The concept of moral injury has gained rapid traction over the past decade, especially in the context of protracted and asymmetric warfare. Framed as harm that wounds the conscience rather than the psyche, moral injury sits at the intersection of psychology and ethics while exposing deep tensions between them.

This paper advances a double argument. First, it critiques the therapeutic turn in moral injury discourse: the growing impulse to “treat” guilt, shame, and conscience risks collapsing morality into psychology. When wrongful harm has occurred, centering the perpetrator’s distress may be ethically illegitimate and even therapeutically counterproductive. In an era of heightened self-focus, guilt can too readily be reframed as a symptom rather than a demand for responsibility, repair, and moral agency. Second, the paper argues that outright rejection of therapeutic intervention is equally untenable: soldiers are often barely adults who did not choose the wars they were sent to fight, and unresolved moral anguish substantially heightens risk for despair and suicide.

Moral injury thus reveals a paradox akin to that embedded in the much older and long-contested “Just war theory” which sets criteria for the right to go to war and the right conduct in war. Moral injury and Just war theory are both conceptually strained, yet without them we lose essential tools for thinking ethically about warfare. By critically examining moral injury discourse and emerging clinical practices, this paper explores how theory might mediate between ethics, psychotherapy, and politics. I outline an approach that neither fully medicalizes conscience nor fully moralizes suffering, grounding moral repair in exploring moral identity, and enhancing free will and accountability going forward, repenting and making amends, using theological and ethical concepts as well as a third and more recent part of Just war theory - Ending a war (Jus post bellum) - while taking seriously the professional and national duty to address the unbearable moral pain of soldiers.