What Good Are We Seeking? Child Soldiers and Thick Ethical Concepts

I. Introduction

What good are we seeking, those of us who are concerned with child soldiering, including the diverse set of researchers and policymakers who work in this area? Early work by humanitarian policymakers presented typical child soldiers as passive victims of circumstance who needed protection from predatory adults seeking to exploit them. Since then, the field of child soldier studies has grown within academia largely among social scientists and jurists, which describes typical child soldiers as political actors with enough agency to decide whether joining armed groups is in their interest. If we place these perspectives along a spectrum, on one end are those who advocate for the end of child soldiering as a global goal, and on the other, we find advocates for the recognition of an international legal right of juveniles to join and serve in armed groups. Arguably, what unites the differing perspectives along this spectrum is a concern for what is good for children—and, so, the question emerges: what good are we seeking?

In what follows, I show that virtue ethics offers a valuable and underexplored approach for thinking through this question in a way that reframes our ethical focus away from the current preoccupation with the rights and responsibilities of children in war toward children’s broader moral good. This is because virtue ethics employs thick concepts (e.g., virtue and vice concepts) that are evaluative and descriptive at the same time, in contrast to the thin rights-based concepts used in existing ethical evaluations of child soldiers. Rosalind Hursthouse explains that “‘Virtue ethics’ is a term of art, initially introduced to distinguish an approach in normative ethics which emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to an approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or one which emphasizes the consequences of actions (utilitarianism).” ¹ She adds that virtue ethics tries to move us away from allowing “a vague concept of justice and rights to encompass large areas of morality that virtue ethicists believe are better dealt with in terms of other, more concrete, virtues.” ²

I present virtue ethics as offering resources that researchers and policymakers can draw on in our collective quest to better the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable children. Rather than supplant other disciplines within and beyond the humanities, the virtue ethics approach to child soldiering would work with these disciplines. In the humanities, narrative approaches can help discover how children and adolescents develop habits of thought, feeling, and action that shape their moral characters over time when they grow up inside armed groups. Social scientists can help uncover how virtue and vice are grounded in the specific cultures where child soldiers are used and how to repair the moral harms that children and their communities suffer through political violence. Overall, the virtue ethics approach to child soldiering offers a new perspective centered on children’s moral good that challenges us to better understand how child soldiering affects the moral development of war-affected youth and how this, in turn, affects how communities burdened by war make sense of and repair the harms caused by political violence.

II. Thinking Ethically About Child Soldiering

Within the humanities, the field of philosophy—and specifically, the subfield of ethics—is a natural home to the concept of the good. Work on child soldiers by ethicists is quite limited, however, and the work that does exist is focused more on the concept of right than that of the good. In some of the earliest ethical work on child soldiering, Jeff McMahan asked, “What can moral philosophy contribute to the resolution of the problem of child soldiers?” to which he asserted, “Moral philosophy obviously has nothing to say about the urgent practical problem of preventing unscrupulous recruiters from forcing children to fight their unjust wars for them. That is a question of political and legal policy on which philosophers have no special competence to pronounce.” ³ McMahan then explains that ethicists can be useful to the study of child soldiering by examining questions of the rights and responsibilities of children in war. For instance, they can examine what rights children have in armed conflict, as well as the rights of combatants who confront them in the field. They can also investigate the grounds for holding child soldiers responsible (morally or criminally) for wrongs they carry out in conflict. But beyond that, McMahan seems to believe, moral philosophy has little to say about child soldiering.

The few scholars since then who focus on ethical questions concerning child soldiering seem to support McMahan’s view on this point. Some of the most influential ethical evaluations of child soldiering put forth, for instance, by McMahan, Krista Thomason, ⁴ and Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale ⁵ focus almost exclusively on questions of rights and responsibilities. Now, to be fair, the systematic examination of the rights and responsibilities of children in armed conflict is an important task, and one that I also have pursued in my work. ⁶ So, the point is not that we should abandon our inquiries into the rights and responsibilities of children in wartime, but rather that these sorts of questions do not exhaust the ethical questions at stake. Virtue ethics sheds light on new ethical issues at stake and thus offers a valuable and underexplored approach to thinking about child soldiers from an interdisciplinary perspective.

