 Michael Crow here, President of Arizona State University. Sorry I can't be there with you on this really important conference on the Moral Injury Project and the Center for the Future of War. Our job at the university, among the many things that we take on, is to think about the future, to project the future. And one of the things as we think about the future of war is understanding what, in fact, happens to the combatant. What, in fact, happens to the person that we ask to implement our political objectives. Should we do about this? How can we manage this? How do we manage our society when war is becoming less and less prevalent, at least historically, that the number of people involved is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. So now it's possible, as has been the case for the last 15 years, to have multiple wars and not know anyone, even participating, to sort of see about it on the news. And so we've got really complicated things and this Moral Injury Project is a way for us to bring in different perspectives, mindsets, and really think through all of these things and what they mean, thinking about really complicated, hard things. That's what we do. We're excited about this being a project associated with our Plus Alliance between the University of New South Wales, King's College London. We're excited that this is all coming together in ways of really thinking seriously and hard about the future. And we're doing everything that we can to push and drive forward and maintain our role as a highly innovative, highly adaptive, a highly future-engaged institution. And so sorry I can't be there with you. Look forward to hearing some of the results from the meeting. Thanks a lot. So that was Michael Crowe, the president of Arizona State University. I'd like to welcome all of you here. Thank you for coming out early on a Monday after a long weekend. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the New America Foundation, which is the building and the organization that we are now in. I'd like to thank you on behalf of Arizona State University, which has a deep relationship with the New America Foundation, looking at complex questions of policy that require both academic and real-world input. Surprisingly hard to mesh those two. I'd like to thank you on behalf of the Center for the Future of War, which is a New America Foundation, ASU integrated activity that looks not necessarily just at war, but at conflict, the complexities of conflict in the modern world, everything from the disinformation campaigns that we're seeing in Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, to the more complex questions of, for example, moral injury and identity, which we'll be talking about today. I'd also like to welcome you and thank you on behalf of the Plus Alliance, which is an alliance between Arizona State University, Kings College London, and the University of New South Wales. The importance of that is that, particularly in the area of moral injury, we've tended to generally talk a lot in terms of anecdotal information and in terms of fairly preliminary analyses. Much of it has been by American scholars and American commentators of all kinds, and not much in terms of the cultural implications that may lay behind moral injury. If moral injury is in part a question of identity, then one would expect culture to be a very important variable. We haven't really begun to explore this, so one of the reasons that we're excited about the moral initiative here at the Center for the Future of War is precisely because we can bring in the experience of, say, Australian warriors who have been part of initiatives that have generally been led by the Americans. How do they respond to different situations? Does it enhance the possibility of moral injury if you're Australian or British caught up in a primarily American initiative or not? So one of the reasons why we want to take this multicultural approach is precisely because we think that there are important things that need to be explored in that space that we're able to explore because of our unique structure. So that's why we're here. And I hope you'll see that when you read through the report that we've provided. So the specifics of this meeting are to announce that initiative and to encourage all of you to become involved with it. The complexities of moral injury are very profound and although the concept has been with us for a while, I think it would be premature to say that we really have a firm understanding of the domain that we're trying to work in. And so it is our hope that this will encourage that. I should also point out, and this is one reason that on the panel we have people who are intimately associated with these issues, Ed Barrett from the Naval Academy, Bill Nash from the US Marines. We also would like to encourage the development of ways to address moral injury now. Some of you may have served in Vietnam or been in the military during the Vietnam era, as I was. And you know that the way the country managed those warriors was really unconscionable. And some of them have not yet recovered and some of them have managed to recover after a process of decades. Given the exposure to military operations that President Crow talked about, given what we're looking at now, our hope is, our fervent hope is, that we can help address some of those issues for warriors returning now so that they don't have to wait decades before they can begin kneeling. So that's why we're here. If you take a look at your agenda, what we have planned is we'll have two videos from our partner institutions. Andrea Elner from Kings College, London, and Tom Frane from the University of New South Wales. And then we'll have a panel on moral injury. With the panel, what we're going to do is we're gonna talk for, oh, 10 minutes each, plus or minus, presenting our perspectives. And then we're going to open it up to a discussion with the audience because we think that that will be the preferable way to explore some of these issues and get at some of the points that we may be taking for granted that need to be explored, that kind of thing. So that's our plan. And we will proceed now with the videos from our partner institutions. Again, thank you very much for coming and welcome. Imagine you're a soldier operating amongst people of a country who are killing, torturing, and raping each other. Your mission mandate is to remain neutral. You have to witness acts that profoundly violate your moral principles. You do not do anything about it. You feel ashamed about that. In principle, you have followed legal orders. In practice, you might as well have committed these acts yourself. You cannot forgive yourself for not having prevented them. You start punishing yourself. You're likely to have been morally injured. Moral injury, as I define it, is the result of either having to witness and not being able to prevent acts that profoundly violate your moral principles, or you have to commit them in fulfillment of legal orders. And that seriously upsets your moral compass. My name is Dr. Andrea Elner. I am a lecturer in the Defense Studies Department King's College London. We are based at Trivenham at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, where we deliver professional military education to officers at intermediate, advanced, and higher levels. My own research has revolved around civil-military relations, their sociological and political aspects in a historical and contemporary context, military ethics, and armed forces, gender, and war. I came to moral injury when I researched a study, a chapter I contributed to a book I co-edited called When Soldiers Say No, Selective Conscientious Objection in Modern Militaries. I looked at people who turned from serving soldiers who were committed to being good soldiers to war resistors as a consequence of their experience of the Iraq War in particular, but later also Afghanistan. A key theme of their public accounts was that they tried really hard to reconcile actions they were ordered to take or things they observed that profoundly upset their moral compass with their duty that they had sworn to fulfill when they joined the military and swore their military oath. So they found themselves in situations where they only had choices that led them from their perspective to conduct themselves in a way which involved morally reprehensible activities. In Britain we have since found that there is further anecdotal evidence emerging of soldiers or ex-service personnel grappling with issues that we would probably consider to be moral injury, but that's not what it's called in the public debate because our debate in the UK is not quite as advanced as that in the US and in Australia. There are also people beginning to look at both sides of the Atlantic at civilian cases of moral injury, but we here in the Plus Alliance are focusing entirely on military personnel. Now moral injury is often portrayed as an injury of the soul, as an injury of emotions or a psychological state, but we must not overlook that it is actually the result of moral reasoning of individuals not being able to find a way through conflicting moral frameworks in situations in which they have to not only take decisions but act upon that decision. So if they're unable to reconcile their moral standards with their actions, there is at least the high potential that they will be morally injured. The point is moral injury is not only a psychological phenomenon, and that raises a range of difficult questions. Does moral injury manifest itself in specific historical and operational contexts more than others? Can we identify common factors across national and military cultures or types of operations that make moral injury more or less likely? If so, can we learn lessons for reducing the risk of moral injury? Is it an individualized experience? Or does its occurrence and severity depend on the sociological and political context, systemic and organizational factors, and leadership along the entire chain of command? So there's a lot that we still don't know about moral injury. We don't know whether it's possible to prevent it. It might just be an inevitable and a fundamentally human response to the barbarity of war or the barbarous aspects of war. A comparative perspective on the investigation of moral injury, what it is, where it comes from, will allow us to try to identify common as well as very specific conditions for its occurrence, or even the absence of moral injury. It