(FORTUNE Magazine) – One worries that he behaved churlishly in his recent exchange of views with Dr. Lonnie R. Bristow, chairman of the American Medical Association. There was Lonnie, stuck at migraine-engendering O'Hare Airport in Chicago but still gallantly returning the call one had made to his office. And all he got for his courtesy was an argument about the AMA's incomprehensible position on the death penalty. $ Its position has been in the news recently, in the following context. Many state laws mandate the presence of a physician at all executions, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the guy is dead. But in 1993 an AMA panel -- the council on ethical and judicial affairs -- caused to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association a ruling that doctors may not attend executions. The council did not purport to be taking a position on whether the death penalty is or isn't good social policy, only to be ruling that attendance was inappropriate for doctors. Attendance, says the council, would violate the Hippocratic oath and the general commitment of doctors ''to preserving life when there is hope of doing so.'' Bowing to this judgment, a doctor in Virginia recently pulled out of an execution at the last minute. He was replaced by a colleague of the view that ''the AMA is not great God almighty.'' By a stunning coincidence, this also happened to be our own position. We began by asking Bristow why an AMA panel, and not the doctor's own conscience, should govern decisions about his participation. An estimated 200 landings and takeoffs later, we still did not have an answer to this question but it had at least been determined that the process was not democratic. Bristow asserted that the AMA's in-house ethicists had to act as they did because every state in the union requires doctors to ''live an ethical life,'' and we said, ''Yeah, but society is not exactly agreed as to what's ethical in this context,'' and he said, ''I'm not here to argue with you,'' a line one has heard before when the interviewee is beginning to get sore. Moving along, Bristow kept saying gamely that doctors should not be the ''instrument of death,'' and we kept rejoining that this was scarcely a reasonable description of the doctor's role at executions. When he said that ''you can't be a healer and a killer at the same time,'' we suddenly thought to ask whether anybody in the AMA had put the abortion argument into play on hearing this line. (The Hippocratic oath says the doctor must revere life ''from the time of conception.'') Bristow did not seem interested in pursuing the issue of abortion, and in case you are wondering, this happens to be another area where your servant feels individuals should be free to act on the dictates of conscience.