Physicians at War
The Dual-Loyalties Challenge
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Beschreibung
There are a range of ethical issues that confront physicians in times of war, as well
as some of the uses of physicians during wars. This book presents a theoretical
apparatus which undergirds those debates, namely by casting physicians as
being confronted with dual-loyalties during times of war. While this theoretical
apparatus has already been developed in other contexts, it has not been specifically
brought to bear on the ethical conflicts that attain in wars. Arguably, wars thrust
physicians into ethical conflicts insofar as these wars create a tension between a
physician’s obligation to heal and an obligation to serve some other good (e.g.,
military chain of command, national security, the greater good, etc.). Alternatively,
we can debate whether this conception is appropriate. For example, one could
argue that that non-medical duties cannot attach to physicians (e.g., due to nonoverlapping
spheres of justice), thus abrogating the dual-loyalty challenge. Or else
one could argue that these medically-trained personnel do not act qua physicians
at all (but rather partisan advocates) and therefore duties that would otherwise
attach to physicians do not attach here.
In the first part of this book, these issues are debated. In the second part of
the book, the dual-loyalities frame is used to explore various substantive debates
that obtain when the military makes use of physicians. Physician involvement
in torture is a heated topic, and certainly the most visible element of the debate.
Also, however, we could use the dual-loyalties framework to explore issues in
other arenas, such as: development of chemical and biological weapons, medical
neutrality/battlefield triage, and so on. In each of these cases, the same tensions
arguably exist: physicians have duties both to their patientsand “elsewhereâ€
(which, depending on the details of the view, could be any of the above-mentioned
ends).
This paper offers a brief examination of ethical health issues arising from military operations and outlines which, if any, of these ethical health issues apply to current Australian Defence Force (ADF) military operations. The transparency of military operations provided through real time global media reporting and the Internet, has raised public awareness of incidents that can be viewed broadly as ethical issues or dilemmas. While many of these issues are not new, it is the changing context of post cold war military operations and scale and demand of humanitarian operations that places new requirements on how the ADF best addresses these potential issues before they become critical incidents. In identifying potential ethical issues arising from military health operations, it is recognized that military health personnel operate within a command and control organizational structure and associated culture. It is also recognized that the complexity of the issues and the environment within which military health personnel are expected to operate will raise ethical health issues not likely to be encountered to the same degree by those health practitioners operating in the average suburban practice or hospital, except when health personnel are confronted with large scale emergencies, such as those encountered with recent terrorist attacks and massacres.
A topic that has thus far not been treated at book length and nowhere nearly as comprehensively Extremely timely and highly current Unique and broad basis for dealing with issues that not only impact on medical ethics, but cut across various spheres of justice in a setting defined by the multiple perspectives of medical, military and legal practice Unique in its treatment of the subject matter, which hitherto has only been done in a fragmented and isolated manner
Autor*in
Fritz Allhoff
Themen in »Physicians at War«
Ethical Issues Medical Ethics ethics human rights issue
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From the reviews:
"Physicians at war: The dual-loyalties challenge is a collection of essays which provide philosophical, political, and legal perspectives on many of the conflicting obligations which physicians may face during times of armed conflict. … valuable for anyone who is concerned about the role and obligations of physicians in national security/defense issues. … this book has important implications for other areas of medicine were physicians find themselves called upon to use their medical skills and knowledge in service of the state." (Jason Gatliff, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Vol. 6, 2009)
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