As social scientists continue to debate their colleagues’ participation in the military’s Human Terrain System, a new voice has entered the fray. George R. Lucas Jr., a military ethicist who is a professor of philosophy at the United States Naval Academy, has just published Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (AltaMira Press).
Mr. Lucas—as you might imagine of someone who teaches at a military college—is somewhat more sympathetic to the human-terrain program than are the leaders of the American Anthropological Association. (He will speak on a panel at the association’s annual meeting on Friday.)
Participating in the human-terrain program might be ethical, Mr. Lucas argues, even if one believes that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are illegitimate. The major fears that social scientists have expressed about the program—namely, that scholars’ insights would be used to help the military choose targets—are serious concerns in principle, Mr. Lucas says, but there is little evidence that such things have actually happened.
It might be best, Mr. Lucas argues, for anthropologists to create a nongovernmental organization—"Anthropologists Without Borders,” in Mr. Lucas’s suggestion—that would advise the military but would not actually be employed by the military.
Mr. Lucas spoke with The Chronicle earlier this week.
Q. The social scientists who have enlisted in the human-terrain program are a diverse bunch—there have been anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, and regional experts. But the anthropology association has spent by far the most energy debating the program. Do you think it’s feasible for there to be a cross-disciplinary conversation about the ethics of the program?
A. Yes, there are people from all over the social sciences who are involved in the program. And so a conversation that goes on within the anthropology association is not necessarily going to have any meaning or jurisdiction for political scientists. But I’d say to the anthropologists that they should engage in conversations with colleagues in other fields, and not simply treat this as a matter for anthropology.
There’s an odd pattern here. Some of the events that anthropologists often describe as major black marks in the history of anthropology—like Project Camelot [a military-financed effort to study social stability in the developing world], in the 1960s—when you look at those programs carefully, there actually weren’t many anthropologists involved. They were other social scientists. But it’s anthropologists who tend to dwell on those events. And I don’t know what to make of that pattern. I certainly think there needs to be a wider discourse.
Q. Has the human-terrain program ever reached out to you or any other military ethicist for advice?
A. Not to my knowledge, no. Certainly not to me, and I don’t think they have to anyone. But the same can be said of the anthropology committees that have examined the program. Before the anthropology association issued its findings about the program, they didn’t seek any guidance from ethicists. And when you compare that with the history of, let’s say, medicine: —iIn the 1950s, when they discovered that they were involved in ethically thorny issues that were outside their domain of expertise, they called in philosophers and theologians.
Q. Why do you believe that participating in the human-terrain program can be morally permissible even if one believes that the current wars are illegitimate?
A. Yes, that’s the hard question. It struck me that the situation that the anthropologists are in is similar to the situation of a doctor who disagrees with the war but who might be willing to go over to the combat zone and help with casualties, especially noncombatant civilians. That person wouldn’t see himself as licensing or approving of the war. But I recognize that that’s a very difficult tightrope to walk.
