ABSTRACT
While the concept of moral injury has been embraced in academic, medical, military and public discourses, it needs development regarding the ‘moral’ in ‘moral injury’. Current conceptualizations of moral injury approach morality implicitly as a harmonious belief system. However, people always have multiple moral commitments that may co-exist in tension. This chapter examines the morally injurious experiences that emerged in soldiers’ and veterans’ stories, discussing two stories in detail. Veterans’ stories often spoke of value conflict, moral overwhelmedness and senselessness. These themes each demonstrate an experience more complex than the unequivocal wrongdoing that is the focus of most literature on moral injury. Accordingly, veterans often felt not only guilt and anger, but also profound moral disorientation, meaning that they started to doubt their own and others’ ability to do good, and even the very notions of good and bad. This painful loss forced them to engage in an ethical struggle, in order to find moral re-orientation again. All this, it is argued, demands an understanding of moral injury beyond a strict pathology-focused trauma understanding toward one that can properly capture the complex moral dimension of moral injury.
