Unthinkable and Tragic: The Psychology of Weapons Taboos in War

Dolan, Thomas M.

doi:10.1017/s0020818312000379

Cited by 29 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…The use of nuclear weapons has both potential advantages and disadvantages that must be weighed against one another but which are understood and valued differently by every person. Dolan (2013) has demonstrated such a trade-off consideration in a qualitative analysis of American elites. We aim to identify the underlying moral structure of this calculation.…”

Section: Building a Moral Utilitarian Argument With Multiple Moral Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, studies have shown that public opinion can shape the menu of acceptable options even in the most existential crises (McKeown 2000) and that the public is less dependent on elites for their attitudes than has been posited by the literature on elite cues (Berinsky 2009). Moreover, Dolan (2013) shows that elites face the same moral trade-offs.…”

Section: Conclusion: Situating Individual-level Findings In the Broadmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons

Rathbun

Stein

2019

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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Recent research into the public’s attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons repeats long-standing mistakes in how international relations theorists think about morality. Falsely equating consequentialism with state egoism and normative obligations with restrictions on the use of weapons of mass destruction implies that ethically motivated beliefs about foreign affairs must be other-regarding and that other-regarding behavior is not utilitarian in character. Drawing on empirical research into moral psychology, we argue that liberal, other-regarding morality is only one kind of ethical foundation. Alternative moral concerns such as retribution, deference to authority, and in-group loyalty also help to determine foreign policy beliefs. We find that all three are associated with support for the use of nuclear weapons in the American public. Our survey respondents act as moral utilitarians who weigh different ethical considerations in forming their judgments.

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Section: Building a Moral Utilitarian Argument With Multiple Moral Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Situating Individual-level Findings In the Broadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons

Rathbun

Stein

2019

Journal of Conflict Resolution

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“…Crawford (:550) highlights the importance of emotions in affecting material decisions that revolve around interests and positions: “[t]he perception and creation of interests is an emotional process as well as one rooted in a material reality or drive for power.” Kertzer and McGraw () make a similar point on the ideational/material distinction, demonstrating that fear plays a significant role in realist theory writ large , a paradigm traditionally dominated by materialist perspectives, as well as in the minds of ordinary individuals. Their model provides significant benefits as the literature includes emotional variables in a wide swath of areas of IR, from nuclear politics (2012), weapons taboos (Dolan ), sincerity assessment (Hall and Yarhi‐Milo ; Holmes ), and generalized trust (Rathbun ), to funding for homeland security (Mueller and Stewart ). Sasley's (:688, 690) application of the affect heuristic by decision makers shows how leaders make necessary simplifications, including the tagging of stimuli with “affective label[s],” (Sasley :690), in making decisions.…”

Section: Approaches To Emotions In Ir and Foreign Policy Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Believing This and Alieving That: Theorizing Affect and Intuitions in International Politics

Holmes

2015

Int Stud Q

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Rationalist models of decision making typically follow the general form of desire + belief = action. But determining an actor's beliefs and desires often proves challenging. One set of theories turns to psychology—and in particular emotions—to uncover how emotions help to shape and strengthen beliefs. Some of this work establishes a fit between emotions and the rationalist paradigm. It holds that emotions account for more than irrational behaviors; they also serve as a source of rational belief. Feeling, it claims, is believing. I argue that if actors belive in the reasonability of their feelings, then this move is warranted. But a range of behavior defies this logic. Instead, I suggest that actors often find themselves torn between contradictory affective intuitions, on the one hand, and rational beliefs, on the other. In consequence, they hold rational beliefs, but their resulting behavior qualifies as irrational. I apply existing work on the distinction between belief and alief to make sense of this phenomenon. I illustrate my claims through a rereading of the security dilemma—where irrational intuitions, in conjunction with rational beliefs, fuel conflict.

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“…Important scholarly and policy work on 'weapons taboos' -moral opprobriums restricting or prohibiting the use or development of certain weapons -demonstrates that some very efficient weapons (e.g. chemical weapons) can be removed from the assumed inventory of war (Dolan, 2013;Price, 1997;Tannenwald, 2008). The tenor of this work is to focus on those weapons that are rendered illegitimate, even inhumane, in the practice of warfare.…”

Section: Becoming a Weaponmentioning

confidence: 99%

Death in the details: Finding dead bodies at the Canadian War Museum

Shah

2017

Organization

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Of the 13,000 works of art in the Canadian War Museum’s holdings, only 64 display dead bodies. Prevailing explanations of this absence revolve around respect for the dead and ethical responsibility to avoid the glorification of war. And yet death and destruction are pervasive in war. The irony is that one leaves the museum with the sense that war does not produce corpses, or at least not very many of them. Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the Canadian War Museum’s armaments collection, described as ‘the way in which human ingenuity has been applied to the science of war, creating weapons and other devices to attack, protect and kill’, but with only technical information about weapon calibre and capacities provided. This article describes an effort to dig up the dead. Studying the form and function of the labels accompanying weapons, I argue that seemingly mundane technical specifications classify and standardize certain kinds of bodily injury and death, and make the bodies destroyed by war present. Overall, arguing that injury and death are in the (technical) details, I challenge the assumption that a focus on technological devices sanitizes war. Instead, I propose a way to investigate and interrogate how death and injury in war are calibrated and embodied in the standards that make weapons ‘conventional’.

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Unthinkable and Tragic: The Psychology of Weapons Taboos in War

Cited by 29 publications

References 65 publications

Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons

Greater Goods: Morality and Attitudes toward the Use of Nuclear Weapons

Believing This and Alieving That: Theorizing Affect and Intuitions in International Politics

Death in the details: Finding dead bodies at the Canadian War Museum

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