Yuan Yuan

When soldiers fight as required by justified military norms in just wars waged by their state, they may nonetheless kill or maim innocent civilians, either unexpectedly or as foreseeable collateral damage. Such incidents often inflict severe moral injuries on those soldiers, haunting them even though they have fought just wars justly, which seems deeply unfair. I first argue that it is normal and fitting for severe non-culpable rights infringements to evoke intense negative agential emotions, which I describe as proportional quasi-remorse. However, I argue that the agent who should bear proportional quasi-remorse for norm-required rights infringements in just wars is not the soldiers who directly cause harm but the citizenry on whose behalf the soldiers fight. By drawing on the metaphysical dualism of soldiers’ actions in war and the exclusionary power of justified military norms, I contend that when just soldiers act as required by justified military norms, resulting in infringing others’ rights, the soldiers do not infringe those rights, while the state—representing the citizenry and acting through the soldier—does. By relocating quasi-remorse proportional to norm-required rights infringements from soldiers to the citizenry, my account dismantles a primary normative foundation of the moral injuries suffered by those soldiers.