Abstract
The book begins with the experience of Zlatko Dizdarević, editor of the leading wartime newspaper in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, as well as Ivana Maček’s wartime ethnography of the capital’s siege. They serve as cases of moral injury that the work returns to in each chapter, creating a narrative thread throughout. The introduction presents an argument for virtue language, the limitations of key anthropologies of violence and subjectivity, and presents the particular strengths of Murdoch’s use of virtue language for speaking about and understanding moral injury.
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- 1.
For Oslobodjenje’s role in Sarajevo’s resistance to the siege, see Kurspahi, As Long as Sarajevo Exists. Dizdarević’s diary was eventually published as a record of his work and reflections during the multi-year siege. See Dizdarević, Sarajevo: A War Journal.
- 2.
Dizdarević, Sarajevo, 54.
- 3.
Sayer, Why Things Matter to People, 2.
- 4.
For example, the very term “structural violence” was only coined in 1969 and studies into the violence inherent in institutionality found in Foucault and Bourdieu occurred only in the second half of the twentieth century (Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has almost become a colloquial designation, was only added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980 (Trimble, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 5, 12).
- 5.
Trimble, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 5–7; Crocq, “From Shell Shock and War Neurosis to PTSD.”
- 6.
Sociologist Philip Gorski has also written on Emile Durkheim’s use of Aristotle to show the relevance of virtue ethics to sociology (Gorski, “Recovered Goods”). And anthropologist Thomas Widlock has also argued for virtue as a salient category in anthropology (Widlock, “Virtue” and “Sharing by Default?”) Their work is different enough from the present study to include only a mention here, but they are part of a growing trend to recover moral concepts for the social sciences, although for a varied range of reasons.
- 7.
Laidlaw, The Subject of Virtue, 3.
- 8.
Mattingly, “Two virtue ethics,” 162; Robbins, “Between reproduction and freedom,” 295.
- 9.
Scarry, The Body in Pain.
- 10.
As the reader will soon see, I am assuming the experience of survivors from the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina in the 1990s. What counts as “everyday language,” and what is called “ordinary ethics” by Veena Das (“Ordinary Ethics”) and Michael Lambek (“Toward an Ethics of the Act”) will depend on the history of a given place and people, some of which have a great deal of experience with extreme violence. The insights gleaned from this work should be a resource for such situations, though it will require a critical engagement based on the experience of those living in the midst of such violence.
- 11.
This, of course, does not mean that such experiences do not have economic causes at their root, as there was a great deal of economic decline that helped precipitate the conflicts. Indeed, much has been written on this conflict and on the related conflicts associated with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, focusing on the economic aspects of the war and its causes, while other examples of such research have looked at the history and politics of the region. Perica, Balkan Idols, 308–9; Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe, 374, 414. A selection includes: Malcolm, Bosnia: A History; Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed; Waller, Becoming Evil; Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia; Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell; Perica, Balkan Idols; Ali and Lifschultz (eds.), Why Bosnia?; Ramet, Balkan Babel; Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe; Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism; Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia; Norman, Genocide in Bosnia; Mojzes (ed.), Religion and the War in Bosnia; Sells, The Bridge Betrayed; Allen, Rape Warfare; Campbell, “Violence, Justice, and Identity in the Bosnian Conflict.” See also Brubaker 1996, 64–65, 70, 73.
- 12.
Demick, Lugovina Street, xxxi.
- 13.
Maček makes this search of language for the experience of the war central to her work, which she frames in terms of “limit situations” (Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 30). To provide a more theoretical explication for her informant’s experiences, Maček brings to it terms from Holocaust research and writings, such as Primo Levi’s gray zone, and talks about the humiliation of having no power over one’s life (Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 66–70). She also documents the ways in which the besieged resisted indignities by trying to hold on to the aesthetics and routines of pre-war life, through the use of humor, and the creation of pride by overcoming wartime obstacles. And Maček compiles this evidence to argue for violence as the key source of the dissolution of ethical systems as opposed to, say, competition (Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 6–7, 88–89). But this method does not include a further frame based on a moral language to explicate the moral dimensions of normality, which is an inherently moral term.
Although vocabularies are limited, there are nevertheless various works trying to explicate the experience of violence. Some of the more well-known include Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Susan Brison’s Aftermath, and more recently J.M. Bernstein’s Torture and Dignity that draws not only on Brison’s work but also on Jean Améry’s classic, At the Mind’s Limits. There is also now a growing literature on the experience of moral injury, understood as harm done to veterans by their role as soldiers, such as Gabriella Lettini and Rita Brock’s Soul Repair.
