the local cleric to just come shoot at us. So they're just poor, so, 'we don't have anything against you, we're just poor; we need money.'

Barry: Robillard's philosophical work today arises directly out of his own military experiences. It came out of his thinking as a young lieutenant in the midst of the Iraq war, a war that, at the time, he thought was unjust. What was a soldier supposed to do in the middle of a war they deemed unjust? He and a fellow West Point alum gave a presentation at a joint services conference in 2006.

Mike: when we presented that, that sort of polarized the room. To present it in uniform and I don't know that would have got us in trouble in some circles or not, but half the room hated us, half the room loved us. The Canadians, especially in the foreign officers, really loved us.

Barry: in the presentation, Robillard said something I found interesting; he said, that as a lieutenant in addition to leading and protecting his soldiers from physical harms, he had to ensure the ethical welfare of his soldiers. I asked him what he meant by 'ethical welfare.'

Mike: I think we were thinking something along the lines of, if you were a leader, then when you lead people into certain contexts, you're pulling them into this context where they're trusting you to to have done due diligence ahead of time to make sure that what they're going to do once they hit that context is most ethical.

Barry: to a young lieutenant Robillard, he sought as a military leader's job, to protect his soldiers from moral harms, or the harm you do to yourself when you do something unethical. The idea that someone doing an immoral action is, in fact, doing himself a great harm is a very old idea in Western philosophy. It goes all the way back to Plato in a dialogue that West Point cadets study: the Crito. In the Crito, Socrates argues that doing harm to others is a way of corrupting your own soul and that corrupting your own soul is the deepest harm you can inflict on yourself. This idea that there is something called moral injury is receiving a lot of attention in recent years, as psychologists psychiatrists, and philosophers have found it a very apt description of the trauma that many of today's soldiers face coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. A moral injury is an injury to a person's conscience resulting from that person's perception or infliction of a deep moral wrong, or when that person is put in the situation where they must make a profound moral decision. Moral injuries often result in moral residue, which is damage to the conscience that a person carries with them for life. It is this moral injury that a young lieutenant Mike Robillard was worried about when he started to question the justice of the Iraq war. He was worried that the injustice of the war was forcing him to put his men in a position of injuring their souls.

Mike: we do owe it to soldiers that we don't put them in contexts where there is an unneeded risk of moral injury. I mean, sometimes it's endemic to war, but if we can mitigate it, then we ought to.

Barry: this brings us to Mike Robillard's philosophical work, on something he's calling 'moral exploitation.' He believes that a lot of young soldiers are being exploited, but it isn't the usual kind of exploitation. To Robillard, exploitation requires two things: you need an exploiter, who is a person or group who is in some advantageous position; you need an exploitee, the person being exploited. The exploitee needs to be in a vulnerable position. It could be different kinds of vulnerability: being a child, being poor, or otherwise powerless. For the exploitation to occur, the exploiter takes advantage of that vulnerability to garner an excessive or unfair benefit from the exploitee. The usual cases we're familiar