How do you navigate legal responsibilities and ethical judgment in the dilemma of conflict of duty and emergency evacuation?

A woman who is about to give birth and her husband are brought in at the same time in a hospital with only one ventilator. The physician must decide who to treat, and discusses legal responsibilities and ethical judgment through the concepts of conflict of duty and emergency evacuation.

 

Two patients with an equal chance of survival are brought to a hospital with only one ventilator. One is a woman about to give birth and the other is her husband. The physician, who has a duty of care, is unable to treat one of them because there is only one ventilator. When multiple duties conflict with each other in an emergency situation where the actor has no choice but to fulfill only one duty, and the duties are interrelated in such a way that fulfillment of one duty prevents the fulfillment of the other, it is called a conflict of duties. In a conflict of obligations situation, the obligation must be a legal obligation, and the actor must not be responsible for creating the conflict of obligations situation. Duties are categorized into action duties, which are obligations to do certain things, and omission duties, which are obligations not to do certain things. An action is when an actor uses physical force to alter the natural course of events, while an omission is when an actor allows an event to happen without exerting any physical force. For example, in the emergency situation above, if the doctor in charge did not connect the patient to a ventilator, the doctor breached his duty of care to protect life.

 

 

Situations where duties can conflict with each other can take the form of omission versus omission, duty to act versus duty to act, or duty to act versus duty to act. However, not all of these three types of conflicts constitute a conflict of duties. Most criminal lawyers believe that conflicts of duty do not constitute conflicts of obligation. On the other hand, a conflict of duty to act versus duty to omit is not a conflict of duty, depending on the viewpoint, but rather an emergency evacuation. An emergency evacuation is an act that a person has good reason to take to avoid a present danger to his or her own or another’s legal interests. In this context, a legal interest is an interest protected by law, and a threat is a condition that endangers the legal interest. If you are driving to avoid a pedestrian who suddenly appears on the left side of the road, and you suddenly turn the steering wheel to the right and damage a part of the building, it can be considered an emergency evacuation. If it is recognized as an emergency evacuation, there is no penalty. To explain this in terms of duties, it can be understood that in a conflict between the duty of action to protect the lives of others and the duty of omission to not destroy the property of others, the steering wheel is in violation of the duty of omission. This leads to the view that a conflict of duty of action versus duty of omission is essentially the same as an emergency evacuation and should therefore be excluded from duty conflicts.
There is a view that conflict of obligation is not in itself distinguishable from emergency evacuation because they are similar in that they both require the preservation of the legal interests of one party in an emergency situation without prejudice to the legal interests of the other party. However, the difference between conflict of duty and emergency evacuation becomes clear when the scope of the duty is limited to the duty to act. While emergency evacuation has the possibility of resolving the conflict by taking the risk of harm to oneself rather than transferring the risk to a third party, a conflict of duty has no such possibility. In other words, the driver in the previous example could resolve the conflict by sacrificing his own legal interest by turning left instead of right. The doctor in the previous example, on the other hand, has no such possibility. Furthermore, unlike emergency evacuation, where the actor’s legal interest is violated by the act of actively doing something, a duty conflict is violated by the actor’s inaction of allowing an event to happen. Therefore, a conflict of duty is usually a conflict between duties.
If we define conflict of duty as a conflict between duties, we can consider two cases. There are two cases: when there is a weight of value between the conflicting duties, and when there is a conflict of equal value. In the former case, it is the general view of criminal law that it is not illegal to fulfill a higher-value duty at the expense of a lower-value duty, because it is consistent with the rule of law to fulfill the higher-value duty among multiple duties. However, when there is a conflict between duties of equal value, there are two views: the view that there is no offense for infringement of legal interests by omission and the view that there is an offense but the liability can be avoided.
The view that there is no illegality is called the fragmentary illegality theory. According to this view, if obligations of equal value conflict with each other and cannot be fulfilled simultaneously, it should be left to the actor’s conscience to decide which one to choose. If either of them is illegal, then the act of the person who fulfills the obligation and the act of the person who does not fulfill the obligation at all are the same in that they are illegal and therefore unreasonable. On the other hand, there is a view that since none of the duties of equal value can be waived, there is illegality in the violation of the duty, but the liability can only be exempted, which is called the liability fragmentation theory. According to this view, an act is illegal in that it abandons one of the duties of equal value, but it can be excused because lawful behavior cannot be expected in a conflict of duties.
In this conflict of obligation situation, moral dilemmas and legal liability become intertwined. Actors must be able to foresee the consequences of their actions and be prepared to take responsibility for them. In addition, society must provide clear standards and guidelines for these situations to help actors make the best decisions. For example, it is important for medical ethics committees in hospitals to have protocols in place for these situations, and for medical staff to be trained to make quick and correct decisions in emergency situations.
Furthermore, a multidisciplinary approach is needed to understand the nature of conflict of duty. Conflicts of duty should be studied and discussed in depth in fields such as law, ethics, and medicine. This multidisciplinary approach will allow us to explore the causes and solutions to conflicts of obligation, which will allow society to establish a fairer and more ethical legal order.