Military Review English Edition September-October 2014 | Page 77

MACRO-ETHICS

complex ethical dimensions behind a decision to conduct the mission to kill Osama bin Laden:
Many question whether the special mission
for Osama bin-Laden into Abbottabad,
Pakistan, was legal under international law.
Yet Americans largely agree it was morally
right, whether or not it met the standards
of international law. The law on the subject
is conflicted, depending on whether one
focuses on violations of sovereign territoriality or the significance of Osama bin-Laden
and his finding sanctuary in Pakistan. From
the standpoint of law, both arguments are
compelling—but the majority of Americans,
to put it simply, do not care; the morally right
necessity of eliminating bin-Laden trumped
any esoteric question of legality.9
However, setting aside the bin Laden example,
Major also concludes that what is legally permissible
is not always morally permissible: “The consideration of what may lawfully be done does not consider
other relevancies of morality, diplomacy, politics,
our own public opinion, and relations with the host
population.”10
These points raise concerns for the unknown or
unanticipated perils that arise from the adverse consequences of macro-ethical decisions. For example, what
if the legally questionable mission to capture bin Laden
had failed? What if it had been a catastrophic failure
involving significant friendly casualties, as did the 1979
“Desert One” hostage rescue mission in Iran during the
Carter Administration?
Also, obvious and complicated contexts (which are
considered ordered), tend to gravitate toward complexity (which is unordered, but not chaotic), especially
when applied to war, national security, and international relations. Consequently, there is an inherent danger
for decision makers to oversimplify situations and
contemplated solutions.
The Cynefin Framework addresses these difficulties.
Snowden says failure to recognize a situation’s context
may result in disorder.11 He refers to disorder as “not
knowing which space you are in.”12 He goes on to state
that this is the place “where we are most of the time”
because people “interpret each situation according to
their preference for action.”13 Typically, a certain blindness is caused by our preferences and our experiences.
MILITARY REVIEW  September-October 2014

The cliff between order and chaos. Therein lies a
danger because according to Snowden, there is a “cliff ”
between the ordered domains (including obvious and
complicated) and chaos.14 Chaos may result from either
deliberate unethical behavior or failure to recognize
complicated or complex situations. In the latter cause,
complacency may cause one to oversimplify and misinterpret a problem causing an already complicated
situation to become chaotic. Thus, failure to understand
how complicated a military problem is may lead to chaos
and moral failure.
Irrespective, Snowden warns, once one falls into chaos, it is difficult to recover. He concludes “One should,
therefore, manage in the complicated and complex
spaces to avoid the cliff.”15
Morally permissible strategic outcomes. Although
moral chaos is bad, moral complexity is not necessarily
bad as long as military leaders understand the situation
and apply an acceptable macro-ethical solution. This is
where macro-ethics can use the Cynefin Framework for
making ethical military decisions leading to desirable
strategic outcomes that are morally acceptable.
Within the Cynefin Framework, Snowden considers
complex and chaotic contexts unordered: “there is no
immediate apparent relationship between cause and
effect.”16 Snowden defines a complex context as a place
where “cause and effect are only obvious in hindsight,
with unpredictable emergent outcomes.”17
Making decisions in a complex context calls for
leaders to probe, sense, and respond in order to discover an emergent practice.18 Of these three actions, the
key to success in a complex context is effective probing,
Snowden asserts.19 He defines probing as conducting
“safe-to-fail experiments” (not fail-safe experiments).20 If
a solution does not work, leaders should get rid of it. If it
succeeds, they should amplify it.
This approach may be fine for business decision making. Nevertheless, how can military leaders apply it to
ethics? How do leaders conduct probing ethically?
Before military leaders probe a situation to discover
solutions, they mu 7BFWFW&֖