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Names: LiVecche, Marc, author.
Title: The good kill: just war and moral injury / Marc LiVecche. Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037846 (print) | LCCN 2020037847 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197515808 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780197515822 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Just war doctrine. | War (Philosophy) Classification: LCC U22 .L588 2021 (print) | LCC U22 (ebook) | DDC 172/.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037846
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037847
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197515808.001.0001
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To those who fight not for love of fighting, but for what they defend; to the commanders and chaplains who support their doing so; to those who teach (or taught) them all how—most especially JBE. And to my family: Kara, Dominic, and Naomi (who help make clear why we fight).
I contend that fortitude in war has its roots in morality.
Lord Moran
Foreword
While at first blush it might seem ironic, if not contradictory, for an Army Chaplain to write in support of a book entitled The Good Kill, in fact it is not so. As he identifies in this work, Marc LiVecche is both a Christian realist and a scholar of military ethics practically interested in helping warriors either prevent or recover from moral injury. While not necessarily claimed as a pastoral impulse, his motivation to fortify the warrior through the ethical lens of the just war tradition flags LiVecche as an ally in my task as “Padre” to help those who bear the cost of battle, often long after they have left the battlefield. Both of us are concerned with the care and maintenance of the imago dei of those who serve in the profession of arms, that is, in shorthand, with the care of their souls.
Books such as this are always relevant, but The Good Kill is all the more timely given our growing understanding of moral injury as an enduring cost of war. LiVecche’s signal contribution is helping warfighters think rightly about the morally traumatic aspects of warfighting; here, the basic task of killing the enemy. Importantly, LiVecche doesn’t dismiss this trauma; he contextualizes it, as he does when reflecting upon the importance of intention in the use of lethal force or when making crucial distinctions between moral and nonmoral evil, guilt and grief, and moral injury and moral bruising. More than this, however, The Good Kill has significance for to the profession of arms that goes beyond any pastorally collaborative intent I share with my colleague, rich as our alliance has been and will continue to be.
This work is all the more vital because warfare in the twenty-first century is rapidly contextualizing along a trajectory hitherto unknown in human history. Because of the rapid and ever-increasing development of technology in relation to warfare, the most salient feature of this new pathway will be a marked increase of the speed of war, particularly decision-making. As artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapons systems (AWS) become ever more predominate on the battlefield, new questions emerge as to how much control human beings will retain of future combat. Given the rise of fifthdomain warfare and multidomain battle—simultaneous, integrated combat action in and through land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace—there is a basis
to wonder whether traditional constructs such as land borders, the rule of law, and regulatory theories such as the moral frameworks of jus ad bello and jus in bello will continue to allow militaries to maintain control of warfare in concert with national interests.
In the midst of such changes, however, some things will remain the same. While nation states will make the increasingly thorny problem of conventional conflict with peer or near-peer competitors the centerpiece of their strategic concepts and plans, proxy and civil wars and nonstate terrorism will continue to flourish, as will the threats of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear war. Moreover, such ongoing threats will endanger an increasingly urbanized world. In 1950, the world’s city-dwelling population was 746 million. In 2018, it was 4.2 billion. History reminds us—nowhere more horrifically than the recent battle for Aleppo in Syria—of war’s ruinous horrors when operations occur in high-density cities. Urban combat tends to be a long, plodding nightmare of attrition resulting in staggering resource costs and human casualties as well as taking a severe toll on quotidian goods such as health, dignity, education, and livelihoods. Advanced technologies can mitigate these costs, but they cannot eliminate them. Smart weapons and precision strikes are only as good as the information that supports them— and the commitment to use them. Mistakes happen. And the longer highintensity combat continues, the greater the possibility that even the most ethically committed warfighters will falter in their commitment to discrimination and proportionality. The onset of high-speed, incredibly destructive combat in densely packed urban settings in and among civilians will make plain the continued cost of war—not just in the physical devastation of urban infrastructures and human bodies, but in the moral and spiritual wounds that transgress the human soul.
