Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group harm—with (...) religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

This book looks at what it means to be wronged, and why we react to wrongdoing in ways that can cause us more suffering and pain. An alternative approach called 'restorative justice' is proposed as a safe and effective way of avoiding these reactions whilst honouring our values and our common humanity.

Moral injury is a term whose popularity has grown in psychology and psychiatry, as well as philosophy, over the last several years. This presents challenges, because these fields use the term in different ways and draw their understanding from different sources, creating the potential for contradiction. This, however, is also an opportunity. Comparison between behavioral sciences and philosophy can help enrich understandings of harms considered not just psychological but moral. To this end, I provide an overview of the more influential (...) writing of moral injury, mapping them into three broad discourses: clinical, juridical-critical, and structural. This overview then leads to a discussion of how comparative engagement among these discourses promises to expand on current theories of moral harm. I argue that such a comparison will demonstrate that more emphasis on structural violence will strengthen current understandings of moral injury, often understood in a more narrow sense to be a result of more direct, physical violence, allowing us to view moral injury as a result of institutional and social violence and injustices. (shrink)

Moral injury describes the effects of violence on veterans beyond what trauma discourse can describe. I put moral injury in conversation with a separate but related concept, dirty hands. Focusing on Michael Walzer's framing of dirty hands and Jonathan Shay's understanding of moral injury, I argue that moral injury can be seen as part of the dirt of a political leader's dirty hands decisions. Such comparison can focus more attention on the broader institutional context in which such dirty hands decisions (...) are executed, while contributing to the growing vocabulary of moral conflict, trauma, and harm. (shrink)

This article is concerned with theories and therapeutic practices that interpret post-traumatic combat stress as a ‘moral injury’ produced by the shock of carrying out lethal violence in uncertain battlefield conditions. While moral injury is said to share many symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its proponents – military and Veterans Health Administration clinical psychologists, chaplains, and some psychiatrists – are concerned by PTSD’s inability to account for the meaning-based moral and ethical distress that counterinsurgency battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan (...) are allegedly especially prone to produce in US soldiers. Moral injury theorists seem to want to describe a phenomenon that is both more profound than PTSD but which, as clinical psychologists Shira Maguen and Brett Litz state, is not itself a mental disorder. In this article, I examine the links between moral injury theory’s fringe diagnostic status and the fringe status of the kinds of violence it understands as uniquely injurious to soldiers’ psyches. Moral injury valorizes war-fighting and military culture while casting war as a source of almost inevitable psychopathology. I argue that moral injury theory represents an effort to carve out a distinct domain of psychological expertise but also a negotiation of the tension between war violence’s ‘normal’ practice and its excessive or morally hazardous manifestations – both of which link mental illness directly to the politics of war violence and post-war care. (shrink)

Although jus in bello violations create transgressive acts that cause moral injury, the primary consideration in thinking about moral injury should be jus ad bellum. If one is fighting in an ad bellum just war, then transgressive acts can be rationalized in a way that allows for consolation. But for morally sensitive combatants engaged in an ad bellum unjust war, consolation is more difficult since there is no way to justify or rationalize morally problematic deeds committed in defense of an (...) unjust cause. Morally serious combatants should consider the question of jus ad bellum as they struggle to deal with moral injury, along with other values such as obedience and loyalty. Such an inquiry can produce further trauma when the justness of the war is called into question. The paper examines moral injury and justice in war, grounding the discussion in concrete examples: the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and the U.S. war in Iraq. It concludes that in a democracy, ordinary citizens should demonstrate solidarity with combatants suffering moral injury, since those combatants serve in wars—even unjust wars—authorized by us and fought in our names. (shrink)

