Herman Melville's account of Bartleby the scrivener has something to teach us about the interactive nature of refusal and the empathy necessary for an exchange of values in the setting of conscientious refusal.
When patient autonomy became a closely held value in medical ethics in the 1960s and '70s, the physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to deliver a given service began to be contested.
An attempt to investigate correlations between race, attitudes, and contraceptive use did not find meaningful associations between race and attitudes about birth control or pregnancy that could influence contraceptive choice.
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.
If employees of religious institutions whose consciences conflict with those of their employers were to be granted legal protection for positive claims of conscience, the religious freedom of institutions within which they work would be gravely compromised.
An argument that the concept of judicious dissent can resolve the debate over a physician’s conscience-based right to refuse to provide lawful services.
An argument that an individual physician’s conscience-based decision not to offer specific, lawful medical services should not restrict patients’ access to those services.
Direct sterilization by means of tubal ligation is morally unacceptable in Catholic bioethics but other procedures that result in indirect sterilization may be acceptable under certain conditions.