it's the most unprofessional shenanigans that one could almost conceive of. People just start reaching in the file drawer for whatever they think will work. They start implementing policies that were designed for a Soviet gulag primarily to induce confessions, not to get interrogational intelligence, and then out of sheer desperation, they start spreading that through the organization, and then after the fact, when it becomes obvious that, oh, look this turned out just as badly as the professional, the people that actually knew what they were talking about predicted, they shunt all the blame off onto low-ranking soldiers and then they try to justify themselves about providing any proof. When I look at the aspect of the torture policy that bothers me the most, I'm not even sure that it's the moral aspect, although it does morally bother me, it's the sheer and utter incompetence of the leaders of the United States military and our political leaders that just blows me away. It's sad.

Barry: since I last spoke to Ian, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and vowed to return to the Bush-era torture policies. Neither the new Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, or a Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, agree with that change in policy. Both of them served as Marine Commanders during the Iraq war. You're listening to Hi-Phi Nation. I'm Barry Lam. Ian Fishback proposed one kind of solution to the problem of moral exploitation. He wanted leaders to draw sharp, red lines between what you can do and can't do, making it so that soldiers didn't have to make a moral decision about how to carry out a detention. He wanted leaders to take complete responsibility for those guidelines and for command failures to implement those guidelines. But the more general problem of moral exploitation is not just within the army; it's between the government and its soldiers, and between society and its soldiers. I asked Mike Robillard about how he thinks we can minimize moral exploitation.

Mike: first thought is that the content of the military pitch to young recruits needs to be revised. I think there's plenty of young recruits that, they're not under any illusion that they might go to war and they might die or they might lose a limb or eyesight. I don't think that they're confused about that, but what I think is missing during the recruitment pitch is someone saying, 'look, you might leave the wire and have to deal with some really crazy triage scenario where you have a limited amount of medical resources and you have to distribute it between your own men and civilians.' That's not part of the content of the pitch.

Barry: letting soldiers know that tough moral decisions are part of the job is a start, but Mike Robillard and a lot of these guys from service academies in ROTC already take classes on moral decision-making, and they still don't feel prepared to take on the moral burden. What else is needed?

Mike: the state, at least in principle, does recognize that age factors into moral decision-making, with everything from drinking to marriage to sex, some of the most recent evidence in neuroscience suggests that the prefrontal cortex doesn't fully mature until age twenty-five. Ironically, age twenty-five is when the Selective Service time period cuts off.

Barry: raising the age of enlistment to twenty-five and changing the pitch might help prevent some cases of moral exploitation, but it's not going to get rid of the problem, and if you can't get rid of the problem, you might want to distribute the problem more fairly and equitably.

Mike: I don't think it needs to be the case that, in order to discharge their duty to soldiers, that everyone become a soldier, but maybe something like a war tax or a draft might be another institutional way in