Moral Injury and the Possibility of Self-Forgiveness

“I don’t have very long to live. No, Doc, no, no, I’m not suicidal, it’s just that sometimes I don’t give a fuck. I don’t care if I live or die. I’ve been waiting to die ever since I got back from Vietnam. When I get that way, my wife, my kids – and I really love them – it’s ‘’Get the fuck away from me!’ Once when my daughter was younger and I was that way, she came up behind me and before I knew it I had her by her throat up against the wall. I can still see her eyes. I put her down and just walked out of the house without saying anything to anybody and didn’t come back for a week. I felt lower than dogshit. I hate it that my kids behave so careful around me. I made them that way, and I hate it. Every time I see them being so careful I think of that look in her eyes and I get this feeling here [puts his palm on his belly] like a big stone sitting there.”

“I never tried to kill myself, but a lot of the time I just don’t care. For years I used to go to the Combat Zone [the Boston redlight district] after midnight and just walk the alleys. If I saw someone down an alley in the dark, I wouldn’t go the other way, I’d go down there thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll get lucky.’“^[1]

I. Introduction

People who have experienced war, whether as combatants or as civilians, face a markedly increased risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury. The accounts collected by Jonathan Shay offer only a small glimpse into the circumstances of those suffering from these conditions – circumstances that are almost incomprehensible to anyone not directly affected. But they still convey something of the burden of suffering associated with these conditions.

War not only affects life, limb, and property, but also the psyche. War experiences traumatize soldiers and civilians in a variety of ways. When such trauma results in psychological disorder, it is generally referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms of this trauma-related disorder include nightmares and flashbacks, hypervigilance (a persistent sense of threat), jumpiness, sleep disturbances; difficulty concentrating; outbursts of anger, feelings of failure and guilt (including survivor guilt), as well as difficulties interacting with others and sustaining relationships. This often leads to alcohol abuse, drug addiction, domestic violence, unemployment and incapacity to work, social isolation and other catastrophic effects on a person’s own life and on the lives of those around them.^[2]

Whereas all forms of mental illness resulting from traumatic experiences were previously classified as PTSD, there is now recognition of a similar but in some respects distinct condition, namely moral injury. If you yourself have committed serious moral wrongs, failed to prevent them, or if you have witnessed such wrongs – especially when they were carried out by superiors or were structural in nature – your confidence in your own moral integrity, or in human morality more broadly, may be shaken. The term thus derives from the fact that what is violated in such cases is a person’s moral self-image and moral agency. They come to see themselves as morally deficient to a pathological degree and are tormented by guilt, or their moral values may erode, leaving them morally disoriented. They no longer see themselves as fully fledged moral agents.

This means that the distinction between PTSD and moral injury lies in their origins: PTSD arises from traumatic, overwhelming and frightening experiences, whereas moral injury stems from the perception of one’s own moral reprehensibility. Now, I am not a psychologist and therefore cannot, and do not wish to, comment on the specifics of these conditions. Yet, if moral injury is tied to moral wrongdoing, moral self-image and the loss of moral agency – that is, to concepts central to practical philosophy – then it stands to reason that philosophy can and must make important contributions here.

I will attempt to make such a philosophical contribution in what follows. If moral injury is marked by the conjunction of serious moral wrongdoing and the subsequent erosion of moral self-image and moral agency, then the question arises as to whether and how an ethical working-through of the wrongdoing can restore moral self-image and enable a person to regain moral agency. In particular, the question arises as to whether those affected can forgive themselves for their moral wrongdoing and thereby restore confidence in their own moral character.

However, philosophy does not approach this question from an empirical-psychological perspective. It is not concerned with whether, or how, this can be achieved in (often therapeutic) practice. Rather, it concerns the conceptual and ethical conditions of ethically justified self-forgiveness – that is, the question of when one may regard oneself as morally rehabilitated not merely for the sake of one’s own healing (and thus, in a sense, self-deceptively), but rather when such a conviction of restored moral integrity would in fact be ethically warranted.

II. Is it even possible to forgive oneself?

When we ask whether people who have suffered moral injury can forgive themselves, we must first pose a more fundamental question: “What does it mean to forgive oneself?” Most authors in the philosophy of forgiveness agree, in general, that forgiveness is conceptually limited to victims. That is because it would seem absurd for an uninvolved person to say that they have forgiven. Let us imagine for a moment that I, as a completely uninvolved person, were to say to you: “I forgive Ratko Mladić for the Srebrenica massacre.” I suspect you would not know what to make of this remark and would not only be puzzled that I regard myself as ethically entitled to do so, but also unsure what the content of the statement is supposed to be at all. What exactly could I be forgiving when I was not even a victim?

