Moral Injury, Blame, and Punishment

Moral injury can be understood as occurring when one feels that their moral code has been violated or relationship to their moral community meaningfully damaged. There are therefore three points of access into the experience of moral injury: as victim, bystander, or perpetrator. Because both victim and bystander incur moral injury passively, we generally place little or no blame on them for having done so. In the case of the perpetrator, however, our reactions are more mixed. We might believe that perpetrators, as the active agents of a moral code violation, deserve the psychological and emotional wounds that they incur as a result of their wrongdoing. However, the literature on this subject suggests that we perform this assignment of blame often selectively. The scholarly content on moral injury and how it is overcome focuses in large part upon either historical, biblical, or literary heroes whose worlds look very different from our own, or upon contemporary soldiers who are members of the legally legitimate military of an established liberal democracy. This chapter asks, ‘where are all the bad guys’? Where are the enemy combatants, guerrilla fighters, felons, and convicts? I suggest that they are largely absent from conversations about moral injury (despite almost certainly experiencing moral injury) because our understanding of the phenomenon links recognition of moral injury with exculpation. I use Sophocles’’ Philoctetes in order to draw out this claim, and to situate the conclusion that such objective applications of the label of ‘moral injury’ do more to confuse and mislead than to accurately describe the experiences of the injured.