We aren’t children. Let’s stop using the term “moral injury”
(Spoiler alert: it's not really an injury)
I’m all for a good sermon, but I really dislike attention grabbing concepts that inhibit critical thinking. In the news recently I’ve seen the concept “moral injury” come up a couple of times. I first saw it invoked in this article about how teachers suffered “moral injury” when they had to enforce school or departmental policies they believed were harmful. And more recently I saw it in a Forbes article about a business owner in Florida who asserted he would suffer moral injury if he let go of his ESG (Environmental, Social and Governmental) and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) principles that, given the current political climate, may hurt his bottom-line.
It's one of these exciting, “OhHh, wHaT iS ThAt!?!” terms from the bottomless wellspring of critical theory. And from the perspective of the progressive left, I can see its appeal. Forget moral injury, with Trump in office, liberals are receiving a moral beatdown. Whether it is the United States’ relationship with Israel, the recent Supreme Court ruling about adolescent transgender treatments, the dismantling of USAID, reduced support of Ukraine, and so on, it’s not a good time to be a liberal. While I don’t love everything that is happening, there are several problems with invoking “moral injury” when things happen that we don’t like.
The main issue is that when used as a qualifier of morality, “injury” is a weasel word similar to the use of “health” in “mental health”. It’s a euphemism without any consensus definition of what it constitutes. Injuries are physical in nature and objectively verifiable by third parties. Having a broken arm is a verifiable and amoral fact. Moral injury, in contrast, is only verifiable by the aggrieved party and is, well, moral. Injuries are objective and black-and-white while morals are socially constructed and grayscale. (Seeing this weakness, I’m sure some clever researchers will publish a p-hacked study that concludes “we can see moral injuries on brain scans” which then fails to replicate because everyone’s brains appear to be morally injured.)
As a result of this, we run into a second issue, which is that it doesn’t advance conversation. It’s a shrieking, histrionic, trump card. “I’VE SUFFERED A MORAL INJURY SO I WIN THE ARGUMENT!!!” “YEAH, WELL I SUFFERED A MORAL INJURY SO NO YOU DON’T!!!!” And we’re back where we started. Since it’s objectively unverifiable and logically incoherent, it can be applied to just about anything and leads to “hot” and emotional conversations rather than “cool” and rational ones.
We are in moral quandaries all the time and moral injuries aren’t really injuries. They are a rhetorical device used to win arguments by conjuring “villains who oppress us” out of the ether so that we might sweep the concerns of other interested parties under the rug. As Megan K. Stack writes, if something isn’t working then we ought to try and change it using, “straight talk, compromise and extending one another a little grace.” If that doesn’t work, then figure out another solution. But there isn’t a safe and heavenly place where we will be free from so-called “moral injury”, so we ought to dive in, embrace the messiness, and work together to figure it out.