• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Executions and Torture: The Consequences of Overriding Professional Ethics

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    10_6YaleJHealthPolyL_Ethics351 ...
    Size:
    2.340Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Gottlieb, Michael
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/6072
    Abstract
    Physicians often face conflicts between their professional duty of loyalty to patients and their concomitant responsibilities to third parties. These latter responsibilities may be to family members or to other parties interested in a patient's welfare. Or they may take an economic form, as is increasingly reflected by the influence of health plans and other third-party payers in clinical decision-making. A physician may have a responsibility to perform a court's request for a forensic evaluation or to perform actions on behalf of state institutions like prisons, which require specific duties of physicians that conflict with their traditional commitments. Or the responsibility may be to the military, whose ultimate goal is to protect the security of a population. In each case, a physician's additional or peripheral responsibilities may divide her initial duty to patient care. Military duties are often particularly difficult to reconcile with other personal, professional, or even legal duties. The history of judicial deference to the military in this country, embedded in the Constitution and known as the separate community doctrine, reflects our willingness to cabin military duties as both separate from other duties and, for the most part, unconditional. Perhaps it should not be surprising that when a service member believes a given order to be in conflict with his or her own moral value or ethical code, an available justification for otherwise unethical behavior is employed: The imposed military duty constitutes a separate responsibility, apart from those normally attaching to an individual in his or her "personal" life. If duties can be thus compartmentalized, one may consider himself free from personal responsibility for actions performed while operating in a specific and sanctioned role such as soldier, attorney, or physician. One may only be held professionally responsible and thus judged on the basis of shared professional ethical guidelines. It remains an open question how individuals ought to honor their personal values when professional duties require conflicting action, and much of the literature on role morality has focused on this question. The implications that follow from sacrificing one's personal moral values for professional obligations can be disturbing, even if they are ultimately justifiable from a utilitarian perspective. More disturbing, however, should be the apparent ease with which robust professional norms and duties in one profession can be suppressed in favor of those in another. Such has been the case with the medical profession and the military. The strong evidence that doctors ignored, justified, or even helped in the humiliation, degradation, and physical abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib has shocked many in both the medical and non-medical communities. Mounting evidence suggests that physicians falsified and delayed death certificates, shared detainees' medical information with military interrogators, ignored abuse, and covered up homicides -- all activities in contravention of international law and medical ethics. This Note argues that, while these activities were arguably outside the realm of military duties, they would not have been committed had medical professional norms been obeyed.
    Collections
    Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.