So stress and psychological injury sometimes has a kind of.
Legalistic definition in terms of the possibility of of of payments.
But I think it's reasonably it was reasonably clearly understood as a kind of as an injury that is obviously psychological as opposed to physical.
And the implication is that there's some kind of damage which is in need of repair.
It's characterised by, on the one hand, various kinds of mental distress conditions of extreme fear and associated behaviours such as hyper vigilance,
but also by various kinds of cognitive impairments such as memory loss.
It is a. A feature very much of policing and of military personnel.
And those occupations are subject to some quite notable stressors that cause psychological injury
often characterised as follows or at least taxonomist as follows consequence of some traumatic event,
a life threatening or life threatening injury, obviously being shot at or everyone's legs blown off or some such thing.
Those life threatening situations tend to generate fear, obviously, but also sense of helplessness and so on.
The second kind of major category is some kind of major loss generating grief.
And the third. So the major category that's often drawn attention to is mental fatigue as a consequence of recurring traumatic events.
And the the kind of image that's often offered here is of a sort of frog in the foot in water.
So we confront a traumatic event able to accommodate one event,
able to accommodate events over a series of over a period of time, but eventually a wear and tear.
Generates some kind of damage. Okay.
Moral injury is often contrasted and it is typically, I think, contrasted in the literature with post-traumatic stress disorder and.
If we look at some of the literature on this,
perhaps the easiest way to characterise the difference as far as the literature is concerned is to think of.
To think of PTSD as severe stress and functional impairments resulting from traumatic events.
So what's the difference between PTSD and moral injury? Well, it's quite similar,
except that what's typically added is that the traumatic the traumatic event in question violated and then an individual's moral values.
So the idea is that PTSD is somehow.
Morality is not implicated, but with moral injuries.
Somehow it is. And the way in which it's implicated is that the person who's traumatised,
the one who's suffering the injury, has engaged in some moral transgression.
They've done something morally wrong or something that they believe to be morally wrong,
or alternatively someone has wronged them and that this is part of the trauma, whereas in the other cases it isn't.
So in the PTSD cases. There is no moral transgression.
That's the way the distinction. Is. Is typically drawn.
And I'm going to suggest that that actually is is rather problematic to draw to draw the distinction that way.
Although I do I do accept that.
There are cases where obviously the trauma doesn't involve a transgression on
the person traumatised and doesn't necessarily involve anyone who's wrong then.
I mean, obvious cases would be accidents or natural disasters which may traumatise people, but no one has been wronged even though the sufferer.
Has been. Psychologically damaged.
Jonathan Shay I would put the quote there. He distinguishes between PTSD and.
A moral injury. And he suggests that where there has been moral injury,
that is where there's been a moral transgression or someone has been deeply wronged or feels that they've been deeply wronged.
They're different in terms of what's called for, in terms of treatment,
and specifically if the person who's been traumatised by something that they've done where the thing that they've done involves a moral transgression,
then it's far more difficult to to treat them.
It's also far more difficult to treat someone who who feels that they've.
Been deeply, morally wrong, says says Shai as he's a psychiatrist treating people so.
There's reason to. To accept what he has to say on the matter.
Okay. So what I would suggest is that when people in this context and indeed in a lot of other contexts talk about morality,
they often have in mind a kind of narrow sense of morality.
That is, morality is consisting of certain sorts of prohibitions down to laws don't cheat,
people don't steal, don't enslave people, don't kill people, and so on.
And whatever, whatever one thinks of all of that is as an account of morality.
It is somewhat, I think, somewhat narrow.
An alternative view is a little bit more expansive, and I think it's the one that might be needed in this context.
That is the view of a moral age and not not simply as someone who might violate or not violate various rules,
but who actually is a kind of a is the kind of agent that cares a lot about certain things.
It cares fairly deeply about certain things. And most people are caring agents in this sense.
I'm not I don't have in mind, by the way, that kind of normative theory that the art of care ethics that although I guess this there's.
There's there's a relationship there.
So if you if you think about it, most people care pretty deeply about their own life, which is,
of course, a source of trauma when it's threatened and when it's continuously threatened.
The fear of death, the ongoing exposure to life threatening situations can be quite traumatic.
