To Market, to Market...

Abstract

State intervention in the practice of pharmacy to ensure access to drugs is authorized as an exception to the norms of a free market. But state intervention in the practice of pharmacy to ensure freedom of conscience is required as the rule according to the norms of a free country, which insist upon minimum standards for the preservation of human dignity.State intervention to safeguard freedom of conscience typically takes the form, not of limitless compulsion, but of limited prohibitions. Employers and others are obliged only to abstain from certain kinds of wrongful conduct, not compelled to do all that legislators or “interest group armies” think desirable. In this respect, protection of conscience legislation is actually less onerous than legislated medical or pharmaceutical mandates. Like laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment and education, such legislation may be seen as an unwelcome constraint in a free market, but it is a bulwark of liberty in a free country.Problems of access to drugs should be left to the marketplace (which is competent to manage the distribution of goods and services), while acknowledging the duty of the state to intervene when and to the extent necessary to ensure that minimal human needs are met. However, deprivation of freedom of conscience is a fundamental injustice, and justice is the primary concern of the state. Thus, the state acts completely within its proper sphere of competence when it intervenes to the extent necessary to protect the dignity of the human person by enacting protection of conscience legislation.