that defines the situation as one in which they're under attack.
Right. And Marines have standard procedures to follow after an IED attack.
As one said, we call those remedial action. What would happen if there is a close ambush for ambush, an IED?
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.
For an IED, it's always get out of the kill zone. Cordoned off the area.
Look for a trigger man. And Wuterich said later, at this point, I realised my mission had changed.
Okay. So prior to the explosion, he's trying to get back to the base safely.
He's in this orientation of vigilance. Now he's under attack.
We had practised this scenario before on whiteboards, in classrooms, in front of superior subordinates peers.
My training would take over from here. So Wuterich now is in a new situation whose most relevant features are.
One of his men has been killed. And his squad is under attack.
Emotionally, the first feature of the situation likely triggers anger and perhaps a desire for revenge.
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.
So he focuses on locating the IED trigger man and identifying who is attacking.
There were some reports of small arms fire after the IED, which was a common sort of tactic that was used.
And his cues and looking for maybe attacking they have moral salience for the reason I suggested earlier,
because someone out there killed one of his men and maybe trying to kill him in his squad.
But at the same time, the responsibility not to harm innocent civilians remains a morally salient feature of the situation.
He also should be experiencing some emotional aversion to the prospect of violating this responsibility.
This should lead him to engage in accurate, positive identification of hostile action or hostile intent.
So right after the IED goes off, Woodward pulls to the side.
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.
He said. So my immediate thought is, okay, maybe this was a car bomb.
Okay, maybe these guys had something to do with the IED.
So Wuterich regards the presence of the men itself as a possible cue of hostile action and intent.
The IED and the men themselves are associated very closely in his mind.
He then says there were military age males that were inside that car.
The only thing that was Iraqi was them. I notice the term military age males, right?
He didn't say there were five young men. There were five people of college age.
These are military age males. He regards this as an additional cue that inclines him to interpret them as hostile.
And then one of his colleagues, Sergeant Dela Cruz, was yelling at them in broken Arabic to get down on the ground.
We said they were not complying.
In fact, they were starting to run in the opposite direction, away from where Corporal Dela Cruz was approaching them.
Twitter regards this as the final cue necessary to positively identify the men as hostile.
He then opens fire and kills all of them. And this again in the span probably of less than a minute.
Okay. So I think it's plausible to suggest Wuterich sense of what was morally salient in this situation.
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.
His reading of the cues was not sufficiently influenced by anticipated emotional distress from the prospect of killing innocent civilians.
He did not, in other words, experience an emotion strong enough to slow.
This rapid sort of. Um, information processing he was undergoing.
And the direction that it led him, which was governed by emotions of anger and fear.
Right. What could have interrupted this? Well, you might say.
Well, had he just. Formed of self and taking more time to deliberate rationally.
This would have led him to realise that what he was seeing couldn't on its face.
Suffice. To fire on them, he would need to look more closely.
But he was unlikely under these circumstances to draw at least fully on this faculty of rational deliberation.
I would argue what was more likely to interrupt his rapid information processing and interpretation was an emotional response.
Again anticipated emotional aversion to killing innocent civilians.
That would have tempered. The other emotions that were leading him in a certain direction.
I had had that anticipated response.
Involve greater emotional and aversion.
This could have led him to take just another minute or less to seek additional information about the men.
Had anyone seen them before the explosion? In fact, someone had seen them in the convoy and had waved them over to the side.
That's how they ended up where they were.
Instead of relying on his colleagues broken Arabic, he could have turned to the Iraqi soldiers in his unit to communicate with the men.
He could have taken a few seconds to consider anyone triggering an IED likely would be moving away from the convoy, not approaching it.
So responding with the right emotion, in other words.
Based again on this anticipated emotional distress would have slowed his response enough to allow reason to gain more influence.
Indeed, I think without this immediate non-conscious emotion, there might be little prospect that reason actually could have much influence.
So what was necessary was for him somehow to retain a strong enough.
Visceral, emotional aversion to the prospect of killing innocent civilians when the situation changed from one of vigilance to being under attack.
Right. So conclude with what implications there might be for military ethics training.
Right. Certainly Wuterich was familiar with the Geneva Conventions.
He had been briefed on the rules of engagement in the theatre. Right.
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?
Research suggests that at least two mechanisms might trigger a morally appropriate emotional aversion.
One is what's called outcome aversion. This reflects a first person.
I'm sorry. Yeah, a first person perspective on outcome aversion is contrasted with action aversion, which is a.
A perspective, actually, of the perpetrator. Let me give you an example.
Researchers illustrate this by using the example of one person hearing about.
Another person slicing the throat of someone.
The outcome, a version model, maintains that the emotional response to hearing about this scenario is grounded in empathy for the victim.
And the distress caused by imagining the suffering of the victim.
And naturally, empathy plays a significant role in that process.
In this way, as Don Pizarro has suggested, empathic arousal operates as a first alert signalling moral relevance.
So thinking back to Wuterich,
what could military training have done other than make sure he knew he knew the Geneva Conventions and the rules of engagement?
Well. It's not uncommon for service members in situations such as Iraq.
To have indifference or even resentment toward the local population.
The sense that they're not cooperating. The sense that maybe they're, in fact, assisting the enemy.
Right. And I've heard people talk about the importance of unit squad leaders, unit leaders, different levels of educating.
Forces about the lives of people who are caught in these conflicts.
You know, they don't represent the standard sort of fully autonomous chooser that we tend to think of ourselves as being right.
They're enmeshed in a very complex web of relationships that may subject them to danger from a variety of different sources.
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.
Emotional aversion to killing someone who is, in fact, innocent.
Action aversion involves.
An emotional response that puts oneself in the shoes of the perpetrator rather than the victim.
Right. So in my in the example, how would it feel to slice someone's throat?
Right. And research suggests that the result of the distress that results may be the roots of this may be empathic,
but that over time this may be internalised. So that emotional distress occurs even with the knowledge that no one is being hurt.
So someone hears about someone throat being slashed with a rubber knife.
Right. Or the prospect of firing a toy gun at someone.
Actually, it can elicit emotional distress, even knowing that no one is going to be harmed because one has internalised this.
Am I the sort of person who does this? Right. And that's what's known as action aversion.
And for action aversion. You know, one way maybe of harnessing the appropriate what I would call an emotional response.
Right. Could be to foster a greater sense of professional duty.
That. Focuses on protecting innocent people.
Right.
There are a sense of professional identity in which there is distress at the prospect of violating this professional duty to protect the innocent.
Right. That you know, this is just this is the sort of thing we don't do.
We're here to protect these people. Right. And your duty, you can you could undermine the mission.
That's a more pragmatic right sort of argument. But, you know, that's not who we are.
That's that's not what we do. We take steps to try to avoid that point.
So as I say, this is all to me certainly quite suggestive.
You'll see at the bottom there a reference to Aristotle, and that's even more speculative and even more suggestive.
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,
there is at least some resemblance to Aristotle's notion of habituation.
Right. And so I can't go very far because I haven't thought certainly hadn't thought deeply about this.
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.
So again. I'm really more or less at the beginning of this research project.
I think there are some interesting avenues of inquiry.
I think there are also probably some challenges. But thank you for your attention, and I welcome your comments and questions.