Moral Injury, Grief, and the Violence of War

Neither of the two primary ethical traditions that address U.S. military force—pacifism and just war reasoning—frame their critiques in terms of violence, instead using the category of “war.” Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on nonviolence, 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. Butler’s nonviolence is grounded in a commitment to the equal grievability of all human beings. The testimonies of servicemembers who have suffered moral injury after participating in war demonstrate how the embodied, relational experience of grief can generate a new, human-centered critical discourse on the violence of war.