This is a really thoughtful reflection and I think much nearer the mark than many of the published articles about moral injury, which for me always seem to skirt around the more unpalatable aspects underlying this phenomenon. I had not come across the term moral injury until 2020. I think a related concept is moral blindness. What differentiates moral injury from guilt?
I'm not sure about the BMJ authors suggestion that moral injury arises in part from healthcare workers sacrificing their/their own loved ones needs/preferences for those of strangers/wider society. This certainly would generate complex feelings, but not all negative.
I wondered if moral injury might partly explain why some vocal healthcare workers on social media appeared to project their anger by blaming various real or imagined categories of dangerous 'other' (lockdown skeptics, anti-maskers, covidiots, anti-vaxxers, fringe scientists) for the perpetuation of the pandemic. The longer the harmful policies were enacted, the more difficult it was to justify them even to themselves, but no-one had the courage to stop doing the things they believed had kept people safe.
You summarise the crux of the issue well with the sentence 'a morally injured workforce is evidence that the response to covid-19 was morally wrong.'
This is a really thoughtful reflection and I think much nearer the mark than many of the published articles about moral injury, which for me always seem to skirt around the more unpalatable aspects underlying this phenomenon. I had not come across the term moral injury until 2020. I think a related concept is moral blindness. What differentiates moral injury from guilt?
I'm not sure about the BMJ authors suggestion that moral injury arises in part from healthcare workers sacrificing their/their own loved ones needs/preferences for those of strangers/wider society. This certainly would generate complex feelings, but not all negative.
I wondered if moral injury might partly explain why some vocal healthcare workers on social media appeared to project their anger by blaming various real or imagined categories of dangerous 'other' (lockdown skeptics, anti-maskers, covidiots, anti-vaxxers, fringe scientists) for the perpetuation of the pandemic. The longer the harmful policies were enacted, the more difficult it was to justify them even to themselves, but no-one had the courage to stop doing the things they believed had kept people safe.
You summarise the crux of the issue well with the sentence 'a morally injured workforce is evidence that the response to covid-19 was morally wrong.'