A Moral Obligation for Military Medical Service in the United States

Abstract

As an active duty military medical officer who has been deployed several times, I wish to infuse the debate over the dual role of military physicians with a sense of the military physician's ethical responsibility to society as a whole. To do so, I summarize the concept of dual agency and raise the topic of duty. Then I develop an argument for what I consider an ethically superior, but seldom discussed, moral position: the obligation of physicians to perform military medical service in the United States. In advancing this concept, I am aware of the contradiction inherent in the notion of mandatory service in a free society. I am also aware that the American military itself generally disagrees with this opinion.