Morality Games 303 been silent over his use of conventional weapons to kill over 100,000 Syrian civilians. A Reuters/Ipsos poll at the time found that only 9 % of Americans favored intervention in Syria, but 25 % supported intervention if the Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against civilians (Wroughton, 2013). In the past, the United States has abided by the norm against the use of chemical weapons even at the expense of American lives: In WWII, Franklin D. Roosevelt chose to eschew chemical weapons in Iwo Jima even though, as his advisors argued at the time, their use would have saved thousands of American lives. It might even have been more humane than the flame-throwers that were ultimately used against the Japanese (“History of Chemical Weapons,” 2013). We say that the norm against chemical weapons is a categorical norm because those who abide by it consider whether a transgression was committed (did Assad use chemical weapons?), rather than focus- ing entirely on how much harm was done (how many civilians did Assad kill?). Other norms are similarly categorical. For instance, in the introduction to this chap- ter, we noted that across cultures and throughout history, the norm against murder has always been categorical: We consider whether a life was terminated, not the loss of useful life years. Likewise, discrimination (e.g., during Jim Crow) is typically based on categorical definitions of race (the “one drop rule”) and not, say, the dark- ness of skin tone. Human rights are also categorical. A human rights violation occurs if someone is tortured or imprisoned without trial, regardless of whether it was done once or many times and regardless of whether the violation was helpful in, say, gaining crucial information about a dangerous enemy or an upcoming terror attack. We even assign rights in a categorical way to all Homo sapiens and not based on intelligence, sentience, ability to feel pain, etc. Why is it that we attend to such categorical dis