Moral repair
The work of rebuilding the things that let people live together in a moral relationship after wrongdoing — trust, hope, mutual recognition, and shared confidence in what counts as right. Its defining move is to treat this as relational and shared: repair happens between the wronged, the wrongdoer, and the surrounding community, rather than being something administered to a damaged individual. That places its centre of gravity on the victim and the relationship, which is part of why borrowing it to describe healing the person who did the wrong is a genuine stretch.
Margaret Urban Walker's term for the work of restoring or stabilising — and in some cases creating — the basic elements that sustain human beings in a recognisably moral relationship: trust, hope, mutual recognition, and confidence in shared moral standards. The construct is relational and political: repair is something done between victim, wrongdoer, and the wider community, not something done to an injured individual.
Etymology§
Articulated by Walker in Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge UP, 2006), drawing on the transitional-justice and restorative-justice traditions that had developed out of post-conflict reconstruction work in South Africa, Rwanda, and the Balkans. The term moral repair is Walker's; the underlying conceptual material — amends, forgiveness, trust, hope — has older roots in moral philosophy and in religious traditions of penitence and reconciliation.
For the moral-injury literature, moral repair is the construct that names the work that needs to be done after the injury — and the construct is borrowed across a methodological boundary that the borrowing sometimes does not register. Walker's construct is positioned around the victim of wrongdoing and is relational in structure: the repair is between victim and wrongdoer, mediated by the community and its institutions. The moral-injury literature centres the perpetrator or the betrayed-from-within case, and the borrowed repair vocabulary gets reoriented toward the moral repair of the agent who did wrong rather than the victim who was wronged.
The reorientation is most visible in Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair (2012), where the project name itself stakes out the position. The conceptual stretch is non-trivial: repairing the moral self of the combatant who did wrong, on the model of repairing the moral relation between a victim and the institution that wronged them, is not the same operation. Kinghorn's 2012 article and Sherman's Afterwar both work the construct more carefully and engage Walker's framework directly.
For the corpus the relevant practical question is whether moral repair in the moral-injury sense — what a clinician, chaplain, or community can do for or with a morally injured person — is the same kind of operation as moral repair in the transitional-justice sense, or whether the two share only a vocabulary. The literature has not settled the question; positioning your reading inside the disagreement is more useful than treating it as resolved.