Word.ws English Dictionary

moral injury

moral injury noun: harm to an individual's moral conscience and values, resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others, and accompanied by guilt, shame, anger, etc.

Noun

moral injury (countable and uncountable, plural moral injuries)

  1. Harm to an individual's moral conscience and values, resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others, and accompanied by guilt, shame, anger, etc.
    • Photojournalists also dealt with “moral injury,” long-term psychological distress that comes from witnessing actions that violated their moral beliefs.2025 April 29, Damien Cave, “How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of moral injury

pluralmoral injuries

Questions about moral injury

What does moral injury mean?
Moral injury means harm to an individual's moral conscience and values, resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others, and accompanied by guilt, shame, anger, etc.
What part of speech is moral injury?
Moral injury is a noun.
What is the plural of moral injury?
The plural of moral injury is moral injuries.

Words near moral injury in the dictionary

  1. moral high ground
  2. moral high grounds
  3. moral imperative
  4. moral imperatives
  5. moral injuries
  6. moral injury
  7. moral low ground
  8. moral low grounds
  9. Moral Majoritarian
  10. Moral Majoritarians
  11. Moral Majority

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: moral injury (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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