hinman@sandiego.edu

MCRD, 9-23-98

Thanks for those kind words of introduction.

I have been asked to speak today about the importance of character. Let me tell you a little bit about what I have to offer you, and what I don't have as well.

I am, as you know, an academic. Most of my research is in the area of ethics, and over the past ten years that research has led me to become increasingly convinced of the importance of character. What I would like to do is develop for you some of the reasons why I think character is important. In the process, I will try to indicate some of the places where I think the points I am making translate to the concerns you have as officers here at the MCRD. However, you know far better than I do the particular moral demands of the military life in general and the challenges of military life at the MCRD in particular. I hope, during the discussion, we can then take some of these general points and apply them to the specific situations that you deal with here.

Let me begin with Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who lived almost 2,500 years ago and whose work, amazingly, still plays a major role in the discussion of character today.

Aristotle was a teacher, and his most famous pupil was Alexander the Great, a person of no small military accomplishment. Aristotle lived in Athens, and the rivalry--cultural as well as military--between Athens and Sparta was intense. He was a philosopher, but philosophers in those days were not as detached from the rest of life as they are these days. He participated in the political life of Athens. He was a scientist, whose biological works dominated biology for over two millennia until the discovery of genetics a hundred years ago. He formalized the laws of logic that stood untouched until this century. His works on ethics remain as relevant today as they were back then.

For the last two hundred years, ethics in the West has been shaped by a dream that you may well share. It was a mathematician's dream. Moral philosophers hoped that they could develop a set of rules that could be used to figure out the answer to any moral problem. Their hope was a seductive one: they hoped that they could develop a set of fundamental principles which, when applied to any actual state of affairs, could yield the right answer, could tell us--without any ambiguity--what to do.

This is a powerful dream. If fulfilled, it would put an end to all sorts of moral wrangling, to relativism, to moral disagreements in general. Feed in the facts, turn the crank, and out comes the correct moral answer.

Well, a couple of things happened. First, philosophers couldn't agree on what those fundamental principles might be. Hardly surprising, for a group of philosophers! But, even more importantly, a number of thinkers began to conclude that principles don't quite work the way these philosophers had hoped.

Instead of seeing the moral life like a math problem, it is more helpful to think of it in terms of engineering. Often, there is no one solution in engineering. We find that there are general principles, laws of physics, that constrain us, but within those constraints there may be several acceptable ways of building a bridge or designing a warship. What we then need is good judgment to determine which of those ways is preferable. And that is not a matter of putting in the facts and turning the crank--that requires judgment, judgment about how best to apply the rules to that particular instance.

This is where character comes in. The limitation of a morality that consists solely of rules is that we need to be able to make judgments about when and how best to apply those rules. We need to be able to make good judgments, and this is true of engineering and well as morality. Judgment is the ability to apply rules well, and character is the foundation of judgment in morality. This is the point that Aristotle saw most clearly.

There are several benefits here in concentrating on character, not just on rules. Before we look at what Aristotle had to say about character, let me mention three of the advantages of this approach.

First, when people live by rules, they often view the rules as external to them--as something imposed by other people, by superior officers, etc. This becomes a problem when the uniform is taken off. If your marines see themselves as bound only by rules, then they will be likely to see themselves as free once they are off duty, out of uniform. But to the extent that you form their character, they will be their own enforcers and judges--even when they are out of uniform. Here is, I think, one of the potential payoffs of the concentration on character: it provides a foundation for self-discipline, even when out of uniform.

There is a second benefit to concentrating on character: Character-based decisions may allow an individual to act more quickly. Especially on the battlefield, one doesn't want people to agonize over decisions, weighing the pro's and con's, deliberating slowly and carefully. Instead, one wants a quick, sure, instinctive response. Character, not rules, is more likely to deliver that kind of response.

Third, the character-based approach to morality is particularly helpful in dealing with new situations, situations that may not have been anticipated when the rules were formulated. And new situations seem to be the rule of the day for the Marine Corps: Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, to name but a few.

Rules alone won't do the job here, because there will always be new situations which don't fit the rules exactly. Character provides rules with the necessarily flexibility to adapt to those new situations.

Aristotle says several things about character that are helpful here. He pays particular attention to four characteristics of character:

• Character and Habit
• Character and Excellence
• Character as necessary to human flourishing.
• Character and the Golden Mean

Let me tell you about them and try, as much as my limited knowledge permits, to point to some of the connections between Aristotle and the Marine Corps.

First, he tells us that good character is a matter of habit, of discipline over a long period of time. This is something that the Marine Corps knows well. You don't just tell the new recruits coming through this room what the rules are--you make them live those rules, day in and day out, at least until they leave here. You don't get character by just thinking about it--you get it by doing it. I suspect that this, too, is what the Crucible signifies: boot camp doesn't conclude with a multiple-choice test. Those who finish here successfully do so by action, not just by thought.

What Aristotle calls habit, incidentally, bears a striking resemblance to what the Commandant of the Marine Corps calls self-control. For both of them, habit or self-control is the foundational virtue or strength of character upon which everything else rests.

Second, Aristotle tells us that virtue is excellence--indeed, the Greek word for virtue, arete, is also the word for excellence in Greek. Virtue is not just about applying rules, it is about applying them well. Educating for character is educating for excellence.

