The Protector Ethic

Discover how the martial way leads to a protector ethic

On July 4, 2015, Kevin Sutherland was stabbed to death on a Washington, DC, Metro car while ten passengers watched. The attack took three minutes. No one intervened.

Where would you have been standing? What would you have done, and would you have known what you ought to do?

In The Protector Ethic, James V. Morganelli, a martial artist with four decades of training, a master instructor in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu who lived and trained in Japan, and a holder of a master's degree in social philosophy, takes on the question most practitioners avoid: why train at all?

His answer is direct. The martial way exists to protect life. Your own, the lives of others, and, when your skill allows, the life of your attacker. Every technique you have ever learned gains its meaning from that obligation. Without it, training drifts toward vanity, performance, or plain thuggery.

Morganelli builds his case on the four cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, prudence, and courage, and tests each against real events: subway murders, hostage standoffs, Iwo Jima, Fallujah, and a 75-year-old chess teacher who stopped a knife attack on sixteen children. He draws on Marine Corps ethics training, Verbal Judo, natural law, and the work of Robert Humphrey and Jack Hoban. He takes on moral relativism, combatives culture, MMA as self-defense, and academic ethics with the same candor, and he grounds every argument in something nearly every tradition and belief system shares: human life has value.

This book will not hand you new techniques. It will change how you think about the ones you already know, and about the person using them.

Inside, you will learn to:

• Put ethics before tactics, so the right protective choice points you to the most effective physical action.
• Work through six ethical contexts for conflict, from escape and resistance to extraction, intercession, confrontation, and subduing an aggressor.
• Protect the victim first instead of attacking the attacker, the mistake that gets well-meaning interveners and the people they help hurt.
• Apply five rules of viability that keep your training honest and your techniques usable under real conditions.
• Train to fail less rather than perform perfectly, and drop habits that only work inside the dojo.

For the experienced practitioner, this is a hard look at what your years on the mat are for. It asks you to become the kind of person who walks into a room and makes everyone in it safer.

Read The Protector Ethic and know your “ought” before the moment arrives.

James V. Morganelli is a writer, award-winning screenwriter, and a teacher who has studied martial arts for forty years.

A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he majored in philosophy with a concentration in East Asian languages and culture. In 2013 he received a master of arts in social philosophy from Loyola University Chicago, where he concentrated his studies on applied ethics and natural law.

James has been certified in verbal defense and influence and is a master instructor in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu of Japan, where he trained for three years. Upon his return from Japan, he founded the Shingitai-Ichi Dojo in 1998 to continue his training, teaching, and outreach. James is also a staff member at Resolution Group International―professional conflict-resolution experts dedicated to teaching ethical, verbal, and physical skills to civilians, law enforcement, and the military. It is headed by Jack Hoban. James lives in Chicago with his wife.