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This paper aims to demonstrate how public disclosure can be used to balance physicians' conscientious objections with their professional obligations to patients--specifically respect for patient autonomy and informed consent. It is argued here that physicians should be permitted to exercise conscientious objections, but that they have a professional obligation to provide advance notification to patients about those objections. It is further argued here that public disclosure is an appropriate and ethically justifiable limit to the principle of advance notification. The argument for publicly disclosing physicians' conscientious objections is made in this paper by discussing three practical benefits of public disclosure in medicine, and then addressing how publicly disclosing physicians' conscientious objections is not an undue invasion of privacy. Three additional concerns with public disclosure of physicians' conscientious objections are briefly addressed--potential harassment of physicians, workplace discrimination, and mischaracterising physicians' professional aptitude--concluding that each of these concerns requires further deliberation in the realm of business ethics.

Brody (2011) makes a compelling argument for why pharmapologist objections to conflicts of interest between medicine and industry are fallacious. My aim is not to contest Brody's arguments against the pharmapologists, but to address the challenge he presents in the conclusion about pharmapologists moving toward developing new ways to engage with medicine that maintain high standards of professionalism. I begin by briefly recounting the basis of Brody's argument. I then argue that Brody's challenge is, at best, impractical, and at worst paradoxical. In making this argument I show that the strictness of Brody's argument inadvertently sabotages any pharmapologist reply toward answering his challenge.Brody assumes the noncontentious view that trust is a foundational pillar supporting medical practice. Conflicts of interest between medicine and industry are thus prima facie unethical because they erode that pillar. Furthermore, Brody claims, if medicine did not play an essential social role or if trust were not a foundational pillar supporting medical practice, then arguments that conflicts of interest between medicine and industry are unethical would have no merit. Brody, via Erde, then notes that conflicts of interest between medicine and industry occur when physicians, who have a duty to advocate for the interests of their patients, are subject to the interests of third parties or certain social arrangements in ways that can tempt them to neglect their patient's interests. Since the meat of Brody's argument is not to assess what qualifies as conflicts of interest per se but instead to argue against the pharmapologist perspective regarding conflicts of interest, this basic framework for understanding conflicts of interest seems to suffice. However there is an issue regarding the moral soundness of Brody's framework that I briefly discuss prior to taking on Brody's pharmapologist challenge.There are at least two substantial problems with Brody's understanding of why conflicts of interest are morally blameworthy. Brody recognizes that merely being tempted to neglect one's obligations is not itself morally blameworthy. He also acknowledges that it is difficult to show how it is morally blameworthy when physicians actually fail to fully advocate for their patients' interests because there is no good evidence to suggest either that they intended not to advocate for their patients' interests, or that this is equivalent to totally abandoning their obligations to advocate for their patients' interests. For Brody, what makes conflicts of interest between industry and medicine morally blameworthy is therefore the entering into avoidable social arrangements that are capable of tempting physicians to advocate for the interests of third parties over the interests of their patients in ways that threaten our society's trust in physicians.For the sake of space, I only mention these two problems here. However, any strong rebuttal to Brody's argument would first need to justify and defend these problems in greater depth. First, witho...