Loyalty, Betrayal, and Atonement: A Philosophy of Moral Injury

In the mid-2000s, the number of United States military veterans committing suicide drastically increased. In an effort to understand the causes this crisis, psychologists in the Veterans Administration (VA) focused their attention on “Moral injury,” a psychiatric diagnosis first introduced in the 1990s by VA psychologist Jonathan Shay. A type of post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury is a condition in which veterans are traumatized by their actions in war time. While initially confined to the field of psychiatry, interest in moral injury has spread, with spiritual care providers, legal experts, and military ethicists weighing in. Academic philosophers, meanwhile, have largely overlooked moral injury. In this essay, I seek to construct a philosophical account of moral injury from the bottom up. I begin with experiences and psychopathological descriptions of moral injury, and then offer my own interpretation drawn from resources in the ethical philosophy of Josiah Royce. I argue that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty provides a necessary philosophical scaffolding for psychopathological descriptions of the condition, and that, properly understood, Royce’s theory of communal atonement provides an outline for ameliorative practices to address moral injuries in military veterans.