UT philosophy faculty members Adam Henschke and Maren Behrensen have both had new articles published recently.
Henschke's article "Moral Risk, Moral Injury, and Institutional Responsibility: Ethical Issues in HUMINT" has just come out in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence.
- Abstract: Intelligence is morally unique—means and ends that are typically morally problematic are rendered justifiable by reference to the special purpose that national security intelligence serves. This is particularly the case with human intelligence (HUMINT), where operators and handlers might have to violate normal ethical principles as part of their job. Lying, coercion, and/or exploitation may feature as part of a HUMINT operation. This creates a moral risk, where individuals and institutions are excepted from normal moral constraints. Rather than looking at the immediate moral risks of HUMINT operations, this article looks at the relation between the moral risks encountered as part of HUMINT and moral injury. Moral injury may refer to two complementary phenomena: when a person is exposed to immoral activities and suffers psychologically because of dissonance between those immoral activities and normal moral behaviors, and when a person’s moral character is “numbed” because of them engaging in immoral activities. HUMINT exposes intelligence officers to both kinds of moral injury. There is a moral responsibility of intelligence institutions to be both aware of, and seek to mitigate, moral injury, while operating in a context where such moral risk is at times justifiable.
Behrensen's article "The Exalted Professor: Epistemic Violence in the Academy and its Analogies with Spiritual Abuse" has now been published (open access) as a chapter in the book Epistemic Injustice and Violence: Exploring Knowledge, Power, and Participation in Philosophy and Beyond, published by Transcript Press.
- Behrensen also spoke about the research related to this paper on a panel on diversity at the German Congress of Philosophy, which was recorded and now available online.
Behrensen's work also contributed to the recent publication in the American Journal of Bioethics from the Brussels Collaboration on Bodily Integrity entitled "Genital Modifications in Prepubescent Minors: When May Clinicians Ethically Proceed?"
- For more about the article, see this press release from Oxford University.
