Moral injury is a form of suffering or harm that is subjective in nature. It affects practical reasoning and the way one views the world, which touches directly on moral agency. This panel will see how we can better understand moral injury and agency through critical engagement with both.
In this paper, I present addiction as a helpful case study for examining some of the tensions around the question of agency within the literature on moral injury. People suffering from addiction often perpetrate harms on those around them in pursuit of their ‘drug of choice,’ and experience the devastation of moral injury as a result. As is well known, a major point of departure within the literature on the definition of moral injury is around the question of who inflicts the wound of moral injury (i.e., someone else or the self). Addiction offers an interesting case study in that it demonstrates that it is possible to be both the person who inflicts the harm and a victim of the harm (i.e., the disease of addiction and the resultant moral injury) at the same time, which shows that the binaries we tend to operate in need not always apply.
Though the terminology of moral injury and accompanying recovery strategies are yet to be explored from Korean perspectives and practices and are generally unknown by the general population and impacted individuals in South Korea, the South Korean context is a rich site to explore the concepts of moral injury and collective resilience. This paper will review the historical and political contexts of the Korean peninsula that undergird collective and intergenerational trauma among Koreans, as well as the state of research on military trauma and moral injury in South Korea. Drawing on political, religious, spiritual, and social practices of collective action by Koreans, we will make connections to South Korean methods of moral injury recovery and possibilities for further research on this topic and context.
Joshua Pederson’s Sin Sick focuses on the pain of those who breach their own ethical principles and addresses healing from moral injury through the process of witnessing. I examine Pederson’s application of what Domnick LaCapra calls “empathetic unsettlement,” and then argue that Pederson meaningfully shows how literary fiction may aid to develop moral injury witness. However, I also question how adequately Pederson takes into account the experience of trauma manifest in autobiographical accounts such as those described by psychiatrist Dori Laub. While I find Laub’s own understanding of trauma theory in relationship to traumatic dissociation problematic, I propose that fictional accounts stand at a meaningful distance from the direct experience of trauma in Laub’s interview subjects (including adaptive/protective trauma responses manifest through such subjects). Failing to explore issues of direct experience of trauma in moral injury risks ignoring how trauma may impair the recognition of moral injury itself.