Roger Wertheimer will give a seminar on the tensions between the ethos military professionalism and key principles of modern orthodox just war theory for the Ethics, Norms and Identities programme at PRIO. The seminar will be chaired by Greg Reichberg.Please register with seminar@prio.no if you want to take part in this seminar.
Militaries are professionalized by a militarization of professionalism that transforms both the ethos of militarism and the ethos of professionalism. This talk will focus on the tensions between the ethos military professionalism and a key principle of modern orthodox just war theory: viz., the so-called "moral equality" of military personnel according to which military personnel are not held morally or legally accountable for their "lawful" contributions to the evils inflicted by an unjust, aggressive war. Roger Wertheimer was educated at Brandeis and Harvard, and received the Carrier Prize for the outstanding Harvard philosophy doctoral dissertation (1969). He has been a Deputy Sheriff, Guggenheim Fellow, psychotherapist, entrepreneur, and has taught at numerous schools including Tufts, Carnegie-Mellon, UC Irvine, and the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was Distinguished Chair of Ethics (2001-2003.) He is author of a recent essay on "Jus ante bellum: the responsibility for educating future military officers" which will appear in an edited volume on contemporary re-evaluations of the just war tradition.