will help us answer the above questions that I've just posed, and explore what they mean for decisions to go to war, the conduct of war, and leadership before, during, and after operations. As an international team, we can promote cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives. So for example, from a British perspective, we would expect to learn much from exploring the operations in Sierra Leone in 2000, Bosnia-Hazik arena in Kosovo in the 1990s, the deployments to Northern Ireland, or the wars at the end of the empire. How do these operations compare to operations conducted by Australian or US armed forces of a similar kind or a very different kind? It is the principal aim of our publication to stimulate debate and scholarly, as well as policy-oriented research. To this end, we seek to cooperate across different disciplines and attract funding for activities that will help us grow our network of military personnel. Practitioners from a wide variety of sectors, including civil society and the arts, and researchers. And our aim is to advance, share, and translate our insights into recommendations of practical applicability. In other words, our aim is to grow an international community whose purpose it is to help us all understand the causes, manifestations, and consequences of moral injury, a lot better than we do at the moment. We want to reach out to those who are grappling with moral injury, as well as those who may be able to help, who may be able to help heal, or if that were possible, prevented. So in closing, I would like to thank Tom and Brad for inviting me to represent Kings College London under the Plus Alliance umbrella in producing this publication. May its launch be the first of many good things to come. Thank you very much. Hello from Australia. My name is Tom Frayman, I'm a professor at the University of New South Wales in Canberra. Let me briefly explain my interest in moral injury and why the launch of this white paper is so important. After joining the Royal Australian Navy just after my 16th birthday and serving at sea and ashore for 15 years, including doctoral studies that focused on uniform service and institutional ethics, I left the Navy to become an Anglican priest and was appointed Bishop to the Australian Defence Force seven years later. Following six years as a theological college principal, I started work as a civilian academic at UNSW Canberra in mid-2014. Our university delivers the undergraduate program at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra and maintains a lively postgraduate program with some 2,000 students of which about half are uniform personnel. The relationship between UNSW and the Australian Defence Force has spanned the past 50 years, allowing us to draw on considerable experience and expertise. Having seen the effects of modern conflict and peacekeeping missions on former colleagues and also some friends, in August of 2014 I gathered together an experienced team of practitioners and academics to focus on the unseen wounds of modern military service. We published this book, Moral Injury, Unseen Wounds at an Age of Barbarism the following year. The book's release provoked community interest in the inner lives of ADF men and women and started the dialogue that continues to gain momentum. With the establishment of the Plus Alliance in 2016, UNSW was brought into close and continuing contact with like-minded scholars at Arizona State University and King's College London. We soon found that faculty at the three institutions were interested in moral injury and what we could each gain from a shared conversation. After all, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have been close operating partners for more than a century. Australians have fought, suffered and died alongside Americans in the two world wars, in Korea, Vietnam, the liberation of Kuwait and more recently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, not to mention peacekeeping and humanitarian missions such as Somalia and Cambodia. There is then, I think, much to be gained from a common exploration of what happens to the spirits of our younger men and women when they're sent to places that we don't talk about at parties, to quote a well-known American movie starring Jack Nicholson. In Australia, the moral injury conversation has not been underway very long. We have, though, heard and overheard practitioners, philosophers and pastoral carers in the United States talking about moral injury and have only just started to concentrate on its causes and its consequences for Australians. Now, I believe we've come to two firm conclusions. The first is that those returning from recent operations indeed appear to have been affected morally by these experiences. These unseen wounds are among the unavoidable consequences of both the circumstances and the conflicts in which they have been deployed. Now, while some Australians serving in conflicts before, say, 1990, were affected morally by their experiences, it may be that the forms and features of contemporary Western culture and the politically contested nature when coupled with the specific character of operations after, say, 1990, have made uniform men and women more susceptible to moral injury. But this is a contention rather than a conclusion. We need to undertake further research to determine whether it is indeed supported by evidence. The second conclusion is this. As the experience of moral injury is apparent among uniform personnel deployed by their national governments, the culture from which an individual is deployed appears to have an immediate and important influence on the likelihood of a person being morally injured and the possibility that the wound incurred will be debilitating. In effect, the way Australians deal with moral injury will reflect an Australian outlook on life and living. But is this really so? Now, we expect that the experiences of moral injury among American, British and Australian personnel will have common elements. But is there a unique dimension for personnel from each nation? Now, we would like to answer this question because we think it will help us to isolate the impact of host culture on the experience of moral injury and to better appreciate how each nation can deal with the morally injured in their midst. The abiding concern is, of course, to help the many uniformed people whose lives have been disrupted and whose spirits have been damaged by their experience of service abroad. But we still know very little about moral injury other than that it is real. So the launch of this white paper highlights the commitment of the Plus Alliance partners and their faculties to the welfare of current and former serving members of the armed forces. So right now, I think we need two things. The first is material support for our inquiries. And we hope that a benefactor might see the importance of this work and contribute. The second need is for practitioners and scholars to connect with our project, offering their experience and expertise. It is a multidisciplinary inquiry. So the range of relevant insights and pertinent insights is, in fact, very large. I will end by conveying my thanks to my Plus Alliance colleagues, Daniel Rothenberg, Brad Allenby, and Andrea Elmer, and to everyone attending this launch. I wish I could be with you. But your interest is of great encouragement to us, especially to those on the far side of the world because we are with you in spirit. So those are our partner institutions. And what we're going to do now is have a panel. Rosa Brooks will lead the panel. And as I say, we'll have about 10 minutes of presentation from each panelist on their perspectives, what drew them to this issue, how they're approaching it. And then we hope to open it up to a dialogue between the panel and the audience. So that's our plan. And we intend to stick to it. So if the panel will come up, please. Good morning, everybody. This is the few and the proud for morning conferences. You see, I'm up here clutching my cup of coffee because I know from bitter experience that neither panelists nor audiences are entirely awake before about 10 a.m. So thank you for turning out for an early event. It's terrific to have you here. And what we're going to do is I'm going to just first have each of the panelists speak briefly about their perspectives. I'm going to ask our panelists to also, before we even do that, just briefly introduce yourselves. Obviously names and affiliations are in the program, but before I ask you each to jump into your prepared thoughts, I know you've prepared very hard for this. Before I do that, just to say a little bit about your own background before we do that. And then I'd like to have a little bit of back and forth between us and with the audience. So Bill, why don't you start and just tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to be the guy described as the Marine Corps psychologist in the program. Well, thank you. So good morning. I'm Bill Nash. I'm a psychiatrist. I spent 30 years in the Navy, retired in 2008, and came back to work in the Marine Corps two and a half years ago as their Director of Psychological Health. Just very briefly, my experience with moral injury has been from the ground up as a mental health professional on the ground with Marines in various situations. And so that's the way I see it. Thank you. And? Hi, I'm Ed Barrett. I'm the research director at the Stockdale Center, which is a military ethics think tank of sorts at the Naval Academy. And my background is 30 years Air Force, nine of it active duty as a C-130 pilot. The rest of it reserves. And in the middle of that, all that, I got a PhD, University of Chicago and Political Theory, ended up at the Stockdale Center running this program. We pick a different topic every year and bring in three fellows. And then the fellows, a few faculty and staff research the topic. And then at the end of the year in April, we hold a conference on that topic, which Rosa spoke at last year, that's attended by all the people in the military educational institutions that teach ethics, leadership and law. So it's a two day mini course in something that they're probably not teaching well or even at all. So last year's topic, for example, was the future conflict scenarios, trying to look past some of the futures issues that we're talking about now. This year we're looking at civil wars, interstate conflicts, secessions, revolutions, the ethics of all these things, coups, interventions and