This podcast episode features a session from our 2020 conference, Bioethics in Real Life: Lessons We're Learning from Covid-19.

There are currently a number of articles trying to explore the experience of the pandemic through the lens of moral injury. In doing so, they take on the assumptions and resources of moral injury discourse as it is found in psychological studies of wartime experience, namely, a reticence to address broader politics, both in terms of policy making and the politics of wider culture, that condition and shape experiences of moral injury and in which such experiences are inevitably embedded. I argue that, just as in moral injury research that comes from wartime experience, there is an important lacuna around where broader politics are not adequately considered when trying to understand the experience of healthcare workers. This is important, as such a deficit will lower the efficacy of using such a concept and also skew our understanding of the nature of lasting moral harms that come from crises such as the current pandemic.