To see how virtue ethics reframes our ethical perspective on child soldiers, let us return to McMahan’s essay, “Child Soldiers: The Ethical Perspective,” which offers an account of just war theory applied to child soldiering. His contribution to this area is to reject the moral equality of combatants, ⁷ which is a moral principle that maintains combatants on both sides of a conflict have the right to attack one another when threatened. McMahan argues instead that a combatant may be justifiably attacked only if he or she is morally responsible for fighting for an unjust cause. Those combatants with a diminished capacity to appreciate the injustice of the cause for which they fight are justifiably attacked to a more limited degree, which means that combatants on the just side should exercise mercy and restraint in fighting them, ⁸ while those fighting for a just cause are simply not justifiably attacked.

While we might think that child soldiers would be excused from responsibility and thus not able to be justly attacked due to epistemic ignorance concerning the injustice of the cause for which they fight, McMahan argues otherwise. He writes, “Even if they’re cognitively and emotionally immature, and even if they’ve been brutalized and brainwashed, they’re still, it might be argued, sufficiently morally responsible to be able to recognize that indiscriminate killing is wrong.” ⁹ He further reasons that where child soldiers are on the unjust side of the conflict (which they tend to be, in his view), ¹⁰ it is reasonable to expect that they are subject to injustice within the group itself and that those who are victimized should know that what they are fighting for and ordered to do by their leaders is wrong. McMahan holds that the fact of their victimization should serve as evidence that they are part of unjust groups. Because, in his view, it is unreasonable to expect child soldiers who are victimized by their groups to be epistemically ignorant that they are on the unjust side of the conflict, ¹¹ we cannot excuse child soldiers from responsibility for their participation in wrongs they perform as members of these unjust groups. As such, they remain legitimate targets in war (though McMahan does say that just combatants should show mercy and exercise restraint when confronting them in the field ¹² ).

Notably absent in McMahan’s account of child soldiers who become caught up in unjust groups are thick ethical concepts that are evaluative and descriptive at the same time. Following Bernard Williams, we can distinguish between thin ethical concepts such as bad, wrong, or unjust and thick ethical concepts such as cruel, callous, or inhumane. ¹³ Rather than see thick and thin ethical concepts as a binary, we can construe the distinction as a matter of degree. Fitzgerald and Goldie attribute five characteristics to thick concepts:

Let us flesh out these characteristics using unjust and cruel as examples of thin and thick ethical concepts, respectively. To call a behavior “unjust” does not tell us anything about why it is unjust; that is, it does not describe what makes it unjust. Yet, if we were to call an unjust act “cruel,” for instance, this provides rich descriptive information that captures what makes it bad, wrong, or even unjust. That is, it is bad, wrong, or unjust in a particular way—in a way, for instance, that shows callous indifference to others’ suffering or a sadistic desire to see others suffer. Where those with the vice of cruelty typically harbor certain emotions (e.g., callousness or sadism), so too do those who suffer from cruelty—a victim of cruelty may experience certain emotions such as anguish or torment.

Now, while a person who acts in a manner that is cruel, but who has not developed a habit for it, may feel guilt or shame in having acted cruelly, once a person becomes cruel (i.e., has developed the vice of cruelty as part of his or moral character), it is less likely he or she will feel these emotions that express self-censure. Here it would be appropriate for onlookers to respond to such a person with negative reactive attitudes such as disgust or anger. ¹⁵ Indeed, part of the moral instruction of youth typically involves cultivating in them the appropriate emotions to particular experiences, such as teaching them to be disgusted or angered by cruelty.

Moreover, thicker concepts like cruel are descriptive because they are based on experience, are observable, and to that extent, are world-guided. That is, we can actually see cruelty in the world. Later in this section, I describe the cruelty we can see in the world in my discussion of the infamous armed group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to illustrate this point. It is not simply that groups like the LRA treat child soldiers unjustly, they are cruel to them and encourage them to be cruel as well. In other words, what is concerning about armed groups that brutalize children is not only that they act unjustly toward them because, for instance, they violate children’s rights, but because they have a habit of acting cruelly and instilling cruelty in others, and cruelty is a vice. So, while both the terms “unjust” and “cruel” express negative ethical evaluations, cruel is a thicker concept than unjust because of its descriptive content and world-guidedness.

