triage
Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion
Editorial synthesis · provisional
Definition
Triage is provisional judgment and intervention when waiting for full reconstruction would deepen urgent harm. It uses the leverage available to limit irreversible loss while preserving feedback and a path to repair. Its legitimacy requires a return to reconstruction; emergency pressure does not make domination or captured judgment acceptable foundations for ordinary governance.
Explanation
AB distinguishes the fast tempo of treating a patient, answering a flood or pausing a harmful deployment from the slower work of rebuilding institutions. Triage protects what must survive now so that later repair remains reachable. The danger begins when temporary emergency measures harden into infrastructure.
PB requires the course that forecloses least and retains a path to repair, while rejecting abstention as automatically innocent. It expressly refuses domination and capture as lesser harms authorized by emergency. This is a bounded ethical orientation, not a numerical procedure that settles every forced choice.
RB3 calls triage a provisional suspension of full reconstruction and requires structural learning afterward. Its trolley example separates minimizing immediate irreversible harm from normalizing forced-choice arrangements. The source’s physiological metaphor of a triage report belongs to another context and does not supply this ethical definition.
Scope and attribution
Retain the ethical main entry without inventing a universal risk calculation.
AB — The Actual Book
Fast intervention must preserve repair and return to reconstruction.
Occurrence locators: 193, 195, 196; Notes: 249; Appendix: 281, 283.
PB — The Possible Book
Least foreclosure remains constrained by non-domination and correction.
Occurrence locators: 106, 180.
RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations
Provisional emergency judgment must produce a route into redesign.
Occurrence locators: 175, 192, 194, 207, 210, 256, 259, 260, 262, 269, 271, 272, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284, 285, 288, 291, 292, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 303, 308, 312, 318, 319, 320.
Background used in the editorial explanation
AB p.81 is a physiological metaphor for feeling, not an occurrence of ethical triage. Clinical service labels and the rejected elite-selection usage are also kept outside this entry’s occurrence list.