This paper provides a preliminary sketch of an alternative theoretical framework for analysing the ethics of war. Standard approaches to the ethics of war take statesmen and leaders to be the primary moral agents. Moral judgment tends to be rational and analytical and the focus tends to be the relations between states. These approaches tend to instrumentalise the humanity, agency and lives of soldiers. The alternative approach will triangulate the theoretical frameworks of three distinct literatures: evolutionary approaches to morality, military psychology and conflict sociology. The first suggests that humans are endowed with a ''universal moral grammar'', the second suggests that soldiers have a natural disinclination for killing, while the third suggests that violence is only possible under extreme and abnormal social conditions. Together, these three approaches allow us to understand or frame the ethics of war from the perspective of those doing the fighting and killing. From here it is possible to ask quite different questions regarding the ethics of war: should we train soldiers to overcome their disinclinations for killing? Should we order humans into such extreme and abnormal conditions? Can we expect legitimately expect soldiers to bear the emotional and psychological traumas of war? In sum, does changing the terms of debate in this way delegitimise war and by what right can distant bureaucrats order the contravention of our basic humanity? I will argue that this ''first image'' approach to the ethics of war is a valuable corrective that can radically alter our ways of understanding the ethics of war and war itself - perhaps the quintessential international relation.
