ABSTRACT
The need for foreign assistance in treating the victims of Ebola and preventing its spread raises the difficult question of what justification there might be for drafting military physicians to engage in this sort of task despite the serious risks it poses. After considering how these risks should be assessed and in what different circumstances they might be faced, the paper goes on to examine what sort of reasons military medics might expect to be given for their deployment to areas hit by epidemics. It suggests that analogies with military actions are required to justify such a deployment and two are offered: 1) that this is a form of consensual humanitarian intervention; and 2) that it can constitute a type of self-defence. Rightly formulated, it is claimed, either can provide a justification of a sort acceptable to military doctors.
