A soldier's "moral injuries" inflicted in the line of duty can cause paralyzing guilt and shame even after he or she returns home, Georgetown University philosophy professor Nancy Sherman said in a lecture in Thornton Hall on Monday. These non-physical injuries are difficult to heal emotionally and lead to a shockingly high suicide rate among military personnel and veterans, she said.
Moral injuries manifest themselves in experiences of perpetrated transgressions or the failure to prevent them, according to Sherman. Modern warfare affords many opportunities for moral injuries, in part because of the unpredictability of technology, she said.
Sherman said that there has been a recent and "frightening" spike of suicides in the military, whose members are often deployed multiple times.
"By one account, the military are one percent of the population but 20 percent of suicides," Sherman said. "Many of those serving are returning to us intact visibly but with much deeper wounds internally."
Moral wounds such as survivors' guilt leave victims with the task of recovering a "sense of lost goodness," Sherman said. Symptoms of these injuries can be of a psychological or social nature and may include feelings of disillusion, according to Sherman.
"These wounds beg for healing by consolations of self-empathy that allow for ownership of the past and ownership of the future," Sherman said. "This healing is vital because between 2005 and 2010, a service member took their life every 36 hours, and one veteran, every 80 minutes."
The overwhelming guilt associated with these injuries is actually a mask for a deeper feeling of shame of falling short of one's measure, according to Sherman.
Moral wounds are best healed by self-empathy, which works to surmount harsh self-reproach through emotional and moral growth, Sherman said.
One approach to treatment is psychotherapy, which allows a victim to revisit a stressful situation with a compassionate listener; This can help reframe the events that occurred with fairer judgment and less rigid notions of morality, Sherman said.
Sherman frequently referenced various philosophers, drawing on ideas such as Aristotle's concept of self-friendship, which involves finding the right way to befriend oneself and using this as a counterweight to overbearing self-judgment, she said.
"In the best kind of friendship, you take the best qualities in a friend and try to move toward them," Sherman said. "You use this to grow as an individual."
Sherman told the story of Major Jeffrey Hall, who left Iraq with severe near-suicidal post traumatic stress disorder due to a paralyzing sense of shame, though he is not truly responsible for any moral transgressions.
"He felt thoroughly impotent in his role, profoundly betrayed by his command and coalition and humiliated by those who had forced him to betray innocents who had already suffered egregiously," Sherman said. "In this case, the guilt feels maybe morally fitting and admirable it shows he's not callous and cares about his troops but not strictly speaking fitting in terms of the actual facts of moral responsibility."
This sense of guilt is not completely irrational because these feelings often simply eclipse feelings of shame, Sherman said. Shame can be as destructive as guilt, and it is important to unmask it and find ways to accept and tolerate it, she said.
It is important to have a moment of exoneration and to be empathetic with oneself in order for healing to take place, according to Sherman.
Among the members of the audience were two sophomores in the honors program at Hartford High School in Hartford, Vt., Tanner Wilson and Sydney Koloski, who said the startling number of suicides in the military surprised them.
"Personally, I was unaware of all the suicides versus deaths in combat," Wilson said. "I didn't really know how many people were actually hurt by what they saw there rather than simply dying in combat."
Wilson said that although the overall presentation was strong, the vague mentions of different philosophies only confused Sherman's points, but he added that the stories did provide an interesting perspective on people who served and the feat of returning home with grief.
Koloski also said she appreciated that Sherman incorporated various stories of shame told by former and current soldiers into her lecture.
Sherman's presentation was part of the philosophy department's Sapientia lecture series, which is funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.