And that seems to me to strongly suggest that what's in play here is the fact that the quite basic natural fact that
people particularly care about their life and they also care about the lives of various significant other people,
so that when those people with the lives of the family and so on are threatened, that also or indeed they die.
That generates grief, which can be quite traumatic.
Other things that people typically very deeply care about or their autonomy.
And of course, they very much care about being treated unjustly by others.
What about the police and and the military?
Well, they are as human beings, they care about all these things I've just mentioned.
But in addition, it seems that they have a particular.
A set of virtues that they care very much about, that they seek to be approved of because they have these virtues and.
If they think that they don't have these virtues, that can be a great source of shame to them.
Let's call those virtues role based on the role of the police officer, the role of the military.
Combatant. Is such that.
They internalise a certain structure of virtues.
Of course, those virtues are ones that a lot of other people have, too. But it's it's particularly important to them, let's put it that way.
Loyalty to comrades. Physical courage, strength and skill.
With. With. With a weapon. Discipline.
And something that's particularly relevant to moral injury, physical and mental resilience.
And, and and the self-mastery, the ability to control oneself in in dangerous or life threatening situations is very much the fore.
When it comes to the honour that is so important, police and military personnel, obviously that structure virtues is to some extent derived from the.
The purposes of those of those occupations.
What I'd like to. Particularly draw attention to is that.
The self-worth that those individuals feel and the worth that they actually
have in the eyes of others is very much dependent on their capacity to this,
to have and to display mental and physical resilience and.
It's a source of. Considerable distress if they feel or others feel that they are weak or cowardly cowardice is something that is is not acceptable.
Okay. So if you think about this notion, this kind of fairly informal notion of a caring agent,
which I'm contrasting with also the narrow notion of an agent that.
Is concerned not to engage in. Not to breach certain sorts of rules, not to breach rules of of against lying and cheating and so on and so forth.
I'm suggesting that the caring agent is possessed of sort of can be thought of as having four components.
The first component, obviously, is they've got some sort of caring attitude, which essentially a kind of emotion,
but it's not an emotion in a sense of a of a simple idea of like dislike or that kind or a sort of feeling.
It's a complex attitude which which consists in part of of cognitive states, such as beliefs and so on.
But right. It's an emotion and not simply a set of beliefs.
So the content of the caring attitude is whatever they care about.
And I've suggested a number of things that care about their life. Most people do.
They care about the lives of others.
They they also care about the levels of they they like to they they care about whether or not they're approved of by other people.
And of course, as an agent, as the caring agent obviously has agency, which translates roughly into autonomy,
the which includes not simply freedom from from from interference by others, but self-mastery.
And of course. That autonomy that they possess is partly in the service of the other things that the that the agent cares about.
So they're the kind of components of this view. So if we look down.
At. Four different ways in which.
The moral identity of such an agent might be compromised or undermined.
Because for the caring agent, if it's if it consists of a caring attitude, a certain content in terms of.
Caring about their life, caring for the loss of others and so on. Autonomy.
Then we can look at. The moral identity understood in terms of the moral identity of a caring agent in this in this sense,
we can think of that that moral identity is being potentially compromised in at least four ways.
The first line which might be compromised is that we're undermined is that the something deeply cared about is lost.
So if you think of a mother losing her child, this might compromise or to some extent undermine their moral identity.
In this sense of moral identity, namely the moral identity of a caring agent.
And hence phrases such as she lost part of herself and so on and so forth.
The second kind of way in which it might be diminished or undermined or compromised
is some externally caused harm that overwhelms the Caring Agents Agency.
So the death of of comrades in war and saw may induce grief but also and this is a kind of a feature of of PTSD suffered by.
Combatants is a sense of helplessness, and that kind of trauma can undermine the caring agents autonomy, their self mastery.
This is called into question. They're overwhelmed by force.
So fear in this in this context. And that helplessness compromises the.
Their autonomy. And induces.
Or can induce and cause a psychological.
Damage or, as I'm describing it, moral, moral injury.
And potentially compromised their moral identity.
The third kind of case that comes to mind is.
The conflict between what is cared about. As part of one's role identity and what mind, what one might.
Care about, as it were, prior to. The internalisation of that role identity.
So for example, if there's as I think most people as is the case with most people, there's a sort of deep aversion to killing people.
That is it's it's profoundly distressing.
But if the role is such that this is part of the role and you need to,
as it were, internalise this and and be able to engage in this kind of activity,
potentially routinely, then that might set up a kind of a kind of tension between these two elements of your of your identity.
On the one hand, you're as it's part of your identity that was part of your identity that the aversion to killing.
On the other hand, now that is a necessary part of the role.
And it may be that tension which generates problems for for soldiers in particular.
Okay. Now, the fourth kind of case is. Obviously simply.
Kind of loss of your moral identity. Which is a feature of some extreme cases of PTSD, post-trauma traumatic stress disorder.
Some of these guys reportedly simply cease to care about anything very much.
Okay. So the caring agent is no longer caged literally about very much.
And that would seem to be a fairly profound loss of moral identity.
Okay. So a couple of other points that some of the object of care, uh, a kind of constituent of the.
Parts of one another.
So it's not just that you care about this and you care about this and you care about this thing, and they're separable compartmentalised.
It's that in caring about this thing. You also kind of necessarily care about this other thing.
So I think of this at the individual level and then at the group level.
At the individual level, perhaps the ongoing threat of being killed generates a condition of fearfulness.
And that fearfulness, your fear, you fear for your life, may in turn undermine your morally informed, rational judgement.
You're overwhelmed by the fear which undermines your autonomy.
So now you've got a problem in terms of your capacity for self mastery,
and that in turn may undermine your self-respect, since self-mastery is crucially important to you.
So you've now got a kind of ramification process going on where one part of your identity is starting to be undermined,
and that starts to undermine another element of your identity and so on.
Another kind of case which is of ramifications through a group where.
The loss of a sibling in a family or common in war is not simply your sort of particular direct loss that you feel profoundly,
you grieve deeply and saw and you hurt deeply, and you may even be injured in a manner that needs repair.
It's not just a sort of temporary feeling, but that loss that you feel may be felt by a close relative of yours, that is your losses felt by them.
So this loss ramaphosa's through the through the group.
Okay.
So I'm suggesting not that just returning to the standard view of this, I'm I'm not rejecting the claim that there's a distinction to be made between.
A traumatic event which causes extreme distress and may cause cognitive impairments.
I am not rejecting the proposition that there's a distinction to be made between those traumatic events or sequence of events that are such that.
You have morally transgressed or someone is morally transgressed against you.
Those ones, those kinds of plays on the one hand and the other kinds of case of traumatic events which
generate extreme distress and and possible cognitive impairments which don't involve you.
Transgressing or don't involve someone else morally transgressing against you, wronging you.
I'm not suggesting that is the distinction. What I'm suggesting it is both cases involve.
The potential. To undermine your moral identity.
And and the argument there is essentially that. There are certain things that you care deeply about.
And if. If those things.
Are taken away or in some way compromised that can undermine your moral identity because they are things that you deeply care about.
And that can happen even in those cases where you haven't actually done anything morally wrong.
And indeed, nor has anyone this sincerely done any thing wrong to you.
Okay. So what's the upshot of this?
The upshot of this is if this view of the matter that I'm presenting is is is correct, it's not simply that.
It's not simply that there's PTSD here and moral injury over here or even that moral injury is a kind of species of PTSD.
This view is correct. Actually, PTSD is a species of moral injury, a particularly serious kind of moral injury.
Or more. More specifically, PTSD is a manifestation of a very serious moral injury.
If this view is. Is. Used to be believed.
Of course, it'll turn out that there are now at least two different species of moral injury,
ones that involve transgressions or being transgressions against, on the one hand and the other places where that's not not the case.
Of course, there's a sort of verbal point here if you want to insist that one of these kinds of cases,
moral injury and the other isn't you, you can obviously do so.
But that doesn't affect the the larger theoretical point.
Okay. One of the one of the consequences of this is that since a lot of these traumatic events are beyond the control.
Of the person morally injured. Of the person suffering from PTSD.
Since a lot of these events are beyond their control,
one can't actually now say that at least in some of these cases, that that the person could be morally responsible.
They're obviously not morally responsible for the event that traumatised them. In the cases in question.
But now we can we can also obviously say that they're not actually moral,
morally responsible for the damage, the psychological damage that's been done to them.
And therefore, if this view that I've been pushing is correct and not actually morally responsible.
For the diminution or the compromising or the diminishing of their moral identity resulting from those traumatic events.
So this seems to mean that your moral identity is to some extent, to some extent, not under your control,
which is to say that the boundaries of moral responsibility are not so, so to speak, coterminous with the boundaries of of moral identity.
And and of course, it also would follow from that that it may be that if you're.
As a consequence of these traumatic events suffering. This loss of moral identity that.
You know, if you are to be, so to speak, repaired, that would entail at least in these cases.
Some kind of. Collaboration or assistance from other people other than yourself, maybe your family members,
maybe your colleagues, maybe your comrades, health professionals or whatever.
At least that may well be the case in many cases, of course, of the other cases where evidently that's simply the problem can't be resolved.
You can't be healed. The mechanism here seems to be from from what I can make out that.
When these traumatic events take place, you engage in a process of dissociation, try to get some distance between yourself and the trauma,
which is a actually a very useful typically a very useful device to to deal with with trauma to try and get some distance that keep it to some extent.
At a distance from yourself. But the problem is that if it's been very severe and long lasting and so on,
you simply end up with this sort of unresolved psychological injury that you have,
which you're not actually doing anything about and which which actually can you continually at times re-experience and therefore get retraumatized.
So in order to deal with the the injury, you're going to have to, to some extent, come to terms with it or reinterpret it at all or something.
If it's if it's to be dealt with, if indeed it can be dealt with.
But at any rate, that process may involve assistance from other people.
Okay. So. If we think about combatants first and then I'll move to say a police.
Combatants. First,
the empirical evidence seems to be that killing in military combat is closely associated
associated with moral injury and disassociated experiences of the carnage mentioned earlier.
Violent behaviour and severe civilian life and functional impairment.
So the mere fact that you engage in killing at least for some for some members of the military.
Can have this kind of impact. And presumably it has this impact because deliberately killing another human being is
is a highly morally significant event for the for the person who's doing the killing.
It's also obviously pretty significant for the person who just got killed. And this is the case, even if.
And this is a sort of important point, I think, in light of we've been saying before,
even if the action is believed to be morally justified, they can it can still be.
I can still be traumatic and indeed generate cause moral injury, at least in in many people.
In addition to.
So this sort of trauma, which is, as it were, part and parcel of the role, the problem can be compounded by various sort of organisational stresses,
an unsupportive leadership, excessive, excessively punitive discipline, resentment and so on and so forth.
One of the other issues in the military culture, which I mentioned before,
is this emphasis on physical and mental resilience, which is very important in terms of being able to undertake the role.
So it's critical to the role, but it can.
End up compounding the problem of moral injury. If moral injury is, is, is, is kind of it's just not accepted and is is regarded as stigmatised.
It's regarded as just simply weakness that can't be tolerated.
Then that, of course, can come rather than.
Then taken to be what it is. Something that.
Is is is a consequence of traumatic events and can be resolved and probably is such that at certain points will be experienced by anyone.
I mean, as it were, everyone's got a breaking point.
And if that's the case, then we've got a phenomenon that has to be kind of dealt with as an injury that can be presumably can be repaired,
but not simply kind of stigmatised and rejected as some kind of fundamental weakness.
Of course, it gets difficult then to think about which is which.
Do you have someone who's who,
who's criticised Bill for being weak as opposed to someone who's in some genuine sense suffering injury that needs to be needs to be repaired.
And another factor, of course, for. A military people is which can compound their problem is an unsupportive homeland community.
This has been talked about a lot in relation to Vietnam veterans, for example.
Okay. With turning now the police. Again, police routinely confront critical incidents, including road deaths, scraping bodies off the highway,
trauma other than death, confronting victims of child sex abuse, etc., etc.
These are morally significant events and moral injury may emerge after a long specia series of traumatic events.
Typically when we looked at what was happening in the New South Wales Police, it was a case of.
But it wasn't just sort of one or two or three traumatic events.
It was kind of years and decades of confronting these these sorts of traumatic events before the.
The sort of moral injury occurred. So I remember interviewing this guy that had a in.
A very impressive police background particularly.
He was the guy that the go to guy for sieges. He obviously was was a very mentally and physically tough guy.
Unquestionably. But after 20 years of this, when I was talking to him, he had PTSD was being diagnosed with PTSD after 10 minutes,
talking about him, talking about his, you know, what he'd been up to in his career.
