Abortion and Conscience Protections
Christopher Kaczor in The Ethics of Abortion, 2023
Much is at stake in the debate about conscience, as the true story makes clear. What is conscience? Although some understand conscience as a feeling or instinct, what I mean by conscience, or the act of conscience, is the agent's best-reasoned judgment about whether or not to perform an action, reasoning which should be informed by careful consideration of moral truth and relevant circumstances. An action does not become morally right simply because it is done in accordance with conscience. Considered objectively as an action, to torture and murder an innocent person is always wrong. If someone's conscience compels him or her to torture and murder another person, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that such an agent has voluntarily suppressed knowledge that they can and ought to know. Such voluntary culpable ignorance does not excuse an action that is morally wrong. Such a voluntarily ignorant agent is therefore guilty both of not properly informing his conscience and of harming and killing a person, the negative consequence that follows directly from his lack of due care in finding out what is truly just. Agents always have moral obligations to obey their consciences, and agents always also have a moral obligation to properly inform their consciences.
Resistance: Part I
Alan Bleakley in Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice, 2020
For psychoanalytically oriented theorists such as Judith Butler (1997), Foucault’s description of biopower is necessary but not sufficient, falling short where it fails to engage with psychoanalytic notions of rational conscience clouded by the irrational or unconscious. As the forces of governmentality shape identities, this is accompanied by emotional reactions such as shame and guilt, and these interact with, and re-stimulate, repressed childhood memories, some traumatic. These shape a moral conscience. For example, doctors’ erotic or sexual feelings towards patients are tightly controlled by a professional and ethical expectation that such feelings should not be acted out, as the patient is considered to be vulnerable while in the care of the doctor. A significant period of time should elapse before any suggestion of acting upon deep feelings such as falling in love with a patient that is reciprocated, as the patient’s response may be clouded by unacknowledged positive transference. However, the stimulation of erotic feelings in the present, as psychoanalytically oriented theorists such as Butler know, is entangled with repressed desires from the past that may or may not be re-constructed in the present as fantasies or memories. Personal parental psychodynamics are readily projected onto one’s cultural “parent”, such as the doctor. Further, the study of such psychodynamics is not a standard part of medical students”’ education in the spheres of professionalism and clinical communication, a situation that I interrogate in Chapter 14.
Connecting lines from an ethical point of view
Elisabeth Hildt, Dietmar Mieth in In Vitro Fertilisation in the 1990s, 2018
Is it an illusion to hope that the personalist approach can function in a kind of preventive way as a way to integrate new advancements in medical technology? The rapid changes in reproductive technology, genetic diagnosis and human gene therapy seem to suggest that it is and that ethical evaluation comes always after, if not much too late. This observation does not, however, discharge us from the duty to openly evaluate the values of new technologies. Science, medical technology and practice, medical ethics and law all have their specific agenda. But a real interdisciplinary approach creates the framework for an appropriate ethical reflection. Conscience has to do with ‘science’, ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’ … this may even be all that is ethics about: to keep our minds open, to analyse values, and to strengthen basic attitudes of trust and devotion, although – for me – always in the light of the humanly desirable.
Medical Disobedience and the Conscientious Provision of Prohibited Care
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2021
Conscience often refers to an individual’s beliefs about right and wrong that are central to her identity and character: who she is and what she stands for, when it comes down to it. Having moral integrity means living according to these core convictions. Conscience looms large in ethically fraught professions like health care. Before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, some doctors who’d seen self-induced or back-alley abortions kill patients said their conscientious commitment to the equal dignity of women or to compassionate care for the desperate and vulnerable compelled them to provide unlawful procedures at risk of losing their license or going to jail (Joffe 1995). But medical conscience has been tied to religious conservativism ever since the backlash against Roe v. Wade. That’s when many states passed laws insulating practitioners who refuse to perform abortions on the ground that it would contravene their faith in the sanctity of life.
Do Clinicians Have a Duty to Participate in Pragmatic Clinical Trials?
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
Andrew Garland, Stephanie Morain, Jeremy Sugarman
Refusals to participate might also arise from individual objections to the research. These objections can take several forms. The most morally fraught is conscientious objection, which as a matter of ongoing debate deserves special attention. To some, conscientious objection is incompatible with professional duties (Giubilini 2014; Hughes 2018; Savulescu 2006; Savulescu and Schuklenk 2018). When the medical profession has judged that an intervention is a valid component of appropriate care, then a clinician who refuses to provide that care is failing a professional duty. Qualms of conscience—the argument goes—are not good enough to excuse this failure. Being a member of the profession permits exercise of professional judgment, but conscientious objections illegitimately imply private constraints on medical care. To be clear, this distinction depends on whether assertions of conscience are moral claims, rather than professional judgments couched in moralized terms. As noted above, clinicians typically think they are morally obliged to provide high-quality care, so knowingly providing bad care is morally bad. Yet there is a difference between making a professional judgment about the quality of care and having a moral objection to the care itself. For example, physicians who refuse to perform abortions typically do not argue that abortions are contra-indicated, but that they are morally wrong.
Unjustified Asymmetry: Positive Claims of Conscience and Heartbeat Bills
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2021
The conscience, according to Sulmasy, isn’t just moral intuition or a set of feelings, but rather a judgment about one’s core moral commitments (2008, 137–8). It serves to alert an individual to potential value violations and to harass the individual after a violation until the violation is remedied (Morton and Kirkwood 2009, 352). Conscientious objection, then, is understood as an objection to some action or omission based on this moral judgment.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Central Nervous System
- Emotion
- Imprinting
- REMorse
- Moral Reasoning
- Genetics
- Soul
- Pride
- Lust
- Piety