Rebeccah Leiby

Moral injury can be understood as occurring when one feels that their moral code has been violated or relationship to their moral community meaningfully damaged. There are therefore three points of access into the experience of moral injury: as victim, bystander, or perpetrator. Because both victim and bystander incur moral injury passively, we generally place little or no blame on them for having done so. In the case of the perpetrator, however, our reactions are more mixed. We might believe that perpetrators, as the active agents of a moral code violation, deserve the psychological and emotional wounds that they incur as a result of their wrongdoing. However, the literature on this subject suggests that we perform this assignment of blame often selectively. The scholarly content on moral injury and how it is overcome focuses in large part upon either historical, biblical, or literary heroes whose worlds look very different from our own, or upon contemporary soldiers who are members of the legally legitimate military of an established liberal democracy. This chapter asks, ‘where are all the bad guys’? Where are the enemy combatants, guerrilla fighters, felons, and convicts? I suggest that they are largely absent from conversations about moral injury (despite almost certainly experiencing moral injury) because our understanding of the phenomenon links recognition of moral injury with exculpation. I use Sophocles’’ Philoctetes in order to draw out this claim, and to situate the conclusion that such objective applications of the label of ‘moral injury’ do more to confuse and mislead than to accurately describe the experiences of the injured.

The field of transitional justice—concerned as it is with the mechanisms of recovery from societal conflict and mass violence—has long found its de facto home in legal theory. While this is in many respects a natural pairing, I argue that just as transitional justice has expanded in scope from the regime-change paradigm to general situations of human rights violations, so too should our conception of it expand from the purely legalistic to the more explicitly ethical. This paper makes the case that while transitional justice remains undertheorized along ethical dimensions, increased attention to both the ethical underpinnings of justice interventions and the ability of ethical work to center the individual experience might go a great distance towards addressing what Pablo de Greiff has identified as three of the chief challenges facing transitional justice today: insufficient attention to context, formulism, and technocratic tendencies.

Transitional justice theorizing has the tendency to smuggle in an over-reliance on dualities: one’s resentment can give rise to either vengeance or forgiveness, but not both; one can either be fueled by anger or by the hope of progress, but not both; and so on. This dualistic way of thinking replicates the kinds of false dichotomies that hamstring other societal movements, among them the struggle against racism. Drawing on Myisha Cherry’s case for so-called ‘Lordean rage’ within the context of the anti-racist movement, I make the case that transitional justice in general would be well-served by centering the transformative power of emotion (even and especially when that emotion defies oversimplified and strict categorization).

Hobbes would say that this level of apprehension is inevitable in any society that isn't governed by a sufficiently powerful central ruler. Just as in our world, some people or groups would have more power than others, and some of these might have more power than most. The Emperor would still be subject to the demands of the Spacing Guild, for example, while the Spacing Guild would still need to be on good terms with the governor of Arrakis because of the Guild's absolute dependence upon spice. In a world like this, it would be difficult not to see potential threats around every corner, and with good reason. And in this state of wariness, political and social stability will be tough to attain. Hobbes had seen firsthand the terrible destruction that civil war could unleash, the horrific loss of life and destruction of security.

The eminent philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt once attended a similar trial with a similar plea: the 1961 trial of the mid‐level Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. She portrayed him as an exemplar of what she termed the banality of evil. After his capture in 1960, Eichmann was tried on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was an exemplary case of the thoughtlessness and lack of self‐reflection that goes into setting unthinkable atrocities into motion. Like Eichmann, Mao doesn't cut the figure of a hardline fanatic, blinded by ideology. Mao's unwillingness to place the cause ahead of his own desires should indicate that he isn't wholly blinded by fanaticism, as Dresden is. In her characterizations of Eichmann, Arendt noted his odd lack of imagination, his inability, in other words, “to think from the standpoint of someone else.”

Transitional justice addresses legacies of social and political wrongdoing by coming to terms in some sense with the past and charting a path forward. In my dissertation, I introduce the complementary notion of ‘transitional ethics.’ Whereas transitional justice asks how we can dispense justice in the aftermath of widespread violence, transitional ethics asks how we can meet wider demands of morality in the aftermath of widespread violence. Although the formulation of the concept of transitional ethics is novel, its deployment is not. In fact, nearly all transitional projects of the past several decades have included an implicit appeal to consequentialist transitional ethics. In my dissertation I make the case instead for a contractualist model of transitional ethics, one that both acknowledges the shared nature of the transitional project and affirms the agency of previously silenced individuals.