The Moral Injury of Pardoning War Crimes [View all]
The president may feel like he’s righting a wrong, but he’s damaging the nation’s moral compass.
Post-traumatic stress — the nightmares, flashbacks and anxiety set off by terrifying events — is a defining injury of the global war on terrorism. But in the past few decades, the mental health community and the military have come to understand that there is a related, intensifying phenomenon called moral injury.
Moral injury doesn’t simply result from witnessing or participating in the horrors of war. Moral injury comes from participating in events that violate soldiers’ morality or, as the Department of Veterans Affairs describes it: “failing to prevent immoral acts of others, or giving or receiving orders that are perceived as gross moral violations.”
A person suffering from moral injury may be unable to trust friends and family, or the society that enabled the immorality. The injured can question whether virtue exists. Moral injury is often described as a bruise of the soul.
To avoid such injury, militaries long ago adopted procedures to ensure that those who don the uniform can do so with honor and then remove it with pride. One of the pillars of that framework is the military justice system; another is societal taboos against aberrant behavior.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/opinion/editorials/trump-gallagher-pardon-war-crimes.html
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