- 14.
This does not mean, however, that other moral languages and modalities are not useful. There may be good reasons why a neo-Kantian or utilitarian vocabulary could be developed and employed, particularly if one’s goals differ from that of the present inquiry. To try and compare and contrast different moral-philosophical languages would take a volume in itself, however. The goal of this work is not to arbitrate between these options but, instead, to use a specific resource—virtue—to show that virtue can be applied in a critical, analytical way to questions of violence and subjectivity in a way that current methods of violence and subjectivity do not. Comparisons between a virtue hermeneutic of moral subjectivity and other hermeneutics are welcome but will need to be saved for future works and conversations.
- 15.
Scholars over the last few decades have argued that virtue ethics arose in other locations, arguing for virtue ethics in Buddhism and Confucianism, to use two examples (Tu, Confucian Thought; McKeown, “Buddhism and Ecology;” The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights). I will focus, however, on virtue ethics in so-called Western philosophy, meaning those understandings of virtue rooted in the philosophy of Attic Greek nation states in the last millennium “Before the Common Era.”
- 16.
MacIntyre , After Virtue. Nussbaum is more difficult to discuss in terms of virtue ethics, as she sees to have created a critical distance between her thought and that category, moving to develop instead, along with Amartya Sen, a capabilities approach grounded in a liberal, Rawlsian political philosophy (Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice; Women and Human Development). She has contributed to virtue ethics, however, and has an eye for how virtue affects life and institutions.
- 17.
Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 1.
- 18.
cf., Williams, “Moral Luck.”
- 19.
Although I am not engaging with metaphysical questions here, it is safe to say that metaphysics has been critical for most traditional virtue ethics, although a biology to ground one’s understanding of virtue can also be emphasized, such as in the ethics of Aristotle, who developed not only personal ethics but also political philosophies and biologies. One of the most prominent neo-Aristotelians (and Thomists, for that matter), Alasdair MacIntyre, wrote Dependent Rational Animals after After Virtue in order to provide a missing biological grounding for his moral philosophy (MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, x).
- 20.
This literature is quite large and diverse, covering not only moral virtues, which are the focus of this work, but also epistemic virtues in order to try to solve problems in traditional epistemology (Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind). There are also various sources for such ethics. Although Aristotle has loomed large, Aquinas, Hume, Nietzsche, Martineau, Hutchinson, and Plato have also been resources. There have even been attempts to meld virtue with other normative approaches, such as a utilitarian virtue ethic (Driver, Uneasy Virtue). For good overviews of current and seminal works in virtue ethics, see Crisp and Slote, Virtue Ethics, which is a classic source.
- 21.
Tessman, “Critical Virtue Ethics” and Burdened Virtues; Swanton, Virtue Ethics.
- 22.
Das et al., Remaking a World; Das et al., Violence and Subjectivity; Kleinman et al., Social Suffering; Kleinman et al., Deep China.
- 23.
This is similar to Kleinman’s own definition: “Experience may, on theoretical grounds, be thought of as the intersubjective medium of social interactions in local moral worlds. It is the outcome of cultural categories and social structures interacting with the psychophysiological process such that a mediating world is constituted. Experience is the felt flow of that intersubjective medium” (Kleinman, Writing at the Margins, 97).
- 24.
Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters,” 327.
- 25.
Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters,” 325.
- 26.
Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters,” 325. See also “How Bodies Remember.” See also Deep China, a work focusing on moral subjectivity and modern transitions, which Kleinman helped edit.
- 27.
For Kleinman, morality is largely an emotional affair. He talks about “what really matters,” and in giving examples, he talks about people who feel better during an illness (“moral regeneration”) as well as the uplifting feel of listening to a piece of classical music. It can also be connected with an experience of suffering during disease where change is not welcome but is a harbinger of increased pain (Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters,” 330).
- 28.
Kleinman, “Everything that Really Matters,” 326.
- 29.
This can be seen in Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential work on virtue, After Virtue. Although MacIntyre later took pains to show how vulnerable human moral life can be, his vulnerability as understood in Dependent Rational Animals is grounded in biological precariousness and not political violence and instability. Indeed, even his original thesis, whereby modernity is typified by moral intelligibility, is not a discussion of the violence of the modern age, but rather of its change in epistemology.
