Fritz Allhoff 
Physicians at War 
The Dual-Loyalties Challenge

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.

Table of Content

Physicians and Dual-Loyalties.- Physicians at War: The Dual-Loyalties Challenge.- Dual-Loyalty and Human Rights in Health Professional Practice: Proposed Guidelines and Institutional Mechanisms.- Guidelines to Prevent the Malevolent Use of Physicians in War.- Dual Disloyalties: Law and Medical Ethics at Guantánamo Bay.- Toward a Framework for Military Health Ethics.- Physicians and Torture.- Physician Involvement in Hostile Interrogations.- Indecent Medicine Revisited: Considering Physician Involvement in Torture.- Torture and the Regulation of the Health Care Professions.- Physicians and Weapons Development.- Is Medicine a Pacifist Vocation or Should Doctors Help Build Bombs?.- The Case Against Doctor Involvement in Weapons Design and Development.- Armed Conflict and Value Conflict: Case Studies in Biological Weapons.- Ethics and the Dual-Use Dilemma in the Life Sciences.- Physicians on the Battlefield.- Triage Priorities and Military Physicians.- Medical Neutrality and Political Activism: Physicians’ Roles in Conflict Situations.