Malignant Normality

Nazi doctors are exemplars of what I would now call the normalization of evil. And they further suggest the relative ease with which physicians—members of my own medical profession with its claim to healing—could be socialized to killing. Recently, this issue has arisen in a particularly troubling fashion. I have in mind the participation of American physicians and psychologists in torture during the Iraq War era. More recently it has been revealed that two psychologists were architects of the CIA’s torture program. That could happen because torture had been approved from above, and in that way became part of an American version of malignant normality. As physicians, as professionals in general, we need to reexamine our relation to societal normality and seek a more universal healing ethic.