the like. So that's my background. Oh, and how I arrived here, Jesse Kirkpatrick back there from George Mason gave me a call one day and said, the National Endowment for the Humanities has this grant program and they want people to use the humanities to help combat veterans understand their experiences. And so we talked about it and I had a previous interest in this, which I'll talk about later, but we put together a grant proposal and it was just renewed for the second year this year. So that's my background on this issue, looking at it over the last two years in small workshops with a variety of people. And Brad, people obviously already know you, but you want to say a little bit more about how you ended up here. Yeah, the vagaries of fate. I was an officer during the Vietnam War, did not serve in Vietnam. And then I wandered into law school, was an executive at ATT for a while, served in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and then went to Arizona State University. The integrative factor in a lot of my work has been emerging technologies. And I ended up coming at moral injury from a very different perspective, I think, than most people who are involved with the process. Not from a medical or a psychological perspective, but more from a what is the impact of emerging technologies and the complexity that a modern warrior faces doing to the identity of the warrior. And so I tend to look at moral injury and all the ways of looking at moral injury that we're going to talk about are valid ways. This is a complex system and we're each giving you a perspective which is partial and somewhat arbitrary, but important, but valid. My perspective tends to begin to look at it from the perspective of identity, which is particularly given the politics that we're seeing, particularly given what's going on around the world, particularly given the complexity of information flows, what happens to human identity in a place like combat and how can a human being remain human through all of these experiences. And so I come at it from more of an emerging technologies perspective. So why don't we just go in the order we have people sitting here and don't feel like you have to fill 10 minutes. You can talk for two minutes or you can talk for five minutes or you can talk for 30 seconds because I think we're going to end up having a terrific discussion. So, but I think we're going to have a terrific discussion, but if each of you want to give some preliminary thoughts on how do you make sense of this concept of moral injury? Do you find it a useful concept? How have you seen it in your own careers and work? How much do you think the rest of us should be focusing on this? What should American society be doing about this? Bill, I'll start with you. Okay. So I'm going to give you a physician's perspective on this. This is my lens. This is my perspective. And actually I trained to be an orthopedic surgeon before I went into psychiatry and so I knew something about treating injuries. And an injury I learned is something that happens to you that you don't choose, that it happens to you and it breaches your integrity. It reduces your functioning and it causes pain. And moral injury, we're finding, meets all those criteria. We're learning what the consequences are for health, well-being, functioning, social, occupational, family. We've got, we're only just beginning to scratch the surface and all those things so we have much more to learn. But it's clear that it's a spectrum from little twinges and bruises to car crash, levels of moral injuries, where certainly seems that it's related to suicide, to violence, to a lot of adverse health and social outcomes. So what can we do about this? You know, as a healthcare professional and now as an organizational psychiatrist where I have one patient now, the Marine Corps, and I'm trying to help my patient stay well and get well. Here's the main point I wanna make. I have come to the conclusion that there is no way in God's green earth we are ever gonna prevent moral injury. And I think it's because we are hardwired to take blame in situations where moral injury can occur. Here's why I think that. Some of you probably are aware of the, what's been called the trolley experiment. There are many versions of it but moral psychologists have done research with human volunteers and they would put them in these hypothetical situations and say, okay, imagine this thought experiment. Imagine you're watching this trolley go down a track and it's headed right for five people who are tied up on the track and they can't move and they can't and you can't stop the train, they can't stop the train. There's a switch in front of you, a lever and if you throw the lever, it will divert the train, the trolley onto a separate, a different track but on that track, there's one person tied up who's gonna certainly die if you pull the lever. So you got a choice. Don't pull the lever, five people die, pull the lever, one will die. So in studies, they've done, I don't remember the data, I certainly don't do this work myself but in general, people wanted not to pull the lever because they didn't wanna have their understanding is they didn't wanna have their fingerprints on this but a significant number decided the utilitarian view is my job is to do something that will cause the death of one person to say five. So there are other versions of this and one of them is called the Fat Man version as a Fat Man, I object to the bias but so in this version, there's a bridge over the top of the track and the only way to stop the train is to put something heavy on the track in front of the train and there's this Fat Man and so you have a choice. You can push the Fat Man off the bridge onto the track to stop the train killing the Fat Man to save the five people. So here's the important finding. Fewer people would physically push someone in front of the train than would pull a lever to do the same thing, think about that. So what is the real world extrapolation? How does this work in the real world? Well in my world, the military, we have a third option, our nations have a third option. We don't have to pull the lever, we don't have to push anybody on the track, we can recruit high school students to come into our military services and do it for us. Right, that is what we do and they know it and they know their job is to absorb that harm to own it, to be responsible for it and not to turn on the organization that they love and revere and say, you did this to me. No, they say I did it. And this is up and down, left to right throughout the organization. It's not something you have to teach people, we're hardwired to do this. And every, I remember vividly a, I'm almost done, vividly a Marine who was waiting for a medical discharge from the Marine Corps after it was a double amputation from an IED and I was interviewing him on camera for a military culture training project and he was deeply wounded by his injuries. His greatest moral injury was his amputations. What did it mean to him? He felt like he lost that battle. You know you lose the battle when you leave part of your body behind. And he could not forgive himself for losing that battle. That did not, that was inconsistent with his identity as a warrior. So he has a choice, he can diminish the ideal he aspires to and just sort of let the blame pass through him or he can absorb the blame and say, no, it was me. It was my, I zigged when I should have zagged, I wasn't smart enough, blah, blah, blah, even if it doesn't make sense. And I think the moral young men and women that make up our societies will take that blame. The same way children will take the blame for their parents' divorce or abuse in the home and many other situations where moral injury is a risk. So that means that my job and I think part of our jobs is acknowledging that, okay, I'm not gonna take this away from you. This is yours to bear. But how can I help you with that? How can I help share that burden with you? How can I reduce that social distance because that's one of the greatest harms, I think, of moral injury is it just creates enormous social distance. You had experiences other people can't imagine. So I'm really excited about this conversation. I think it needs to be international. I'm just glad to be here. Thank you, Bill. Ed. Preventory remark, I'm not representing the Naval Academy, the Navy, US government. I'm just speaking based on my experience and reflections. And as I mentioned, I came at this, my interest in this topic through this NEH program that Jesse Kirkpatrick and I are co-directing. The NEH's marching orders were very broad. They just said, we wanna help veterans understand their combat experiences using the humanities. And the humanities specifically, meaning fiction, narratives, and poetry. So we actually read poetry and analyze poetry, which is something very new for me. And they said to pick two wars. We picked World War I and recent counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. So with several purposes in mind, we decided to hold two-day 10-person workshops comprised of three groups. Veterans who teach at the military academies, they teach philosophy, English, some social sciences too. And then also psychologists who treat veterans, some of them within the military system, the VA. And then also chaplains, military chaplains. So the authors that we read on World War I, you might not be familiar with, I'm just gonna read some of their names. Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker, Wilfred Owen, and Ernest Hemingway, you've heard of, and many others. And then on recent coin, the authors we read are, many of them are listed in the back of that report. There's an excellent two-page list in the last page of this report. And take a look at that. You read many of those. We read some Sophocles for good measure too. As far as the purpose of the workshops, while they can be therapeutic for participants, our main goals are just to deepen the participant's understanding of combat trauma and to provide humanities resources for teaching and counseling that they do. And happily one of our discussion leaders is this semester teaching a course at the Naval Academy on combat trauma using the syllabus that we provided for the workshop. So this is bearing some interesting fruit. So based on participating in this project, I wanted to offer five comments on contemporary accounts of moral injury. I'm doing this from a philosophical perspective just because that's my work now. I was trained as a political theorist, but I'm doing philosophical, ethical education now, and some of my best friends are philosophers, so I think I can represent the discipline pretty well. So the first comment would be that moral injury is sometimes merely, this is a complaint actually, associated with its cause and not also with its effect. In all of the literature, moral injury is said to be caused by actual or perceived immoral acts, so far so good. But because we are calling the injury moral the effect of the immoral act should also have something to do with morality as far as I'm concerned. Given the causal relationship between the morality of acts and an agent's character, the denigration of one's virtue should be a core aspect of the definition. For example, acting unjustly undermines one's inclination to give others their due, the virtue of justice. Many combat veterans describe this phenomenon culpable injustice, callous as one's attitude toward the value of human life. And when Jesse gave me that call, this is why I was extremely interested in it. I've had friends, Air Force friends describe guilt that they've held for years, 20 years, 30 years after the first Gulf War for things they'd done, and a couple of them came to me privately for whatever reason. I at one point worked for a Catholic archbishop, so I guess I was the closest thing to a priest that they knew, and they confided in me that this pain, so that was one of the reasons I was initially interested in this. Second and related comment, defining moral injury to include its moral effects avoids confusion with a certain type of spiritual injury, and I think this category is underappreciated. When we first started the NEH workshops, I was convinced that what people were calling spiritual injury was just moral. But I'm now convinced that spiritual injury is the loss of faith in the goodness of God or human beings that can result from the experience of evil in the world. Obviously combat, you see much of that. The religious version, now there's a religious and a secular version I think, the religious version results from the well-known theodicy problem, how do you reconcile gods, omnipotence and benevolence. A military chaplain, friend of mine quit his ministry after several years, I'm sorry, several months of tending to gravely wounded OIF veterans. In the secular version of spiritual injury, one can lose trust in authorities, and I think this loss of trust in authorities is mistakenly associated with moral injury. I think it's actually spiritual. We can talk about that. Third comment of five, accounts of moral injury that include morally relevant emotions such as guilt unfortunately fail to distinguish between what philosopher Bernard Williams called agent regret on the one hand and remorse on the other. Regret is the appropriate response to bad consequences for which one is causally responsible but which are either justified or excused. So combat examples where one should experience regret include intentionally killing an aggressor or accidentally killing an innocent. Remorse on the other hand is what one should feel and culpable for unjustified harm. But unfortunately accounts of moral injury use the word guilt to describe emotional responses to all of these situations. Now in cases where regret is appropriate, one has done nothing morally blame worthy and probably will not experience damage to one's character. The dependent variable I talked about before. In other words, moral injury is the wrong framework for these cases and they should be treated with explanations of why moral blame and self approach are not warranted. David Woods book describes a West Point professor, he's a philosophy professor and a veteran who recommends this exact approach. He thinks that much of what we're calling moral injury is really just cases untreated, misunderstanding false consciousness and really should be looked at as put under the purview of regret and treated more philosophically than otherwise. On the other hand remorse and vice accompany culpable injustices and should be treated differently. Fourth point, genuine moral injury which includes remorse and or character harm seems to be associated with several causes. And I'm just gonna laundry list these so we can talk about these in the discussion. And okay, I'll just list them. Fighting for an illiberal regime, although we could actually talk about whether fighting for a liberal democracy can induce some of this too. Fighting in an unjust war, killing combatants when unnecessary, killing child soldiers who are not culpable perhaps and therefore lack liability to be killed, abusing injured adversaries and prisoners, returning from a war to a society where there's a large experiential gap between civilians and the military, killing combatants for revenge or pleasure. So they're liable to be killed but there's a certain motive here and then also causing collateral damage. So finally in closing, I wanted to highlight the implications of these last two causes. Motives, ignoble motives and collateral damage. The fact that justified killing can damage an agent's character when motivated by the desire for pleasure or revenge indicates a need for new approaches to treatment and training. I'll just leave it at that. And finally, the fact that soldiers who cause necessary and proportionate collateral damage experience character harm indicates a need to rethink the permissibility of doing so and a need to reconsider the relevance of experience to our moral theories. Thank you, Ed. Brad. Great point. So let me just make a couple of additional points based on what's already been said and then we can launch into a discussion. The first point I'd like to make is there's always a question as you begin exploring something like this as to whether you're looking at a new domain or a domain that's already been developed. That is, in this case, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And I think there's two points I would make. The first is that there are clearly examples of moral injury that do not involve trauma to the individual. If you look in your book, there's an article by Doug Pryor who's worked in this area who talks about drone operators who suffer significantly because they see the person for a long time that they may be targeting. They begin to think of them as human and then they target them. And then, and this is where I think identity begins to come in, then after targeting those individuals, they get in their car, drive off their base in Nevada and they're home with their kids at a soccer game. And part of the damage comes from the fact that those two worlds are very different. Anybody that's been in the military will tell you that the focus in the military is on your mission. And so that gives you a structure. If you're a drone operator, that structure begins to break down. It sounds like a really good thing that these individuals can go home and be with their children and their families. And for many, it probably is. But for some, the difference between the two identities you're demanding of them becomes so great that you begin to suffer and that's Doug's point. So trauma is not necessary in cases of moral injury. The second thing I would say is if you're a veteran, being told that you have a disorder is negative. And the reason is that it implies that there's something wrong with you. A lot of time moral injury arises because you're a human being in a situation, combat, that no human being should be in. And so you suffer. And so the idea that that's a disorder is insulting. The idea that it's an injury is in part a recognition of the fact that you have been damaged but you have been damaged through no fault of your own even as you internalize it as shame or guilt. So I don't think we're dealing with PTSD. And one of the reasons that's important is we have ways now of trying to manage PTSD. Those ways do not work with moral injury. And I think that's an important lesson going forward as we think about appropriate treatment. Which I think is partially what we would like to do with this initiative and the reason that we regard it as important. We don't understand moral injury yet, but we do understand enough to try to do better institutionally. And I think that that's important. And I think it's important because we can move forward with trying to do things better for our veterans returning home today even as we try to understand exactly what it is that has happened to them. And so those need to be explored. Some of you will recall if you were involved in Vietnam that the way that we used to tell families that their loved ones had been killed is you'd have a cab driver drive up and go to the door and tell you which was not amenable to any kind of reasonable psychological state. The second reason that we want to start this initiative and the way we've structured it is precisely because we're at a point now where we can begin thinking about whether or not culture makes a difference. And that becomes important when to your point as you start thinking about things like training. Are there ways we can train individuals today? And we're not talking about people sitting up here who have been experienced through 20 or 30 years. We're talking about kids out of high school. Are there ways that we can train them that will make them more resilient to the kinds of things we know they're going to see? The kinds of things that combat involves. And if there are, then we should be doing it. And you can justify that for all kinds of reasons. But the obvious requirement is if a country is going to demand that of its kids, then it's equally important to demand that we do the best we can for them. And we're not. And I think that's an important lesson going forward. And it raises interesting questions. Are there differences in the way that regular infantry is trained, special ops is trained, are there differences in those training regimes that reflect differences in the way those individuals respond to combat situations? We don't know, but that's a really important question. Are there differences in the ways that Americans respond compared to Australians? We suspect so, but we don't know. What I do know, and this is anecdotal, is speaking to some of the individuals who have been involved in Iraq in particular, they perceive very different moral ambiguities in the initial war in Iraq. When we knew we were right, and the war now where it's not at all clear why