Recent years have seen many cases where the moral transgressions of public figures have led to widespread disengagement from their work, such as no longer watching their shows or reading their books. In the academic context, this can manifest as not inviting an academic to speak, no longer citing or teaching their work, or even ending professional relationships. This paper aims to explore the question of whether there could be purely epistemic reasons that could underwrite such practices of disengagement; bracketing social, moral, or political concerns. In doing so, it addresses a common criticism: an academic’s moral transgression need not give us epistemic reasons to doubt the quality of their work, making disengaging unjustified. The main part of the paper investigates whether this criticism can be countered by viewing an academic’s moral transgressions as a defeater. After dismissing the option of undercutting defeat, it proposes a template argument for when there could be purely epistemic reasons for disengaging, namely if it takes place in areas where the moral transgression that motivates disengagement also functions as a higher order defeater.

Moral injury is the profound psychological distress that can arise from exposure to extreme events that violate an individual’s moral or ethical code; for example, participating in, witnessing, or being subjected to behaviours that harm, betray or fail to help others. Given that the experience of moral transgression is inherent to moral injury-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it is important to consider patients’ religious beliefs and formulate how these may interact with their distress. In this article we describe how to adapt cognitive therapy for PTSD (CT-PTSD) to treat patients presenting with moral injury-related PTSD, who identify as religious. Anonymised case examples are presented to illustrate how to adapt CT-PTSD to integrate patient’s religious beliefs and address moral conflicts and transgressions. Practical and reflective considerations are also discussed, including how a therapist’s personal beliefs may interact with how they position themselves in the work.

Key learning aims

1. (1) To understand the importance of patients’ religious beliefs in the context of moral injury-related distress.

2. (2) To understand how patients’ religious beliefs can be integrated into Ehlers and Clark’s (2000) model when working with moral injury-related PTSD.

3. (3) To offer practical adaptations for CT-PTSD to integrate patients’ religious beliefs and practices, including how to set up a consultation with a religious expert in therapy.

4. (4) To aid therapist reflection on how their personal beliefs interact with how they position themselves in therapeutic work with religious patients.

An increasing body of research has investigated the effect of emotions on judgments concerning moral transgressions. Yet, few studies have controlled for arousal levels associated with the emotions. High arousal may affect moral processing by triggering attention to salient features of transgressions, independently of valence. Therefore previously documented differences in effects of negative and positive emotions may have been confounded by differences in arousal. We conducted two studies to shed light on this issue. In Study 1 we developed a questionnaire including vignettes selected on the basis of psychometrical properties (i.e., mean ratings of the actions and variability). This questionnaire was administered to participants in Study 2, after presenting them with selected pictures inducing different valence but equivalent levels of arousal. Negative pictures led to more severe moral judgments than neutral (p = .054, d = 0.60) and positive pictures (p = .002, d = 1.02), for vignettes that were not associated with extreme judgments. In contrast, positive pictures did not reliably affect judgments concerning such vignettes. These findings suggest that the observed effects of emotions cannot be accounted for by an increase in attention linked to the arousal which accompanies these emotions.