PhronesisMoral injury (Jonathan Shay 1994, Brett Litz et al. 2009) occurs when a person perpetrates, fails to prevent, or witnesses events that transgress their deeply held moral beliefs, or when they are betrayed by authority in high-stakes situations. We apply the Displacement Framework to formalize moral injury as a wrong attractor W_MI in which the person's moral world has been shattered and cannot reconstitute.
The moral integrity ground state S0_moral is defined as integrated moral agency: coherent moral commitments, ability to act within them, and sense of oneself as a moral person capable of good action. W_MI is formalized with three basin subtypes: the perpetrator basin W_perp (guilt and shame at moral self for actions that violated core beliefs), the witness-failure basin W_wit (guilt and helplessness from failing to prevent witnessed violations), and the betrayal basin W_bet (rage and loss of trust in institutional reliability and just-world assumptions).
Nine formal propositions cover: S0_moral as integrated moral agency (P1), W_MI three-subtype architecture (P2), moral injury vs. PTSD differentiation — shame/guilt/betrayal vs. fear (P3), the self-as-perpetrator wound and moral self-erasure loop (P4), the betrayal wound and institutional-evidence loop (P5), healthcare and institutional moral injury — systemic constraint forcing moral violation (P6), the spiritual dimension — moral injury as theological crisis beyond psychological suffering (P7), cumulative Phi_MI across psychological, occupational, relational, and spiritual domains (P8), and return paths including Adaptive Disclosure therapy, meaning-making, chaplaincy integration, narrative testimony, restorative justice, and ACT (P9).
Subtype-specific return path geometry and the multiplicative harm of compound moral injuries are analyzed.