- 30.
Dizdarević, Sarajevo, 54. For example, both the Croatian foreign ministry and the government of Herceg-Bosna, which was a breakaway region in southern Bosnia-Hercegovina, attempted to deport more than 10,000 Muslim men in 1992. Within one summer, 45,000 to 50,000 Muslims had been “cleansed” from the Mostar area alone (Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell, 323).
- 31.
There are, of course, exceptions. Again, Alasdair MacIntyre engages in virtue ethics to critique the project of the Enlightenment, liberal rationalism, and capitalism, proposing a new approach based on what he sees as a neo-Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. Lisa Tessman and Christine Swanton have been among the first to try to expand the application of virtue beyond its more recent concerns. There have also been other virtue ethicists trying to explore its application in other fields, including those in the edited volume, Working Virtue (Walker and Ivanhoe, Working Virtue). This is a further, helpful extension of virtue ethics, though unlike the present study, they do not attempt to use virtue discourse to help analyze experience and the social repercussions of violence and social change more generally.
- 32.
Virtue ethics itself is a contested category. Martha Nussbaum, who was part of the spread of virtue ethics in the late 1970s through the end of the 1980s, eventually questioned the salience of such a concept, arguing that it makes little sense to define a category of ethics called virtue ethics when thinkers representing other categories, such as Kantians and Utilitarians, also use virtue. Nussbaum argues, instead, that we categorize virtue ethicists according to what they are arguing against (such as “anti-Kantians”) or the philosopher they draw on (“Neo-Humeans” or “Neo-Aristotelians”) (Nussbaum, “Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?” 200–1). There is much to be said about this, yet labeling one’s thought as “anti-” privileges the critique over the constructive element, and the modifier “Neo-” is not ideal as it can reduce one’s thought too quickly to that of another, opening one up to dismissal. The fact that many virtue ethicists see a closer relationship to each other’s projects than that of others should also be taken into account, which Nussbaum does not do. In this way, I acknowledge the problems with the category yet also affirm that there is a substantial and fruitful discourse that the umbrella term “virtue ethics” allows.
- 33.
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 87–141.
- 34.
Papanikolaou, “Trinity, Violence, and Virtue.” See also Papanikolaou, “Learning How to Love.” My thanks to Papanikolaou for thinking through this distinction.
- 35.
Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 177.
- 36.
This understanding is derived both from Charles Taylor and Iris Murdoch, particularly in Sources of the Self and The Sovereignty of Good. As we delve more into Murdoch’s philosophy in later chapters, we will build on this notion of the moral.
- 37.
Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege, 9.
- 38.
Murdoch was one of the first to introduce Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy to an English-speaking audience. See Murdoch’s Sartre: Romantic Rationalist.
- 39.
Murdoch, as we will see later, was also influenced by Zen Buddhism.
- 40.
I have discussed the connection between morality and identity but not fully enough. I will do this further in the following chapters. Philosopher Charles Taylor has already asserted the relationship by stating that our identity is informed by whatever our understanding of good is (Taylor, Sources of the Self, 27).
- 41.
Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 63.
- 42.
Some of the terms that I use to describe Murdoch’s thought, such as horizons, I take from philosopher Charles Taylor, a student of Murdoch. Taylor, who shares Murdoch’s universal conception of goodness, along with a sense of its content as broad and culturally relative, describes moral horizons as the moral ideals toward which individuals strive. And Taylor’s notion of horizons can help further underscore what is central for Murdoch in her framing of the self as a field of tension: the importance of striving toward the horizons embodied in the different modalities that make up that tensile field. I will sometimes refer to Taylor to bring out aspects of Murdoch’s thought, but articulated in ways that may be more helpful in adapting Murdoch’s thought to a more engaged, analytical application (Taylor, Sources of the Self, 17, 27–28).
- 43.
I take the notion of virtue as a form of striving from Julia Annas’s virtue ethics (Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 18, 52).
- 44.
Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By, 43, 182–184; Antonaccio, “A Response to Nora Hämäläinen and David Robjant;” Mulhall, “All the World Must be Religious;” Robjant, “How Miserable We Are, How Wicked.”
- 45.
This move to application in Murdoch’s thought is something that Maria Antonaccio has called for in her A Philosophy to Live By.
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Wiinikka-Lydon, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Moral Injury and the Promise of Virtue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32934-1_1
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