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The Soldiers' Philosopher (2014)

Professor Nancy Sherman has worked with the US military for over 20 years, and has written several books on military ethics, including Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind ; and The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers .

The course took them through deliberative models and major ethical theories - Aristotle, emotions, deliberation and habits; Kant and universalizability; Mill and Bentham, and notions of maximizing utility. You come home and you have this gorgeous child, and a family you want to adore, and you can’t even feel joy because you’ve turned off your emotions in certain ways. If you have an officer, a commander, who is giving you unlawful, immoral, bad advice, and it’s even part of a system - of torture for example - the moral individual will question that, whatever philosophy they have.

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