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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

The conclusion sounds reasonable and may well be correct. But I’d still be a bit worried about selection effects. The kind of person who signs up for a tour of duty to Afghanistan is probably a bit different than someone who signs up for a UN peacekeeping mission.

So an alternative conclusion / title could be: “Moral injury more common among those with high moral standards”.

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A better title would be "Likelihood of moral injury differs among different combat contexts," though that doesn't serve as quite a catchy title as the original.

The problem with "moral injury more common among those with high moral standards" is that "moral standards" is not what is being observed, rather, the study specifically finds "diverging effects of KIC on veterans from combat-oriented and peacekeeping missions-" making no judgement about personal "moral standards."

Your "high moral standards" bit seems to be an assumption about the difference between peacekeeping forces and combat-oriented forces (which sometimes even overlap) rather than something to do with the actual research article at hand.

This was most definitely not the case with my wife. Before Ukraine, she would never have even considered killing another human being. In the war it was very different. Every dead Russian was one step closer to a safe Ukraine.

Talk about your wife some more?

The emotional churn when watching russians throw their lives away in belligerent assaults in flattened cities, mined fields and the like, is difficult to convey; righteous fury I've never felt in another context.

I have to agree. Evolution seems to have placed human empathy on a spectrum -- some have a lot of it and perform caregiver functions within a community, others have less of it and tend to perform defensive function. While we may not have physically differentiated castes as do ants, it would be unwise to assume that all healthy humans will have the same level of empathy. Layer on top of that, military training designed to further attenuate empathy, and you get a very select group. That said, since that group is basically "soldiers", the claim "Soldiers can kill without moral injury", isn't inaccurate.

> Evolution seems to have placed human empathy on a spectrum

What makes you say the spectrum is caused evolution? I would say, based on what I've seen, it's caused by lifetime experience and parenting/mentoring.

> some have a lot of it and perform caregiver functions within a community, others have less of it and tend to perform defensive function.

Experts consider empathy an essential tool of conflict: it's required to understand the emotions of the enemy, which is necessary to anticipate and understand. Remember that humans evolved without literacy and possibly they wouldn't have understood their enemy's spoken language.

> military training designed to further attenuate empathy

I would guess that it's the opposite, for the reasons above. Also, afaik empathy for others is the same mechanism as empathy for oneself and that is essential for processing emotions, which is essential for handling traumatizing experiences. People with less empathy are much less functional under stress.

They talk tough, though.

There is a whole Wikipedia article about UN peacekeepers committing atrocities. Not sure if claiming that on average they have “higher moral” standards than people who sign up for the Norwegian Army is fair (and they at least occasionally face repercussions for their actions unlike the “peacekeepers”)..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_by_UN_peacekeep...

I don’t think people who signed up for the Norwegian army were randomly sent to Afghanistan. It was most likely a voluntary assignment. Thus the strong selection effect.

Overwhelming majority of soldiers (at least non US/UK) deployed to Afghanistan had very few chances to engage in combat. You’d have to be in special forces to get a chance to shot people on a regular basis, and yeah that’s likely a very small and self-selected subset.

I just don’t see the point of equating this with the lack of “higher moral standards” (compared to UN peace keepers at least) I don’t think that many Norwegian (or most other Western/NATO soldiers) were implicated in that many incidents related to rape or looting.

Not in my experience.

Did a tour in Afghanistan and Kosovo. Both completely just invasions, IMHO.

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