In recent years, there has been a tremendous interest in the ethical issues that confront physicians in times of war, as well as the sometimes instrumental use made of physician 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 do cast 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., national security, the general public, the greater good, etc.). Whether this dual-loyalty framework is appropriate is debatable. Certainly some people think that it is, but others have argued that it is not. For example, Michael Walzer holds that non-medical duties cannot attach to physicians (due to non-overlapping spheres of justice), thus abrogating the dual-loyalty challenge. Alternatively, Fritz Allhoff has argued 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: medical neutrality; triage; development of chemical and biological weapons; confidentiality, etc. In each of these cases, the same tensions arguably exist: physicians have duties both to their patients and 'elsewhere' (which, depending on your views, could be any of the above-mentioned ends).