As Unites States Army operational doctrine states, “War is chaotic, lethal, and a fundamentally human endeavor. It is a clash of wills fought among and between people. All war is inherently about changing human behavior, with each side trying to alter the behavior of the other by force of arms.”1 However much combat changes, it remains that people will continue to be the singular political and military center of gravity in future war. This is essential to comprehend. In war, the center of gravity is that which decisively affords a combatant freedom of action and advantage over an opponent. Thus, one must defend one’s center of gravity at all costs while seeking to attack and negate the effect of an opponent’s center of gravity
The Good Kill registers this basic truth: war will remain a human contest of national will and policy, but one still fought by warriors who are human beings before they are combatants. Advancements in both AI and AWS are bearing this truth out, as nation states are regulating new technologies with increasing human control precisely because it is in their best interests to do so. How and why? At a practical level, we’ve all read enough sci-fi to know that the enemy can always breach and compromise preprogrammed network and technological systems that we have given independent battlefield autonomy. But at another level, human beings, at present, are alone capable of the kind of ad-hoc, discreet, reflective moral judgments that on the battlefield so often mark the distinction between an atrocity and a good kill.
And so, if the enduring nature of war is not changing, the ethicists operating in the profession of arms find their essential tasks essentially unchanged as well—only now they are faced with the conundrum of how to increase the speed, accuracy, and strategic acumen of their ethical reflection to align with the conduct and pace of present and future war. If they ever existed at all, gone are the days when ethicists in the profession of arms have the luxury of time to reactively reflect on how war is unfolding and then to render sober moral and ethical opinions. Instead, military ethicists will need to become predictive and forward thinking in their craft, integrating the vital conceptual ethical ideas of the past with how war is changing and then applying opinions to the problem sets of future wars. Ethics in the profession of arms will have to aid security professionals, warriors, policymakers, and government leaders before a fight takes place. After the brawl begins, the speed of warfare will quickly render such otherwise essential advice irrelevant.
In this way, LiVecche is boldly indicating the future of ethics in the profession of arms. He is attempting to help us “get left of the boom,” to coin a tactical phrase from counterinsurgency operations that seek to limit the effects of improvised explosive devices. Focused on, yes, the problem of moral injury, this book argues from a rigorous application of an in bello ethical framework that moral formation is in fact the most timeless and effective preventive antidote to moral injury in warriors. Indeed, The Good Kill posits that the rigorous preparation of the warrior’s character matters more in ensuring she or he will recover from moral injury than any other single factor. This, however, is countercultural. To put it bluntly, largely Western professional militaries have so focused on preparing
their warriors through accumulated tactical expertise through training, technological enhancement, rigorous physical conditioning, and, when wounded, through both prompt medical care and then behavioral health treatment modalities that they have largely forgotten that the warrior’s greatest defense against soul injury is soul conditioning. This work is a timely and timeless reminder that success in future war will always remain with the fighting prowess of the warrior, but that the warrior’s character will remain the lynchpin of a victory worth winning.
The Good Kill concludes with a meditation on a portion of General George C. Marshall’s 1941 speech delivered at Trinity College, in Hartford. As a soldier, I approve—and conclude with my own gesture to another section of that address. Himself a devout Christian who always placed the human soul in subservience to God’s providence, General Marshall’s wisdom rings true again:
War is a burden to be carried on a steep and bloody road and only strong nerves and determined spirits can endure to the end. It is true that war is fought with physical weapons of flame and steel, but it is not the mere possession of these weapons, or the use of them, that wins the struggle. They are indispensable, but, in the final analysis, it is the human spirit that achieves the ultimate decision.2
Here, then, is where The Good Kill marks a signal contribution to the profession of arms. First, it proves the perspective that the debate between the efficacies of technology versus the warrior’s soul toward victory is neither new nor mutually exclusive. Second, however, it does sound the tocsin that calls us to remember that we best serve our warriors when we best prepare them for the moral and spiritual cost of war. Long after one’s body has healed of the physical wounds of combat, the moral and spiritual wounds of war can continue to corrode a warrior’s soul for the remainder of this earthly life. Indeed, untreated, such wounds can reframe a warrior’s outlook on or hope in eternal life as well, making the cost of such woundedness far greater in scope than even many advanced, contemporary professional militaries understand. Third and perhaps most importantly, like General Marshall this book posits that the Christian witness about the worth and sufficiency of the human soul in war is indispensable to victory. The Good Kill, like the good padre, is a combat and force multiplier. Ethics in the profession of arms can aid us in
reversing the trend of solely trusting in the chimera of technology, and this book stands in the vanguard of works that remind us of not only the human cost of war but also the criticality of the warrior’s soul toward achieving victory, for it alone in the end is decisive.
