This panel explores foundations, intersections, and applications of moral injury and epistemic injustice and their respective and interrelated uses to describe the ways in which societies implicitly grant privileged groups credibility in describing their own experiences and knowledge production while implicitly denying that same credibility to marginalized groups. Moral Injury illuminates some of the consequences of epistemic injustice, and vice versa, particularly given the tendency of governments and institutions to propagate moral injury and epistemic injustice through conflict, war, racism and racial violence, xenophobia, stigmatization, and pathologization. The papers wrestle with modern discourse on moral injury and epistemic injustice tied to matters of restoration, testimony, mediation, healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness. In exploring connections, affinities, and differences, the papers examine interconnectedness, possibilities for how our individual consciences condition our senses of responsibility, accountability and response, and the ways in which both concepts are evidence that we might envision a hopeful future.
This paper introduces the concept of phronetic injustice—a form of epistemic injustice that specifically wrongs individuals as moral knowers—and demonstrates how it constitutes a systematic pathway to moral injury. When powerful actors perpetrate epistemic malpractice by manipulating, concealing, or fabricating morally relevant information, they corrupt the epistemic foundations necessary for virtuous moral deliberation. From propaganda obscuring ongoing genocides to educational sanitization and ideological censorship, these manipulations are able to compromise the exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis) on a massive scale, causing otherwise virtuous individuals to become complicit in atrocities through epistemic manipulation rather than personal moral failure. This corruption frequently results in moral injury as agents discover themselves complicit in actions that fundamentally violate their deepest moral commitments. In an era of mass atrocities and sophisticated disinformation campaigns, deepfakes, and AI-amplified information warfare, understanding this concept of phronetic injustice is critical for both individual flourishing and collective responses to injustice.
International humanitarian law and modern just war reasoning lead some to interpret many veterans’ moral injuries as mistaken attributions of guilt to themselves rather than to the aggressors responsible for the negative consequences of a just war. This rejection of morally injured veterans’ knowledge is similar to what Miranda Fricker describes as testimonial injustice. Unlike the cases Fricker describes, however, this particular injustice is based not on identity prejudices against veterans but rather on prejudices against the other characters in their testimonies: the combatants and civilians they’ve harmed. As such, rejecting morally injured veterans’ testimonies as mistaken constitutes an injustice not only against the veterans themselves, but represents an expansion of the category of testimonial injustice because it perpetrates an injustice against those of whom the veterans speak. The result is a failure to recognize both harmed persons and the harms they’ve suffered.
This paper considers critiques of religious forgiveness proposed through recent moral injury research by psychologist Brett Litz and the recent book Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice by psychiatrist Judith Herman. Religious discourses on forgiveness do not locate justice first in relationship to the individual or the community but in relationship to repentance before the divine. This undoubtedly can be abused in certain contexts such as Christian perpetrators who use God’s offer of forgiveness through Jesus Christ as a “free pass” to avoid true accountability or reparations. But I argue this does not have to be the case. Transcendent claims about Christian or other forms of religious forgiveness draw from rich communal traditions of penitence and repentance which also do not necessarily force a choice between confronting the therapeutic or structural issues at hand in moral injury.