Moral Injury in Research and the Responsibility of Ethics Committees

Moral injury has received increasing attention in academic literature. It generally refers to two complementary phenomena: When a person's moral character is harmed as a result of them engaging in immoral activities, and when a person is exposed to immoral activities and suffers psychologically as a result of dissonance between those immoral activities and normal moral behaviours. Moral injury is important for ethics committees to consider as research participants themselves might have experienced moral injury, and certain research might itself expose a research participant's moral injuries. At the same time, researchers might also be at risk of moral injury. Certain sorts of research may be stressful or traumatic for a researcher to engage in, and a researcher may become emotionally disengaged, or it may result in psychological stress and trauma for the researcher after their research. As such, the risk of moral injury to both research participants and researchers alike is something that ethics committees need to consider when assessing particular research protocols.