The Critical Power of an Expanded Concept of Moral Injury

Abstract

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.

Fearful and Faint‐Hearted: On Affect and the Just‐War Tradition

“…But it would acknowledge that our judgments have a history, because affects and their circulation play a role in determining what counts as a premise in our deliberations, and sometimes have a weighty role. Take, for example, the recent academic interest in moral injury in war, which “is inflicted when servicemembers commit or witness violations of deeply held moral commitments” (Kellison 2021, 443). While much of that academic work has gained power in the wake of US conflicts since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the phenomenon it highlights has a much longer history.…”

“…What does it mean to assign testimonies of fighters in more recent wars, such as Sgt. Kevin Benderman, who, according to his conscientious‐objector application, in 2003 saw a young girl with “her arm horribly burned and blackened, standing helplessly on a roadside” in Iraq, and when told by his commanding officer that his convoy could not spare the medical supplies to help her, “knew” that he could not kill once he had looked into her eyes (Zucchino 2005; see also Brock and Lettini 2012, 38; and Kellison 2021, 453)? Benderman's reaction is also an immediate kind of knowing, one rooted in affect and not discursive reasoning.…”

“…Benderman's reaction is also an immediate kind of knowing, one rooted in affect and not discursive reasoning. And as Kellison, Shannon Dunn, and Kate Temoney have pointed out in a recent JRE focus issue on moral injury, there is no good reason to limit these stories to those of combatants (Dunn 2021; Kellison 2021; and Temoney 2021).…”

“…In my own faint‐heartedness, I do not rush to judgment. And so I am not necessarily committed to the possibility that Kellison uses moral‐injury testimonies to ground a functionally pacifist stance, as seems to be implicit in her claim that “if a sizable number of American service members experience moral injury as a result of committing or witnessing acts fully consistent with military policy and just war criteria, the obvious question is why these norms and policies allow acts that many people experience as violations of deeply held moral commitments” (2021, 445). But my own faint‐heartedness does commit me to examining religious traditions in their complexity in the pages of the JRE.…”