Furthermore, the distinction between thick and thin concepts has also recently been applied to epistemic concepts, which could be used to challenge the view that it is unreasonable to expect child soldiers who are brutalized, brainwashed, and abused by their groups to suffer from epistemic ignorance concerning the injustice of their group’s cause. Perhaps our understanding of the concept of ignorance warrants some thickening, as some forms of ignorance are culpable (and thereby manifest epistemic vices) while others are not. We need to seriously examine from an interdisciplinary perspective the notion that child soldiers who are victimized by their groups and ordered to act cruelly against others will be able to reliably perceive the cruelty in what is done to them, or in what they are ordered to do. To appreciate how the actual experiences of child soldiers affect their developing habits of perception and judgment, we need an approach that is guided by thicker ethical concepts than the current ethical approaches.

Like McMahan’s focus on rights and responsibilities, Krista Thomason’s essay “Guilt and Child Soldiers” also focuses on responsibility for wrongdoing in her work. Yet, she makes an important contribution by looking at former child soldiers’ views of their responsibility. In particular, she focuses on the guilt that many child soldiers report experiencing after they carry out violence against others—experiences which she characterizes as “both intelligible and appropriate.” ¹⁶ Thomason identifies two ways that emotions may be morally appropriate: they may either be morally permissible or morally valuable. ¹⁷ In her view, the guilt experienced by former child soldiers who participated in violence against others is morally valuable because it can be an important part of their moral recovery. She writes, “Since feelings of guilt are part of the realization of the wrongness of our actions, the guilt that child soldiers feel is an important part of reintegrating them into the moral community.” ¹⁸

Because Thomason’s approach appeals more to the experiences and emotions of former child soldiers than McMahan’s, it moves us a step closer to a thicker account of child soldiering, but her account of why guilt is good is laid out in rather abstract and unempirical terms. Using a richer virtue ethics approach, we would want to know how the feeling of guilt can contribute to a former child soldier’s moral recovery in a more grounded and descriptive sense because guilt is not good for its own sake. What we need is a “world-guided” understanding of how guilt can contribute to the moral recovery of former child soldiers, perhaps something that a virtue ethicist might describe as contributing to the development of the virtues of empathy or compassion.

Relatedly, rather than see former child soldiers as needing to reaffirm their membership in the abstract “moral community,” virtue ethics invites us to see the moral recovery of former child soldiers occurring through an empirically grounded process of moral character development within a particular social context. This process involves the moral work needed to repair the real relationships that may have been damaged during their time in conflict. The moral recovery of child soldiers is not simply an intrapersonal experience, but a process of development that occurs with other persons who were affected, such as community members of former child soldiers. This is especially true because child soldiers are often used in conflicts that tear apart their communities and cause collective harm. Because a virtue ethics approach is interested in the moral good of former child soldiers and their political communities, it asks us to evaluate our social and legal responses to political violence in light of the ends of restorative justice.

Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale gesture toward these concerns in their work on child soldiering, but ultimately fall back on a standard view. ¹⁹ They begin using rather thick concepts to describe child soldiering—they call the stories of child soldiers “tragic” and explain that some children endure “horrifying” initiation rituals. ²⁰ They further recognize that these sorts of thick negative ethical evaluations about child soldiering are natural, and thus shared by many people. Yet, they contend that “the non-responsibility of child soldiers is much less obvious once their capacities for independently motivated and goal-directed agency are taken into account.” ²¹ Here, too, we see the standard ethical preoccupation with responsibility at play.

They rely on interviews with former child soldiers, who report making choices to join armed groups and use violence against others, to argue that most child soldiers have some important degree of accountability for the harms they carry out during conflict. They also cite Michael Wessels’ finding that “some children, like some adults, learn to enjoy killing” and that some even come to “locate meaning in cruelty.” ²² Their argument for the accountability of child soldiers who harm others is captured in the following set of claims:

Recall that, for us, to say that someone is morally responsible for her behavior is to say that this behavior is attributable to her in a way that makes her an appropriate target of the emotional responses involved in holding people accountable for their behavior. Responses involved in holding someone responsible for bad behavior—blaming emotions like resentment—are appropriate, on our view, when the behavior in question expresses objectionable judgments or attitudes about the standing of others and about how they may be treated. In such cases, an agent’s behavior has an expressive significance that licenses blaming responses. ²³

This account of moral responsibility is centered around reactive attitudes and is based on the rather simple idea that someone is morally responsible for bad behavior if her behavior expresses objectionable judgments or attitudes that it would be appropriate to blame. As they explain it, the negative reactive attitude (e.g., resentment) not only precedes the judgment of responsibility but also has primacy. In this view, we judge a person to be responsible through the expression of blame, and we express blame when we judge something bad.

Now, while the virtue ethics approach to child soldiering would not confine its concerns to questions of responsibility, it certainly has something to say on the topic, and it would call into question the underlying logic presented here. Talbert and Wolfendale reason that bad behavior is attributable to a person if it would be appropriate to blame the person for it, and it is appropriate to blame a person for bad behavior if it expresses objectionable judgments or attitudes about the standing of others and about how they may be treated. What, then makes a behavior bad or a judgment or attitude objectionable?

These are rather thin concepts that could helpfully be thickened by an appeal to moral character and corresponding virtues and vices. On the virtue ethics account, if an action or attitude is attributable to or expressive of a person’s manifestation of a particular vice of character (e.g., cruelty), then it is fair to say that the action or attitude is blameworthy. Hursthouse calls this the “primacy of character,” and it means that we cannot understand acts or attitudes without first understanding the exemplars (for virtues) and their opposites (for vices). ²⁴

With this in view, though, some apparent problems arise if we apply this thinking to child soldiers. First, if responsibility for wrongdoing depends on the propriety of blame, which attaches to bad behavior or objectionable attitudes or judgments, which, in turn, depends on the manifestation of particular vices of character that are expressed through the bad behavior or objectionable attitude or judgment, then how do we apply this to children and adolescents whose characters are still very much developing? Secondly, above I asserted that a person who acts in a manner that is cruel, but who has not developed a habit for it, may feel guilt or shame in having acted cruelty, which implies that we can ethically evaluate acts as cruel even if not performed by a person with the vice of cruelty, thereby suggesting that moral character is not primary after all.

Yet, rather than present problems for the virtue ethics approach to child soldiering, I argue that these issues actually reveal the value and uniqueness of such an approach. We can flesh this out using the well-known case of Dominic Ongwen that Talbert and Wolfendale consider in their work. ²⁵ Between the ages of nine and thirteen, Ongwen was abducted on his way to school by the LRA, after which he was placed in the home of LRA leader Vincent Otti, who “trained” Ongwen alongside other LRA members to become a child soldier. The LRA was known to use particularly cruel methods of initiation and indoctrination, with credible threats of physical and psychological harm for non-compliance.

Children were often abducted or forcibly recruited. During initiation, the LRA was known to order children to kill a friend or family member, and to sometimes even hack their bodies to death and drink their blood. Children who disobeyed or showed signs of sympathy toward their victims could be executed or tortured through disfigurement. Conversely, compliant children were often rewarded, especially those who appeared to enjoy harming others. LRA leader Joseph Kony appealed to children’s spirituality to further induce them toward compliance by convincing them that he could read minds, such that disobeying them even in their thoughts would get them punished.

As such, it is reasonable to expect that young Ongwen was ordered to harm innocents during his adolescent formative years. It is also reasonable to expect that he complied with these orders, given that he rose through the ranks into adulthood to become the youngest leader of the LRA. Ongwen is also the youngest person charged with international crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC or Court), and the only person convicted by the Court for the same crimes of which he was a victim. ²⁶

If a character is central to attributions of blame, which, in turn, depends on the presence of vice, then how do we apply this to children and adolescents like young Ongwen, for whom it is unreasonable to expect to have either virtues or vices in their developed senses, insofar as these consist in settled (though not fixed) habits of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting in the world? The answer lies in the fact that while our characters are developing as youth, children are not moral blank slates. Ongwen’s childhood actions, attitudes, and judgments reflected something of the man he was becoming and the moral character that he was shaping through them. Of course, once abducted as a child, Ongwen’s story became “tragic” (to borrow Talbert and Wolfendale’s word) because he was put in circumstances that substantially (if not entirely) deprived him of the fair opportunity to develop a virtuous moral character inside the LRA. ²⁷

Hursthouse and other virtue ethicists address cases involving “tragic dilemmas,” which are situations that virtuous agents are forced into that do not allow for a virtuous resolution. ²⁸ Of course, it is not quite right to think of Ongwen as a virtuous agent upon his abduction who was then forced to “get his hands dirty.” But we can build on the notion of tragic dilemmas to reason about the kinds of tragic upbringings that frustrate the ordinary attribution of actions, judgments, and attitudes to children and adolescents.

