The Warrior’s
Code
Prof. Shannon E. French, Ph.D.
Dept. of Leadership, Ethics, and Law
2001
“Warrior”
should not be used to describe every individual who now fights, has ever
fought, or prepares to fight a war. The
term would have more strength if we reserved it to apply only to those war
fighters who meet other important criteria, which may be less tangible, but
ultimately more significant, than that of having taken up arms against an
enemy. Before we call any collection of belligerents a culture of warriors, we
should first ask why they fight, how they fight, what brings them honor, and
what brings them shame. The answers to these questions will reveal whether or
not they have a true warrior’s code.
On the first day of the philosophy
course I teach at the U.S. Naval Academy called, “The Code of the Warrior,” I
ask my students, who are midshipmen preparing for careers as officers in the
U.S. Navy or Marine Corps, to reflect on the meaning of the word “warrior.” To facilitate this, I give them an exercise
that requires them to identify whether any of a list of five words are perfect
synonyms for “warrior.” They are then
asked to write a brief explanation of why each of the five succeeds or fails as
a synonym. The time constraint keeps
their responses relatively raw, yet they are often surprisingly earnest or even
impassioned.
The words I offer my students for
their consideration are “murderer,” “killer,” “fighter,” “victor,” and
“conqueror.” I have found them consistently to favor the rejection of all
five. The reasons they offer to account
for why they wish to dismiss each of these as synonyms for “warrior” regularly
stress the idea that a true “warrior” has to be in some way superior to those
who might qualify for the other suggested labels. Consider these representative
comments from a variety of midshipmen:
MURDERER
“This word
has connotations of unjust acts, namely killing for no reason. A warrior fights an enemy who fights to kill
him.”
KILLER
“A warrior
may be required to kill, but it should be for a purpose or cause greater than
his own welfare, for an ideal.”
FIGHTER
“Simply
fighting doesn’t make a warrior. There
are rules a warrior follows.”
VICTOR
“Warriors
will lose, too – and the people who win aren’t always what a warrior should
be.”
CONQUEROR
“A
conqueror may simply command enough power to overcome opposition. He can be very lacking in the ethical beliefs
that should be part of a warrior’s life.”
Almost
without exception, my students insist that a “warrior” is not a
“murderer.” They can even become emotional in the course of repudiating this
(intentionally provocative) potential synonym. It is very important to them to
be sure that I understand that while most warriors do kill people, they never murder
anyone. Their remarks are filled with contempt for mere murderers:
Ø
“Murder is committed in cold-blood, without a
reason. A warrior should only kill in
battle, when it is unavoidable.”
Ø
“Murder seems to me something that is done for an
individual motive: a motive that has no real purpose or cause.”
Ø
“Murderers have no noble reason for their crimes.”
Ø
“While a murderer often kills innocent or defenseless
people, a warrior restricts his killing to willing combatants. He may stray, but that is an error, not the
norm.”
Ø
“This word has connotations of unjust acts, namely
killing for no reason. A warrior fights
an enemy who fights to kill him.”
Ø
“A murderer is someone who kills and enjoys it. That
is not a warrior.”
Ø
“This term has very negative connotations associated
with it because a murderer is one who usually kills innocent, unarmed people –
while a warrior has honor in battle and does not take advantage of the weak.”
Ø
“A murderer murders out of hate. A warrior does not. He knows how to control his anger.”
Ø
“Murdering involves taking an innocent life, which
does not make someone a warrior.”
Ø
“A warrior is not a murderer because a warrior has a
code that he lives by which is influenced by morals which must be justified.”
Ø
“Warriors fight other warriors. Therefore they kill,
not murder.”
Ø
“A murderer acts out of hate or personal selfishness.”
Ø
“‘Murderer’ lacks any implication of honor or ethics,
but rather calls to mind ruthlessness and disregard for human life.”
Ø
“A murderer kills for gain, or out of anger. He does not allow victims a fair fight.”
Ø
“The term ‘murder’ represents an act done with
malice. Warriors killed people in an
honorable way.”
Ø
“‘Murder’ implies senseless and unjustified killing.”
Ø
“A murderer has no honor.”
Clearly,
my students do not regard the distinction between a warrior and a murderer as a
trivial one. Nor
should they. In fact, the
distinction is an essential one.
Every
human society on earth deems some behavior to be morally unacceptable, and
murder is a good example of an act that is cross-culturally condemned. Whatever their other points
of discord, the major religions of the world agree in the determination that
murder (variously defined) is wrong.
According to the somewhat cynical 17th-Century philosopher
Thomas Hobbes, the fear of our own murderous appetites is what drove us
(humans) to form societies in the first place.
