Moral Repair — Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing

Margaret Urban Walker is Donald J. Schuenke Chair Emerita in Philosophy at Marquette University, and previously held the Lincoln Professor of Ethics chair at Arizona State. Her earlier book Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (1998) had established her as a major figure in feminist moral philosophy and in the expressive-collaborative approach to ethics that takes the moral life as constituted in particular relations of recognition and accountability rather than in abstract universal principles. Moral Repair extends that methodology to the question of what happens when moral relations are damaged by serious wrongs.

Cambridge University Press published the book in 2006. CUP's philosophical list is one of the major academic philosophy lists in English; the book was widely reviewed in Hypatia, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and the major moral-philosophy journals, and has been a syllabus presence in graduate courses in moral philosophy and transitional justice. The reception was strongly positive on the philosophical merits and registered the book's position at the intersection of mainstream moral philosophy and the transitional-justice / restorative-justice literature that had grown out of post-conflict reconstruction work in South Africa, Rwanda, and the Balkans.

The argument is positioned on the victim side of wrongdoing rather than the perpetrator side. Walker's analytic moves are organised around the moral emotions and practices that sustain moral relations — resentment, forgiveness, trust, hope, making amends — and the question the book asks is how those relations can be reconstructed after serious wrongs have damaged them. The construct of moral repair as Walker defines it is a relational and political construct: repair is something done between victim and wrongdoer (and the wider community), not something done to an injured individual.

The relation to the moral-injury literature is two-sided and useful. Where the moral-injury literature centres the perpetrator or the betrayed-from-within case — the soldier who did something they cannot square with their moral self-conception, the clinician forced into the act they cannot endorse — Walker centres the victim or wronged case. The two literatures use the repair vocabulary in overlapping but non-identical ways, and the difference shows up most clearly in practice: the Brock / Lettini Soul Repair project leans on Walker's framework but reorients it toward the moral repair of the agent who did wrong rather than the victim who was wronged. The borrowing is sometimes uncited and the conceptual stretch involved is sometimes under-acknowledged.

The stake is philosophical and politically-engaged. Walker writes from feminist moral philosophy and is explicitly committed to taking ordinary moral practices — gossip, blaming, expressing resentment, accepting apology — seriously as the locus of moral life rather than as prelude to or distortion of theoretical moral reasoning. The book draws on case material from intimate-partner violence, medical wrongdoing, mass political violence, and post-apartheid South Africa, and the argument is that the practices of moral repair are what produce moral relations rather than the other way round.

For the moral-injury corpus this book is the principal philosophical precursor on the repair side of the construct. Read Walker alongside Williams' Shame and Necessity: where Williams is the precursor on the injury side of the moral-emotional vocabulary, Walker is the precursor on the repair side. Read both before Afterwar, which uses both philosophical lineages without reconstructing them, and before Soul Repair, which uses the repair-side vocabulary without explicitly engaging Walker.