Suppose, for instance, young Ongwen was ordered at credible threat of execution or torture to hack an innocent person to death. Arguably, this is something that a truly cruel person might do even if not coerced, but an adolescent doing so to prevent himself from being executed or tortured would not necessarily show he is cruel as a matter of his moral character. Rather, it would show that he acted as a cruel person characteristically acts. So, blaming judgments of this kind (i.e., that one’s behavior is bad or one’s judgments and attitudes are objectionable because they are cruel) do indeed depend upon the primary character. It just may not be the character of the person who acts upon which the judgment depends. Still, we need to know what a cruel person is (what his character is like) before we can judge actions to be cruel.

This, then, also helps to explain why a person who acts in a manner that is cruel, but who has not developed a habit for it, may feel guilt or shame in having acted cruelly. The fact that an adolescent (e.g., a former child soldier) feels guilty after acting in a cruel way (i.e., as a cruel person characteristically acts) shows that he or she has not developed the vice of cruelty. Still, because it is through acting as a cruel person characteristically that one becomes cruel, acting in this way is not good for a young person. It creates the risk of developing the vice of cruelty, and because cruelty is a vice, it pulls a person’s father from the good for a human being.

On Talbert and Wolfendale’s account, Ongwen is responsible for his adult actions regardless of the fact that they expressed learned perceptual and behavioral responses from his childhood about how to survive inside the LRA. They argue that he is criminally responsible for his adult acts on the grounds that he had multiple opportunities as a youth to refuse to participate in LRA “training” or try to escape as a youth. The fact that he did not—or at least did not do so successfully because he remained a member of the LRA from at least the age of thirteen to thirty—is sufficient to conclude that Ongwen is accountable for his conduct. In fact, on their account, he is also blameworthy for the violence he carried out as a child soldier, on the grounds that acts that harm innocent people are the proper objects of blame and the attitudes that young Ongwen must have manifested toward others to perform such acts are objectionable.

I have argued elsewhere, however, that it is unreasonable to expect child soldiers like young Ongwen to forcefully resist armed groups, and moreover, that the recognized defenses to responsibility at the ICC would excuse child soldiers for the wrongdoing they perform. ²⁹ Furthermore, given the isolation, indoctrination, and coercion used by the LRA to train its child soldiers, it is reasonable to expect adult Ongwen to have developed substantially impaired moral perception from growing up inside the LRA, which deprived him of the fair opportunity to appreciate the nature of his conduct while inside the forcibly limited and hostile environment of armed conflict.

A virtue ethics approach forces us to grapple with the complexity of Ongwen’s case in that it requires us to ask what demands we are willing to place on children and adolescents who are at risk of recruitment into armed groups. Ongwen’s ultimate conviction at the ICC for some of the same crimes of which he was a victim sets a worrisome precedent for the future. Will children and adolescents now need to accurately foresee the consequences of their childhood conduct on their adult moral characters and expose themselves to serious harm at the hands of armed groups, if it is reasonable to expect they may eventually be corrupted into vice? That is a mighty expectation for young people growing up in societies ravaged by political violence.

At what point, for instance, should young Ongwen have made this ambitious moral judgment? Or perhaps we should have expected him to resist during his abduction, which may have gotten him killed? Afterward, should he have tried to escape the LRA and fend for himself alone in the bush, even if caught, he might have suffered a fate worse than death? At what point, and on what grounds, is it reasonable to expect a child or an adolescent to sacrifice his or her own life to avoid a future of vice and violence? These are the difficult questions that needed to be asked in Ongwen’s case but were not. An important value of a virtue ethics approach is that it does not allow us to escape such questions. Of course, Ongwen’s case is extraordinary and does not represent the typical child soldier (if there is one). Still, in more ordinary cases, such as those where adolescents join armed groups for protection and where they are not victims of persistent cruelty, an approach like virtue ethics that is oriented around thicker ethical concepts and that rests on the primacy of character allows us to see child soldiering in a new way.

