Conscientious Objection as a Clumsy Solution
Nathan Emmerich1, Australian National University Acton 1Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
Abstract
The extensive discussion of conscientious objection in healthcare that has emerged over the past two decades has focused on whether the healthcare professional’s right of non-participation can be vindicated and, if so, the proper conditions of its implementation. On the face of it the matter has been treated as a (first order) moral issue, something that has arguable reached its apotheosis in recent claims regarding the moral symmetry between conscientious objection and conscientious provision (Fritz 2021). Discussions of the referral requirement and the notion of institutional conscientious objection have proceeded on a similar basis; they are framed as moral questions and a majority of authors seek to adjudicate them as such. In this paper I argue that conscientious objection is an ethico-political device for managing conflicting, irresolvable and well-founded moral perspectives on some first order ethical issue—such as abortion and VAD—or, more generally, issues in which establishing a right of non-participation can mediate the kind of otherwise irresolvable matters that inevitable arise in morally pluralist social contexts. As such, the various ways in which a right to conscientiously object has been articulated and implemented suggest it is a clumsy solution, something that “nod[s] in different directions to maintain overall ‘normative optimality’” (Shapiro 1987).
Fritz, K.G. (2021) Unjustified Asymmetry: Positive Claims of Conscience and Heartbeat Bills. The American Journal of Bioethics 21(8):46–59.
Shapiro, M.H. (1987). Introduction: Judicial Selection and the Design of Clumsy Institutions USC Symposium on Judicial Election, Selection, and Accountability. Southern California Law Review. 61(6), 1555–1570.
Biography
Senior Lecturer, ANU.