We eagerly entered into a social contract in which certain rules of
civilized behavior could be enforced by a sovereign power in order to escape
the miserable, anarchic State of
Unfortunately,
the fact that we abhor murder produces a disturbing tension for those who are
asked to fight wars for their tribes, clans, communities, cultures or nations.
When they are trained for war, warriors are given a mandate by their society to
take lives. But they must learn to take
only certain lives in certain ways, at certain times, and for certain reasons.
Otherwise, they become indistinguishable from murderers and will find themselves
condemned by the very societies they were created to serve.
Whatever additional martial
activities they may engage in, such as conquering foreign peoples, acquiring
booty or expanding territory, warriors (even the so-called “barbarian”
warriors) exist for one primary purpose. That purpose is to defend their
communities from any forces that may seek to undermine the security of the
social contract: from the “Barbarians at the Gate.” The trick is that they must
find some way to accomplish this goal without become the barbarians themselves.
Most projections into the haze of
our prehistoric past suggest that early human societies were tribal, and that
within these tribes a hunter class, charged with providing food for the tribe
and protection from predatory animals, evolved into a warrior class having a
broader mandate to protect the interests of the tribe generally against all
threats, animal or human. Alterations in
population sizes, migration, and the strained carrying capacity of certain
regions of the earth caused more tribes to come in contact with one another and
vie for resources. Inevitably, serious
inter-tribal conflicts arose. Before long, a successful warrior class became
essential to each tribe’s survival. As
more complex social-political systems developed and civilization advanced, the
composition and exact duties of warrior classes around the globe underwent some
changes. But their primary role remained constant: to protect and promote their
culture’s survival.
The
survival of a society does not depend just upon the rescue of citizens or the
retention of land. The survival of a culture depends as much, if not more, on
the continued existence, recognition, and celebration of a coherent cultural
self-conception – on the preservation of cultural identity – as it does on the
continued existence of a sustained population or physical boundaries. Several
cultures persist in the absence of any physical boundaries (e.g. nomadic
cultures), and a culture can be destroyed or supplanted by other means than
genocide or territorial conquest. A
culture’s identity is defined by its deepest values: the values that its
citizens believe are worth defending, worth dying for. These are the values
that shape a society’s “way of life.” And it is that “way of life” that
warriors fight to maintain.
Warrior
cultures throughout history and from diverse regions around the globe have all
constructed codes of behavior, which establish that culture’s image of the
ideal warrior. These codes have not
always been written down or literally codified into a set of explicit rules,
yet they can be identified as they are carefully conveyed in some form to each
succeeding generation of warriors. These codes tend to be quite demanding. They
are often closely linked to a culture’s religious beliefs and can be connected
to elaborate (in some cases, death defying or excruciatingly painful) rituals
and rites of passage. And in many cases they seem to hold the warrior to a
higher ethical standard than that required for an ordinary citizen within the
general population of the society that the warrior serves. The warriors themselves frequently police
strict adherence to these standards; with violators being shamed, ostracized,
or even killed by their peers. [One relevant historical example comes from the
Roman legions, where a man who fell asleep while he was supposed to be on watch
in time of war could expect to be stoned to death by the members of his own
cohort.]
But why to warriors need such a code? Why should a warrior culture want to restrict
the actions of its members and require them to commit to lofty ideals? Might not such restraints cripple their
effectiveness as warriors? What’s wrong with, “All’s fair in love and war?” Isn’t winning all that matters? Why could any warrior be burdened with
concerns about honor and shame?
One reason for such warriors’ codes
may be to protect the warrior him- (or her-) self from serious psychological
damage. The things that warriors are
asked to do to guarantee their culture’s survival are not always pleasant.
There is truth in the inescapable slogan, “War is hell.” The combination of the warriors’ own natural
disgust at what they must see in battle and the fact that what they must do on
the battlefield seems so uncivilized, so against what they have been taught by
their society, could make warriors feel tremendous self-loathing.
Warriors need a way to distinguish
what they must do out of a sense of duty from what a serial killer does for the
sheer sadistic pleasure of it. Their
actions, like those of the serial killer, set them apart from the rest of
society. Warriors, however, are not sociopaths.
They respect the values of the society in which they were raised and
which they are prepared to die to protect. Therefore it is important for them
to conduct themselves in such a way that they will be honored and esteemed by
their communities, not reviled and rejected by them. They want to be seen as proud defenders and
representatives of what is best about their culture: as heroes, not “baby-killers.”
By setting high standards for
themselves, warriors can create a lifeline that will allow them to pull
themselves out of the hell of war and reintegrate themselves into their
society. A warrior’s code may cover everything from the treatment of prisoners
of war to oath keeping to table etiquette, but its primary purpose is to grant
nobility to the warriors’ profession. This allows warriors to retain both their
self-respect and the respect of those they guard.