III. Child Soldiers and the Political Actor Narrative

In the last section, I showed that the standard approach used to evaluate child soldiering from an ethical perspective employs rather thin concepts (e.g., bad, wrong, objectionable, unjust) to examine questions of rights and responsibilities. This stands in contrast to virtue ethics, which is oriented around thicker concepts (e.g., cruel, brutal) that are more evaluatively and descriptively rich. In this section, I continue to show the value of a virtue ethics approach to child soldiering by explaining how it can help resolve a paradox within the influential political actor narrative. Before doing so, I explain what the political actor narrative is, how it developed, and summarize some limits of this narrative that I have identified in my other work.

The 1990s was a time of growing awareness of the global use of child soldiers, to which the international community responded by embracing a narrative that largely saw child soldiers as passive victims of circumstance and predatory adults. More recently, a new perspective has developed from fieldwork with child soldiers that emphasizes children’s agency to explain how they come to participate in political violence. This led researchers working in this area to reject the passive victim narrative as part of what Mark Drumbl influentially calls the “international legal imagination.” ³⁰ Out of the rejection of the passive victim narrative, a new narrative—which I call the “political actor narrative”—has taken shape within the child soldier scholarship.

I trace the political actor narrative to the works of David Rosen, Susan Shepler, Erin Baines, and Mark Drumbl, ³¹ and I characterized the narrative according to four main ideas:

First, childhood is a social construct rather than a universal condition. Secondly, child soldiers are typically adolescents, not young children as they are depicted in popular culture, and in societies that use child soldiers, there is little difference in the capacities of adolescents and adults. Thirdly, many child soldiers are not abducted or forced to join armed groups, but volunteer as expressions of their rationality and political agency. Fourthly, insofar as their choices are voluntary and rational, we can hold child soldiers responsible for their conduct. ³²

I explain, moreover, that my account of the political actor narrative is not meant to be a simple report of the unique and varied works of these authors but to capture a shared focus and emphasis within their work. To that extent, I held that “my account of the political actor narrative is similar to Drumbl’s now widely embraced account of the passive victim narrative, which he claims cannot be traced to one source or set of sources, yet exists in a more nebulous, though discernible sense within international law.” ³³

Where the passive victim narrative (that sees children as passive victims of circumstance and predatory adults) rests on evaluative judgments (i.e., children are naturally good and those who recruit them into conflicts are bad), the political actor narrative presents itself as engaging in a descriptive, rather than evaluative enterprise. However, in other work of mine, I show that the political actor narrative does not escape evaluative judgments, but “takes sides,” so to speak, in big philosophical and evaluative debates about agency, autonomy, and responsibility. ³⁴ I now wish to expand on that argument to show the political actor narrative rests on further implicit evaluative judgments, before exposing a paradox within the narrative and showing how virtue ethics can help us resolve it.

It is first worth noting that we can split the political actor narrative into two camps based on how each construes the kind of responsibility that is fitting for child soldiers who choose to harm others—an active perpetrator view, under which criminal punishment may be fitting, and a circumscribed actor view, which explicitly holds that alternative, non-punitive justice modalities are more appropriate. Now, proponents in each camp assert that child soldiering can be good for children, and they do so on two grounds: (1) child soldiering can provide protection and (2) child soldiering can provide order and impart skills. Importantly, they offer the assertion that child soldiering can be good for children as a factual rather than an evaluative claim.

The notion that child soldiering can provide protection, order, and skills—and that these things can be good, in one sense—seems reasonable enough. Yet, to claim child soldiering can be a good, full stop, and to present this as a factual claim assumes something about the nature of the good in communities that use child soldiers. This raises the question of how central to the good life are the relevant ends (i.e., preserving one’s life, order through discipline and fear, and the kind of skills that child soldiering imparts) under moral traditions where child soldiers are typically found?