they're there. So are there differences in that kind of environment? And can we do anything about it? And then, of course, hiding behind that is a larger question of social responsibility for maintaining a war where we're perfectly happy to balance it on the back of these kids, and not take responsibility as a society. And finally, I would go back to an observation I touched on earlier. Among many other things, moral injury is a disease is a injury to identity. And that, I think, is important because identity is becoming a battle space not just for our military personnel, but for virtually everybody in our society. We are increasingly defining ourselves by our narratives, by our ring-fence communities, by our identity. What are the implications of that as we move into a world where identity becomes a battle space where people are able to manipulate identity? Now, we know this has been done at a very, very crude level by Russian advertisements directed at US service people. As that filters into the military, what are the implications for moral injury, for guilt, for blame? We've always had this issue, of course, Tokyo, Rose, and everything else, but we're becoming much, much more sophisticated in the technologies. So as you combine emerging technologies with the challenge of combat with the fact that American warriors find themselves in something like 140 countries of very different cultures, very different experiences, very different backgrounds. What can we do now to try to mitigate, to try to help people adapt, both when we send them over and when they get back? Thank you all. So let me throw out a couple of questions myself, and let me start by saying, in some ways I find myself a little bit skeptical of the concept of moral injury, and it's for a couple different reasons, and one is that I worry that it is unintentionally stigmatizing, that most people don't distinguish between PTSD and the concept of moral injury, and that sort of plays into a stereotype of, if you are a veteran, you are damaged in some way, that that is what entering the military does to people, it damages them in some profound way, and it sort of fits into a stereotype that obviously we see in other areas as well, and I think it's very much a Vietnam era stereotype in particular, although it has precursors in other wars, the ideas of shell shock and combat fatigue as being sort of blame worthy, but certainly after Vietnam, this sort of a familiar cultural trope of the veteran who's been damaged by his experience who comes back and is homeless, can't keep a job, beats up his wife, commits a crime, et cetera, and I worry a little bit about the ways in which to lay people, this sounds similar, it sounds like we're saying, yeah, that's what happens, you know, you're a normal person, then you go off, you join the military, and you come back and you're just damaged goods, and we won't hate you for it because it's a disease, but we're gonna feel really sorry for you and we might not want you in our community workplace, whatever it may be, do you worry at all about that, in terms of, because I think that the idea of moral, just as PTSD a decade ago kind of gripped the public imagination, and we had a surge of media stories about PTSD, that the last couple of years we've seen a surge of interest in the concept of moral injury, and I wonder if you worry about it having that impact on the average American who doesn't necessarily know many people who have served. Can I take a shot? Yeah, I agree, I'm worried about that too, and I think there are two sides to that issue, in my view, one is blaming the individual, seeing the individual as the entire seat of the problem, that it's an injury to you as a person, as an individual, and so it's just between you and your God, between you and your family, between you and yourself, but like most kinds of social and even health problems, cultural, social, environmental factors play an enormous role, but at the end of the day, none of those other sources of inputs take their share of the blame, right? So, and PTSD is really not any different in that way. Once again, going back to my initial comments, we're not gonna talk those individual service members out of or veterans out of taking responsibility for their own ills and injuries, because like I said, I really think they're hardwired to do that, but I think it's our responsibility, my responsibility not to add to their burden by saying, well, this is, here's a new name, it is stigmatizing, so I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, similarly skeptical, that's why I tried to craft a very narrow definition, which is based not only on the cause, but also the effect with the focus on one's character, and many veterans come back just fine, their character is intact, they're perhaps even better people than they were when they left, and they're not wracked by remorse at all, so I think that you can see this bogeyman too frequently. Nevertheless, it does happen, and so in some cases maybe there should be remorse felt when there isn't, so I think you have to- Different kind of moral injury. What's that? That's a different kind of moral injury. Yeah, right, right. So I think you just have to be careful and define the concept appropriately, accurately, and then go from there. Yeah, I think that's, I think your concern is perfectly valid, I mean, it was when people came home from Vietnam, it was even worse, of course, they were baby killers, so the guilt and shame that they might have felt from being thrown into environment that they clearly were not trained for, was compounded by the fact that society rejected them, which in some ways makes them different than any other war that we've ever been in. And I think the result of that is why we can't allow that to stop an honest effort to try to address moral injury, because you ask yourself, how many of those people that did end up after 15 or 20 years or 30 years on the street or with addiction problems or with all of the pathologies, the social pathologies that came out of their rejection, not just their trauma in Vietnam, but then their rejection by their society when they returned, how much of that might have been avoided? How many people might have led much happier, much more productive, much more spiritually and morally meaningful lives had we not been so brutal when they came back? And I think the same argument applies now. If we know moral injury is happening, worrying that it may take some education on the part of the public shouldn't stop us from trying to address it. And Ed's point's well taken. This is not a military phenomenon per se. The military, as all of you know, divides itself into tooth and tail. And even with privatization, there's a pretty large tail. And I gotta say, when I was in the Army during the Vietnam War, I was stationed in Georgia. And whether I was defending Georgia from the US or the US from Georgia was never clear to me, but there was no moral injury. And I think it's important to recognize that most of the military, including people who do go into combat are not going to have an issue with this. But there's a number that do. And so I think the argument would be we have a moral ourselves, our society, we have a moral responsibility to them. So let me ask the, in some ways, the flip side of the question I just asked and pick up on when you said that the military, in some ways, it's not a monolith and in some ways it's also not unique. I suppose you could argue that to be human is to sustain moral injury, right? That all of us have moments when we feel that we've failed. We have moments when we feel that the universe has failed us, that we see pain and suffering that we can't alleviate or pain and suffering that, in some way or another, either through our direct actions and our decisions we've caused or simply through our emissions that we've failed to ameliorate. Is it useful, I guess, to pull this concept out and is it useful, A, is it useful to sort of pull this concept out? Isn't that, might I not just say, hey, that's the brakes, that's living. Nobody gets out of life with clean hands and that's part of what it is to be human. So is it useful to have this concept of moral injury or some of us more morally injured than others? And the second piece of that question I suppose is do we think that the military is sort of uniquely prone to moral injury as opposed to the people who are doctors or nurses or elementary school teachers or police officers or any of quite a lot of other professions or indeed just human beings, period? Well, I definitely agree that moral injury is not unique in any way to the military and veteran populations. I think it's, all of us are vulnerable to moral injury to the extent we have moral expectations of ourselves and other people. And the higher the stakes in any given relationship or situation, the greater the risk. So as a healthcare professional, I have moral injuries from failing to do the right thing for my patients, possibly leading to their death or bad consequences. And every healthcare professional I know has those wounds that they carry and after a while they get pulled up, they say I just can't do this anymore and they leave, they get burned out. That's certainly true. My worst moral injuries personally are as a parent because the stakes in parenting are in my mind astronomical, right? And I'm not a bad parent, but I'm not a perfect parent. But to go somewhat to your first question, as a psychiatrist, I'm from the bottom up, okay? I'm not gonna go around in Shakespeare's sonnet, admitting impediments to true minds. I don't go around looking for reasons to fault people or say, hey, you're having a problem. But rather, I see their suffering and I try to figure out, okay, what is the nature of this and how can I help and how can someone else help? And that is very compelling. And I think that trumps all of the top-down arguments about what makes sense, our abstractions, our labels. I don't think moral injury is the right term. I think it's an information injury. And information that cannot be absorbed by the individual incorporated into their identity fast enough. And this is the last thing I'll say, and then I'll shut up. In parenting, I'm not a child psychiatrist, but I've certainly had some training and work with families, but there's this term that's been used called good enough parenting. So none of us can be perfect parents, can't be perfect anything. So what makes it good enough? And one of the enduring