Moral Injury, Moral Identity and Warfighting

This article challenges the standard view of moral injury as a distinct species of psychological injury narrowly defined by moral wrongdoing or moral betrayal, and closely related – but not constitutive – to PTSD. Against this voluntaristic-legalistic conception of morality, a care-based moral-psychological account is developed according to which both moral injury and PTSD are best understood as forms of damage to moral identity. Central to this account is the notion of caring deeply about what is genuinely worth caring about, including life, autonomy, well-being, self-worth, and the lives and welfare of significant others. These objects of deep care are constitutive of moral identity, which possesses an objective moral dimension distinct from subjective self-identity. Traumatic events are morally injurious insofar as they threaten or destroy these core objects of care, regardless of moral wrongdoing or responsibility. On this view, PTSD necessarily involves moral injury, though moral injury may occur with or without culpable agency; hence warfighters who suffer PTSD necessarily suffer moral injury, even if they only engage in justified killing and are not themselves seriously morally wronged. The care-based account thus expands the moral scope of trauma, resists the medicalization of PTSD as morally neutral, and reorients moral injury toward fundamental features of moral identity.