Speaker Series: Yuan Yuan

When soldiers fight justly in a just war waged by their state, they may nonetheless kill or maim innocent civilians unexpectedly or in terms of expected collateral damage in overall justified assaults. Such incidents often inflict severe moral injuries on those soldiers in the form of immense guilt, shame, and remorse, which Yuan Yuan calls “the moral injuries of soldiering.”

These injuries appear to have a fatalistic flavor, representing a wound at the heart of soldiering itself as they haunt soldiers even though they have done the right thing in light of the morality of soldiering. In this paper, Yuan contends that soldiers do not kill in their personal capacity when they fight justly in a just war initiated by their state. Instead, they kill on behalf of and in the name of the people. While their state—representing the citizenry—wronged the innocent war victims, the soldiers carrying out the killings did not wrong them, thanks to the exclusionary power of the rules of engagement. While the soldiers share the responsibility for the killings as citizens of the warring state, their responsibility is no more and no less than that of any other citizen. Only if the citizenry takes up the moral responsibilities for the unavoidable killings of innocents in a just war, through public apology, collective mourning, and fair compensation, can soldiers be liberated from the crushing emotional burdens of harming the victims.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

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Yuan Yuan (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to this appointment, she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 2020. Her primary areas of research are ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law, with an emphasis on the interface between them.  

She is currently working on a series of papers on just war theory, which defends the core principles of the international laws of war by illustrating how political relations transform interpersonal morality in politically oriented or mediated warfare. She also has a secondary research interest in experimental philosophy, employing empirical methods to explore patterns in ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions.