Killing from the Inside Out — Moral Injury and Just War

Robert Emmet Meagher is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Hampshire College (Amherst) and a classics scholar with a long second career in veterans' counselling. The book combines the two: it is a historical study of the Christian just-war tradition from Augustine through the high medieval scholastics to the modern international-legal version, written by a scholar who has spent decades counselling combat veterans, and the argumentative move is to read the tradition critically through the lens of the moral wounds the veterans he has counselled actually carry.

Cascade Books (an imprint of Wipf and Stock, the Eugene, Oregon academic-religious publisher) released the book in 2014. The editorial register is theological-academic-trade and the book has had its strongest reception in chaplaincy, divinity-school, and Christian-ethics audiences; reviews appeared in Military Review (the U.S. Army's professional journal) and several theological-ethics outlets. The book carries forewords by Jonathan Shay and Stanley Hauerwas — the latter being Warren Kinghorn's ThD supervisor and the leading American theological-ethics voice in the Hauerwasian tradition — which signals the institutional location and intended readership.

The argument is structurally a critique of the just-war tradition as a moral-cover institution. Meagher reads Augustine's foundational articulation of the just-war framework not as a constraint on Christian killing but as the doctrine that made Christian killing possible by licensing it under specified conditions; the medieval codification systematised the licence; the modern legal version secularised it; and the cumulative effect across two millennia has been to give Christian combatants a vocabulary in which killing under authority can be told to oneself as morally permitted, and therefore to install the structural conditions under which moral injury is produced. The contemporary clinical recognition that combatants are nonetheless wounded in their moral persons by what they did under the licence is, on Meagher's reading, the empirical refutation of the tradition's claim to be protective.

The argument is contested inside Christian ethics. Critics from the just-war tradition (Nigel Biggar, Daniel M. Bell, Paul Ramsey post mortem) read the book as theologically thin — too quick to collapse the variety of just-war positions into a single straw target, too willing to take pacifist conclusions as already- established. Meagher's position is openly Christian-pacifist and the argument is meant to do political work inside the church as well as analytical work on the construct of moral injury; sympathetic readers see this as clarity, sceptical readers see it as conflation.

The relation to the moral-injury literature is methodologically distinctive. Where Brock and Lettini in Soul Repair write feminist liberation theology in dialogue with veteran testimony, and where Kinghorn in his 2012 article writes academic Christian ethics in dialogue with the clinical literature, Meagher writes long-arc historical theology that uses the construct of moral injury as evidence in a structural argument about the just-war tradition itself. The three together constitute the theological corner of the field, and they are doing different kinds of work.

The stake is theological-political and openly pacifist. Meagher is arguing that the appropriate Christian response to the empirical fact of moral injury is not better post-deployment chaplaincy or improved treatment protocols but the dismantling of the doctrinal framework that licenses the injury-producing situation in the first place. The position is consonant with Hauerwas's long-standing pacifist Christian ethics; the foreword by Shay is more cautious and acknowledges the position without endorsing the pacifist conclusion.

For the moral-injury corpus this book is worth reading as the just-war-side complement to Soul Repair and Kinghorn's article. It is also the book in the field most likely to provoke disagreement on substantive grounds across political and theological lines, which is part of its value. Read it after the foundational clinical literature and after the other theological treatments, so that the polemical force of the just-war critique is registering against an existing understanding of the construct.