Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Page 75

Decision Making
driven macro-ethical decisions because the American
people expect, and our military profession demands, that
military professionals make military decisions based on
proper moral judgment, taking into consideration the
overall end state desired at tactical and strategic levels.
As ethicist Don Snider writes,
To be sure, all of our forces use billions of dollars of technology, but it is all at the beck and
call of a human operator or commander who
uses discretionary moral judgments to apply
that military power. That is the art of being a
military professional, making repetitive discretionary judgments often scores of times a day
that are both effective militarily and within
the moral norms expected by the military’s
client—the American people.1
In making these discretionary moral judgments,
Army leaders must take into consideration complexity since understanding and visualizing the complex
environment—all the conditions, circumstances, and
influences that bear on a commander’s decisions—are
essential to proper macro-ethical decisions.
In a decision process guided by macro-ethical concerns, actions at any level can be considered morally prohibited, morally permissible, or morally dubious. Morally
prohibited actions are always unethical and wrong;
they should be considered unacceptable. However, the
moral implications of actions resulting from military
decisions are harder to analyze because their effects can
cross the levels of war. Sometimes morally permissible
actions on the tactical level have morally prohibited or
morally dubious outcomes on a complex strategic level.
This means morally permissible tactical actions that have
morally prohibited strategic outcomes should be considered unacceptable. Additionally, sometimes morally
dubious actions on the tactical level produce desired
strategic outcomes that are morally permissible. Actions
contemplated from an ethical standpoint require careful
consideration and perhaps new analytical tools to guide
the process.
One helpful tool for guiding macro-ethical decision
making is known as the Cynefin Framework, a problem-solving tool developed by David J. Snowden and
MILITARY REVIEW  September-October 2014

MACRO-ETHICS
A U.S. Air Force
MQ-9 Reaper
from the 62nd
Expeditionary
Reconnaissance
Squadron takes off
from Kandahar Air
Base, Afghanistan,
13 March 2009.

others for business. Understanding
complexity through the Cynefin
Framework is not the only way to
(U.S. Air Force photo by
make macro-ethical decisions. It is,
Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr.,
AFCENT Combat Camera)
however, a way.
This paper will examine the
Cynefin Framework and its usefulness to ethical decision
making for military leaders. It will then examine two
historical military situations in which understanding or
misunderstanding a complex environment led to good
or poor tactical decisions with subsequent good or poor
strategic outcomes. Then it will apply these insights to
the analyze the macro-ethics of the tactical use of drones
in current operations. These case studies will illuminate
the fact that morally dubious actions may produce desired strategic effects that are morally permissible. They
will also show how morally permissible actions at the
tactical level can have morally undesirable effects on a
complex strategic level.

A Sense-Making Framework for
Morally Complex Decisions
According to David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone,
in their 2007 article “A Leader’s Framework for Decision
Making,” the Cynefin Framework “helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so that they can
make appropriate choices.”2 This framework strives to
make sense of the prevailing environment. In a 2011
video posted at a website called Cognitive Edge Network,
Snowden places decision-making models in two groups:
categorization models and sense-making models.3
According to Snowden, in a categorization model, the
framework precedes the data. In a sense-making model,
the data precedes the framework.
This distinction is useful for ethical decision making.
Many accuse moral analytical systems of being too narrow in that they do not account for varied and new situations. This is because the analytical frameworks seem
to precede the data, or in the case of ethics, the new and
unique situations. In complex situations, it may be better
to adopt an ethical framework to meet the situation.
Nevertheless, it is important to point out that this is
not situational ethics per se. Morally prohibited actions
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