Abstract
Marc LiVecche's The Good Kill addresses the issue of moral injury among warfighters as a result of armed conflict.
Where post-traumatic stress disorder (or ‘shell shock’ in older conflicts) is defined by symptoms such as paranoia and hypervigilance, moral injury is defined by the experience of crippling levels of shame, guilt and sorrow (p. 3). Moral injury is sometimes defined as something suffered by combat veterans who have committed or witnessed acts outside the rules of engagement (e.g., the deliberate shooting of civilians). Jonathan Shay (Odysseus in America (New York: Scribner, 2002) defines it as a moral wound suffered when a warfighter is betrayed by a legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation (p. 23). LiVecche prefers Brett Litz's definition of ‘the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioural, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations’ (p. 25). Importantly, this means that moral injury can be suffered as a result of legitimate acts within the rules of engagement, such as the killing of an enemy combatant. This is clearly a pastoral issue: the experience of moral injury is strongly linked to veteran suicide. For LiVecche, the issue is also clearly a theological one, and requires a theological approach, not just a therapeutic one that seeks to minimize guilt after the event (p. 195). What is needed, he argues, is not just healing but vindication. Simply put, the problem is the widespread, culturally embedded, and church-sanctioned belief that killing is always morally wrong, even when it is deemed necessary. LiVecche's solution is to argue that, while all killing is evil in an objective sense, not all killing is morally wrong, and therefore not all killing is sin (p. 67). Sorrow is an appropriate emotional response to having legitimately killed in war, but guilt and shame are not (p. 70). Moral injury can thus be avoided, or at least mitigated, if warfighters are formed in a way that helps them to understand on both a rational and experiential level that killing is not wrong.
To make this argument, LiVecche turns to the just war tradition. Pacifism and nonviolence are set aside as serious moral options early on, and LiVecche selects Niebuhr as his chief interlocutor. For Niebuhr, the reality of human sin and the demands of history mean that love and justice are sometimes in tension, and the pursuit of justice (which sometimes involves coercion) must sometimes run ahead of the ideal of love, even as that justice is ‘seasoned with as much love as the situation allows’ (p. 57). The resulting Niebuhrian paradox that emerges—killing is wrong but in war it is necessary—LiVecche finds unsatisfactory, as it leaves warfighters bearing an unfair moral and psychological burden on behalf of the society that deems war necessary.
LiVecche goes on to argue that killing in war is neither sin nor a paradox: killing in a just war can be the right thing to do and, further, it can be a loving thing to do. The Augustinian claim that one can love one's neighbour by killing them (or at least at the same time as killing them) is explicated by means of a penal substitution approach to atonement. In the cross, we discover a God who is simultaneously wrathful and loving, thus ‘Wrath can be a form of an expression of love’ (p. 72). Love and war are not in contradiction but in mutual enterprise (p. 84). As an aside, this means LiVecche also defends the value of retributive punishment more generally, and the death penalty in particular (p. 136).
In another Augustinian move, LiVecche turns to intention as the mooring point for the moral value of an action. The question here is whether the attitudinal requirements of Augustine's just warrior are realistic: can one really kill another human being in combat while loving them, and without anger? Here LiVecche draws on the doctrine of double effect: it is possible to intend the good effects of something and accept the evil affects without intending them. As he puts it, ‘intention involves not just willing an act but also wanting the effect’ (p. 114, emphasis original). The two are separable: a doctor can operate on an ectopic pregnancy and cause the death of the foetus without actively wanting to do so (p. 111). LiVecche also draws on first-person combat narratives (as he does throughout the book) and concludes that the attitudinal requirements of a just warrior are possible for at least some people at least some of the time, and therefore not completely unrealistic. He distinguishes between rational and sensual wants, and allows that a gap may open up between the two in practice, particularly under the severe strain of combat. Soldiers who kill in moments of rage or motivated by revenge (who do less than perfectly what is morally permissible) may end up with ‘moral bruising’ (p. 201), but there is no need for them to suffer debilitating moral injury. He defends a certain ‘callousness’ and the use of dehumanization as appropriate defence against moral injury (pp. 163ff): these are not morally reprehensible but, like a surgeon's concentration and detachment as she removes a child's gangrened leg, a technique that enables the pursuit of a greater good. LiVecche closes the book with an extended picture of the dispositions and skills needed to be a just warrior.
