On Medical Duty in the Face of Collapse in Medicine: Ethical and Philosophical Aspect of the Problem

The article deals with the category of a doctor’s professional duty. The author raises the question of the limits of the doctor’s responsibility to patients in the context of the 2020 pandemic. The category of medical duty is considered in retrospect, after which the author correlates the historical ideas about the proper behaviour of a doctor with the modern working conditions of doctors. The article discusses the question of the internal motivation of the doctor to follow the professional duty, based on the internal orientation of the individual — “to have” or “to be”. The article states that the orientation “to be”, implemented in the doctor’s professional activity, can only be a free choice of the individual. Thus, the category of medical duty transforms from external requirements to the figure of a doctor into a moral requirement of a doctor to himself.