Rev. Timothy S. Mallard, PhD Chaplain (Colonel) USA
Command Chaplain, US Army Europe
Acknowledgments
This book started life as a dissertation at the University of Chicago Divinity School. As such, it accumulated the normal array of student debts—the happy, nonfinancial kind.
First, thanks to my initial supervisor, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Alas, I was unable to thank her fully before her death. I hope she knows how grateful I am for her shepherding my work for the time she did, helping to bring me through exams and my dissertation proposal to acceptance. Jean: I only regret that I did not get to enjoy working on this together; it is poorer for it. I am so sorry I did not write faster. I missed you then, and I miss you still. The world could use you right now.
Much gratitude is also owed to my reading committee. Stephen Meredith, thank you for the encouragement and instruction you gave me over those years at Chicago, but more for your friendship, the opening of your home, and the enjoyment of shared libations—especially those raised in memory of Jean (thanks for trying to get her to slow down and for always sticking by her even when others did not). To Martin Cook, thank you for stepping in and for bringing your expertise and wisdom to bear in a way that, early on, made the dissertation better and, later on, has helped to make the book that much better still. Your service to the profession of arms and to the men and women who have taken up the call to stand on freedom’s wall fortifies my own commitments to serve them myself.
Finally, thank you to William Schweiker, who took over supervision after Jean and proved, as expected, a very capable Stief-Doktorvater. Thank you for the adoption, for seeing this thing through, and for allowing a personal sorrow and potentially professional disaster to be weathered as smoothly as could be possibly imagined. You have helped to distill from a pronounced loss the compensation of having been able to work under the guidance of two great minds. That this dissertation would be conferred with distinction says as much, if not more, about my supervisors’ ability to guide it as it does about my ability to write it. I can only hope that I managed to display some measure of the marbling of both of you.
Many others have contributed in crucial ways. Herb and Terry Schlossberg have always shown interest and support. Walking through the National Museum of the Marine Corps under the guidance of Herb (may his memory be a blessing) confirmed my commitment to ground my argument in combat narrative, in the real stories of the real men and women who fight our wars. George and Beverly Ebersole welcomed my family to their lakeside condo, allowing my clan annual opportunities for rest, fun, and good company. Other like-minded friends have helped with their insights, feedback, pushback, encouragement, bluster, and conversation: Daniel Strand, Lubo Ondrasek, Debra Ericson, Marsh Moyle, Timothy Mallard, Dan Wulff, John and Amy Giannini, David Blair, Joe Chapa, Keith Pavlischek, Paul Miller, Paul Coyer, Matt Gobush, Mark Melton, Shira Maguen, Luke Moon, the whole of the Tony Clan, Ed Brooks, Joe Capizzi, Eric Patterson, Chris Eberle, Ed Barrett, J. Daryl Charles, and James Turner Johnson, among many others. Thanks also to Theo Calderara and the team at OUP.
I owe a pair of debts to Robert Nicholson and Mark Tooley, the forces behind Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. First, they gave a freshly minted PhD the opportunity to help found a journal aimed at intersecting (really reintersecting) Christian intellectual inheritance with issues of statecraft, foreign policy, military ethics, and the like. My writing, teaching, and public and conference speaking work at Providence helped to field test many of the ideas in this book. Secondly, after my having helmed the journal for three years, they helped restructure Providence so as to make my relocation overseas possible, giving me the space and time in which this book could be finalized. Thank you both.
