Chapter 2 - Moral Injury and Moral Failure

Summary

Military service members may perform an action – such as killing – that they realize is the best thing to do in some situation, but that nevertheless strikes them as being morally wrong or even unthinkable. Such unavoidable moral failure may involve feelings of extreme distress and self-destructive behavior, together constituting a ‘moral injury.’ Service members (or veterans) often feel an anguished sense of responsibility in these cases, while other people do not tend to think it is right to hold them responsible. I defend this mismatch of reactions against the claim that servicemembers cannot be responsible for actions that were unavoidable, arguing that this denies something important that their distress reveals. Their tendency to hold themselves responsible may be a fitting response that correctly represents how it matters subjectively to them that their own action was unthinkable. However, others cannot hold them responsible because they have not violated fair, shared, normative expectations.