perspectives on good enough in the world of child development is titrating the information that the child has to incorporate into their identity and their worldview, controlling that flow of information so it is never more than they can handle, more than they can master. And in the world of trauma, mastery is fundamental. If you cannot master the information because it's too much all at once, and the gap is too great between this is who I thought I was and this is who I seem to be. This is what I thought the world was, this is what it really is. If that gap is too great, then you're screwed. Yeah, as a cradle Catholic who's been wrecked with guilt from a very early age, I appreciate your points. You know, we're all morally injured at just part of the human condition. You can't avoid it. We're fallible, we're going to sin and we need to figure out what to do about that. Nevertheless, obviously soldiers are dealing with the right to life and taking what is otherwise a right that's extremely fundamental and so they're subjected to very, very serious moral situations and so I think it's much more likely that they're going to have very serious forms of moral injury in some cases. Yeah, we actually were concerned about that question when we were framing this initiative. I think moral injury is associated with the human condition. A couple of the other areas you mentioned, for example, I would be very surprised if those who are actively engaged in some kinds of espionage don't suffer from moral injury. That said, the stress of combat and the fact that uniquely among human activities in civilized society when you join the military, you are illegally and morally, to the extent you can internalize it, able to kill another person. In fact, in some cases, it's your job to kill another person. That makes it different and it makes it different, I think, in a very fundamental way. So that's why we focused on the military aspect of moral injury. Like PTSD, it may well be that as we explore it, it will spread further out and we'll be able to see it and treat it hopefully in other cases. But especially given the responsibility that we as a society should feel for our military, particularly for the young men and women that are coming back from difficult experiences, it seemed us appropriate to begin by focusing on this. Moral injury is not a well-defined domain yet and I'm sure we'll find plenty of examples. But it appeared to us that particularly given the exigencies of combat, this was a good place to begin. I have more questions, but I thought I would turn to those of you sitting in the audience to see if any of you have questions and we have a microphone. So if you have a question or a comment, I'll put your hands up and we'll bring you a microphone. And if you don't mind, please introduce yourself. Thank you. I'm Joel Garrow with the Center on the Future of War and I'm at Arizona State University. I'm really interested in your point, Rosa, about this being the human condition. Which I think is important. What do we know about people who come back from terrible combat who end up not morally injured? What do we know about, what's different about these guys? And if you come back not morally injured, does that make you a monster? Well, I gotta admit that's an understudied group of people who are doing well. Usually they're included in studies as the control rather than the experimental. But that's a really difficult question to even try to answer because everyone's experience of a deployment is so unique to that person. Even if you're a member of a fire team, for example, in ground combat and you're one of five people maybe who do everything together, your personal experience is gonna be unique to you because of what you did, what you didn't do, what you saw, what you heard, what you smelled, how you felt, what sense you made of it at the time and then what sense you make of it for the rest of your life. So I think in general, even the people who are morally injured grow in wisdom from the experience because you see aspects of life that good and bad that you might never have seen otherwise. So I'm not sure what your point is, but... Treat, thank you. How do you treat this if you don't know what health looks like? It's a great question I think and I think part of the reason that I pushed back against the concept a little bit not only is concerned about stigmatization of a large group, but also if you think of historically, warfare has been part of human culture forever more or less and there are all kinds of ways in which it seems weird to me to pathologize something that is a sort of normal human experience on some level and I worry about the sort of the disease metaphor. Are we kind of over medicalizing and experience that for most of human history has been normal for at least some period of their life for most, certainly most males in a society and what do we gain, what do we lose? At the same time, I recognize that there are people who do sustain what it's, I don't have a better term than moral injury but sort of I think it's a great question to ask what makes them different and here's just one tiny, I wouldn't even call it a hypothesis but just a query as we move forward to try to study what is it that we mean, what's the, why do some people seem to go into the most horrific wrenching experiences and they come out and they're okay, they say yeah that was terrible, it was hard to be part of, it was hard to see, I had to make hard decisions but basically I'm fine versus other people coming out of the same situation or maybe even a lesser degree of sort of moral weight and they come out and there clearly is something wrong, it's, they're struggling terribly to deal with it, I mean one interesting thing to maybe explore would be we do know that not for officers but for enlisted personnel that there is a, there is a above average or disproportionate number of people who enlist come from pretty traumatizing and damaging family backgrounds and this is a generalization, there are plenty of people who enlist who come from completely happy intact families in every way but I know that there have been some studies that suggest that the rates of family dysfunction among enlisted personnel are higher than in the similar demographic among civilians and lots of theories about why that might be so, one of which might be precisely that the structure and the apparent moral certainties of military life seem really appealing to someone who's coming from a difficult and unstructured chaotic background but one question would be are people who do come from backgrounds that are themselves chaotic, difficult, painful, dysfunctional in one way or another, are they more prone to experience moral injury in a combat situation or conversely maybe they're less prone to, maybe they're maybe coming from a more difficult background gives them a resilience that others who don't have that don't have but I mean I think it's a great question but finding out a little bit about is it the experience in itself or is it what people are bringing to begin with that renders them more or less vulnerable to this? So part of the reason that we want to work on this initiative is precisely because right now most of what we have is anecdotal and it doesn't speak to those kinds of questions. It's complicated by the fact that you may not know somebody is suffering from moral injury because what you're dealing with is people who are not going to communicate weakness. I mean that's not going to be part of their ethos and yet we know that this kind of issue, I mean Ajax, right, the play by Sophocles, Ajax is a Greek hero and he goes crazy, he kills people and eventually he kills himself because of what we would call something that looks like moral injury, that was what, 2,500 years ago, shell shot. The 1,000 yard stare that people talk about with veterans, that comes out of Sophocles. So clearly this is not a temporary or a made up phenomenon and it's very hard to tell when somebody has moral injury if they choose not to express it. How many people have parents who were in World War II and their father never talked about the experience? I'm sure I'm not the only one. So was he morally injured? Well, we have no way of knowing. But notice how important that question is for two reasons. One is it's important to know if there are some kinds of background, some kinds of people that are more resilient because then you could start doing things like saying, okay, these kinds of people might work better in combat units and you know what? You're kind of vulnerable, you probably would work really well in some kind of tale, right? Logistics or quarter master course. So there is a lot of important operational information that could come out of exactly that kind of question and the answer at least as far as I know today is that we don't know because we haven't done that kind of work because we haven't really gotten serious about moral injury. Peters? Oh, I'm sorry, Ed. Well, I was just gonna answer your question was why are some not morally injured? And just from our readings, from our workshops, we've had about eight of these workshops so far. Primary variables seem to be in the realm of ethics that they acted justly and with an appropriate attitude. And they know that they did that. They know the difference between acting justly and unjustly having a noble attitude versus ignoble. So in terms of then selecting people to avoid these problems, you would wanna select people who aren't, say, prone to revenge and don't take pleasure in doing wrong things. You just see a certain psychological profile you would want to not put in those situations and you would want to have people that understand ethics, ultimately, and train them. And I think this is a big problem. Many of these soldiers have probably not acted morally but they think they have because they don't understand the difference between licit killing, somebody who is forfeited their right to life and not. So I think that would be part of the equation. That observation and some of the other observations, and Rosa's written an entire book about the collapse of the boundaries between war and peace. And for a Marine who's now going to Helmand, for Bill Nash, perhaps, they're going back to exactly the same villages that eight years ago they took back from the Taliban that had been retaken. And so in these endless wars which the boundaries between war and peace are not really clear and there's no sort of victory celebration