Toward an interdisciplinary conceptualization of moral injury : From unequivocal guilt and anger to moral conflict and disorientation

While the concept of moral injury has been embraced in academic, clinical and public discourses, it is still nascent and needs development regarding the ‘moral’ in ‘moral injury’.

When questions about the complex nature of morality go unaddressed, clinical practice is based on unsubstantiated and possibly reductive assumptions about the moral dimensions of traumas. 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. What are the implications of moral tension in the experience of distress, and what are the implications of the complex nature of morality for the theoretical understanding of moral injury?

This article addresses these questions, drawing on relevant literature from the fields of philosophy and social sciences, and on 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with Dutch veterans, thus contributing to a refined, interdisciplinary concept of moral injury.