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At a crucial moment, Améry states that torture is like “a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners.” Comparing Améry’s analysis of his torture with Susan Brison’s philosophical account of her rape, this chapter opens by demonstrating that rape and torture have the same fundamental structure. It then seeks to analyze the harm of torture through the analysis of the harm of rape. Following Jean Hampton’s lead, harm is here theorized as moral injury. Hampton takes Kant’s idea of persons as ends-in-themselves and turns it toward the victim of wrongful action: moral injury is done when an individual is the object of behaviour that represents her value as less than the value she merits as a member of her community. In rape and torture this devaluation occurs through dispossessing the victim of her bodily autonomy and integrity. To be so dispossessed, violated, causes devastation. This analysis assumes that persons both have a body that is the instrument of their actions in the world, and they are their living, sentient body. Torture and rape work to deprive victims of their voluntary body and to leave them with only their sentient, living body.

In “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Elizabeth Anscombe argues that philosophers have been wasting their time doing moral philosophy because moral obligations based on moral principles make no sense in the absence of the religious setting in which “ought” statements appear as laws commanded by the creator of the universe. What is untoward in traditional morals is the idea that moral wrongness is essentially about breaking rules and commandments. For us secular beings, what makes an action wrong is that it harms a person. If what makes an action wrong is that it harms a person, then the primary phenomena of modern moral life is moral injury. The claim, then, is not that there are no moral rules; it is, rather, that broken rules stand for broken bodies and ruined lives. Moral injury is best comprehended from the perspective of the victim, the one suffers the injury, rather than from the perspective of the agent tempted to commit the injury. Torture and rape are paradigm cases of moral injury; interrogating them will lead to thesis that what is harmed in moral injuries is the dignity of the wholly embodied human subject.

This chapter opens with a reconstruction of the opening articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that makes it, as a response to the Nazi deformation of law, an exact analogue of the uprising of the rule of law analyzed in Chapter 1. It is then argued that modern moral philosophy in its deontological, rule-based and utilitarian forms are forces of moral alienation, that is, they are forms of moral reflection and self-understanding that separate persons from their deepest moral commitments and experiences. Utilitarianism undermines our collective experience and understanding about the meaning of torture in relation to the rule of law; while deontological moral principles undermine women’s experiential knowledge of the moral injury of rape, while tacitly leaving the deformation of patriarchal assumptions about embodiment and reason untouched. Modern moral philosophy abstracts from moral experience, making the reality of moral injury imponderable. As a consequence, most women in the modern world do not and cannot have the trust in the world enjoyed by most men. Such an unequal distribution of trust is a marker for our moral malformation and the systematic injustice of the modern society.

This chapter creates a sketch of the ways moral injury appears in the world. It reviews contemporary research on moral injury, outlines working definitions of the term, identifies common symptoms, and explains current possibilities for treatment. Here, the concept of moral injury is discussed in tandem with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of veterans are plagued by mental illnesses, and there are no good strategies to help them heal. This is the promise of the moral injury concept. The chapter surmises that the reason why so many veterans continue to suffer is because the source of their pain has not been correctly identified, and perhaps moral injury is a significant contributing factor to it. Accordingly, researchers in the field believe that moral injury might be key to helping address a mental health crisis that continues to metastasize.

This introductory chapter discusses the idea of introducing the idea of moral injury to literary studies. Accordingly, moral injury is defined as akin to being “sin sick.” It is a novel concept that defines and describes the lingering negative effects that afflict those who do or witness wrong. Indeed, moral injury and its antecedents have a long if unacknowledged literary history. The chapter also contends that moral injury shapes not only the substance but also the style of literature — that a number of tropes often cluster around it. Often, if not always, accounts of moral injury in literature are accompanied by a dark excess, a looming evil that encroaches and threatens to spread. Moreover, this excess manifests formally in a few distinct ways.

This chapter looks at moral injury in the literatures of the recent U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These literatures are explored in part because these wars have produced the bulk of recent moral injury research. Another reason is because of the claim that moral injury is these conflicts' “signature wound.” Accordingly, the chapter argues that moral injury — and especially the pain associated with witnessing others' ethical breaches — is a pervasive presence in works by Brian Turner, Kevin Powers, Phil Klay, and Roy Scranton. The chapter also argues that stateside civilians' ignorance of (or failure to witness to) these conflicts is a contributing cause of service members' moral injury — and that these authors ask readers to ponder their own complicity in the wars fought in their name.

This chapter takes a look at literary depictions of moral injury and its historical antecedents. It advances a few theses regarding the ways in which moral injury sometimes inflects literary style. Indeed, moral injury shapes both individuals' conduct and their worldview — their works and their words. Thus, the central claim here is that literature engaging moral injury themes is often formally distinctive. The chapter contends that in the ways they respond to evil, the characters discussed in the following chapters have family similarities to the veterans discussed in the previous chapter. It argues that they respond to wrongdoing in ways that are both recognizable and predictable when viewed through the lens of moral injury. the chapter also argues that we can see such responses in both contemporary and classic works.

This chapter considers the problem of misrecognition as a source of moral injury in Theodor W. Adorno and in the project of Critical Theory. The chapter begins by reprising Axel Honneth's recognitive critique of the communicative turn. The singular achievement of recognitive theory is to provide an account of all moral injuries, injuries that are not just misfortunes but normatively wrong, in terms of misrecognition. It is tested against Nancy Fraser's contention that inequality cannot be analyzed in recognitive terms. A negative social philosophy, one bound to injustice, must give priority to history and event. Honneth's approach displaces what Adorno conceived of as the two orienting frames of Critical Theory: a contextualization of modern social forms within a fragmentary philosophy of history, and, working from the opposite pole, the provisioning of an ineliminable and primary role to event and experience.

