Moral Standards

Should doctors be held to a higher moral standard than the general population?

This fascinating ethical question was proposed by an article I read lately about professionalism. Specifically, it commented on medical students posting images online of unprofessional behavior: drinking, partying, dressed inappropriately. While the article didn't outright condemn this behavior, it suggested that physicians and medical students be held to a higher moral standard; although it may be okay for the general population to make public such activities, it is certainly not permissible for a doctor to do so.

Interesting. Why should this be? On the one hand, a person's public and personal lives should remain separate. Perhaps there are some professions in which this is less the case (such as a publicly elected politician) but in general, a physician's life need not be under public scrutiny. As long as what we do at work is appropriate, what we do at home ought not to matter. Furthermore, freedom of speech protects what doctors choose to put online or say in public; it is, if I may use the medical ethics term, a matter of autonomy. Why should a need for a doctor's image to be doctor-ly override his or her personal choices?

On the other hand, doctors have greater moral responsibilities than other people. In many other professions, people act selfishly; they are out to maximize profits and minimize expenses without regard to the customer. In medicine, the physician ought to serve the patient's best interests, not his own. And here lies the rub. There may be some therapeutic motivation for a physician to appear professional even in his personal life. Perhaps we want our doctors to fit a certain mold; we want them to be reading the medical literature or playing golf or attending charity events in their spare time rather than going to salsa clubs, bar-hopping, and throwing costume parties. Maybe. And if this is true, one could argue that professionalism outside one's professional life is crucial to the patient-doctor relationship. This could be a case for holding doctors to higher moral standards even outside the direct purview of medicine.