Moral Injury and the Promise of Virtue (1st ed. 2019)

By: Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into UK education collection to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: 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.