Macy Salzberger

This article aims to clarify and expand our conceptual repertoire for understanding domestic violence and abuse by making legible different characteristic harms, particularly those that cannot be made sense of in terms of physical harm. Sections 2 and 3 of this article review popular understandings of the harms of domestic violence and abuse. These often emphasize either (a) pain and suffering or (b) the loss of capacities for self-governance as characteristic harms of domestic violence and abuse. In its second half, this article argues that domestic violence and abuse characteristically involve yet another harm to the victim, one that cannot neatly be explained in terms of hedonistic welfare or concerns for a victim's capacities for self-governance. More specifically, this article argues that through the characteristic social isolation of domestic violence and abuse, perpetrators alienate victims from what motivationally roots them to the world. Although relationships that motivationally root us to the world might make us fundamentally dependent on others and can cause us great pain, they nevertheless play a profoundly valuable role in our lives by giving us reasons to go on living.

In this article, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from two distinct kinds of moral harm: moral damage and moral injury. Moral damage occurs when the ability to develop or sustain good moral character has been compromised by an agent’s circumstances. Moral injury refers to a kind of psychological anguish that follows from when an agent causes or becomes causally implicated in actions that we ordinarily would understand to be morally grievous offenses because of their circumstances. A person can experience moral damage or moral injury separately, but the experiences of moral damage and moral injury can also overlap. Because abusers often expect victims to adopt morally deficient dispositions and often implicate victims in wrongdoing, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from both moral damage and moral injury. By appreciating the different yet overlapping moral experiences of the victim, we become better positioned to identify strategies for responding to and repairing the different harms they suffer.