This leads to the mountain of gratitude owed to Peter McDonald and the McDonald Agape Foundation for their invitation to serve as McDonald Research Scholar at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford, where my dissertation became a manuscript which became a book. Under the founding vision of Alonzo McDonald (may his memory, too, be a blessing), the McDonald Foundation has long supported Christian scholarship in service to the academy and, increasingly, to the profession of arms. It is an honor to be counted among those they think worthy of attention. Thank you to Mark Maurice for starting the whole thing off. Lastly, to Nigel and Ginny Biggar: I am inexpressibly grateful to you for opening your arms, home, and lives to my family during our too-brief sojourn with you. Thank you for helping make Oxford a home. Nigel, thank you for the walks and talks, and for modelling the scholarly mind, pastoral
heart, and pugilistic grit; and for showing how each can flourish without tension in the same soul. And thank you for marrying up, and for sharing Ginny with us. Ginny: you rock.
Finally, and most especially, my deepest gratitude goes to my family. The extended famiglia includes some of the most gracious people in the world. A special thanks is owed to my paternal grandfather, my mom and dad, and my brother Christian—who collectively taught me how to work hard and to stand for basic goodness, in service, self-sacrifice, and as a shield against that which harms the innocent. To my children, Dominic and Naomi—for the moral goodness, grit, and bearing you already show in deep reserves; for the fairness, generosity, gallantry, and loyalty you show your friends; for the way you display, even now, the signature of God upon your being. Thanks for being my kids. You are why some fights ought to be fought. I love you and am proud of you beyond comprehension. Lastly, which is to say firstly, to Kara— I’m grateful, as always, that you are my wife and the mother of my children. Thank you for helping to raise just-war kids and for modeling how to “hate well and love good” and to take chances for what you believe. You are χαρά, indeed. On more than one occasion Jean admonished me to never forget that those Spartan men chosen to stand, and therefore fall, at Thermopylae were chosen not so much for their own courage or martial prowess but for the strength of their women to keep the family in their absence. “You’ll be no good to anyone,” Jean warned, “if your home isn’t strong.” Well, then, because of you, I have some chance at doing some good. May it be so—for His glory, now, anon, and evermore.
Introduction
In Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Pfc. Don Doll is the first soldier of Charlie Company to make a kill. Part of US Army reinforcements relieving the Marines on Guadalcanal, C Company is pinned beneath heavy fire while attacking a fortified ridgeline. During a lull in the shelling, Doll spots a Japanese machine gun crew repositioning a couple hundred yards away. He rises from the tall grass and squeezes off several rounds. One of the enemy falls.
“I got him! I got him!” Doll yells aloud, clearly exhilarated by what he has done. We then hear Doll in a voice-over, conveying his inner thoughts. This hints at a more complex array of responses. “I killed a man,” he muses, clearly astonished. Cognizant that some sort of line has been crossed, Doll’s conclusion seems tinged with both bewilderment and defiance: “It’s the worst thing you can do. And nobody can touch me for it.”
Malick’s source material, the novel of the same name by Guadalcanal veteran James Jones, delves deeper into the complexity. Alongside the twin pleasures of shooting well and stopping the enemy, the narration reveals that Doll feels guilt as well. “He couldn’t help it,” we are told. “He had killed a human being.” Like his cinematic counterpart, the literary Doll also believes he “had done the most horrible thing a human could do, worse than rape even.” And he, too, is impressed by the apparent lack of consequences: “Nobody in the whole damned world could say anything to him about it.” Doll, he confesses to himself, “had gotten by with murder.”1
The scene, in both its cinematic and literary versions, is powerfully rendered. The horrific awe at the killing of another human being is credible, even appropriate. But in response to the judgment that killing a human being is the “worst thing you can do,” I can only say, “Well, no.” For instance, surely killing an innocent human being is worse than simply killing. Surely, killing even a guilty aggressor when something less lethal would be equally just and effective in protecting the innocent is worse than killing the guilty when there is no such alternative available. And what about killing that is accompanied by feelings of delight at getting to kill? While not an action itself, such
elation must taint that particular act of killing, setting it apart from other acts of justified killing in which such glee is absent. So enjoying the fact that you are killing a human being, surely, is worse than simply killing a human being.
The specificity matters.
