Moral Navigating: How Soldiers Learn to Kill for the State

• In Event: 30267 - Policing and Military Sociology

Abstract

How can organizations shift people’s minds and behavior to align with state objectives, and how do diverse individuals negotiate these efforts? This article answers this question by examining moral navigating: the practices that people adopt to traverse unfamiliar and morally-contentious terrains. I detail organizational attempts to recalibrate the ways people navigate and their endpoints. Drawing on the extreme-but-instructive case of the U.S. Army, I analyze how the military prepares warfighters to kill with restraint. Based on a three-year immersive ethnography and over 100 interviews, I show how imaginations and rehearsals of calculated violence gradually shift recruits’ preexisting moral profiles and habits. Certain actions and thoughts that once inspired negative emotions shifted to neutral or positive feelings, whereas those that were once value neutral, like tolerating misbehavior, were afforded negative valences. The findings illuminate how organizations can transform heterogeneity in beliefs and behavior into relatively uniform situational responses over time. Yet, they also highlight how people continue to ascribe different meanings to these responses—charting their own paths to similar destinations. I conclude with a discussion of how the state may rely on moral navigating across sectors and possibilities for shaping trajectories moving forward.

Author

• Taylor Paige Winfield, University of Arizona