Some points to consider:
http://www.britannia.ac.uk/britannia_gu ... cs.htm#eth
Ethics and Moral Behaviour
"The difference … between moral standard of behaviour and ethical systems of belief."
Hosmer, 1991, p103.
Every profession has its own code of ethics governing the day-to-day professional conduct of its members. Individuals in their primary and subsidiary functions day by day, as well as in emergencies, observe the code and adopt a related pattern of moral behaviour. Unfortunately even professional philosophers tend to use the words ethics and morality interchangeably. It is as well to remind ourselves of the formal distinction.
Ethics is "moral philosophy", a scheme or code of morals and "moral right and wrong" (Honderich, 1995, pp586-595). More narrowly it is objective "rules" and "duties" (Singer, 1993, p3). Its substance is expressed in concepts, ideas, hypotheses, theories and imperatives. We form our beliefs around what we think we ought to do, in the light of what others think and do.
So ethics lies within the mind and imagination and is to do with corporate beliefs.
On the other hand Morality is to do with human behaviour. It implies personal thoughts, actions and relationships and making value judgements on what people are doing or being in the following contexts:
Right or wrong
Sincere or insincere
Good or evil
Honest or dishonest
True or false
Just or unjust
Real or unreal
Selfish or unselfish
Fair or unfair
Appropriate or inappropriate
Faithful or unfaithful
Pleasing or displeasing
Many of these pairs are not opposites. Sometimes a moral position is very close to an absolute - absolutely good or sincere, wholly fake or dishonest and the imperatives of the situation and requirement for personal action are absolutely clear. At other times the evidence has to be very closely sifted and the "ifs" and "buts" carefully considered.
While "some people think that morality is [made up of] ... nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people having fun", (Singer, 1979, p1), morality is much more a matter of upholding "positive freedom" (Berlin, 1958) than limiting peoples' activities.
Moral behaviour implies personal choice, and the extent of that freedom to choose is the substance of this Guide.
There are certain universal ethical truths that can safely be grasped. The difficulty of "absolutes" was tackled by Aristotle and he argued that the "mean" between extremes is a helpful mental position to adopt when, as responsible people, we are duty bound to make moral judgements from ethical precepts - reconciling the practical and the ideal.
"Aristotle said 'we become good by doing good things'. A person's habits of feeling will guide him or her to have the right amount of desire to resist the enemy, to resist evil, falsehood, unfairness, and insincerity. This is his celebrated idea of the 'mean' between 'excess and deficiency'." (Cottingham, 1995). Absolutism - the fundamentalist approach which is by definition anti-democratic - can be as self-defeating as mental paralysis or amoral indifference.
It is a central theme of this Guide that all human contact and activity between two or more persons has moral consequences. The test of any action is the overall good it does. A number of fundamental ambiguities are to be found in the military profession. Fortunately G. E. Moore, a mainstream philosopher, conscious of the value of the Aristotelian "mean" between extremes, comes to the rescue of commonsense. While acknowledging the difficulty of defining good, truth, sincerity, etc, Moore stated convincingly that "there is actually a vast body of shared conclusions about 'the world', expressible in quite ordinary propositions whose meaning are perfectly clear, and which are certain to be true" (Moore, 1925). For "the world" read "naval practice".
In recent years there has been a return to conflicting arguments about human rights and human obligations. The latter appear to be accorded less significance currently than human rights, a consequence perhaps of the natural reaction to those periods of the twentieth century when countless lives were shattered by authoritarian state policies of communism and fascism, and still are by arbitrary rule or sheer chaos, in many parts of the world.
"Giving priority to the private over the public", however, warns Mary Warnock, is not the whole aim of civil liberties (1998, p95). "The search for publicly acceptable solutions to [social and legal] dilemmas on which opinions may differ ... is dependent for its working on the conviction ... that we must try, individually as well as collectively, to act for the best." There are then reasons for not pursuing excesses of individual rights or group special pleading, which by nature are self-centred if not downright selfish. In nature "co-operative groups thrive", suggests Matt Ridley (1996, pl75) "and selfish ones do not". By all of this we understand that civil liberties require reciprocal civic obligations.
How far should we as officers judge moral behaviour and apply commonsense to ethical imperatives?
DATELINE 26 FEBRUARY - 1990 KUWAIT CITY - MUKLAH RIDGE
On 25 Feb 99 American intelligence agencies reported that Iraqi occupation forces and members of the secret police were preparing to leave the city with up to 200 tanks and other equipment hidden amongst civilians fleeing and soldiers retreating from Kuwait City. It was later proved that only 28 vehicles in the convoy were military. Large numbers of Allied aircraft were authorised to acquire targets and fire at will over a 30 square mile area. Remember that Iraqi forces had been engaged in acts of perfidy earlier in the week, so there were tough challenges for the commanders in the field.
Armed retreat is not tantamount to surrender so the Iraqis were not hors de combat. The use of cluster bombs against soldiers on foot does not, however, seem to be in the spirit of proportionality.
What do you feel about the Military Ethic which allows this interpretation of armed retreat?
Does it sit comfortably with Warnock's idea that "we must try, individually as well as collectively, to act for the best"?
Individual Standards
"To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou can'st not then be false to any man."
Shakespeare, Hamlet, (1. iii. 58).
As Naval Officers, we are committed to serve the public; from that we expect to derive personal satisfaction.
At Admiralty Interview Board, in training at Britannia Royal Naval College, in our periodic confidential reports, attempts are made to discover whether we match up to the qualities and the characteristics of officership in the Royal Navy. We in turn will similarly assess our subordinates, according to appropriate criteria. In being good Divisional Officers we must recognize how the moral character of an individual has developed and matured into adulthood and how it affects their present level of responsibility. Some people fail to mature for a number of psychological reasons: if we detect moral immaturity, we find it difficult to place in them our full trust. We may assess that they could fail to act for the best at some vital moment.
Sometimes we know what some people think about us, at other times we remain (blissfully) ignorant. We all have an "inner" life of thoughts and feelings, many of them pure and straightforward by any ethical standards. While the word "integrity" is to be found in the vocabulary of ethical virtues and the practicalities of assessing and judging people, we often use it indiscriminately, as a good sort of word to have around, like "leadership". Integrity means, "oneness", "wholeness", a "complete entity". In its ethical-moral sense it implies that what we think and say is what we do; what we promise we deliver; we act according to our principles. Integrity means what we believe in, we practise openly. Integrity is when private behaviour and public behaviour converge.
Sometimes, however, we fail to deliver; we do things we say we will not do; we act directly or indirectly against our beliefs or saner judgements.
Remember the eccentric Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1689-1762) who once admitted, "I give myself sometimes admirable advice, but am incapable of taking it."
We devote many periods of our lives attempting to perfect our psychological make up. This facet of character is an incredibly complex emotional defence mechanism, ready to meet every eventuality to the limits of our imagination note our imagination - and that is where many fail. Many of our dearest projects are self-defeating because they are excessively selfish. That does not mean that everything we do is always selfish. As a matter of honour the philosopher David Hume (1711-76) asserted that a person should simultaneously be "useful, both to himself and more significantly to others". That truth often humbles us when we are most judgemental, and suddenly realise that we have been wrong about others and ourselves.
In pursuing the notion of a person's inner life, it is necessary to make comparison between "personality" and "character". Personality is to do with the emotional attractiveness of others, their obvious and immediate features which distinguish them in the everyday sense and whether we like them because they like us.
Character is quite different: it is "the sum of moral and mental qualities which distinguish an individual ... viewed as a homogenous whole", i.e. a person's integrity in the sense of the word stated above.
This draws us back to what ethics is about, "the science of morals, that branch of philosophy which is concerned with human character and conduct". Character, therefore, is what we are as much as what we do; it is marked by what we truly believe; it denotes our reserves of moral strength; the depth of our hold on the inner qualities and convictions that make us "useful ... to others" - when we put their interests ahead of our own in the "highest calling" of our service.
Usefulness to others includes the danger of losing our lives, the highest calling of all. Christians subscribe to the belief that "greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends" (St John, 15.13). As Naval Officers we are called to accept that this fine sentiment interprets "friends" as all of humanity. To accept this challenge in the front line and elsewhere, and to translate it into action for your men and women, you will need to be on good terms with the following personal qualities.
PERSONAL INTEGRITY
To be
Willing to accept hazard, danger and self-sacrifice.
Courageous - morally, physically and intellectually.
Honourable and self-controlled.
Humane, conscienced and restrained in operations and war.
TRUSTWORTHINESS
To act with
Energy, sublimating self-interest for the interests of the group.
Intelligent conformity and obedience.
Intelligent loyalty and powers of self-discipline.
Confidence, based appropriately on openness and confidentiality.
. The funny thing is, the police stood there waiting for it to happen about 50meters away, and when it kicked off, we smashed the **** out of them until the police got there. I got an £80 fine as it was my first offense and a caution, despite the fact that i was the one attacked, as im applying for an officer, 
will this affect my application?? I know they do security checks, i really hope it doesnt? But im sure it will?? Can anyone help me on this??? Thanks.