This book is an examination of killing in war in its moral and normative dimension. My primary task is straightforward: I argue against the commonplace belief, often tacitly held if not consciously asserted, among academics, the general public, and even military professionals, that killing, including in a justified war, is always morally wrong—even when legally sanctioned and practically necessary to avert an even greater moral wrong. I approach the question from the field of Christian ethics, standing in a particularly Augustinian current of Christian realism, a stream of political theology that strives to avoid both idealistic sentimentality as well as cynicism as it brings values to bear on national interests and personal and communal duties to act responsibly and prudentially in pursuit of justice, order, and peace in the world. My principal analytical tool will be the moral framework of just war, a branch of political theological reflection regarding the moral and ethical spurs and limits to warmaking in the context of responsible government and human flourishing.
Viewing the question of killing through the iron sights of the just war tradition will naturally distance me from the pacifists, who insist that one must never take human life, whatever the circumstances. But it distances me as well as from those secular realists who breezily dismiss the need to justify war by anything beyond raison d’état. So too does it open a gulf between me and religious fanaticism, which believes no justification beyond the command of God is necessary.
The Christian foundation beneath the just war framework posits that while the act of killing always results in an evil—the loss of the essential good of life—it is not necessarily itself an act of moral wrongdoing, or malum in se, evil in itself. This puts me also at odds with the unqualified assertion—a hybrid of the pacifist-realist extremes—that Doll, having killed, had therefore done something “worse than rape” and had gotten away with “murder.” Against this, just as rape does not characterize all sexual activity, Christian realism insists—as does both common law and common sense—that not all killing is murder. Just as there is a context in which sex is permitted, so too is killing sometimes permissible.
Here, too, the clarity is crucial. This work is motivated in part by the large numbers of psychiatric battle casualties suffered during combat operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan—indeed, which have attended military activity throughout history. Too often, combat veterans stagger home from battle suffering not necessarily from physical injuries as classically perceived but injured all the same. While posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has long been recognized as a psychiatric wound among warfighters, there is an increasing recognition that something else is at play as well. Many combat veterans suffer symptoms atypical to their PTSD diagnosis. Many do not present—or do not only present—the paranoia, hypervigilance, or other typical responses to life-threatening ordeals. Instead—or additionally—they display what is best described as soul wounds: crippling degrees of guilt, shame, sorrow, or remorse.
These soul wounds have come to be termed “moral injury,” an unofficial diagnosis distinguishing a psychic trauma resulting from doing, allowing to be done, or having done to you that which goes against deeply held normative beliefs. Whether as agent, witness, or victim, the experience of moral evil can lead to an existential crisis. This book focuses almost entirely on moral injury as it afflicts the moral agent, the doer of the deed. Here is where my assertion that killing comes in different kinds matters.
If doing something that goes against deeply held normative beliefs leads to moral injury, it should be unsurprising that a warfighter would be morally injured following the commitment of an atrocity—for instance, the wanton killing of an innocent civilian or the gratuitous infliction of pain on an enemy combatant. Moral injury resulting from perpetrating moral evil is appropriate; its absence would be a crisis. Indeed, we once called this the consciousness of sin. However, large numbers of warfighters are suffering from having done the most basic business of war: killing the lawful enemy even under conditions commensurate with the rules of armed conflict and the guidance of moral frameworks such as the just war tradition. The resulting crisis is revealed by clinical studies that identify having killed in combat—no matter the circumstances—to be the chief predictor of moral injury. Moreover, moral injury has proved to be the chief predictor of combat veteran suicide. While other issues such as PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and increased operational tempos can be contributing factors—not least because they can wreak havoc on service members’ relationships to the very people they most depend on for holistic support and emotional stability—it remains that moral trauma is a major catalyst behind the troubling uptick of warfighters dying by their own hands, casualties of war even after battle has long ended.
The response to this crisis is gaining significant momentum. An increasing array of clinical studies, scholarly and popular monographs, edited books, articles, and papers, treatment facilities and regimes, training seminars, and conferences have been deployed to educate, equip, and support both warfighters and those who care for them. To be sure, some of this material is of doubtful value, lacking in philosophical or theological insight, ethical nuance, or familiarity with—or even appreciation for—the profession of arms. Most, however, is characterized by a genuine affection for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, submariners, and Marines who fight our wars, a deep desire to help them fight those wars with rectitude and to help them recover when they fall short. Nevertheless, deficiencies remain.
I recently participated in an annual Operational Religious Support Leaders Training (ORSLT) for the US Army. ORSLT is convened by the Office of the Chaplains to strengthen the religious support readiness posture of chaplain sections, unit ministry teams (UMTs), and religious support teams (RSTs) assigned to a given theater of operations.
One of the plenary talks was given by a senior chaplain with significant theological and academic training, operational experience, and subject matter expertise regarding moral injury. He delivered an excellent presentation helping to identify the foundations of, and the similarities and differences between, PTSD and moral injury, to recognize the possibility for posttraumatic growth, and to illuminate the role of military religious support teams in leading combat veterans into that growth. The chaplain defined moral injury in essentially the same terms as I am here—as an injury that results when soldiers violate their core moral beliefs and thereby feel they no longer live in a reliable, meaningful world and can no longer be regarded as decent human beings. In discussing what the morally injured seek, the chaplain pointed to forgiveness and healing—such as might be found in the healing rituals performed by Native Americans, African tribes, Japanese samurai, or religious penitential systems; reconciliation; and meaning and purpose—such as might occur by finding avenues through moral trauma and into posttraumatic growth: increased maturity, new wisdom, and the like.
These are salutary prescriptions, especially when considering the wide range of agent, witness, or victim dimensions in which moral injury can occur. But if we narrow the aperture in order to focus only on moral injury that occurs from having killed the enemy in justified combat, I submit that a conceptual omission comes into view. A warfighter who rightly kills a lawful enemy and feels guilt, shame, or remorse over having violated a normative
principle might well need something not on that chaplain’s list. He may require vindication.
This is different than forgiveness. One forgives someone who has done something wrong and repented. Vindication is what is given to one who is proved to have done nothing wrong in the first place. Forgiveness is offered to the guilty. Vindication is owed to the wrongly accused.
If I am correct that it is wrong to insist without qualification that killing in war is morally evil, even when necessary to avert a greater moral evil, then not all killing in war ought necessarily to lead to moral injury because not all killing in war is necessarily morally injurious. While this is true, it is nevertheless insufficient to resolve the crisis.
This is because, first, moral injury doesn’t emerge merely out of a conceptual fog that dissipates with clear thinking. More than having to do only with the fact of right and wrong, moral injury involves beliefs about moral facts. It is therefore an epistemological concern as well; it has to do with what we believe—rightly or wrongly—is in fact right and wrong. Compounding the problem, beliefs can operate at both an articulated as well as unarticulated level. We may say we understand that some forms of killing are morally justified, but our gut-level beliefs—the ones that guide us in moments of crisis— might really believe that all killing is murder.
More than this, there is also a phenomenological concern having much to do with experience. One of the ramifications of this is that we might wrongly suffer moral injury for either of at least two reasons. First, we might have our facts wrong. We may believe we’ve committed an unjustified killing when, in fact, it was appropriate.
Secondly, and more significantly, we may know that what we have done is not morally blameworthy and yet still suffer moral injury for it, as might occur following an accidental killing for which we are not to blame. Imagine a scenario in which a conscientious driver accidentally strikes and kills a child. Even if the child were exclusively to blame and the accident unavoidable, it is reasonable that the symptoms of moral injury—grief, remorse, shame—would afflict the driver, even to crippling degrees.
So, on the surface, it seems right to agree that what’s important is not some external truth claim about the rightness or wrongness of a warfighter’s actions; rather it’s what the warfighter internally believes about the action that matters. But this is only true in a limited sense. It is true that what a warfighter believes about killing needs to be taken seriously—indeed, literally with a life-or-death seriousness. And the clinical evidence is clear that when
they have killed in combat many warfighters believe they have done something wrong, sometimes even terribly wrong. These beliefs must not, indeed cannot, be casually dismissed.
Nevertheless, when one is mistaken about the truth, especially when the stakes are high, it is most times meet and just to correct them. Particularly when the false belief is dangerous, as it is dangerous, even lethally so, to believe that all killing is morally injurious, charity demands a correction. Correction is charitable because it is right to vindicate the innocent, including when the innocent person is his or her own false accuser. In one sense, therefore, this book is an effort in moral persuasion. I want to help warfighters and those who care for them to reevaluate false beliefs about what it means to kill in war, to interrogate deeply held principles, and, where necessary, to adapt them, reinterpret them, and thereby to grow in wisdom, emotional and spiritual health, and resilience.
But there is a second reason why it is insufficient simply to prove that moral injury is not a necessary result of killing in war. The stress is on the word necessary. There is a distinction to be made between the claim that moral injury is a necessary result of killing in war and that it is unavoidable. The former suggests that there is no possible world in which one can kill in war and be free of moral injury—because moral law insists that the effect of moral injury ought to follow the cause of having killed. This I deny. But it could be that there is a world—perhaps our own—in which killing in war does not necessitate moral injury but in which moral injury is, essentially, unavoidable.
Consider again our unfortunate motorist who accidentally killed the child. It is not necessary that he suffer moral injury—he has not violated a moral law. Nevertheless, as the driver of the car that struck the child, he remains the causal agent of the child’s death. Unless one were simply heartless, it seems essentially unavoidable that great—perhaps crippling—grief would follow. The risks of this essentially unavoidable—if not necessary—link between being even a blameless act and moral injury is exacerbated, as we will see, by using the just war tradition as the framework for the morality of war.
While the just war tradition helps differentiate between killing that is morally permitted and that which is proscribed, the relevant moral principles— including attitudinal requirements—that ought to guide even legitimate kills are very demanding. For instance, one can kill, but one must not hate. In combat, particularly when the enemy has harmed your comrades, this is a difficult mandate indeed. If moral injury is doing something that goes against a deeply held belief, and if what you believe is that you can kill but must not
hate, then what happens when you kill with hatred? By using Christian moral principles to sever the necessary link between killing and moral injury, am I introducing attitudinal requirements that render killing essentially unavoidable?
To mitigate this, I suggest a distinction between moral injury and what I will call moral bruising. More will be said later, but, briefly, I take moral bruising to follow the same idea as physical bruising. That is, the bruise is a result of an impact trauma that falls short of a long-term, debilitating injury. I want to reserve moral injury for that justified trauma that comes from the guilt of having done something morally wrong. Moral bruising, however, comes not from guilt but from grief, even the grief attending action that is morally right—as is lawful killing in war—or morally neutral—as is accidental killing. Much more needs to be said about all of this.
To make a start, Chapter 1 explores in greater detail both the medical and phenomenological foundations of moral injury and its consequences upon the morally injured. I examine the clinical history that led to recognition of the need for a diagnosis different than, though related to, PTSD and zero in on moral injury’s relationship to killing in combat. I demonstrate the ubiquity of the belief, even among warfighters, that killing is morally evil—even if it is also morally necessary in war. Through again referencing clinical work, this relationship between killing and moral injury is then linked to the suicide crisis afflicting combat veterans.
It will not require a careful reader to recognize immediately my reliance on first-person combat narratives. I utilize these in part because among the first responsibilities of ethical inquiry is descriptive accuracy. If we get the facts on the ground wrong, our ethics will almost certainly falter. First-person testimony helps to ground this project’s conceptual work in the experiences of those about and to whom this project is most directly speaking. The words of those who have served in the realm of blood and iron help prove that clinical findings regarding moral injury have unique explanatory power in helping warfighters make sense of their own experiences.
This understanding, in turn, reveals a second value to combat narratives: they keep me honest. Even were I tempted to fudge the details, I am reminded that sailors, submariners, soldiers, airmen, and Marines— especially the enlisted ranks, who tend to do the bulk of the close-in killing— have highly sensitive BS detectors. They can detect twaddle a mile away. If this book indulges in nonsense—especially if born of a failure to try and understand the facts of a warfighter’s experiences—they will know. Worse, they
