Writing Assistance

Use the entire moral deliberation road map to make a decision in the case provided. Per Diem By Michael Skerker You have been friends with ET1 Grace Kim since A school. You’ve only grown closer this last year serving together at Pearl Harbor. You wearily climb off a jet with her early Saturday morning after a punishing week of work in Japan. You were there to work on a DDG’s fire control system. Grace looks at you and shakes her head in disgust. “You realize they go eight days of work from us and are going to give us per diems for four and a half?” “What do you mean?” “Well, we left at 0100 Monday morning, right? Flew through the night and then went right into a briefing as soon as we go to Japan. Worked all day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then were wheels up in 1800 on Friday. We worked, what, 14-hour days Monday through Thursday and then a full day Friday? That’s at least 64-hours, but they are only going to comp us per diem for three whole days.” You look at her and think math nerd. Grace continues by saying. “They are going to consider Monday and Friday travel days, even though we worked those entire days as well. So, we will get three whole days and two days at 75% of per diem, since Monday and Friday are considered travel days. That adds up to 4.5 days.” “Yeah, well, look, we’re not working factory jobs where you punch out at 17:00, right? You work until the job’s done…It will even out eventually. Sometimes we get per diem even though the hotel had a free breakfast, or we only had to travel two hours…Go home and get some rest.” Grace puckers her face like she bit into a lemon. “No, F&S@ that. Look, I’m not looking for a handout; I just want what’s just. You know my husband Sam works two jobs. I drive a damned Uber on Saturdays. I’m putting in for five whole days on my expense form. The per diem for Japan is real money. That extra $300 means three weeks of Zylexoprol for Maeve.” (Grace’s daughter, Maeve, has a rare medical condition. You know that Tricare only pays for part of treatment since one of the recommended drugs is considered experimental. Grace and Sam nearly kill themselves to make up the difference.) “Um…” Grace roughly grabs her backpack and slings it over her shoulder. “So, you need to put down five days on your travel claim, too, OK? The comptroller is probably going to get both of our forms at the same time. It would look bad if I have five full days and you only have three.” What would you do and why?

Orders to HMS Alacrity

The article was originally printed in the book, One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander. A copy of the original article is included below. To increase readability, the article has been transcribed below. Article Page 1 Orders to HMS Alacrity By Patrick Robinson and Sandy Woodward Authors

Background HMS Alacrity was a 3,000-ton Type 21 frigate in the Royal Navy. She served as part of the British taskforce sent to the South Atlantic to retake the Falkland Islands after the Argentine invasion of those islands in 1982 (see Case 4.6). The Falklands consist of two main islands, Easy Falkland and West Falkland, and over seven hundred smaller islands. The two main islands are separated by a large strait, known as Falkland Sound. To retake the islands the British needed to find a suitable site for an amphibious landing. The best possible site was at Carlos Water, in Falkland Sound on the western side of East Falkland. However, since an Argentine ship had been observed laying mines in the approaches to the main harbor at Port Stanley, the island’s capital, the taskforce commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, was concerned about the possibility that the Argentines might also have mined the northern end of Falkland sound, and indeed the southern end as well. The particular problem for him in this case that none of the ships in the taskforce was equipped for minesweeping, so the only way to find out if there were any mines in Falkland Sound was to “search” for them with the hull of a ship. Since large mines of this type would almost inevitably sink any ship that ran into them, the mission would have to be given to an “expendable” ship, like HMS Alacrity. When writing about the situation, Admiral Woodward states that he didn’t like the idea of telling Commander Christopher Craig, the captain of the Alacrity, to go and try to get himself blown up by a mine, but he also couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility of mines that might sink one or more of the amphibious landing vessels filled with troops as they approached the landing beaches.

