Yes—Primo Levi did use the idea often translated as “moral inversion” (though he didn’t always present it as a single fixed term). The concept appears most clearly in his reflections on life in Nazi concentration camps, especially in The Drowned and the Saved.

What Levi meant by “moral inversion”

Levi used this idea to describe how the лагер (camp system) systematically reversed normal moral values:

• Good became dangerous: Kindness, solidarity, or honesty could put a prisoner at risk.
• Bad became necessary: Selfishness, deception, or even collaboration could become essential for survival.
• Victims were morally compromised: Prisoners were often forced into situations where they had to harm others or make ethically troubling choices just to live.

The “Grey Zone”

Levi connects this closely with his famous concept of the “grey zone”:

• The camp was not simply divided into innocent victims and evil perpetrators.
• Instead, there was a blurred moral space where prisoners might become functionaries (kapos, clerks, etc.), gaining privileges while participating in the system.
• This created a disturbing reality where the oppressed could be partially implicated in oppression.

Why this mattered to Levi

Levi was very careful about judgment. His point was not to excuse wrongdoing, but to insist on understanding the extreme conditions:

• The Nazi system was designed to corrupt moral frameworks themselves.
• Outsiders, he argued, should be cautious about judging those who lived through it.
• Moral inversion shows how totalitarian systems can dismantle ordinary ethical categories.

A simple way to think about it

In normal life:

Helping others = good
Betraying others = bad

In the camps (under “moral inversion”):

Helping others could get you killed
Betraying others could keep you alive

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If you want, I can point you to specific passages where Levi describes this most directly, or compare his idea to similar concepts in thinkers like Hannah Arendt.