There is much to recommend LiVecche's work. It is well-written and tightly argued, and first-person narratives are used well throughout. It is good to read an ethicist bringing the just war tradition into conversation with some of the distinctive moral challenges posed by contemporary conflict—insurgent tactics, use of civilians as shields, wearing of civilian clothing by fighters, the widespread use of tactics outwith the rules of engagement, and so on. We need more theological ethics in this vein. For readers already persuaded of the wisdom of the just war tradition, LiVecche's work may serve as a convincing answer to the problem of moral injury. Military chaplains working with serving troops, or others who encounter veterans living with moral injury in the course of their ministry, will find his work particularly thought-provoking and helpful. This makes LiVecche's work, by his own measure, successful (p. 14).
Those readers (like the reviewer) who do not find themselves at the far ‘hawk’ end of the dove-hawk theological continuum may find the book less satisfying. The danger of setting out with the express purpose of vindicating warfighters suffering from moral injury is the occasional impression that the cart is leading the horse: the moral injury of soldiers must be pastorally addressed, so we must configure the Christian tradition in these ways in order to address it. Readers of a more dove-like persuasion may find themselves asking, ‘Isn’t there another way to stack this up?’ Might not the psychological, moral and spiritual distress of combatants point us towards the conclusion that killing is always wrong (even if we do not blame combatants for it), and that active nonviolence or pacifism must be the Christian preference? (Brian S. Powers’ excellent Full Darkness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019), for example, presents the tradition in just this way.) With the aim of vindicating combatants also comes the danger of treating all wars as de facto just in order to justify combatants’ legitimate actions.
The tight focus on warfighters’ experience and inner intentions will also raise questions for some readers about the wider context of conflict and the bearing this has both on soldiers’ attitudes and experience and the morality of killing. In defending callousness and dehumanization as techniques to avoid moral injury, LiVecche draws on a study of Israeli Defence Force snipers. There is little consideration of the ways in which the wider Israeli/Palestinian situation (or other comparable situations) might establish dynamics of mutual dehumanization, in which dehumanization becomes systemic rather than an occasional technique employed by individual professional soldiers. As Judith Butler insists, we need to examine how people become grievable or ungrievable and the broader frameworks of moral formation in which violence appears as solution (Frames of War (London: Verso, 2016)). The possibility of ‘sin’ in combat situations is not just a matter of individual acts and attitudes, but also a matter of enduring patterns of relationships that, for good or ill, shape our moral vision and our sense of the choices before us. No book can do everything, naturally, and LiVecche does clearly state at the outset that he belongs to the just war tradition, but some readers will find this absence of a broader moral frame troubling.
Lastly, readers not entirely on board with LiVecche's take on the just war tradition may find themselves alienated by the language of the book, which occasionally leans towards a Boys’ Own idealization of the ‘realm of blood and iron’. In what is otherwise a well-written book, it is disappointing to find gratuitous asides such as the suggestion that, where a good person refuses to fight to protect the innocent, moral injury ‘might enter in where the good man's backbone used to be’ (p. 9); these should have been removed.
‘Hawk’ readers will likely find LiVecche's work compelling and useful. ‘Dove’ readers will benefit from engaging with it, but may find it rather more like a model trainset, in that it is admirably well put together and functional but they are unable to get on board. To all readers, however, LiVecche's work poses an important challenge, which ‘doves’ in particular are liable to overlook: what do Christian theologians have to say to those who are morally, spiritually and psychologically injured as a result of war? For rising to this challenge, and for the good points noted above, LiVecche's work is to be commended.