In his book, Woodward described the situation in the following manner: I phoned Commander Craig on the voice-encrypted network and said, “Er…Christopher, I would like you to do a circumnavigation of East Falkland tonight. All the way around to the south, then north up Falkland Sound and out past Fanning Head to rendezvous with Arrow.” I also told him to come up the Sound very noisily, exploding a few star-shells and generally frightening the life out of the Args. I added, “If you see anything move, sink it, but be out of there and home by dawn, so you’re clear of the land before they can fly.” He was silent for a few moments and then said, “Umm, I expect you would like me to go in and out of the north entrance a few times, Admiral. Do a bit of zip- zagging.” “Oh,” I said, feigning surprise and feeling about two inches high. “Why do you ask that?” “I expect you would like me to find out whether there are my mines there,” he said quietly. I cannot remember what I said. But I remember how I felt. I think just mentioned that I thought would be quite useful. He replied, with immense dignity, “Very well, sir.” Then he went off to prepare for the possible loss of his ship and people the best way he could. I shall remember him as one of the bravest men I ever met. This was Victoria Cross material but, strangely, only if it went wrong. I personally felt awful not to have had the guts to be honest with him and wondered what the devil he was going to tell his ship’s company about their task tonight and about my pitiful performance, which, for a sea-going admiral to one of his commanders, beggared description. SOURCE: From Admiral Sandy Woodward (with Patrick Robinson), One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falkland SOURCE: From Admiral Sandy Woodward (with Patrick Robinson), One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falkland Battle Group Commander (Annapolis, MD; Naval Institute Press, 1992), p. 203.

—– Original Excerpt Appears After This Page —–

Role Morality, Special Obligations and Private Values and Conscience

As we have discussed so far there is a range of ways to approach any ethical problem

and often a number of conceptualizations and approaches are needed to be able to understand

what morality requires of us. The rules and approaches we have discussed so far all have one

thing in common: they apply to any person in the same circumstances– anyone similarly

situated has similar moral duties. Constraint and consequentialism reasons apply to all people in

similar circumstances. For example, if there is a child drowning in a river anyone that can swim

and is close by and is unlikely to drown has an equally strong moral duty to jump into the water

and save that child. By saying it is an equally strong duty we mean to say that the fact that a

child’s life has moral worth gives anybody who can save that child (without incurring too great a

risk) a strong reason to act (by jumping into the river). Some people, however, might have

stronger reasons to jump in and save the child than others. A mother of the drowning child will

not only want to (out of love) jump in, she also has, in virtue of being a parent, a strong moral

obligation to jump in. In fact, even if the river is awfully fast and she might break a leg jumping

in or worse – a mother has a duty to jump in and to try to save her child. We might not say the

same about just any passer-by. Ordinary bystanders have a strong moral duty to jump in if the

risk to them is small, but as the risk to them grows, the moral obligation weakens. Certainly, it’d

be nice if they jumped in and tried to save the child even if it is risky, but we don’t commonly

think that they do something terribly wrong if they don’t risk their lives to save the child.

Like the mother, although for different reasons, a lifeguard also has stronger moral

reasons to jump in than a bystander. When we say that person A has stronger moral reasons to

perform some action X than person B, we mean that:

a) it would be more wrong for person A to fail to do X, and that

b) it is harder for countervailing considerations to override person A’s duty to do X.

So when we say that a mother or a lifeguard have a stronger moral duty to jump in, we mean to

say that if they did not jump in to save the child they would be doing something more wrong

than the ordinary passer-by and we mean to say that they, as a matter of morality, ought to be

willing to risk more to save the child (a broken leg or worse) than an ordinary passer-by.

So how come some people (lifeguards for example) have a stronger moral duty to save

the drowning child? That is usually the case for two reasons:

a) they have made a promise or signed a contract or otherwise taken up a role of a

lifeguard giving them extra moral reasons to dive in and save the child, and/or

b) they have (partly because of the role they have taken up) extra training and thus a

smaller chance of drowning and greater chance of succeeding than others similarly

situated.

The first reason (a) is what grounds special obligations. Simply put, special roles come with

special obligations. Parents have extra moral obligations towards their children, teachers to

students, mayors to their citizens, lawyers to their clients, and soldiers to the Constitution and

their country.

Thus, in addition to constraints and consequences there are further tools one might use

to figure out what morality requires of them. Special obligations are obligations we owe to

some people (or institutions) in virtue of a special relationship we have with those people or

institutions. I don’t have moral reasons to help just anyone move furniture, and I do no wrong

by not helping Joe Schmoe move his piano, but I probably have some moral reasons to help a

friend or my parents move.

