| Physicians at War: The Dual-Loyalties Challenge 2008 Edition Contributor(s): Allhoff, Fritz (Editor) |
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ISBN: 1402069111 ISBN-13: 9781402069116 Publisher: Springer OUR PRICE: $151.99 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 2008 Annotation: Recently, there has been a tremendous interest in the 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 physicians 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 non-overlapping spheres of justice), thus abrogating the dual-loyalty challenge. Or else, 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 loyalties framework are used to explore various substantive debates that obtain when the military makes use of physicians. Physician involvement in torture has been 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, medicalneutrality/battlefield triage, and so on. In each of these cases, the same tensions arguably exist: physicians have duties both to their patients and "elsewhere" (which, depending on the details of the view, could be any of the above-mentioned ends). |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Philosophy | Ethics & Moral Philosophy - Medical | Ethics |
| Dewey: 174.2 |
| LCCN: 2008922459 |
| Series: International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine |
| Physical Information: 0.69" H x 6.14" W x 9.21" (1.28 lbs) 274 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |