Moral Injury, Grief, and the Violence of War

That the terms we use to categorize uses of armed force matter significantly has been made abundantly clear in the contemporary discourse regarding whether Israel’s current actions in Gaza are best described as acts of “war” or “genocide.” As this ongoing debate makes clear, there is a widespread sense that to label something as war is to legitimize it in some way. At the height of the post-9/11 wars, Talal Asad similarly observed that dominant ways of distinguishing “war” from “terrorism” performed a rhetorical move that rendered certain forms of destructive force morally and legally illicit while casting other, even more destructive, uses of armed force as presumptively legitimate. In this paper, focusing on the contemporary American context, I expand this analysis by noting a widespread reluctance to characterize what is typically labeled “war” as violence. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler alongside the testimonies of servicemembers who have suffered moral injury after participating in war, I suggest that increased attention to the violence of war grounds a critical perspective that centers the human beings who suffer the harms and devastation wrought by war.

The word “violence” rarely appears in Western–Christian just war tradition literature. There is a sense in which just war is by definition distinct from violence, insofar as the former is taken to be legitimate and necessary, while it is uses of force deemed unjust that are cast as violent. Not only does the language of war serve to legitimize state uses of armed force, but it elides the violent harm and destruction that such acts impose on human beings. As the testimonies of those who experience war (as both combatants and noncombatants) make clear, war is violent whether it meets the criteria of just war reasoning or not. But the violence of war is hard to see if—as is often the case in just war reasoning—the people who fight war and the people who suffer its effects are unseen.

A similar problem arises in many discussions of Christian pacifism, the tradition mostly closely associated with the rejection of war as such, which has often been justified as a form of discipleship that involves asserting one’s membership in an alternative community (the church) to the state. Stanley Hauerwas’s writings offer a paradigmatic example of this understanding of pacifism. One striking aspect of this position is that while it involves a deeply held moral commitment to not kill, this obligation is framed primarily in terms of one’s duty as a member of the church rather than being justified by a sense of empathy for those persons who might be harmed in war. (This is not to say such concerns are irrelevant to the work of Christian pacifists, but for many they play a secondary role.)

Judith Butler’s recent work on nonviolence stands out in relation to these traditions. Butler’s nonviolence is grounded in part on their concept of grievability. Butler writes, “If and when a population is grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose death would be grieved if that life were lost, meaning that such loss would be unacceptable, and even wrong—an occasion of shock and outrage” (2020, 105). As the language of “populations” suggests, Butler argues that there is a demographic component of grievability. That is, the “frames” through which we are able to recognize other beings as grievable humans are shaped by racism and colonialism. When whole populations—like those of the largely nonwhite and Muslim people living in the regions affected by the post-9/11 wars—are rendered unrecognizable by these frames and thus ungrievable, it becomes harder to recognize war in those regions as violence because we do not see the people who suffer the death, loss, and displacement war brings. Butler argues that this situation suggests a moral imperative to work toward a “radical equality of grievability” in order to generate a moral commitment to the equal protection of all persons’ lives. Butler’s account suggests that this recognition of others’ grievability is a deeply relational, embodied, affective phenomenon. If we agree with Butler that an attitude of equal grievability is worth cultivating as a moral disposition, then, we will have to look to sources outside of traditional just war and pacifist texts.

Butler themself does not provide such sources in their work, but I turn to testimony from perpetrators of war’s violence. In the U.S., the past decade has seen the proliferation of a new body of work critical of war, coming not from the perspective of pacifist or just war argumentation but based on the embodied knowledge of military veterans. While some of their critiques focus on issues such as bad leadership or exploitation of servicemembers, many dwell instead on the personal experience of having caused devastating harm to other human beings. Some, like Tyler Boudreau, an U.S. Marine veteran of the war in Iraq, describe consequent shame and self-alienation that they characterize as “moral injury”: a sense of loss of one’s moral personhood in the wake of perpetrating acts that violate one’s own sense of humanity.

One way of characterizing Boudreau’s account using Butler’s terminology is to say that Boudreau and other U.S. veterans suffering from moral injury are experiencing profound grief for those they have harmed. As Butler’s account suggests, Boudreau’s recognition of Iraqi civilians grievable leads him to a moral posture from which to criticize state violence. As Boudreau himself insists, to claim a moral injury is not only to “claim personal responsibility for perpetrating acts of violence” but is also to argue that the socially shared project of war ought to be critically assessed—and is to center the “harmed groups” whose devastation generated the experience of moral injury in the first place (2021, 67). In their documentation of human costs of war and in the affective, relational responses that they engender, these sources provide an essential source for critique of war—even “just” war—as violence that harms real, grievable persons and thus demands a moral response.