KILLING FROM THE INSIDE OUT: Moral Injury and Just War
2015; The MIT Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-4148
Autores Tópico(s)Torture, Ethics, and Law
ResumoKILLING FROM THE INSIDE OUT: Moral Injury and Just War Robert Emmet Meagher; Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2014, 190 pages [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a 2006 book, Robert Meagher, a brilliant classical scholar, delivered the definitive translation of Euripides' play Herakles Gone Mad and argued that Hercules' killing his beloved wife and children during a bout of post-combat madness sheds light on the timeless psychological horrors of war. Killing from the Inside Out examines the psychological effects of combat from another angle, as it pertains to theory (JWT) and the theory's impact on injury' The title comes from the poignant story of Noah Pierce. A young infantry soldier during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Pierce became distressed by several incidents, such as his accidentally crushing an Iraqi child under his Bradley fighting vehicle. After Pierce committed suicide in 2007, his mother said, couldn't forgive himself for some of the things he did and that the kind of wound he had kills you from the inside out As Meagher correctly describes in Killing, Pierce's story is one of many attesting to the power of moral injury, a condition causing self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse, domestic violence, and suicide. Meagher begins his analysis with the roots of JWT in early western civilization. The concept of sin, he shows, was prefigured in the Greek concept of miasma (moral pollution). To the Greeks, killing always polluted the killer, regardless of intentions or the act's perceived justice. This pollution required ritual cleansing, what Christians would later call absolution and cleansing required suffering, read penance Great suffering even transmogrified polluted such as Oedipus and Hercules into heroes or even gods. Turning to early Christianity, Meagher argues that Jesus' life and words clearly promoted pacifism, and such was long the predominant understanding among Christians. This understanding shifted with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine and Rome's adoption of Christianity as the state religion. Quickly, the Lamb of God was redesigned as the Lord of Hosts Ambrose of Milan and his more influential protege, Augustine of Hippo, forged a new interpretation of the gospels--one focused on the spirit rather than the letter of their meaning--to legitimize Christians' serving in the empire's wars. Their concept of just war was much more restrictive than it would eventually become, however. Ambrose and Augustine, for example, strongly condemned killing in self-defense. During the Middle Ages, the church grew more powerful than the state. Meagher describes how this led to the concept of becoming more elastic. Medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas justified defensive and other wars through the principle of double effect. This dangerous principle can justifyjust about anything as long as one's intentions are pure Such dogma enabled the crusades, where a warrior's every sin found pardon, and JWT went, as Meagher vividly puts it, stark raving mad Meagher then examines the evolution of JWT from the medieval period to Early Modern Europe He discusses the Peace of God and the Truce of God, early versions of JWT that narrowly (and unsuccessfully) focused on limiting Christian-on-Christian violence. …
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