The
question can then be asked, if a warrior’s code is indeed crucial to the
warrior’s moral psychology, is enough being done at today’s
I have
asked many midshipmen and cadets this question in a variety of contexts. The answer they typically give is a mixed
review. They do believe that they are
given a code to follow; however, they are not necessarily certain either that
it is an adequate warrior’s code or
that they are sufficiently inspired to take it on board as their own personal
credo (a way of life, not mere memorized words). I believe one of the reasons
for this was captured by Mark Osiel in his book Obeying Orders, in which
he argues that the modern military too often relies on a rule-following
approach to character training, rather than employing a more Aristotelian
method of promoting key virtues and providing strong role models so that young
warriors can form deeply ingrained habits of excellence. A second problem I believe can be traced to
changes in the educational approach at the academies, that
may be lumped under the broad umbrella of “political correctness.” For example, there is a push these days to
avoid any lessons that might give our young warriors a sense of superiority
over their civilian counterparts. This is driven by a well-intentioned concern
over tension in civilian/military relations (the “widening gap”), but it can
undermine the critical formation of confidence among our students. Midshipmen
and cadets are exhorted not to regard
themselves as an elite group, distinct from other cadres of the
population. While I certainly agree that
those who serve in the military should show (and, more importantly, feel) respect for those who achieve
great things in the civilian world and make their own contributions to society
out of uniform, I see no reason why such respect should be thought incompatible
with feeling elite themselves. There is nothing odd about feeling immense pride
in being, say, an excellent fire-fighter, and yet still having great respect
for those who are, for example, excellent coaches, artists, or scholars. A warrior may take tremendous pride in the
fact that he is among those few best qualified to defend his nation and still
think very highly of those civilians who are best qualified to teach in urban
high schools or run successful businesses or write an immortal sonnet.
On the
moral side, I see nothing wrong with withholding respect from persons, in or
out of uniform, who make no real attempt to adhere to ethical standards. If
warriors do in fact live up to the high standards they set for themselves, it
is not unfair or hypocritical of them to expect the same from others. On the
other hand, warriors who are justifiably proud of the ethical components of
their own code should not assume that all civilians lack any equally demanding
code, simply because a civilian’s code, unlike the UCMJ, may not be backed by
the threat of formal punishment. There are plenty of civilians who firmly
believe that adultery is wrong and will remain faithful to their marriage vows,
even if no laws required them to do so.
With regard
to their martial abilities, warriors-in-training should be encouraged to feel
that they are capable of things that most civilians (by choice or nature) are
not. What is the point of training if, at the end of it, you do not feel that
you can do or withstand what those not similarly trained cannot? Unfortunately,
many rites of passage (events intended to prove
to the participants that they can do or withstand what others cannot) have been
softened to the point that they now carry little emotional significance. This
was done to prevent a negative form of hazing, but it seems that the baby may
have been thrown out with the bath water. Some hazing is nothing more the
foolish exercise of petty power by one group over another. Hazing that claims
the status of a rite of passage but in actuality does nothing to make the
warrior feel more prepared to face the demands of his or her future career of service
should indeed be avoided. True rites of
passage, in contrast, are carefully designed to allow those who endure them to
prove something to themselves. Even if they involve lessons in humility, they
are ultimately intended to make the warrior feel more like a warrior, not to
make those administering or observing the rite feel better about themselves. Well-conceived rites of passage enhance
individual dignity; they do not damage it. It should be noted that in
historical warrior traditions, many of the most powerful rites are entirely
self-administered. Sioux braves willingly pierced their pectoral muscles and
attached themselves by cords to a tall pole, dancing around it until the cords
ripped loose out of their torn flesh. The Chinese monks of Shaolin entered the
Corridor of Death of their own free will, knowing that even if they survived
its deadly gauntlet of booby-traps, they could not escape without lifting a
300-pound, red-hot cauldron away from the exit, using only their bare arms
(which would be permanently branded in the process with the images of a dragon
and a tiger). Such rituals may seem
unnecessarily savage, but a similar criticism has been raised in modern times
against mere blood pinning. I think it
is both ridiculous and cruel to “protect” future warriors from rites of passage
that may give them the confidence they will need to survive a genuine conflict,
on the grounds that such rites may cause them physical or emotional distress,
when we have no intention of protecting them from much greater physical and
emotion distress in their careers or in combat. It is equally ludicrous to use
the inclusion of women in warrior training as an excuse for watering down
training. The desire to face real
challenges, to demonstrate competence, and to build confidence by mastering
trials is not gender-specific.
True rites
of passage, along with other lessons and experiences conducive to making young
men and women feel like warriors, have to be maintained at this country’s most
prestigious service academies and other centers of military training. We must
not send our defenders off to hunt through the caves of