The (New) Moral Psychology of Killing in War
Hanne Watkins (University of Melbourne)

May 5, 2016, 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Melbourne Social Psychology Group, University of Melbourne

Redmond Barry, Room 1120
Tin Alley
Melbourne
Australia

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Abstract: You and I are likely among the millions of lucky people living in a Western nation today, who have not experienced war first hand. Yet the common history of the past century is one of wars (Liu et al, 2005,2009), and we have been exposed to it through books, news, and movies (Sontag, 2003). We know war involves killing, on a large and organized scale (Wimmer, 201). As such, war raises a moral puzzle: killing is the quintessential moral wrong (Gray & Keeney, 2015). How does it become more morally acceptable in war? Nor is this the only moral question raised by war. How can some people claim to “hate the war, but love the warrior?” Can it ever be acceptable to target civilians in war? In response to these questions, psychological research cannot determine what people should think. But it can tell us more about what people do think, by describing and explaining the moral psychology of killing in war. In this talk, I argue for a novel approach to studying war in moral psychology. I present a set of studies exploring the "new" moral psychology of killing in war, and demonstrate the implications for moral psychology, the philosophy of war, and our understanding of war in general.

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