The Weightlessness of Moral Gravity

A law&s;s clarity is a necessary condition for a finding of manifest illegality, but not a sufficient one. The gravity of the wrong must also be very great. Learning to be a soldier requires learning to suppress one&s;s initial moral revulsion at killing other human beings. War morally authorizes people to engage in acts that would obviously be criminal under any other circumstances. The normal moral intuitions of peacetime about right and wrong offer little purchase on practical deliberation in combat. Ancient and medieval stigmata no longer correspond very closely with the moral intuitions of modern citizen-soldiers about what is and is not permissible in war. The law of war employs distinctions that often sit uneasily with our ordinary moral intuitions. Intense feelings of moral revulsion, then, do not always signal the unlawfulness of the order evoking them. Medical specialists believe that the numbing of emotion is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress, including emotions of moral revulsion and indignation.