Abstract

In December 2019, President Trump pardoned Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal convicted of war crimes committed while serving in Iraq in 2017. Did Gallagher commit these crimes because he is a bad person, or were his actions the result of situational factors, such as stress and fatigue? These different explanations of Gallagher’s crimes reflect two ways of thinking about the causes of war crimes and how to prevent them: character-based views and situationist accounts. Character-based views attribute war crimes to failures of individual military personnel to live up to military virtues, whereas situationist accounts focus on external factors (such as battlefield stress) as the primary cause of war crimes. While both situationist and character accounts highlight important aspects of the causes of war crimes, in this article I argue that they do not account for the fact that war crimes can (and have) come to be seen as compatible with military virtues. By not acknowledging this fact, these accounts of war crimes fail to address the fact that some of the most egregious war crimes occurred not because military personnel failed to embody the military virtues of their institution, but because they embodied them all too well.