At its core, only the victim of a moral violation can forgive the offender. There are, of course, cases in which those who forgive are not completely uninvolved, yet are also not direct victims. For example, we can certainly understand, conceptually, that a daughter might say she forgives a murderer for killing her father. Here it is not the immediate victim – the father – who forgives (which would not even be possible), but someone emotionally close to him. After all, she is an indirect victim, because she too has suffered harm – the loss of her father – and in this sense she can forgive the crime and the offender.

When we speak of forgiving oneself, this can mean two things.^[3] First, we may forgive ourselves for indirect harm we have suffered, for example our own emotional distress. This may concern moral failings, such as our own fear or cowardice that prevented us from helping someone we wished to help. It can also refer to entirely amoral failures, such as a missed penalty kick that continues to weigh emotionally.^[4] In such a case, we may regard ourselves as an (at least indirect) victim of our own actions. But the more interesting – and here relevant – case is different. Second, we also speak of forgiving ourselves when we do not see ourselves (even indirectly) as a victim, but as a perpetrator. In this case, we forgive ourselves for our own moral wrongdoing against others. But how is that possible if, conceptually, forgiveness is reserved for victims (even indirect ones)?

Occasionally, it is argued that this conceptual restriction is mistaken and that genuine third-party forgiveness does exist.^[5] The daughter, in our case, could therefore not only forgive the wrong done to her in her indirect role as a victim, but also the murder itself, even if she did not hold that role. However, this form of third-party forgiveness is usually limited to cases of indirect involvement, especially through a personal connection to the crime or the victim – and perhaps also to the perpetrator. After all, we can imagine that friends of a perpetrator might resent the crime in a distinctly involved way – one that differs from the general moral condemnation expressed by those not involved. A connection to the act or to someone involved, but not the victim status itself, then forms the basis for forgiveness. Similarly, self-forgiveness could be grounded in such a personal connection to oneself as the offender.

If one does not accept such third-party forgiveness as a conceptual possibility, one is unlikely to accept the possibility of genuine self-forgiveness either. Even so, one may still ask whether there are structural similarities between genuine forgiveness and this form of self-forgiveness, which would allow for applying conclusions from the philosophy of forgiveness to self-forgiveness. The conceptual question would then no longer be of central normative importance for many follow-up questions. As we shall see, such structural similarities do indeed exist. Thus, we need not determine, beyond this point, whether genuine third-party forgiveness is conceptually possible.

III. Self-forgiveness and moral injury

If we grant that it is meaningful to speak of the possibility of forgiving oneself, the question arises, in the context of our topic, to what extent such self-forgiveness is connected to moral injury. In this regard, it is helpful to consider the function and effect of self-forgiveness. Margaret Holmgren writes:

“The first task for the wrongdoer is to recover enough self-respect to recognize that she is a valuable human being in spite of what she has done. Without self-respect, it is unlikely that she will be able to accomplish any of the other tasks involved in responding to her own wrong.”

Here the connection between self-forgiveness and the restoration of one’s moral self-image already becomes apparent. The connection to the disruption of our moral self-image and moral agency becomes even clearer in Nancy Snow, who writes:

“Self-forgiveness for moral wrongs is essential for maintaining the capability for moral agency. After a serious moral failure, we must, to regain our bearings as functioning moral agents, be able to recognize and accept our imperfections and forgive ourselves for having them and for sometimes acting wrongly.”

It cannot be ruled out in principle that, in cases of the most serious moral wrongdoings, a destabilized moral self-image and profound self-reproach may constitute the ethically appropriate response for a person guilty of such acts

This process is by no means confined to the most serious forms of moral wrongdoing, such as rape, murder or crimes against humanity, and the respective moral injuries in the offenders. For Holmgren and Snow, it is evident that we all must routinely forgive and overlook moral missteps – though, as we shall see, not without first taking responsibility for them and seeking to improve. But in cases of the most serious moral wrongdoing, moral agency and moral self-image, or moral self-respect, can erode to such an extent that we are often unable to do so. This is precisely when the ethical questions become most pressing: when may, and when should, we forgive ourselves for having harmed others? When is a person justified in restoring their own moral self-image? After all, it cannot be ruled out in principle that, in cases of the most serious moral wrongdoings, a destabilized moral self-image and profound self-reproach may constitute the ethically appropriate response for a person guilty of such acts.