Thaddeus Metz finds, for instance, that African ethics is centered on the concept of human flourishing, which is roughly captured by the Zulu term ubuntu. ³⁵ Under an ethics centered on human flourishing or ubuntu, what gives value to life is living one’s life in harmony with others. In light of this, the fact that child soldiering may offer children protection seems insufficient to claim that child soldiering is good for them, especially if their self-protection is bought at the cost of destroying real relationships with others in their communities.

Of course, child soldiers are also found outside Africa, in the Middle East, Asia, and South America. ³⁶ Here, too, we find ethical traditions already oriented around thicker conceptions of the good than the contemporary West. Osiel explains that,

In certain parts of the world that are more culturally homogenous than the contemporary West, areas lacking the experience of mass immigration, people continue to employ thick concepts even in their public discourse. . . This is because the stronger commitments we make when employing thick concepts often stem from the contemporary expression of a long-standing culture or civilization. Despite continuing differences over the proper interpretation of its legacy, this common heritage can instill some confidence among interlocutors that even their sharper judgments, positive and negative, will be shared—or at least not dismissed as incomprehensible, incoherent, wholly barbaric. ³⁷

Ultimately, more work is needed to explore how particular virtues and vices are understood and cultivated in places where child soldiers are typically used. Such work would offer new insights into the moral harms children suffer from child soldiering, as well as about the sense, if any, in which it is appropriate to blame child soldiers for harm they cause others.

It is not entirely unreasonable to think that child soldiers and adult soldiers recruited as children are to blame for whatever atrocities they commit given the horrendous nature of such acts, or for who they become—especially those who come to enjoy killing and cruelty. Granted, most child soldiers may not develop the vice of cruelty unless they spend their formative years in extreme groups like the LRA that reward children for brutality and punish them for compassion. Still, the experiences associated with child soldiering creates a substantial risk that child soldiers will develop other vices from their experiences, such as rashness, irascibility, or shamelessness. Moreover, child soldiers are also arguably inclined toward epistemic vices as they develop habits of perception and judgment inside groups that manipulate them within the larger environment of political violence and ideological conflict. ³⁸ Insofar as child soldiering inclines developing human beings toward traits that are blameworthy, the notion that child soldiering is good for children is highly suspect under a virtue ethics account. This notion would also be suspect under other ethical traditions based on human flourishing, or something like the concept of ubuntu.

Now, if it is the case that child soldiering inclines developing human beings toward traits that are blameworthy, then it raises the question of what kind of blame is appropriate. Recall the two different camps within the political actor narrative—an active perpetrator view, under which criminal punishment may be fitting, and a circumscribed actor view, which explicitly holds that alternative, non-punitive justice modalities are more appropriate. Both views also recognize that child soldiers sometimes use excessive violence and indiscriminately harm innocents. Why, then, do these camps part ways on the kind of responsibility that is fitting for child soldiers who cause such harm—with the active perpetrator view supporting criminal blame and punishment, and the circumscribed actor view supporting moral blame without punishment?

I believe this points to a paradox within the circumscribed actor view of the political actor narrative: if child soldiers choose to commit atrocities and it is reasonable to attribute these choices to them as exercises of their agency, then why shouldn’t we hold them criminally accountable under the law? Granted, the circumscribed actor view appeals to the fact that child soldiers act under great strain to explain why punishment is inappropriate, but the appeal to circumstances alone is insufficient to explain why child soldiers are exempt from criminal blame. This is because the circumscribed actor view also emphasizes that there is not much difference between juveniles and adults where child soldiers tend to be used in the world, and proponents of this view do support criminal blame for adults who commit atrocities.