This chapter provides an extended reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which remains perhaps the most sustained, focused meditation on the psychological aftereffects of a criminal act in all of world literature. It both explores Raskolnikov's psychology through the moral injury lens and argues that in the figure of Sonya, Dostoevsky gives us a character who models some of the best practices contemporary researchers suggest for the treatment of moral injury. It shows that for Raskolnikov and Dostoevsky, crime is accompanied by a “disease” that looks quite similar to moral injury. Indeed, the chapter asserts that Dostoevsky is a canny observer of abnormal psychology and that Crime and Punishment offers an accurate prefiguration of the sketches of moral injury introduced in Chapter 1. But Dostoevsky's insights do not end there, as the chapter shows.

This chapter proposes that many combat soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have returned home to confront a psychological or spiritual displacement prompted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or moral injury. These forms of displacement threaten the soldier’s sense of safety and security in the home place. PTSD and moral injury can so invade the life of combat veterans through symptoms such as flashbacks and hypervigilance or shame and guilt that even the physical home becomes threatened. Throughout the chapter we glimpse ways that military training methods, which are intend to desensitize soldiers to killing and instill a sense of exceptionalism necessary for successful combat, create a double bind for soldiers, who must then come to see themselves as victims in order to seek effective treatment for psychological and moral injury.

Chapter 1 explores in greater detail both the medical and phenomenological foundations of moral injury and its consequences upon the morally injured. It examines the clinical history that led to the recognition of the need for a diagnosis different than, though related to, posttraumatic stress disorder, and it zeroes in on moral injury’s relationship to killing in combat. It goes on to demonstrate the ubiquity of the belief, even among warfighters, that killing is morally evil—even if it is also morally necessary in war. Through again referencing clinical work, and introducing some of the key clinicians focusing on the moral injury construct, the paradoxical relationship between killing and moral injury is then linked to the suicide crisis afflicting combat veterans.

This chapter turns to Albert Camus's The Fall, a novel that has already been claimed for trauma theory by Shoshana Felman. It argues, by contrast, that moral injury provides a more helpful paradigm for looking at main character Clamence's mental suffering. In the novel, Clamence commits the crime of doing too little. Further, Clamence suffers for his failure and, as the chapter shows, is morally injured by it. Indeed, a discussion of the anguish that follow his failure to act (the crime of omission) allows one to begin thinking about the possibility of what might be called collective moral injury. The novel also raises the possibility that one is obligated to treat morally injured individuals who, because of their proximity to atrocity, could in recovery provide valuable testimony to mass trauma.

This concluding chapter turns to the question of ethics in wondering whether third parties have any formal responsibility to respond to the pain of the morally injured. In doing so, the chapter proposes a model for thinking about how one might witness moral injury and how it might closely resemble trauma witness. It returns to the seminal question of why one should pay attention to moral injury. While it is certainly good to know that it exists, the chapter questions whether attention should be devoted to it. It asks if attending to it steals focus from the suffering of the traumatized or if moral injury imposes any responsibilities on bystanders.

Wherever there is a military establishment, men and women must be recruited into it and conditioned to be effective war-fighters. Whether or not they are ever deployed, there is a respect in which this conditioning is morally damaging to those involved. Combat training is geared towards making soldiers more comfortable with killing, so that they can do it repeatedly and efficiently in battle, without thinking too much or feeling too deeply. One of its aims is to enable recruits to use lethal violence without suffering emotional distress. But a morally decent person would experience distress in these circumstances. The upshot is that military conditioning is (or tries to be) morally damaging, or corrosive of virtue. It is morally injurious not by accident, but by design.

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s content. Opening with an illustration attending the issue of killing in war, it gestures toward the important link between killing and psychic trauma. To interrogate this linkage, it introduces critical distinctions between different kinds of killing, divergent warfighter attitudes toward killing, various Christian responses to killing and war, and between moral injury and posttraumatic stress disorder. Because it endorses a definition of moral injury as a psychic trauma that occurs when one does something that transgresses a deeply held moral norm, it stresses a critical understanding of the difference between grief and guilt and posits an important distinction between “moral injury” and what it terms “moral bruising.” To elaborate on these distinctions, it introduces the just war tradition as a Christian realist perspective best able to help warfighters navigate the morally bruising battlefield without becoming irreparably injured morally.

This chapter argues that pathological and irreversible damage from moral injury is rare in Africa because of the presence of coherent and transformative rituals of cleansing and repossession which the indigenous African community makes available to the morally injured person(s). The balance of the discussion demonstrates that such rituals and performative experiences heal by addressing some principal aspects of the cultural memory of the victims. The central aim of the chapter is to elaborate on the content, process, symbolic meanings, and clinical potency of these rituals. The chapter suggests that the use of rituals in mental health promotion is one aspect of psychological practice in Africa that appears to uniquely distinguish it from mainstream Western approaches to mental health practice. The chapter emphasizes the need for alternative perspectives for delivering relevant psychological care to victims of moral injury from non-Western cultures.

This chapter explores the concept of moral disability, identifying two types. The first type involves disabling conditions that distort one’s process of moral reflection. Examples include the incapacity to consider the long-term future, to feel empathy for others, and to be honest with oneself. A noteworthy example of self-deception is systematically denying one’s own—and humanity’s—vulnerability to the power of others, to accidents, and to having one’s well-being linked to that of others and the eco-system. Acknowledging vulnerability often requires a new sense of self. The second type includes incapacities directly resulting from ‘moral injury’—debilitating, self-inflicted harms when one violates a deeply held moral conviction, even if trying to remain true to another moral value. Examining moral disabilities highlights the moral importance of self-identity. More progress may be made on controversial issues if we discuss who we are, how we connect, and how we can heal.