One death is as good as another, if death is what you are courting. - James Blish

Of course a sense of guilt has a threshold; at a certain level of intensity it begins to confirm the habit-pattern rather than inhibit it—

This senseless advance of expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter—men who as usual not only had no idea of what they were dying for, but had been actively misled about it—made about as much military sense as the Siege of Sevastopol or the Battle of the Marne. Certainly it was spectacular, but intellectually it was not even very interesting.

No exercise of will can make any of us other than what we are, or more than marginally better than who we are.