or admission of defeat, whichever side you're on, and this may not be answerable right now, but does that make this question harder, more complicated when everything is gray? Let me address that first. I'm not aware of any research, empirical evidence to answer that question. So God is my own anecdotal experience and in that I think the question you raise is enormous is because it goes right to the issue of meaning and meaning is fundamental in putting anything to bed, making peace with it. And I think that's an area where I think we could be doing much better as a society and as organizations that do this work of being honest, truthful, and then when events seem to contradict the ideals and values that we teach, helping individuals make sense of that. I think that is fundamental. Just a quick comment and response. Yeah, in the situation where it's not war and the possibility exists that the individual is going to be killing, I think that can create some problems. Traditionally, people felt that killing was permissible because they were told we were in a war and in these situations, those adversaries are liable to lethal defensive harm. Now when it's not clear that it's war and those individuals are not liable, you're gonna have some moral injury problems or at least a likelihood increase. Yeah, my evidence is anecdotal too but some of the people in our programs that we've talked to have indicated that they saw more problems in their command recently because the first initial response in both Iraq and Afghanistan felt justified. And now when you're just dragging on, it doesn't feel justified, which means that you're removing a very strong prop to the identity of a warrior. And it's more complicated because of the complexity of the operations. If you put somebody in a combat operation, they can work within a fixed time limit they can work within a fixed structure. But if you put somebody in Afghanistan or Iraq today, they're gonna be doing humanitarian work, they're gonna be doing nation building, they're gonna be doing policing and they're going to be doing combat. What we don't realize I think sufficiently is that each one of those is a different identity. We haven't trained, I mean, these are young kids, we haven't trained them to adjust to these shifts in identity. It's the same thing that the drone operators are suffering. We're telling them to shift identity, a very subtle, a very complex human activity and we're doing it on the fly in a situation where if they get it wrong, they're gonna get killed or their buddy is gonna get killed. And I think that's just, I think that's verges on irresponsible. Go ahead. Just wanna say something that's important. I think it's crucial that we do not use, that we don't politicize moral injury. And that's so easy to do because if you're depending on your worldview, depending on your politics, depending on whatever, it's easy to see the other side or some political structure, theoretical structure as the problem. And that is really to, in my mind, to do gross injustice to our young men and women who are bearing this burden. And to me, it's all about you're speaking with someone who feels they are ruined. They are ruined. Their life is done. They can't see any way to stay on this planet because of these experiences. Doesn't matter. Nothing else matters. Or if a veteran or a service member kills him or herself and your job is to talk to his or her mother. Talking about all this, is this moral injury, is it PTSD, is why did this happen? All that is irrelevant. This is about real people experiencing real suffering with real consequences. And I just think that's a real, that's a serious hazard in this one particular area of social policy that crossing that boundary to make it political is just disastrous. Jesse Kirkpatrick, George Mason University. Thanks, great panel. Rosa raised the point of the risk of stigmatizing vets and kind of furthering the trope of the broken veteran. I'd like to sort of turn that question on its head and wonder if anyone has found that using the term moral injury connotes to service members that they might be engaged in immoral acts. And what I've found in some of my sort of informal conversations and helping develop curricula for reserve and national guard members is that there's a concern that there might be a lack of understanding with what the term moral injury means and that service members or their family members or members of their community might think that it is a value judgment that's being placed upon their particular acts or the war in general, even though what they might be doing is perfectly moral or even morally praiseworthy in defense of a just cause. So I guess a question for the whole panel, which is that is there a concern that the lack of understanding of the term might be misunderstood in a way that they could be damaging to service members and their families? Yes, that's again why I was trying to craft something that was fairly narrow and especially focused on character because I think genuine moral injuries is not as rampant as some people think. But nevertheless, it does exist and I think it needs to be, I'm just repeating myself here, but I think it deserves serious attention also. So yeah, that's all. No, I think that's a very valid point and it's been raised by some people in our discussions as well. The problem you run into is that you don't come to a completely clear domain when you start talking about this. There's books that have been published, there's research programs. So if you start switching to another term, I mean first place there's a question of what term could possibly be appropriate, right? So you get into that whole argument. And the second problem is you begin creating gradations and meaning and getting away from the necessity of addressing the phenomenon in real time for real people who are suffering today. So I think you're right and I think the best, at least our approach right now is the best we can do is accept that there is a dialogue on moral injury and try to make it as humane and as effective as possible while admitting that it's not a perfect term. I don't know, if you have better ones, let us know. So we're almost out of time for our panel, but Peter, did you have another question? No, any other questions? Yes, in the back. Ariella, Larry Dachten and historian, writer, consultant. I realize that this may move certainly beyond the realm of individual enlisted servicemen, but I'm wondering about the concept, does it have any sort of conflict resolution, peace building capabilities? Is there a way in which perhaps at different levels and in different settings, moral injury can be sort of harnessed and used for constructing something positive out of it or at least some of the ingredients that go into it. Do you see anything like that? Does it have a potential positive outcome? Well, I think it's actually methodologically from the perspective of a philosophical ethic. This is really, really interesting and important because we, for example, say certain things are permitted and even justified in some cases, but if individuals' characters are being malformed in doing so, then that should possibly take us back to reexamine our theory in the first place. So I think that would be a positive result as a more capacious way of methodologically doing ethics. So I hope it's been clear, if not I'll make it clear now just because it's helpful. I'm speaking only for myself in this. Yeah, I think that there's two approaches. One is Bill's point about not politicizing. There's been some books about moral injury that have taken a very strong anti-war perspective, which flows in an understandable way from the discussion, but violates in some ways a lot of the way veterans feel about their experience because it seems to imply that what they were doing, what they suffered for, what they are damaged from was illegitimate and so that's a difficult dynamic that one needs to be aware of. More broadly, I think that moral injury to some extent is important today precisely because the civil and the military in our society have grown further and further apart and continue to grow further apart. Civil society has a very poor understanding of what the military is doing in their name and what they're suffering in their name. So I think that to the extent that moral injury becomes a dialogue that helps civil society to better understand the stress and the activities of the American military, it offers an opportunity for civil society to be more responsible in the way that that military is deployed. Because I think right now, the way that many people in civil society appear to view the military is that it's where you put difficult problems to get solved and that's not, I mean Rose's book was about that really, that's a naive and increasingly dangerous way to approach the world. So if it brings the military and civil society closer together, my feeling is it probably would encourage more responsible use of the military in some cases than some of our, well I'm a co-founder. And more humane and responsible treatment of each other within the military and between civilian and veteran communities. I see a lot of constructive benefit coming from acknowledgement and learning about this thing that is fundamentally, as Rosa said, this is part of the human condition. I guess to add one thing too, another positive, you mentioned enlisted and I think that's a good point to focus on. I think the training of officers is highly moral but I'm not sure about the enlisted from what I've heard, especially attitudinally, there's an emphasis that might end up being harmful to them and so this romanticization of war and the like is possibly something that needs to be reexamined and changed. You want the aggressive people in the military but you also want them to have certain attitudes that don't end up redounding upon their character badly. Last question. Good morning, I'm Scott Cooper, I'm a retired Marine and graduated from Ed Barrett's institution many years ago now. I'd like to draw you out about the one point and it's really concerning to me about the civil military gap that you've discussed but it seems that especially today there's this notion that, one, a civilian could not even begin to understand, you know, failure of imagination but also that they're not entitled to even try to understand. I mean this was most recently talked about at the very highest levels, that it's inappropriate for instance for someone to