Mark D. White

As Jonathan noted previously, the philosophers' magazine (tpm) has been running a series of the top 50 Ideas of the 21st Century, and today's entry, #42, is "The Moral Psychology of War" by one of my favorite philosophers, Nancy Sherman, author of The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue, and The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue.

From the article:

Going to war inevitably turns policymakers and academics to philosophical justifications of war and its conduct. And so, unsurprisingly, there has been a renaissance over the past ten years in just war theory. But what we need moral clarity about is not just whether a war or its prosecution is justified, but how soldiers bear the moral weight of war. Soldiers go to war to fight external enemies, in Iraq and Afghanistan today, or in Europe and the Pacific in my father’s era. But most, at least the honest among them, fight inner wars as well. They wrestle with the guilt of luck and accident, and the uneasy burden of killing and leaving the killing behind. For some, what weighs heavy is the sense of betrayal that is part of the moral shadowland of wartime interrogation – of building intimate rapport with a detainee only to exploit it. For others, the moral burden comes with killing civilians, as part of the permissible, but no less wrenching collateral damage of war.