Moral Key Terms (MKTs) have been used in public discourses to challenge or support efforts to manage COVID-19. We developed four themes that illustrate this through a theory-driven qualitative content analysis of a dataset consisting of newspaper articles, social media posts, and responses from the online platform PubliCo. MKTs were used to contend how democratic decisions are legitimately formed, how to balance safety and freedom, how to foster dialogue and how to achieve social justice during a pandemic. The different uses of moral terms reflect different life worlds, perspectives, and interests of social groups.
