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Americans tends to hold up soldiers as models of civic virtue. Might they instead be examples of civic vice? Might it be that the average employee at a for-profit business has more civic virtue than the average American soldier?

A few years ago, when writing The Ethics of Voting, I searched through maybe fifty or so books, ancient, early modern, and contemporary, looking for authors’ definitions of “civic virtue”. To my surprise, it turned out almost everyone had the same definition:

Civic Virtue =(def.) The disposition and ability to promote the common good over purely private ends.

Most writers on civic virtue agree on the above definition. Even skeptics who say there’s no such thing as civic virtue can accept it. (They just deny that there is any such thing as “the common good” or “society”.) This doesn’t mean they agree on everything, of course. They might disagree about what constitutes the “common good”, or what counts as “society”. They disagree about what kinds of activities count as possible avenues to exercise civic virtue. They also disagree about just how strong the disposition or ability to promote the common good must be before a person qualifies as having civic virtue.

There’s an interesting issue here. What do we say about people who have a strong de dicto desire to promote the common good, but who, because of unjustified and false beliefs about factual matters, tend to undermine it? For instance consider the following hypothetical person, Betty Benevolence:

President Betty Benevolence strongly desires (de dicto) to promote the common good of her society. However, she is negligent and irrational in how she forms beliefs about what it takes to promote the common good. She processes information in a highly biased and irrational way, and she is blameworthy for doing so. Thus, while she intends to make Americans richer, she chooses policies that hurt their pocketbooks. While she intends to promote justice, she chooses policies that undermine it. Etc. However, she still wants more than anything to promote the common good, even though she consistently undermines it.

Different theorists of civic virtue would dispute whether Betty counts as having civic virtue. For some, having a strong (de dicto) desire to promote the common good is good enough. For others, Betty counts as civically vicious, not virtuous, because she lacks proper knowledge of how to accomplish her ends and because she is negligent for lacking this knowledge.

What about American soldiers, at least those who have fought in recent battles and wars?

We shouldn’t assume that the typical soldier has heroic motivations. Many do. Many do not. Many join the military for less than noble motives, and even when they are in the military, they do not develop noble motives. However, for the sake of argument, let’s just imagine that all soldiers have a genuine and strong (de dicto) desire to protect and serve their fellow citizens.

Even if so, we then need to ask about whether they actually count as having civic virtue. For soldiers might be like Betty–having proper motivations but defective cognition.

Much of this depends on what we should say about American military policy. There are certain wars that are clearly and uncontroversially unjust wars: the second Cherokee War, the Chickamauga War, the Northwest Indian War, and pretty much every war the US fought against native Americans, the Mexican American War, the Spanish-American War, American involvement in World War I, and the second American war on Iraq. That’s just a short list. (To that list, I’d add almost every military action the United States has ever undertaken, including the American Revolution.) Now, I’m not planning to argue for these claims here. That said, it’s  worth noting that the people who defend a war have the burden of proof. Wars are presumed unjust until shown otherwise, and it is difficult to justify a war.

Let’s take the American Invasion of Iraq. Ex ante, the case for going to war was extremely weak. Thus, since by default war is presumed unjust until shown otherwise, ex ante, the war was unjust. Ex post, the case against the war is even stronger.

This meant that soldiers who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, to put it bluntly, assisted the United States government in perpetrating an unjust war and, moreover, they should have know better. Many soldiers believed that war was just, but they were negligent and blameworthy for that belief (as are/were you, if you support/supported the invasion).

In light of that, what should we say about soldiers’ civic virtue?

On this point, Will Wilkinson describes being asked to clap for soldiers on an airplane:

I hesitated to join the applause.

Hadn’t we known for years that the war was predicated on misinformation? Were we all so ready to agree that it was keeping Americans safe? It was, in fact, killing and wounding thousands upon thousands of Americans–many more than were killed on 9/11. Our troops, in turn, have killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who did nothing to any of us. Maybe the soldier on the airplane signed up to keep me safe and to protect our freedom. But why should we all have to agree that his choice was free of false assumptions? Why should we be expected to display our gratitude, to put our hands together, for what may in the end be a senseless waste of life and a squandering of national power?

Many soldiers intend to be my children’s protectors. But the facts seem to indicate they are my childrens’ enemies, and the enemies of justice and freedom. Should I clap for their good intentions or jeer at their bad actions and negligent behavior?

I can imagine certain conservative types having the following reaction: “Oh, you’re just some sniveling, ungrateful college professor, who uses the very freedoms American soldiers win for you to castigate them. You should get on your knees and thank them.” Well, it’s at least logically possible that I deserve that rebuke. However, the facts seem to indicate otherwise.
UPDATE:

Michael Carey writes in the comments:

I think you misunderstand the role of civic virtue with respect to soldiers.  Civic virtue is a way for society to incentivize behavior…

Thus, if we are able to commit as a society to grant soldiers high status regardless of whether the wars we have them fight are just, then soldiers with civic virtue will fight those wars at a discount.

I think he’s right, as an empirical claim, that this is one reason we’ve tended to valorize soldiers no matter what. At the same time, I worry that it’s a dangerous social norm.