There is a quality of self-betrayal in some cases of moral injury; a quality that is typically implicit in the psychoanalytic and philosophical literature on moral injury and moral repair. My review of the recent literature shows that moral injury is typically described as a syndrome that is the result of a person’s experience of moral betrayal within the context of her complicity in a hierarchical institution, in which the institutionally-respected authorities lead them to actions that compromise their own values as they fulfill their institutional duties. I argue there is a phenomenological and normative subjective element missing from the literature: voluntary complicity. Voluntary complicity is clarified if we look other experiential examples that are not typified in the literature. I use stories gleaned from my philosophical counseling dialogues and my memoir commentaries to sketch this type of voluntary complicity. The process notion of normative-ideal agentic identifications helps to understand the agentic state of some people who voluntarily elect to comply in harmful institutional or social situations. I explain the qualitative complicity of individual agency in social and structural situations with the use of intersubjective dynamic-third psychoanalytic theory and phenomenological philosophies of intersubjectivity. I conclude that efforts to recover moral integrity are enmeshed in qualitative complicity, necessitating the need to offer reparations toward the moral community. This community often needs to be remade as part of their chosen ideal agentic identity.

Authors:
Kate Mehuron, Eastern Michigan University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Kate Mehuron is a Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University. She also a certified Philosophical Counselor (American Philosophical Practitioners Association), and certified Academic Psychoanalyst (Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute).

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-mehuron-philosophiccounsel

Additional website of interest
https://mehuron.academia.edu/

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