Misplaced Pages

Dual loyalty (ethics)

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
This article is about ethics. For dual loyalty in politics, see Dual loyalty.
This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Dual loyalty" ethics – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In ethics, dual loyalty is loyalty to two separate interests that potentially entails a conflict of interest.

A frequently cited example of the term "dual loyalty" is used in connection with physicians who must balance, on the one hand, the physician's loyalty to a patient (and/or the regulations that govern the physician-patient relationship), and on the other hand, the institution or country for which the physician serves.

For example, a doctor who is asked by a government to assess a prisoner's fitness to withstand torture faces an enormous ethical dilemma because of the competing loyalties of the doctor to the state versus the physician's code of ethics and his/her commitment to a patient's human rights.

See also


This social ethics-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories: