Rebooting military ethics from moral injury

Abstract

In 2022, members of the Five Eyes Mental Health Research and Innovation Collaborative recommended the integration of moral injury prevention into military leadership training and mission command, and the design of military ethics training to better prepare serving personnel for potentially morally injurious events. The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Five Eyes Health Research and Innovation Collaborative comprises many of the world’s leading experts in moral injury who recognised the need to advance understanding of moral injury, including its moral/ethical dimensions. Their challenge is to take moral injury more seriously across all aspects of military life, including ethics training/education. This essay picks up the challenge from a Christian perspective. We look briefly at definitions of moral injury and examples of moral injury in workplaces, before re-visiting the origins of classic, Western theologically-rooted tradition of just war reasoning – in the experience of moral injury amongst serving military personnel. This essay reconsiders the origins of Western military ethics in Augustine’s conversations with Boniface. We begin where Augustine perhaps failed.