A wound to integrity
Moral injury doesn’t resolve through rest, only through changed conditions or a coherent exit.
Part of the series Findings from The Incentives Are Working. Participants are described by role and sector only.
Moral injury is a wound to integrity: the gap between what a person believes is right and what a system requires them to do, tolerate or witness without the power to change it.
It can only resolve through changed conditions or a coherent exit.
Yet it is usually framed as a resilience problem, as if the task were simply to build your tolerance for the gap between the ideal and the real, and that framing shifts attention away from the governance conditions that created the breach in the first place.
One person I spoke with drew a distinction worth keeping. The slow disengagement that comes from values misalignment and low psychological safety, which he called despondency, is not the same as burnout, a word he reserved for going too fast, overworking and being unable to switch off. They are two different injuries with two different causes, often filed under the same word, and while rest may help the second, it does nothing for the first.
In a system that works, the person naming the problem isn’t treated as the problem, because they are providing the most important data available.
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