Qualifying conscience protections for institutions with requirements that they minimize hardship caused to the patient would prevent religious institutions from acting as a choke point on the path to services.
Julian Savulescu's writing on conscientious objection is guided by an emphasis on the principle of distributive justice that does not allow religion to have a special status as justification.
Movements to deinstitutionalize people with mental illness and to make institutionalization more legally difficult have resulted in a lack of space and resources for the care of those with severe mental illness, and many have ended up in jails and prisons.
Registries of those considered dangerous focus wrongly on those with mental illness, who account for only 4 percent of violent acts committed in the United States.
Patients who have been encouraged to think of themselves as consumers and a medical system that is driven by individual demands rather than big-picture planning can undermine fairness in the distribution of vaccines.
By studying both basic economic theory and the social and philosophical values that underpin medical decision making, medical students will be prepared to make better resource allocation decisions.