I understand why doctors swear to practice medicine ethically, much like the marriage vows. I admire their persistence in wanting to heal people. I admire the thought, if not a little too idealistic.

The admiration of the thought behind Hippocratic Oath comes mainly from the assumption that people are not good nor bad, make neither good choices nor bad and so, quite simply, human lives that should be saved with no exceptions whatsoever.

Obviously, there is value-added to society when a good person is saved. In contrast, should the person still be saved when the soul beyond the body is a man who has committed horrific crimes? There’s a question here of communal ethics vs. an individual’s ethics. Or perhaps there’s a question here of the doctor whose sole job is to fix the person’s body and the soul should not be factored in because the doctor is not and should not judge the morals of the patient?

With the clash of communal ethics and the individual’s set of values, I’m not sure which I would pick. I think most of us would like to say that we would save the bad man, going above our own value system and identifying or be associated with the ethics that a society perceives to be acceptable, or socially acceptable or even fashionably acceptable. Should a set of communal ethics trump individual ethics then when it comes to practicing medicine?

Then again, are we perhaps putting the doctors on a pedestal, expecting them to be superhumans? Or God-like? Judgement on whether a person is good or bad and then holding out surgery or medicine on them should not be up to us. So practicing medicine should be regarded as a service that doctors perform, much like paying a masseuse for a massage. The rest is not up to us to judge.

That being said, a doctor can still refuse medicine or surgery on someone they deem to be morally bad, much like we refuse to be friends with some people because we perceive them to be bad for us.

Bottom line, respect the wishes of the doctor and the patient. Nothing is black and white, just the way we interpret those lines.