Moral casuistry and the ethics of military conflict

This dissertation focuses on the nonnative relationship between formal ethical theory and practical moral decision-making. How do the ethical norms and standards which have their roots in a given religion or school of philosophy get used in practice, especially in an ethically pluralist environment? This dissertation takes up this question with specific respect to how the past four American Presidents, operating in the in the ethically pluralist political landscape of the post-Cold War America, justify decisions to use or refrain from using military force overseas.;When presidential rhetoric is compared against the standards of typical ethical traditions (e.g. political realism, political liberalism, the just war tradition), American presidents will use an assortment of ethical principles appropriated from multiple scholarly and religious traditions to justify their decisions. While this may appear to be a form of fickle politicking, I will argue that this is, in fact, not the case, however. American Presidents are remarkably consistent in their rhetoric on war. They only seem fickle if we judge them on the basis of the scholarly traditions. However, the consistency of presidential rhetoric reveals that it constitutes a `Presidential' tradition of its own, complete with its own methodology and standards of judgment.;The presidential tradition is primarily developed inductively in response to historical events, and only draws deductively from scholarly ethical principles when a historical shift necessitates a novel approach. The most prominent such shift in recent memory was the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War. That event prompted a paradigm shift in which new ethical concepts (e.g. the just war principles) entered the Presidential tradition and older principles (e.g. an internationalism led by a functional United Nations), were resurrected. While these principles were drawn from the scholarly ethical traditions, they are appropriated as "thin" principles, severed from their scholarly and religious grounding. In the presidential tradition, these principles become grounded instead in their history and precedents of the oval office.;Because of this strong historical influence on the presidential tradition, the case history of "good" and "bad" wars in the American consciousness often serves as the moral standard for involvement in future wars. In ethical terms, the Presidential tradition uses a from of the moral method of casuistry when justifying their moral decisions to use or refrain from using military force overseas. Therefore, if a scholar wishes to influence the actual decisions being made by the oval office regarding war, his or her best approach would be to appeal to historical cases rather than scholarly principles in making a case for or against military intervention.;In summary, it is my hypothesis that when the American President has justified the decision to go to war over the past 25 years, he has done so by reference to a casuistic tradition of norms and narratives that mediates the foundational and overlapping traditions from which these norms and narratives have developed. In understanding both the existence and the function of this tradition the scholarly ethicist can learn to communicate more appropriately and persuasively with the decision makers in the oval office.