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Dirty Hands and Moral Injury

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2018

Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon
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Abstract

Moral injury describes the effects of violence on veterans beyond what trauma discourse can describe. I put moral injury in conversation with a separate but related concept, dirty hands. Focusing on Michael Walzer's framing of dirty hands and Jonathan Shay's understanding of moral injury, I argue that moral injury can be seen as part of the dirt of a political leader's dirty hands decisions. Such comparison can focus more attention on the broader institutional context in which such dirty hands decisions are executed, while contributing to the growing vocabulary of moral conflict, trauma, and harm.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 355 - 374
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Joshua Daniels for his feedback, as well as conversations with Matej Cíbik and Michael Campbell. This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), ‘Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value’, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

References

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27 It is difficult to discuss largely due to the dearth of moral language in psychology (Litz et al. op. cit. note 16, 696).

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44 I say ‘obviously’, because Walzer published his seminal article on dirty hands near the conclusion of the war between the US and North Vietnam, a war whose media coverage in the United States, and to a significant extent, its cultural debate, focused on the experience of common soldiers.

45 Sherman op. cit. note 5; Walzer, op. cit. note 9, 173.

46 De Wijze also sees dirty hands through the lens of betrayal one makes against ‘persons, values, and principles’, something that could connect this with his work (Stephen De Wijze op. cit. note 7).

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