I'll talk in a few minutes about courage, so let me take a different character trait to illustrate Aristotle's point here: perseverance. If a person lacks perseverance, that individual is probably going to have a life of dissatisfaction. Perseverance is that strength of character that allows an individual to continue to strive for goals, even when the going gets tough. Without perseverance, we cannot achieve any of our goals that are difficult--which is most of them.

This understanding of character and virtue suggests a view of morality that is internal rather than external. We need to have strength of character, not because someone else demands it of us, but because our lives are diminished without it. Thus the focus of morality is internal rather than external.

Similarly, when we begin to see character in this light, we see morality as positive rather than negative. Morality is less about what we are prohibited from doing than it is about what we positively strive for in our lives.

Fourth, Aristotle tells us that virtue consists in the mean, neither too much nor too little. Here he is not talking about mediocrity, but something much different. He is saying that that you can have too much or too little of a virtue. Let me give you an example drawn from his discussion of courage.

None of you needs me to tell you what courage is--you wouldn't be here if you didn't already know what it is and have it. What I would like to do is tell you a little about what Aristotle says about courage, and invite you to compare your ideas and experience with his.

Genuine courage, Aristotle tells us, is a mean between two extremes. One extreme is easy to see and understand: cowardice. The coward has too little courage.

But is there such a thing as too much courage? Well, think about a couple of different ways in which we could have too much of something--whether we call it courage or something else is a matter we can discuss.

Consider the different ways in which marines can get in trouble in combat situations. First, think about the marine who is fearless. Sometimes this can come from supreme confidence is one's own ability, confidence that may not be entirely warranted. This is the person Aristotle calls foolhardy.

Second, think about the marine who just doesn't see how dangerous the situation is--sometimes, for example, to walk straight through a minefield shows more blindness to danger than it does true courage.

Third, think about the person who risks a lot for very little in return. To turn around and recapture a hill because you have been ordered to do so is an act of bravery--to do the same thing because you think you may have dropped your ball-point pen back there seems, at best, misplaced bravery. It is courage in the service of a goal not worth pursuing, certainly not risking your life and perhaps the lives of your fellow soldiers for.

And this brings us to another point Aristotle makes about virtues: you cannot have any one virtue in full measure, he says, without having the others as well. And this is certainly true about courage: to be truly and fully courageous, you must also know what it is worth risking your life for.

Thus looking at excesses of courage help us to understand what true courage involves. Certainly courage is not about having no fear; rather, courage is the ability to persevere in the face of your fears. This takes strength of will. But courage involves more than that; it involves good judgment:

• Knowing what is worth taking risks to achieve;
• Knowing how great the risks really are;
• Knowing how good your own abilities are.

Courage, Aristotle tells us, is a complex virtue. Teaching recruits to be courageous may thus involve teaching them to accurately assess risks, to know their own abilities, and to know what is worth fighting for.

Seeing this, we can even see that there are different ways in which someone can be cowardly. A coward:

• May not know what is worth taking risks for;
• May over-estimate how dangerous a situation is;
• May underestimate his own abilities; or, finally,
• May just lack strength of will, guts.

Each of these situations requires a different remedy. Your job as officers is the difficult one of knowing how to assess each of these conditions and how to respond most effectively to each.

Let me conclude these comments on courage by noting one final parallel between Aristotle and what I take to be the basic philosophy of the Marines. This relates to the issue of self-sacrifice. Consider the following passage:

…the virtuous person labors for his friends and his native country, and will die for them if he must…he will choose a single fine and great action over many small actions…the one who dies for others chooses something great and fine for himself. (1169a)

Compare this with the following quote:

"There is yet another element…that defines Marines, and that is selflessness: a spirit that places the self-interest of the individual second to that of the institution. That selflessness is stronger nowhere in American society than among Marines." FMFM 1-0.

Despite the fact that one was written 2500 years earlier than the other, they both point to the same understanding of the virtue of self-sacrifice as integral to courage.

Let me conclude the formal part of this presentation on character today by drawing once again on Aristotle. In his work on ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the clever man and the wise man. The clever man, he says, knows the best means to any end. But the wise man knows something more: which ends are worth striving for.

In preparing for today's talk, I was thinking about this distinction and how it might apply to your goals here is training new recruits. Think about training a marine to use a rifle. Certainly the first thing that marine has to learn is how to hit the target. And that's important, there's no question of that. But being able to hit the target makes that marine, to carry over Aristotle's distinction, a clever rifleman.

The second part of the challenge is training that marine to know when to fire that rifle--and that's the difference between a clever rifleman and a wise rifleman. As General Krulak has asked:

The difference between the clever rifleman and the wise rifleman is clear: the clever rifleman knows how to hit any possible target; the wise rifleman knows which targets are worth shooting at.

This is particularly an issue in today's world, where the political and military landscape is constantly shifting. Our world is changing, and soldiers are increasingly put in situations--think of Somalia as an example--where they have to make snap judgments about how to act, and those snap judgments sometimes have to be made with TV cameras in the background. When that happens, we have to acknowledge that soldiers have to use judgment. And the challenge that you face is how to train judgment and at the same time maintain respect for authority. This, I think, is where character comes in.