Many special obligations arise out of commitments we undertake voluntarily and roles

we assume voluntarily. Doctors have special obligations to patients (partly instantiated by the

oath they take), lawyers to their clients, employees to their companies, etc. The contents of

those obligations are often called ‘role morality’. The term role morality refers to obligations

associated with occupying a particular role. When I occupy a role of a lawyer, for example, I owe

confidentiality to my client that I otherwise wouldn’t. In fact, even if what my client has done is

particularly bad and even if otherwise the right thing to do would be to tell the police what they

have done – the moral reasons I have grounded in my role as their lawyer prevent me from

doing what would otherwise be required of me- namely reporting the evidence of a crime. It is

important to note that role morality is not simply a set of rules or laws or regulations that apply

to a particular person in a particular role- very often the morality that is associated with the role

is more informal, and it is honor or character based. More will be said about the role of

character and military virtues in the next module. As we have seen so far, roles like friend,

mother, lifeguard, lawyer, and others create extra moral reasons to act one way or another.

Sometimes these extra moral reasons support what we otherwise ought to do anyway (like

lifeguard having extra and stronger moral reasons to save a drowning child), other times these

moral reasons are countervailing (like lawyer’s reasons to report evidence of a crime being

beaten out by reasons of commitment to client). In other words, special moral obligations that

arise out of particular roles sometimes strengthen moral reasons to perform some action and

other times countermand or quash those reasons.

One final clarification ought to be made about special obligations. Special obligations

and role morality are not subjective, they don’t depend on one’s personal beliefs and values. In

other words, special obligations and role-based morality are different from and separate from

so-called private morality- the sorts of things one holds dear- like their religious beliefs. Special

obligations and role-based obligations in fact might often override private morality.

PROBLEMS:

The existence of special obligations is commonsensical- we all recognize that having special

roles gives rise to special obligations and role morality (special morality that applies just to

those people who are in that role). But the existence of role morality and special obligations

does also give rise to a number of problems.

Problem 1: Voluntarism

As we have seen many if not most special obligations arise out of relationships we enter

voluntarily- being a teacher, a soldier, a medic, or even a parent. But there are also special

obligations (some might think) that arise out of roles we do not enter voluntarily: being a

member of a family, or being a citizen of a country. Commonly we think we owe some duties to

our family members we don’t owe others- care-giving, advice-giving, lending money, etc.

Commonly we also often think we owe more to our fellow citizens than to others (at a minimum

support of public institutions). So one common problem for special obligations is figuring out

how come we can have special obligations arising out of roles we didn’t choose and how does

that fact work with the intuition that other special obligations we have exactly because we

chose them – soldier’s special obligations in virtue of being a soldier.

Problem 2: Conflicting obligations

2a: In cases like the above lawyer case it seems like special role-based morality can give us an

excuse or even a justification to do something that would otherwise be wrong and immoral.

How do we know when and to what extent can our special role-based morality beat out

ordinary moral considerations? Soldiers have a special moral obligation to do otherwise

impermissible things like kill people, including at times (unintentionally, but foreseeably- i.e.

collaterally) civilians. And yet similarly, we know that, just because a soldier is ordered to, he

cannot target a civilian. If we know that reasons that apply to all people like constraints and

consequences already discussed give us strong reasons to not do something harmful, how much

can a special role or special obligation change that moral math?

2b: Another way to problematize the moral math by addition of special obligations is to

consider what one ought to do in cases such as the following: Imagine a case where a friend

must decide whether to save her friend or 3 other people they do not know. In ordinary

circumstances if a person could save either 1 drowning person or 3, consequence analysis tells

us we ought to save 3, but friend’s special obligations might change that. What if it was a

mother choosing between her own child and 100 other children? How weighty are special

obligations?

Problem 3: Persons or institutions?

We are familiar with the idea that we owe duties to other people, but can we owe them to

institutions and what does that mean? This issue becomes particularly important when we think

that an employee owes a duty to her company, a citizen to their country, and a soldier to the

Constitution. What does it mean to owe a duty to an institution? Does it simply mean you owe

it to the people of that institution- do soldiers simply owe a duty to their fellow citizens or is

there something more to saying that soldiers owe a duty to the Constitution?