ABSTRACT
Governments often have ulterior motivesfor wagingwar. Even when such motives do not affect the ad bellum status of the war, they can cause or exacerbate moral injury among combatants fighting in that war. In this chapter, Bazargan-Forward argues that civilian and military leaders, by virtue of their practical authority over combatants serving in the military, confer upon those combatants a particular purpose. The ulterior motives that the leaders harbor constitutively determine the content of the purpose they confer upon a soldier. Even if the war and the soldier’s conduct in it are ex hypothesi just, the soldier’s sense of integrity might demand more: that she helps kill only for scrupulous purposes. It might be impossible to reconcile such demands with the cynical purpose that her opportunistic leaders confer upon her. This failure to justify to herself the carnage she helps cause can exacerbate the severity of any psychological trauma she suffers. The result is that ulterior motives a government harbors in war, even if irrelevant to the ad bellum status of that war, can be a source of moral injury.
