Article Text
Abstract
By way of a case story, two common presuppositions in the academic debate on conscientious objection in healthcare are challenged. First, the debate typically presupposes a sharp division between conscience-based refusals based on personal core moral beliefs and refusals based on professional (eg, medical) reasons. Only the former might involve the moral gravity to warrant accommodation. The case story challenges this division, and it is argued that just as much might sometimes be at stake morally in refusals based on professional reasons. The objector's moral integrity might be equally threatened in objections based on professional reasons as in objections based on personal beliefs. Second, the literature on conscientious objection typically presupposes that conflicts of conscience pertain to well-circumscribed and typical situations which can be identified as controversial without attention to individualising features of the concrete situation. However, the case shows that conflicts of conscience can sometimes be more particular, born from concrete features of the actual situation, and difficult, if not impossible, to predict before they arise. Guidelines should be updated to address such ‘situation-based’ conscientious refusals explicitly.
- Conscientious Objection
- Applied and Professional Ethics
- Codes of/Position Statements on Professional Ethics
- Psychiatry
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
Copyright information:
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Conscientious objection in healthcare: why tribunals might be the answer
- Conscientious objection in healthcare, referral and the military analogy
- The Market View on conscientious objection: overvalued
- Should professional interpreters be able to conscientiously object in healthcare settings
- The truth behind conscientious objection in medicine
- When should conscientious objection be accepted
- Is there no alternative? Conscientious objection by medical students
- Obstetrician - gynaecologists ' opinions about conscientious refusal of a request for abortion: results from a national vignette experiment
- Selling conscience short: a response to Schuklenk and Smalling on conscientious objections by medical professionals
- Factors contributing to practitioner choice when declining involvement in legally available care: A scoping protocol