Vulnerability as a critique of the one-sidedness of the principle of autonomy is at risk of overemphasizing the positive dimension of vulnerability. Moreover, in the discourse on vulnerability, the threat of dehumanization (or moral vulnerability) has not been scrutinized enough ethically. Therefore, the ethics of vulnerability is insufficient when faced with the force of war that requires the conceptualization of vulnerability for political-ethics. The Russian war in Ukraine demonstrates this weakness in a striking way: the called-for openness to the other (...) as well as an active form of nonviolence, as promoted by Judith Butler, may not be an option in times of war. Continuing Jessica Benjamin’s psychoanalytic approach to mutual recognition, the essay shows that the task of morality does not rest upon broadening one’s vulnerability, but rather in understanding vulnerable agency as the dialectic of vulnerability and agency. For the further development of this dialectic, the triadic figuration is emphasized, complementing the dyadic relation of self and other. While the Third can take multiple figurations in the psychoanalytical setting, I understand the Third within the political-ethical context as the possibility of a “moral world” of nonviolence and respect. During war, the role of the bystander is to become a witness who, through the process of witnessing, advocacy, diplomacy, and justice, allows for the moral Third to reemerge. Among others, the ethics of vulnerability must spells out the price for the failure of taking on this responsibility, namely the eclipse of morality. (shrink)

Contemporary analyses of moral injury in war focus on its occurrence in American veterans who commit or witness acts contrary to their deeply held moral beliefs. Moral injuries suffered by noncombatants are largely absent from this discourse. I advocate for greater inclusion of the victim‐centered perspective in studies of moral injury in war. This perspective conceptualizes moral injury as the specific harm suffered when one's moral humanity is not recognized. Given that susceptibility to moral injury is part of moral personhood, (...) failure to acknowledge noncombatants' moral injury represents failure to recognize their full and particular personhood and thus may inflict further moral injury. Centering noncombatants' moral injury strengthens the critical power of moral injury, enabling the identification of specific steps toward establishing just relationships and social trust to repair and prevent moral injury in noncombatants and combatants alike. (shrink)

Moral injury is a term coined both to reflect the moral dimension of wartime experience and to critique overly clinical approaches to psychological harms originating in wartime. Originally defined not only with the tools of the behavioral sciences but also literature and philosophy, clinical approaches have come to dominate moral injury discourse over the past decade. This article argues for a return to interdisciplinarity by engaging metaphysics and ethics, and in particular Iris Murdoch’s post‐Christian notions of the Good and void, (...) to help better account for the experiences of veterans who claim that they hurt not only physically but also morally as a result of their wartime experience. (shrink)

Moral injury names how the lived experience of armed conflict can damage an individual's ethical foundations, often with serious consequences. While the term has gained increasing acceptance for the clinical treatment of veterans and as a means of better understanding the impact of war, it is generally applied to individualized trauma. As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay argues that moral injury is also a useful means of addressing political violence at a societal level. It (...) explores the term's value within international human rights discourse and practice, particularly in efforts to document and analyze the systematic commission of atrocities to achieve accountability and reconciliation. The essay presents field research among Iraqi human rights investigators as a means of reflecting on the value of rediscovering agency in the aftermath of societal trauma. In this way, moral injury provides guidance on the essential ethical qualities of the lived experience of violent repression, an issue central to a more complete understanding of international affairs. (shrink)

In part one of this paper I discuss how issues of combatant misconduct and illegality have led military academies to become more focused on professionalism rather than on the tensions between military ethics and military training. In order to interrogate the relationships between training and ethics, between becoming a military professional and being a military professional, between military professionals and society, I turn to the work of Martin Cook, Anthony Hartle, and J. Glenn Gray. In part two I focus on (...) Cook’s analysis of the conflict between the self-understanding and the expected behavior of military professionals. In part three I focus on Hartle’s analysis of how the experience of alienation by military professionals can help to create the culture of military professionals. In part four I introduce a new theory of professionalism based on the existential and phenomenological philosophy of J. Glenn Gray, which can help us to better understand the philosophical and psychological stakes of what it means to become a military professional. I conclude in part five by suggesting that the most pressing issue in the military is not a lack of professionalism, but a lack of trust. (shrink)

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the “fearful and faint-hearted” person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war (...) and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury. (shrink)