Margaret Urban Walker
in Moral injury
American moral philosopher (PhD, Northwestern), Donald J. Schuenke Chair Emerita in Philosophy at Marquette University, previously Lincoln Professor of Ethics at Arizona State. Foundational figure in the expressive-collaborative school of feminist moral philosophy. Earlier work on the philosophical anthropology of moral life (Moral Understandings, 1998); later work on the ethics of repair after wrongdoing (Moral Repair, 2006; What is Reparative Justice?, 2010).
Stake§
Walker writes from feminist moral philosophy and the expressive-collaborative tradition — committed to the moral significance of ordinary practices (gossip, blaming, expressing resentment, accepting apology) and to the location of moral life in particular relations of recognition and accountability rather than in abstract universal principles. The stake on moral repair is philosophical-political: the argument that repair is a relational and political project rather than a private psychological one, and that the practices and institutions required for it are constitutive of moral life rather than optional add-ons.
Walker is the principal philosophical voice on moral repair as a construct and the source most cited when the moral-injury literature borrows the repair vocabulary from the transitional-justice and restorative-justice tradition. Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge UP, 2006) is the relevant book for the corpus.
Where the moral-injury literature centres the perpetrator or betrayed-from-within case, Walker centres the victim or wronged case, and the construct of moral repair as she defines it is positioned around the moral emotions and practices that sustain moral relations between victims, wrongdoers, and the wider community. The borrowing of her repair vocabulary into the moral-injury literature — most visibly in Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair — is sometimes uncited and the conceptual stretch involved is sometimes under-acknowledged. Reading Walker alongside Williams's Shame and Necessity gives the philosophical-precursor pair on which both the injury and repair sides of the moral-injury vocabulary rest.