The Physician at War

Abstract

AbstractWhen examining bioethics and the Holocaust, the role of physicians is often shocking. As a society, we expect more of physicians. Learning about physician participation in the atrocities of the Holocaust prompts many questions: How did caregivers and healers become killers? How did physicians end up so intimately involved in war time atrocities? But the involvement of physicians in war atrocities is not unique to the Holocaust. Throughout history, medical professionals operating together with and in the name of the governing power and particularly the military, have played key roles in genocides, wars, and human rights violations. This chapter will explore the ethics of physician participation in war. We focus on the foundational and recurring issue known as “the problem of dual- loyalty”—the ethical tension of a single moral agent with two competing interests or sets of moral obligations. The underlying assumptions of this debate will be explored to examine how both the professions of medicine and the military involve a set of professional moral obligations that sometimes conflicts.