Fortunately, a virtue ethics approach can help to resolve this paradox by appealing to the distinction between accountability responsibility/blame and aretaic responsibility/blame, which has been helpfully expounded by Gary Watson. ³⁹ The accountability face is concerned with “social regulation” and “retributive justice,” ⁴⁰ and when we make attributions of accountability blame, we hold that a person deserves adverse treatment in response to his or her conduct because he or she could have chosen to do otherwise. On the aretaic face of responsibility, we judge others in light of “ideals of human possibility” or virtue, and when we express aretaic blame, we “attribute[] something to a moral fault [or vice] in the agent.” ⁴¹ The accountability face, unlike the aretaic face, implicates fairness because it is “unfair to impose sanctions upon people unless they have a reasonable opportunity to avoid incurring them.” ⁴²

This distinction between the two faces of responsibility can resolve the apparent paradox within the circumscribed actor view by supporting attributions of areatic (or moral) blame for former child soldiers while rejecting the propriety of accountability (or criminal) blame. These two faces of responsibility offer richer insights into our judgments about the responsibility of child soldiers than what can be found in the existing work in this area. Moreover, to explore the notion of aretaic blame means taking on an evaluative project. Virtues and vices—the standards of aretaic praise and blame—are not abstract, unempirical constructs, but are both descriptive and evaluative concepts that are grounded in particular social and political contexts. As Osiel puts it, virtue and vice concepts “are thick, in that they effectively merge descriptions of fact with judgments of value. They are thick also in the sense that, to use them properly, one must know a great deal about the specific contours and commitments of one’s society, and often about someone’s place within it.” ⁴³ This means that we cannot make aretaic judgments about child soldiers or adult soldiers recruited as children from within a cultural vacuum, which reinforces my previous point that ethical evaluations of child soldiering need to better appreciate the moral traditions of the communities where child soldiers.

While it may be the case that most child soldiers do not stay soldiers their whole lives, this does not obviate the need to examine how child soldiering affects adult moral development. If most child soldiers eventually transition back into their communities at some point, this makes questions concerning how child soldiering affects character development even more important. We need a better understanding of whether child soldiers learn skills that will help them become good persons and good citizens within their political communities later in life. We also need a better grasp of the kind of blame that is appropriate for children and adolescents who harm others in an environment of political violence. I believe the notion of aretaic blame is underexplored in this area, but crucial for understanding our competing intuitions about the responsibility of child soldiers and adult soldiers recruited as children like Ongwen.

In the end, attributions of aretaic blame depend upon how the way the world really is, which, in turn, requires an appreciation for the moral traditions that exist in places where child soldiers are typically used. Virtue ethics can provide conceptual resources for this reframing of our ethical inquiries into child soldiering, and in doing so, it supports the descriptive focus of the political actor narrative, while situating that narrative within a consistent ethical tradition that challenges us to rethink what good that we are seeking for some of the most vulnerable children and adolescents around the world.

IV. Conclusion

So, what good, then, are we seeking, those of us who are concerned with child soldiers? In this paper, I showed how virtue ethics challenges us to answer this question using thick ethical concepts. This tradition asks us to think about how growing up as a child soldier shapes one’s whole life, and whether the typical experiences associated with child soldiering are more likely to incline persons toward vices like cruelty or virtues like courage. This is crucial for evaluating the relation between child soldiering and children’s good because a person’s acquisition of vices like cruelty moves one farther from living a good life for a human being, or human flourishing.

Questions concerning the rights and responsibilities of child soldiers are important, but they are not exhaustive of the ethical issues at stake. If children grow up in environments where they are rewarded for being brutal toward innocents or punished for showing weakness in the face of orders to harm others (as was reasonable to expect in the LRA), it is reasonable to expect them to have substantially impaired adult moral development as a result. While this may be evident in extraordinary cases like Ongwen’s, it is also reasonable to expect in more ordinary cases to some degree as well. Virtue ethics not only forces us to grapple with realities about child soldiering affects moral development. It also provides conceptual resources that reframe our legal and social responses to child soldiering in light of what it means to live a good life embedded within social practices and ethical traditions throughout the world where child soldiers are used. This, in turn, requires greater investment in community-based restorative justice practices. To this end, we need to be better able to identify the practices that are most conducive to repairing the real relationships that are harmed through youth participation in political violence.

These ways of reframing our ethical interests in child soldiering are driven by a concern for children’s moral good. According to virtue ethics, and consistent with the dominant ethical traditions throughout the world where child soldiers are typically used, children’s moral good consists in fostering and sustaining harmonious relationships with others. These ideas merit further exploration from those of us who are concerned with child soldiers. In using virtue ethics to reframe our ethical interests in child soldiering, I also believe we will start to see that moral philosophy has a lot more to say about child soldiering than McMahan originally surmised.