Moral Injury and the Promise of Virtue

Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030329341
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book turns to virtue language as an important resource for understanding moral injury, a form of subjectivity where one feels they can no longer strive to be good as a result of wartime experience. Drawing specifically on Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and examining the experiences of civilians during the Bosnian War (1992-5), Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon argues that current research into war and current understandings of subjectivity need new ways to articulate the moral dimension of being a subject if we are to understand how violence affects one's moral being and development. He develops an understanding of the human person as a tensile moral subject, one that forefronts the moral challenges and vulnerability inherent in lives affected by war. With these resources, Wiinikka-Lydon argues for a moral vocabulary and images of the human as a moral being that can better articulate the experience of violence and moral injury.

© The Author(s) 2019

J. Wiinikka-LydonMoral Injury and the Promise of Virtuehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32934-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon¹

(1)

Center for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Zlatko Dizdarević was an editor of the Sarajevan daily newspaper Oslobodjenje , which was a critical news source for besieged Sarajevans during the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina at the end of the last century (1992–95). Writing in his wartime diary that would eventually be published as Sarajevo : A War Journal, Dizdarević reflected on the way that the war’s atrocities attacked what might be thought of as social virtues fundamental to the cohesion of community.¹ He writes, “The rifle butt in the back, and the truck ride to the camp cause a distress that cannot be forgotten. That rifle butt shatters everything civilization has ever accomplished, removes all finer human sentiments, and wipes out any sense of justice, compassion, and forgiveness.”²

Although specific to the Bosnian conflict, this striking quotation also captures a more general experience of political violence that others, in other wars, share. Dizdarević bears witness to the experience of those who survive political violence—such as genocide, long-term siege, and intense violent conflict—only to discover that they and their world, or at least their moral perception of that world, have changed in important, fundamental ways. In other words, Dizdarević is an example of those who survive mass violence yet, because of what they have witnessed or what they may have done to survive, are left with the sense that they or the world have changed in a profound moral sense. Survivors may come out of the conflict feeling they have done so only by committing acts previously thought to be immoral or by witnessing events, such as the one Dizdarević reflects upon, that shake one’s faith in the very possibility of goodness in such a world. This can leave a lasting change to one’s moral subjectivity , so much so that survivors often wonder if they can ever be “good” again or what the worth of trying to be good is in such a fallen world.

Sarajevo’s was one of the longest sieges in modern military history that included daily fear of random sniper and mortar fire. This created an environment of deep uncertainty and anxiety that wore away the daily patterns of living and identity that existed prior to the war. The war itself ended with over 200,000 killed, the creation of concentration camps on European soil for the first time since World War II , and the “ethnic cleansing ” of the country, a term that originated during the conflict to refer to the forced elimination of a group, their history, and their cultural artifacts from a certain area. It was a war, a genocide, whose numbers seem small when compared to the rapid carnage of the Rwandan genocide occurring at the same time. Yet, a profound aspect of the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and in the former Yugoslavia more generally, was the destruction not just of individual lives but also of the culture and ties that enabled community.

What the testimonies of those like Dizdarević suggest is that through one’s actions or the actions of others, political violence can undermine the moral intelligibility of one’s world. Violent conflict does not just destroy lives and buildings. It destroys that which makes meaningful lives and community possible. Experiences of war like these can leave a residue of doubt and even despair about the possibility of a restored moral ability and a world capable of supporting a meaningful moral life. It is, in other words, a moral harm that has a lasting impact on how one perceives oneself and others, and on the ability for one to actively aspire to the visions of goodness and the images of personhood that are central to the moral dimension of life, and so are central to one’s existence.

Unseen though they may be, such changes have profound consequences for society. As these images and visions of self, world, and other tell us who we are and who we should be, they are also central to how people understand themselves. They are central, then, to identity, and so changes to one’s moral architecture will also change one’s identity. These moral harms, what have been called in the context of veterans, “moral injuries,” are significant, then, not only for individuals but also for whole societies. Since these harms affect identity, they will also affect society, and if powerful enough, will transform society as well.

Such experiences raise serious questions not only for survivors of political violence but also more broadly. What happens when violence changes an individual’s moral architecture so dramatically? What is it that is affected? And how can we talk about such moral transformation in a way that can illuminate the relationships between violence and subjectivity, of society and the individual, and our understanding of moral experience and character?

Attempts to investigate such questions, which deal with the effects of violence on subjectivity, have largely come from the social sciences. Entire subfields in sociology, anthropology, and social psychology have investigated the causes and dynamics of violence from various angles. It would therefore be reasonable to look there for methods and approaches that could help make sense of the experience that Dizdarević and others have faced. Even with the significant insights such research has provided, however, there is a curious absence of strongly normative language to more fully articulate and account for the experience that survivors have claimed is so central to what is at stake in violent conflict and war. Sociologist Andrew Sayer, for example, argues from within the social sciences that these fields seem to be missing strong frames and vocabularies for representing such claims in their research. As his critique comes from within these fields, it is worth quoting Sayer at length in this regard:

… we are beings whose relation to the world is one of concern. Yet social science often ignores this relation and hence fails to acknowledge what is most important to people. Concepts such as “preferences,” “self-interest,” and “values” fail to do justice to such matters, particularly with regard to their social character and connection to events and social relations, and their emotional force. Similarly, concepts such as convention, habit, discourses, socialization, reciprocity, exchange, discipline, power, and a host of others are useful for external description but can easily allow us to miss people’s first-person evaluative relation to the world and the force of their evaluations. When social science disregards this concern, as if it were merely an incidental, subjective accompaniment to what happens, it can produce an alienated and alienating view of social life.³

Every method, every discipline, has its limits, but what Sayer is arguing is that there are unnecessary restrictions, or perhaps it is better to say there is a general reluctance to examine social life through the lens and with the vocabulary of normative concepts and vocabulary. Denying such an approach leaves out the eye level, that is, any subjective account of humans living their everyday lives that takes personal evaluations into account. This runs the danger that any analysis of social structures, institutions, or actions will not only be limited but also be critically incomplete.

This lacuna is even more interesting if we consider that concern over mental and moral harms have only increased over the years. The last several decades have seen an expansion of studies dedicated to violence, both structural and episodic, as well as to the ways in which violence can transform individuals in negative ways.⁴ Terms such as psychological trauma , post-traumatic stress disorder , and, more recently, moral injury signal the creation of a vocabulary reflecting experiences that, while undoubtedly quite old, are nevertheless receiving concerted attention from government, civil society, and academic inquiry. Changes in terminology regarding psychological combat trauma, for example, in the change from a soldier’s heart and combat hysteria in the nineteenth century to war neurosis and shell shock before and after World War I, respectively, to post-traumatic stress disorder during the Vietnam War and after, evince, if nothing else, cultural debates over the effects of policies and narratives on an individual’s ability to cope as a peaceful moral subject within soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From Subjectivity to Moral Subjectivity
• 3. Moral Subjectivity and the Language of Virtue
• 4. Tensile Moral Subjects
• 5. The Domination of Void
• 6. Moral Subjectivity, Moral Injury
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter