Damage is harm or deterioration. Morality, on the other hand, is the doctrine that seeks the regulation of human behavior according to an assessment of acts, which can be considered good or bad depending on their characteristics and consequences.
The idea of moral damage, in this context, alludes to a symbolic injury a person suffers from feeling aggrieved. It should be noted that, at the legal level, injury may be imputed to another individual for its negligence or malice; the person responsible for the damage, therefore, must assume the reparation of the victim, compensating the victim.
While property damage affects heritage (a house, a car, etc.), moral damage involves spiritual involvement or a psychological disorder. In other words, the injured subject experiences suffering.
Because moral damage is abstract, its determination is complicated, as is the quantification of compensation to repair it. That is why there are various doctrines that indicate how the redress in question should be made.
Suppose an actor runs several television shows claiming that his former partner is an unintelligent woman, who doesn’t like to work. These same statements are repeated in radio broadcasts and in interviews given to graphic media. The woman, in this situation, files a lawsuit against the man for moral harm, stating that public expressions affect her well-being and cause her pain. She even argues that, on the street, she suffers from mockery and criticism from people she doesn’t even know because of her ex-husband’s sayings.
In summary of the above paragraphs, we could say that moral harm is anguish, suffering, affliction (both physical and spiritual), humiliation, or pain suffered by the victim. However, it is important to analyze all these states of spirit, which take place as a direct result of the damage.
If the concept of moral harm were simply defined as these feelings that follow from a particular harm, then we could say that any individual who experiences them could require the Justice to compensate him; however, this is not possible unless such states of spirit occur as a result of the deprivation of a legal good, and that the victim had a recognized interest in it.
Therefore, we should not focus on suffering or pain to define moral damage, since the victim will be repaid by them as long as the legal system recognizes that they are removed from injury to a power of action that has frustrated or prevented him from satisfying or enjoying certain interests of a non-patrimonial nature. These interests may be patrimonial or extra-patrimonial.
In this context, it is correct to say that moral damage is one that affects feelings, beliefs, psychic or physical health, social esteem or the dignity of a person, that is, those rights that majority doctrine includes in the group of extra-patrimonial or personality. The two relevant budgets in this context are as follows: the legal good concerned is extra-patrimonial; injured interest had been legally recognized before the damage.
According to classical Italian doctrine, we can differentiate between two types of moral damage: the objective and the subjective. The first is one who suffers an individual in his social consideration; the second, on the other hand, is what can be defined as physical pain, a series of afflictions or anxieties. For example: the objective would be to cause the slander that can stain someone’s good name; subjective offenses or physical injuries.