Instrumental Morality Under a Gaze: Israeli Soldiers’ Reasoning on Doing ‘Good’

Abstract

AbstractSoldiers often use different kinds of reasoning to explain, justify or legitimize their behaviour. Often these explanations can be classified as moral, because the end goal is to do what is theoretically ‘good’. However, when looking more closely at the incentives for acting justly, we can see they are often triggered by other, more instrumental, motivations. I then want to categorize such reasoning and subsequent acts as instrumental morality. In this chapter, I focus on Israeli and I look at how their actions and explanations fall into three levels; the personal (protecting the self) focused on the group (the unit, or military as a whole) or even as considering the whole nation state. I will further show how this instrumental morality is often influenced by a ‘disciplinary gaze’. I argue in this chapter for a contextualized approach to morality that takes into account power relations, physical circumstances and interpersonal relationships.