Organizing for moral excellence in the military; a theoretical exploration and demonstration through casuistry

Abstract

This paper develops a virtue ethical perspective on moral military behavior in relation to the infrastructural design of the military organization. To this end, Aristotelian virtue ethics is integrated with insights from social cognitive theory on moral behaviour and moral development and insights from sociotechnical systems theory on the design of organizations. This results in a normative theory on the design of the military organization to facilitate moral development and moral behaviour. This theory can yield new insights on the role of the organizational design in moral military behavior, as is demonstrated by applying it to casuistry taken from military operations in which the Netherlands participated: SFIR, UNPROFOR and ISAF.