ABSTRACT
Moral injury is a phenomenon that sits at the intersection – both conceptually and disciplinarily – of ethics and psychology. In this chapter, I explore some of the conceptual and ethical problems that emerge from this dual identity. Ethics and psychology work with very different models of what constitutes appropriate and healthy emotional responses to our own agency. The highly debilitating psychic effects that constitute moral injury may be classified by psychologists as a disorder requiring treatment, but from a moral perspective, these same emotional affects may be markers of healthy and appropriate responses to our own wrongful agency. A better approach to understanding and treating moral injury may depend upon distinguishing more clearly the different ways in which negative emotional responses are connected to wrongful agency and relationships of responsibility we have towards it.