And so he fell apart in front of a sort of cry like a baby.
So he was clearly suffering moral injury.
But also it would be completely false, I think, to say, of this guy that he wasn't mentally and physically resilient.
It's just that it at a certain point, the wear and tear took its toll.
And with people like that, it's obviously problematic to just move straight into moralistic, into stigmatising the guy's weak.
I mean, what presumably should have happened in his case?
He should have been relieved of some of those very demanding tasks and given to a lesser workload
and and been allowed to have some sort of period of of to get himself together and he's repaired.
And presumably, if that had been managed properly over many over a very long period of time, he never would have got to that state.
Or at least that's the the suspicion or at least that's the same is highly likely, again, with police if there's an adverse adversary,
if if if you want if the military has to is fighting on behalf of the of the of the community.
And the community doesn't accept or thinks that what they're doing is is wrong is the case in Vietnam.
Perhaps that is not going to be helpful. Similarly with the police,
if they're in an adversarial relationship with the with the the members of the public that they're supposed to be protecting and so on,
that's also going to be a problem and and not helpful in terms of moral injury.
Okay. So the let him have hammer going for time.
He asks you, you've let me out by calling the seven.
So we've got 15 minutes or so before you leave to talk.
Yes. Okay. So I'll try and speed things up a little bit below.
I'm about two thirds of the way through, so. Okay. So I want to talk now a little bit about the the sort of dirty hands issue.
Okay. So the role of this institutional role of combatants is to a critical dimension, to the role is this is to kill enemy combatants.
So obviously, life is at stake when it comes to the.
The life, the role of a soldier, the role of police is to enforce law and they use harmful methods as well deception,
coercion, manipulation and so on.
And again, something pretty important is at stake, namely freedom.
So these two roles are actually highly morally significant.
There's a lot at stake. I mean, you're talking about life in the case of the military and you're talking about freedom in the case of the police,
because ultimately the end point of their activities is, is someone being imprisoned.
But these roles, obviously, as with all roles, typically internalised the purpose and activity,
become elements as I'm arguing of ones of one's identity and being morally significant roles as opposed to,
say, the role of a sandwich hand or something. Presumably then that caught up in your moral identity.
Unfortunately, however.
In the case of the military and police, the basic methods or many of the basic methods that that are used are actually harmful methods and in fact,
methods such as obviously shooting people dead, but also in the case of the police coercion, use of intrusive surveillance and so on.
Hopefully they're in the service of good ends that is genuinely in the service of national security or gender, in the service of law enforcement.
But nevertheless, they are harmful methods which would normally be regarded as morally problematic.
And that is that is part and parcel of the role.
So and they have to be those harmful methods have to be internalised.
Now. It's not just a matter of running around sort of harming people.
There's all sorts of moral constraints on them, principally in the case of the military discrimination, necessity and so on and so forth.
So they are under moral constraints.
But nevertheless, this this is a potentially dangerous dynamic in place here if if these harmful methods are so central to the role.
And it brings to mind the notion of dirty hands.
And I'm not going to be suggesting that the use of harmful methods by police and military is necessarily dirty hands.
But. But. But. But. Dirty hands scenarios are not, as it were, far off, at least potentially.
So what a dirty hand scenario as well. The the dirty hand scenario for those for those of you who haven't done much political philosophy
or whatever are basically scenarios in which people not necessarily police or military,
but but these are favourite examples, basically scenarios in which people do harm or indeed wrong people, but for a good end.
And some of the kind of salient examples around is where you.
The notion of torturing a terrorist, for example, in order to save lives.
The good in the saving lives, the dirty the dirty method is torture or in the policing case.
You know, this guy's a drug dealer. You don't have enough evidence to nail him.
So you fabricate the evidence. We load. Load up the evidence and you get your conviction.
Of course, the dirty hands is kind of on a spectrum at one end of the dirty hand scenarios.
It's relatively fabricated evidence, which is certainly. A breach of the rules and and unjust and so on.
But it's not.
It's not quite the same thing, for example, is torturing an innocent person to get information to save a large number of lives so that the as it were,
the dirtiness of the dirty hands can be very dirty. A whole list would.
But. I draw your attention to the fact that the the dirty hands is is not necessarily all that far
away from from the harmful if harmful methods that might be used by the police or the military.
So if we start thinking about not sort of just routine arrest of of of people,
if you start thinking about some of the might be regarded as more morally dubious.
But nevertheless, in some jurisdictions, legal methods used by, say,
police or military say enhanced interrogation and enhanced interrogation that might be legal in some juries to not torture.
But or if you think about informants in in in an organisation in which the informant is a criminal of engaging in serious crime,
but you're not actually going to going to arrest this person for giving a good information.
So you turn a blind eye to various great criminal activity on the part of the informant.
And in the case of Northern Ireland, some of the serious crimes could include actually things like murder at any rate.
The point I'm making here is that it's not necessarily such a long step from the use of lawful,
harmful methods by police and military to dirty hands scenarios which where the methods are unlawful.
There's a there's a potential for a kind of slippery slope, slippery slope, slippery, slippery slope.
And the slope could become quite slippery and go beyond even dirty hands scenarios because today's use of some unlawful method.
In the service of some good end might be tomorrows.
In the case of the military. Activity, which probably isn't even in the service of a good.
But that might be rationalised as such. So. On the one hand, there's controlled aggression in accordance with.
The moral, relevant moral principles. But then you've got the phenomenon which is out of Jonathan shows because of of berserk some guy going berserk.
Well, first, I mean, when I just come there, I couldn't believe Americans could do things like this in Vietnam, another human being.
But then I became that we went through villages and killed everything. I mean, everything.
And that was all right with me. So the sort of slippery moral slope.
In the policing situation. This is one from. John Black regards the police officer and this was from his own experience.
I'll let you read that. But basically. He was the Reserve Constable and he joined the police service.
Bump, bump, bump, heavyset, plainclothes officer descending the stairs with one of the feet tucked prisoners feet tucked under his arm.
His head bouncing from one. Step to the to the next.
The. The prisoner in question was a sex offender.
The treatment is, to say the least. Excessive.
The justification. Well, I've got to get him to sign up.
No admission. No confession, no conviction.
The Reserve Constable is kind of in a state of what the.
And then the last couple of lines the Reserve Constable says did you have to.
And the response is done as as a detective. I guess I just got into it again.
In the case of the berserk combatant and this.
And this detective, obviously.
Their behaviour is is morally, to say the least, problematic.
But. It's you can kind of understand how it might come about in certain contexts.
And the problem is that not just what the what they're doing to victims, but in this context, what they what they end up doing themselves.
Because in both in both cases, they're prime candidates for for PTSD and serious moral injury.
Okay. So one of the key things then is that.
In relation to harmful methods, you've got to kind of hold the line on heart, on the use of harmful methods by the police, the military,
such that we don't get this slippery slope happening and therefore don't get or at least minimise the kind of moral injury,
the moral compromises, the loss of moral identity and so on.
That may come with it and. Putting matters in a kind of rather simple light.
What we need is that the harmful methods are justified by objective moral principles.
Secondly, that the that the action is lawful.
And thirdly,
that this community consent to that law so that we're all on the same page with these with these harmful methods and that vote that requirement,
that that threefold requirement is not necessarily all that easy to get.
I mean, there's often the case that the law doesn't necessarily track morality for whatever reason.
And sometimes the community doesn't. Isn't in line with with objective methods and so on.
And you get a lot of problems when those those things don't line up.
Okay. But clearly I'm suggesting the line should be you need to hold the line here.
And and that threefold distinction allows you to maintain the distinction between the Dirty Harry.
Sometimes the police thing is called Dirty Harry Dirty Hands scenarios,
because typically Dirty Harry Dirty Hands scenarios do not meet all of those three requirements.
The methods in question are not typically morally justified.
They may be justified in the mind of the individual because of the good end that they see themselves of serving.
They're not typically not lawful in the not in accordance with the community's will.
So there's a slippery slope from. Harmful methods to dirty hands to something even possibly worse.
I guess I just got into it and going berserk in a in a village.
But the line needs to be held against that, as it were, that slope.
Okay. So coming to the final last couple of slides, reducing moral injury is a kind of wish list.
So I've suggested. I've suggested to you that moral injuries, that far from moral injury being a kind of just a mere species of a of a larger PTSD,
serious psychological damage problem that actually is quite central to it.
