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.

Western academic clinical psychology functions as the primary gateway through which knowledge about psychological suffering becomes legitimized globally. This paper argues that the standards of evidence-based treatment, particularly the criterion of “best available research evidence”, operates not as a neutral scholarly instrument but as a political mechanism that imposes theoretical assumptions onto other frameworks of knowledge. In doing so, it enacts an epistemic colonization that overwrites existing knowledge systems with Western foundations, while simultaneously restricting the emergence and legitimization of new or alternative clinical paradigms. Beneath this seemingly objective standard lies a dense network of theoretical assumptions: epistemological commitments to empiricism, methodological reliance on statistical and experimental hierarchies, and philosophical allegiance to the medical model and materialist conceptions of distress. These assumptions filter out entire forms of clinical theory, rendering alternative frameworks unintelligible or illegitimate. This study will show how these assumptions are embedded in the standard of “best available research,” undermining its pretense of neutrality. We then demonstrate how each imposed assumption has prevented specific current existing paradigms from entering the field, while pressuring others to alter their theoretical foundations to fit in, stripping them of the very novelty that constitutes their value. Finally, we show how this dynamic contributes to the West’s broader global colonization by positioning itself as the sole source of legitimate clinical knowledge, leaving others dependent on its standards and without viable pathways to present their own knowledge on a global stage.

There is a long tradition of viewing psychotherapy with a certain degree of suspicion. Within the relatively cloistered field of psychotherapy ethics, key concerns have tended to cluster around the risk of boundary violations and the need to maintain a considered neutrality on the part of clinicians. But of course psychotherapy also has a life outside the consulting room, so to speak, and broader worries have persisted regarding the societal role of the psychological disciplines (often inspired by the work of Foucault). In this talk, we take up several related strands of concern, exploring the increased importance of social critique as a necessary tool to better understand contemporary clinical realities and the ways in which foundational theories of psychotherapy themselves function within specific social and political contexts. This starts with recognition that ethical analyses have gradually shifted towards the tracking of implicit moral and social values active within the clinical encounter. Indeed, even formalized interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) – including versions adapted for digital platforms – raise the spectre of indirect influence. We also want to suggest that these worries demand another layer of critique, one that examines the explanatory rationale supporting any particular school of psychotherapy. Each and every type of therapy carries with it theoretical assumptions not just about how it works, the particular 'mechanism of change,' but also what conception of well-being and human flourishing is best aspired to. This calls for sustained social and political analysis of both theory and practice.