criticize the military that you could never understand. That's really concerning to me and I find it quite offensive. I haven't done anything that is so different that I can't try to help my family understand what I've done. You know, part of that responsibility is on me and it's wrong for me to assume that others could never understand. How do we start addressing that? So I think in general I think that's absolutely right because that attitude then becomes not a diagnosis of an issue that should be addressed it becomes part of the problem that causes the underlying phenomenon to be worse. So absolutely agree with that. I think a lot depends on the kind of experiences that you're talking about as well. I mean, I can't think of anything that I did in the military that wouldn't be immediately apparent to anybody. On the other hand, I was never in a very difficult combat situation where for example I had to shoot a child who was carrying an AK-47. When that begins to happen, I think that you, it's not maybe a failure of imagination so much as it's an unwillingness to accept what one as a civilian has implicitly caused to happen. I mean, there's one of our, one of the reports in the articles in our report talks about is from a serving American military officer who is concerned about the fact that he thinks that civilian society deliberately doesn't wanna know what he has to do in their name. Particularly when it comes to civilian casualties, it comes to those kinds of issues. I think it's a very, very complex discussion and I think clearly the increasing divide between civilian and military is exacerbated by a lot of attitudes on both sides and it's very dangerous. I actually wonder in some ways, Scott, whether it isn't part of, we live in an age of identity politics, we live in an age where we're constantly hearing claims from all kinds of different groups and individuals that the experience of being blank is sort of fundamentally unsharable. That if you're not, if you weren't in, if you're a civilian, you can't possibly understand what it was like in the military, if you're white, you can't possibly understand what it was like to be black. If you're male, you can't possibly understand what it was like to be female. And I think that those claims are both deeply true, obviously. I mean, you can never understand what it's like to be me, I can never fully understand what it's like to be you. And yet at the same time, that there's a terrible danger in those kinds of claims because obviously none of us are all one thing. You know, we're not just black or just female or just a veteran or just a whatever. You know, that we're many, many different things and we have relationships with many, many different people and the whole human enterprise is pretty much over if we give up on the idea that we can connect in important and meaningful ways beyond the many particular identities that make us up and have pieces that are un-sharable. And I do think that this conversation is part of trying to bridge those gaps, is part of trying to say what's unique, recognizing there are unique things, but even the unique things we can try to talk about and you may not have done that unique thing or experienced that unique thing, but there are probably other things in each of our lives that let us connect and say, you know, I didn't have to shoot a child carrying an AK-47, but you know, I feel like as a teacher, there was a kid who had bruises and I didn't ask questions and maybe that kid went home and got abused and I've never forgotten it and I carry the weight of that responsibility and how do we talk about that? And you know, one of the things that this discussion sort of reminds me of is other discussions of trauma more broadly, including trauma in the wake of mass humanitarian disaster, earthquakes, hurricanes, as well as trauma in the wake of human-caused catastrophes, genocides and so forth and thinking when you have entire communities that have been through something horrific, some of the research on how those communities heal runs very much counter to what I think is our American assumption, which is that everybody needs therapy because everybody's very badly damaged. In some ways, some of the research suggests that when whole communities have experienced something horrific that the best therapy is being part of their community and rebuilding their community in an ongoing way, that that sense of restoration, of reconnecting with each other in the wake of something awful and being part of the effort to rebuild is much more therapeutic than therapy, if you will and I wonder whether there may be some hopeful things here as well and I think of all the many projects ranging from a team Rubicon to a zillion others that aim to enlist veterans in a range of different projects to help others and that that, I wonder, and this obviously is an area for more research, but maybe this should be our final bit of conversation. When we think about moving forward, obviously we don't wanna say, okay, you're morally injured, too bad for you. When we think about the unique ways in which people may experience of moral harms, what do you see each of you as the, what's the way forward? Is it go see a counselor? Is it tell your story, write a poem? Is it go out there and build housing in Puerto Rico to replace damaged housing from the hurricane? What do we do? Well, here's my answer. Number one, take the focus off the individual. It's not the individual's fault and we shouldn't blame them. We should, and you asked a question earlier about whether pre-existing early life experiences, being abused as a child, all these things might heighten vulnerability and risk and all that kind of thing and that's where you end up. The more you look at the individual as the whole problem. So instead, and by the way, I was involved in a fairly large research project where we validated a moral injury scale and we looked at whether childhood trauma was a predictor and it wasn't. It accounted for 1% of the outcome. So here's my solution. Here's my answer to what next? Let's start looking at the larger inter-individual, social collective responses to moral injury. I mean, here's a great example. You could make a case that the United States was morally injured on September 11. You could make a case that many other cultures and societies have endured significant, repeated, protracted moral injuries as a collective. So how about let's look at what are those normal, not necessarily normal, natural, expectable, but processes between individuals as a group so that we take the heat off the individual. The more we look at this as a personal, one-person problem, the more we're gonna be tempted to look for solutions and prevention in the individual, which is unfair, I think. On that last point, I would focus more generally, you were talking about solving it after, I would focus on preventing it prior. And two things bring to mind, two categories of endeavor, first policy and the second education. On the policy side, just very important given what we've read in this workshop, these workshops that wars be just and be explained clearly as so. And that in war, the practices be just also so that it could be policy failures or seeing, inducing people to do certain things like torture, which are going to injure them morally. And then on your issue of non-war, but conflict, harmful conflict, I think that this needs to be studied more, what practices within those kinds of situations are justified. And then on the educational side, just very clear explanations to soldiers about what's justified and what attitudes are appropriate in doing those things. And I think the focus has been largely on the officers, but I think the enlisted need more of that too. Probably need even more because they're not gonna be as educated and experienced and as some of the officers maybe. I would divide it up into sort of three approaches. First, the sort of victory of post-modernism and turning every individual into an island, identity politics and the identity issues you were talking about, I think is part of the problem. I think that communication before, during and after one serves in the military in this case since we're applying it to a military situation is really important, but it's a different kind of communication. I'm not sure we know enough yet to be able to say exactly what kind. I think it would be useful to understand to Joel's early point, it would be useful to understand more about what makes people resilient to moral injury while allowing them to maintain their moral compass because you could turn out monsters if you wanted and that's not the way we want to go. So that's a very important question and once you know that, then you're able to do a lot of things before people are even deployed in terms of where they go. Their MOS is what responsibilities they have that can reduce the incident. During deployment I think the points that Ed raises are critical. I think it's important to anybody that's risking their life and importantly taking other people's lives including civilians. I think it's important for them to know why they're doing it and to be comfortable with that. Otherwise you begin to get Kafka-esque and at least in Vietnam by the end of Vietnam it was Kafka and I think that was very damaging to individuals and I think it was damaging to the country and to our society. And then afterwards, particularly when you're dealing with combat vets, you're dealing with people that are very strong and will not show symptoms particularly to outsiders that indicate that they're at all weak. And so starting communications within the people that have shared similar experiences. Not making it unique to their identity but sharing those experiences with people they can talk to who they're comfortable with is I think very important. Different veterans groups are doing it on sort of an ad hoc basis. It would be nice to see more organized and more supported efforts that give people that opportunity. But it has to be peers at the beginning because those are not the kind of people that are going to open up and talk to anybody about their experiences. I mean these are warriors and they may be hurt but they're not going to let that persona go. Well thank you all very much. This has been a terrific conversation and I look forward to seeing it continue and thank you all for all the work that you do. Thanks John. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks John. Thank you. Thank you.