Of secondly suggested that there's a kind of feature of policing and military, let's call it the sort of dirty hands scenarios,
which sets up a dangerous moral dynamic in those occupations, which is conducive, if you like,
to moral injury because it can corrode moral character and therefore moral identity.
Given all that, what what's to be done?
Well, you know, kind of this is a kind of a wish list, but, uh, I'll have a go at this now, so.
Well, the first thing that probably needs to be done is that you need to recruit mentally and physically resilient people.
I mean, there are probably many people, including possibly probably soft academics like myself,
who simply don't have the the the the the underlying level of resilience to to take take on these occupations.
And there's various ways that people can be tested.
And so but. This is partly a normative question, it seems to me.
That is what what levels of resilience are ones that ought to be in place if you're going to be a police officer or a combatant.
What are the normative standards, if you like, of physical and mental resilience?
Then there's a need for ongoing training in moral injury and coping mechanisms, including for supervisors and those in command.
And there's a kind of pretty difficult issue here, I think,
that calls for a certain degree of reflection on those on the part of those people between.
Identifying and working to prevent or relieving moral injury on the one hand, as opposed to simply accommodating, indulging, if you like.
A lack of mental resilience and a simply a weakness.
And that has that that is a fairly difficult. Process to manage and calls for some degree of.
The reflection. I've got a general point.
I guess it's not a good idea to commit the military to fight unjust or unwinnable wars,
because it's not going to be very helpful in terms of the levels of moral injury.
It's not a likewise not analogous but analogy.
It's not a good idea to get the police to enforce unjust laws or or more likely to in liberal democracies is to get
them to sort of all by themselves solve socio economic problems that they cannot actually solve all by themselves,
such as, for example, drug addiction, because they're going to be on a hiding to nothing.
And this is not very helpful in terms of preserving the moral identities.
And so another kind of general point is that and this is it, there are a lot of entirely all terrible stresses.
There's the stresses that are part and parcel of the job and that there's nothing to be done about them.
That's the nature of the work.
But then there are these stresses, a lot of organisational stresses, for example, that are all terrible and they're compounding the problem.
But, but it's not, it's not necessarily that they, they obtain.
So giving people poor equipment, inadequate training.
Dysfunctional rotation processes, etc. etc.
So there are various organisational stresses that are all trouble which should be looked at.
Then in terms of supervision and so on.
A fair and reasonable workload is one of the problems, which is very unhelpful is, for example,
in the military is is putting some people at much greater risk than others in an unfair, unfair way.
That's not going to be helpful. Secondly, it's important, and relatedly, to have supportive leadership.
Which means that people that it's that moral injury is understood and monitored
and that capacity for making the right kind of discretionary judgements.
In relation to moral injury versus sort of indulging weakness or whatever.
But that is quite a difficult exercise when you when it has to be undertaken in the context of the stigmatism issue.
In relation to the dirty hands scenarios and the slippery slopes.
The issue there is partly, it seems obviously clear guidelines and so on, but but also moral training and a degree of moral reflection.
Obviously, when people are in the middle of arresting someone or engaged in a firefight,
we've got to sit there having a process of moral deliberation. But nevertheless,
there are plenty of there's plenty of downtime and win in which people can think about and reflect
on this and try to think through what would be the right thing to do in this or that scenario.
And and that that would be helpful in terms of dealing with potentially problematic dirty hand scenarios.
And then, of course, there's the issue of involving psychological injury,
moral injury professionals, combat stress control units in actual theatres of war.
Psychological is a critical instance. One of the regular counselling for particularly at risk groups such as undercover operatives,
one of the one of the issues here is that a lot of the the counsellors have to.
And that is that becomes quite a difficult role in that. They've got to understand the nature of the enterprise.
I mean, what you don't want is, you know,
so a newly minted psych graduate running along and doing a sort of overly caring and sharing thing with
somehow cop or military person at a at a critical incident that probably isn't going to work too well,
in fact. Conduct a lot of interviews with such people, and I can assure you, didn't didn't help.
And then finally, what they referred to often is the communal ization of moral injury,
since the military is going to war on or only to be going to war on behalf of the community.
And since the police are enforcing the community's laws and and working to.
Ensure the safety of the members of the community,
then there's presumably some sort of collective responsibility on the part of the community in relation to this issue of of moral injury.
And it's amongst the soldiers and police.
Thanks.