Advice and Dissent: ‘The Uniform Perspective’

Abstract

I examine, and provide a rejoinder from the military (i.e., the ‘uniform’) perspective on, two controversial issues in this essay: (1) the so-called Revolt of the Generals (2006) focused on the responsibility of US senior military officers to give frank and reliable professional advice, including their willingness to disagree with and even dissent from decisions made by their civilian leadership that strike them as professionally ill-advised; and (2) the alleged right of military personnel of lesser rank to refuse to participate in wars they individually deem unjust or illegal. Recent arguments by Jeff McMahan, Brian Orend, Paul Robinson, and Jessica Wolfendale focus primarily on the latter question, and equivocate between defending a right of dissent and a duty to dissent. The right of dissent would grant permission to individuals, within a reasonably just state or professional organization, to refrain from cooperating with policies whose legal or moral justification provoked widespread public dispute (e.g., the US-led military intervention in Iraq in 2003). I agree that granting a measure of latitude in individual moral judgment would constitute an important element of policy for any just state or professional organization, though providing such latitude in the military's case may still be fraught with procedural difficulties. The latter and more controversial argument by McMahan and Wolfendale, however, imposes a duty of dissent as a professional obligation upon all military personnel to withhold their professional service whenever providing such service would implicate them in the commission of unjust or illegal acts. While I concur that a meaningful notion of professional autonomy requires withholding professional service whenever providing it might result in professional malfeasance, I maintain that both these versions of the duty to dissent improperly impose the responsibility for adjudicating widespread public controversies wholly (and inappropriately) on the members of the military profession, especially its most vulnerable junior members. While widely-shared notions of professional autonomy do routinely encompass the right of disagreement and dissent, none imposes a duty to dissent upon a profession's most junior members, especially when the normal procedures for adjudicating legal or moral issues fail to result in clear and unmistakable guidance. In cases of widespread public controversy, professional autonomy and expertise may impose a duty, even at some personal risk, upon senior members of the profession to engage in principled disagreement with publicly-declared policy. It is both sharply at odds with prevailing professional practice, as well as morally unjustifiable in the extreme, however, to impose (as do McMahan and Wolfendale) a duty to dissent on the most junior, least experienced, and potentially most vulnerable members of a profession under such contested circumstances.