Wrongness, Responsibility, and Conscientious Refusals in Health Care

In this article, I address what kinds of claims are of the right kind to ground conscientious refusals. Specifically, I investigate what conceptions of moral responsibility and moral wrongness can be permissibly presumed by conscientious objectors. I argue that we must permit HCPs to come to their o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Liberman, Alida (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley-Blackwell [2017]
In: Bioethics
Year: 2017, Volume: 31, Issue: 7, Pages: 495-504
IxTheo Classification:NCA Ethics
NCH Medical ethics
Further subjects:B professional competency
B conscientious refusal
B Conscientious Objection
B moral wrongness
B Zubik v. Burwell
B Responsibility
B Subjective
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:In this article, I address what kinds of claims are of the right kind to ground conscientious refusals. Specifically, I investigate what conceptions of moral responsibility and moral wrongness can be permissibly presumed by conscientious objectors. I argue that we must permit HCPs to come to their own subjective conclusions about what they take to be morally wrong and what they take themselves to be morally responsible for. However, these subjective assessments of wrongness and responsibility must be constrained in several important ways: they cannot involve empirical falsehoods, objectionably discriminatory attitudes, or unreasonable normative beliefs. I argue that the sources of these constraints are the basic epistemic, relational, and normative competencies needed to function as a minimally decent health-care professional. Finally, I consider practical implications for my framework, and argue that it shows us that the objection raised by the plaintiffs in Zubik v. Burwell is of the wrong sort.
ISSN:1467-8519
Contains:Enthalten in: Bioethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12351