In the case of moral injury in particular, the disruption of our moral self-image and moral agency, as well as the resulting exceptional need to restore them, raise ethically difficult questions about the justifiability of such restoration through self-forgiveness. As Robin Dillon puts it, forgiving yourself “seems a self-indulgent cheat, an attempt to feel good about yourself that betrays a failure of responsibility”^[6]. If we want to dispel this appearance and understand a form of overcoming moral injury that is ethically acceptable rather than merely self-interested or therapeutic, we must confront the ethical question of the justifiability of self-forgiveness and the conditions under which such self-forgiveness can be justified.

IV. (When) can we forgive ourselves?

To answer this question, it can be helpful to first consider when we are permitted to forgive others, and when we may even, in a certain sense, be obligated to do so. There are, in principle, two types of ethical positions here: those who hold that a victim should always be permitted to forgive^[7] (and that doing so is always ethically valuable), and those who hold that certain conditions must be met for forgiveness to be ethically justified.^[8] According to the core view of this second group, hasty forgiveness is a sign of a lack of self-respect. You diminish yourself and your own moral rights, and do not take your own claims as a victim seriously enough, if you forgive offenders, for instance, when they show no remorse. If forgiveness involves forswearing blame and negative feelings toward the offender, then it must be based on the thought that we need not attribute the act entirely to the offender’s character. In other words, we have reason to believe that the act does not adequately reflect the offender’s character, and for that reason we no longer hold the person fully responsible for it. Forgiveness is therefore justified – and indeed typically called for – only where there is sufficient reason to believe that the offender is a better person than the isolated act alone would suggest. Classic indications of this are remorse and apology, perhaps even penance or compensation, as well as a deeper understanding of the offender as a person – for example, when she is a friend whose character we know well enough to recognize that the act does not reflect who she is.

The possibility of unconditional self-absolution would stand in stark contradiction to the very idea of ethical and moral duties and responsibility

The point here is not to determine which of these positions is preferable when it comes to forgiveness by the victim. In the case of self-forgiveness – that is, the offender’s relinquishing of self-blame – it seems clear that this is not always justifiable: even if victims are always permitted to forgive offenders, the same does not hold for the offenders themselves. Such a possibility of unconditional self-absolution would stand in stark contradiction to the very idea of ethical and moral duties and responsibility. Hence, the first group of theories is not relevant here. Instead, we can appeal to the criteria proposed by the second group of theories to determine the basic conditions that ethically legitimate self-forgiveness must meet. According to this view, offenders must not forgive themselves if they have no reason to believe that the act does not reflect their character. They must therefore repent of their actions and actively strive to improve their character. If possible, they should apologize to the victims and do their best to make amends. This in turn requires being aware of one’s own moral wrongdoing and taking responsibility for it. Only those who regard themselves as responsible for an action can even experience self-blame. Those who deflect this blame, this responsibility, and this guilt, or rationalize them away, are not forgiving themselves; they are attempting to undermine the very object of forgiveness –blame and blameworthiness.^[9] In ethics, we call this “justifying”, “condoning” or “excusing”, but not “forgiving” – where the wrongness of the action and one’s own guilt must be acknowledged.

The fundamental requirement for ethically legitimate self-forgiveness lies precisely in recognizing one’s responsibility and accepting the corresponding consequences of one’s actions, including repentance and efforts to improve. Moreover, further requirements may of course apply, such as engaging with the victims appropriately by apologizing or offering to make amends, insofar as this is possible.

It is also worth noting the opposite, and frequent, problem: offenders may not have committed any morally wrongful act, yet still regard their actions as ethically abhorrent – for example, when soldiers have legitimately killed child soldiers in combat. Here, the appropriate ethical response is not self-forgiveness but rather recognizing the legitimacy of one’s own actions. In any case, there are, of course, no issues of ethical legitimacy in overcoming self-blame here, since this blame is not justified to begin with.

V. The loss of moral agency and the demands of ethics

As we have seen, we can forgive ourselves only by acknowledging responsibility for the wrongdoing and drawing the appropriate conclusions from it, such as remorse and an effort to improve. In the case of serious moral injury, however, our analysis encounters fundamental problems: those who lose their moral agency through a profound loss of self-respect – who, for ethical reasons, are no longer able to comply with ethical and moral requirements – also seem unable to initiate or successfully carry out this process of repentance and improvement. It is precisely this ability that has been compromised.

Margaret Holmgren therefore regards the restoration of a minimal degree of self-respect as the first step in the process of self-forgiveness. Only once this self-respect has been regained can one adequately assume responsibility and strive for improvement, and thereby ultimately forgive oneself.^[10] However, this raises two problems. First, this initial step itself would need to be justified before it could be justified on the basis of any subsequent improvement in character. And second, the very problem that must be addressed lies in the radical loss of self-respect itself. As Robin Dillon writes:

“It is odd that respect for one’s intrinsically valuable self is both the starting point of the process that positions one to forgive oneself appropriately and what self-forgiveness is supposed to yield.”^[11]

But Dillon also offers a solution to these two intertwined problems: we can distinguish between different forms of self-respect. Avishai Margalit, for example, distinguishes between “respect” and “esteem”^[12]and Stephen Darwall between “recognition respect” and “appraisal respect”.^[13] The distinction they both draw is that we should recognize one another and ourselves as human beings fundamentally capable of morality (respect/recognition respect), independently of our actions, achievements or character traits. This can be understood as human dignity: the right of all persons to be respected as human beings, or as moral agents.^[14] In contrast, the specific assessment of actions, achievements and character (esteem/appraisal respect) varies from person to person. What we acknowledge in one another – beyond our shared humanity – is, of course, entirely different in different people. Some are better, and some are worse, at playing soccer, doing math or telling stories.

The same applies to moral conduct: some people are better at it than others. But this does not change the fact that we are beings who can confront the question of moral duty at all, because we are moral agents – that is, we can respond to ethical reasons. Otherwise, there would ultimately be no basis for blaming ourselves for our own actions. We have a legitimate claim to respect as human beings and as moral agents.

Every human being – even the most serious criminal – has a right, both toward themselves and toward others, to be treated with respect as a human being

If this is correct, then the first step in the process described by Holmgren – restoring self-respect – concerns this fundamental respect for oneself as a human being (respect/recognition respect). This does not require any special ethical justification, because every human being – even the most serious criminal – has a right, both toward themselves and toward others, to be treated with respect as a human being. However, once this fundamental acknowledgment of one’s own capacity for moral action has been restored, one can begin the further process of repentance and self-improvement and, ultimately, revise one’s own assessment of character (esteem/appraisal respect) in an ethically legitimate manner through an act of self-forgiveness.

If we roughly distinguish three steps – (1) restoring self-respect, (2) repentance and self-improvement, and (3) self-forgiveness – then step 1 is justified by the universal right of all human beings to respect and self-respect, while step 3 is justified by step 2.

It should not be overlooked that the first step will be especially difficult when, in light of the systematic injustice one has witnessed and participated in, one has not only lost confidence in one’s own moral agency but also in humanity’s capacity for morality as such. Then it is not only one’s own self-respect that must be restored, but also one’s respect for humanity as a whole, including oneself. Ethically, this does not pose further problems, but one can imagine that regaining self-respect under conditions of profound doubt about humanity’s morality as such creates a difficult cycle torn between a loss of confidence in one’s own and in humanity’s moral agency that is hard to break, especially after the systematic and traumatic experiences of war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque gave a striking expression to this erosion of trust in humanity:

“Albert expresses it: ‘The war has ruined us for everything.’ He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.”^[15]

VI. Summary

An ethical justification for self-forgiveness requires, as we have seen, on the one hand, regaining a fundamental respect for one’s own humanity as a being capable of morality – albeit including moral misconduct. Since this should not be disputed in any case – even where a morally bad character has been revealed – this step is always ethically justified, and indeed necessary. Building on this, offenders must also take responsibility with integrity, show remorse, seek, where appropriate, to make amends and, above all, work to improve their character. They are then also ethically justified in forgiving themselves for their past moral failures.

Can this ethical analysis, even if it is not its primary aim, help those who suffer from moral injury? It may at least offer guidance on how to make an ethically sincere effort to do so, namely by first regaining confidence in the universal value and claim to respect possessed by all human beings, including oneself, and then improving one’s own character so that one’s present self no longer needs to blame itself for past deeds. In practice, both steps are, of course, far more difficult for those suffering from moral injury than they may appear here. Knowing that one can forgive oneself in an ethically legitimate way seems to me extraordinarily important, so as not to give the impression that self-forgiveness – rather than merciless self-blame and reproach – only increases the moral devaluation of one’s actions and thus further compromises one’s character.

DOI: 10.48701/opus4-831