Conflicts Of Conscience Research Articles

Exploring pharmacists' views surrounding conscientious objection to abortion and implications in practice.

General Pharmaceutical Council standards (UK) state 'pharmacy professionals have the right to practise in line with their religion, personal values or beliefs as long as they …make sure that person-centred care is not compromised', indicating a potential conflict for pharmacists who wish to exercise their right to conscientious objection (CO) to abortion while maintaining a duty of care to their patients. The objective of this study was to explore pharmacists' views of conscientious objection to abortion and whether this included the supply of EC and the impact on practice. Eighteen UK pharmacists were interviewed using semistructured interviews. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, imported into NVivo11 and analysed using thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: beliefs as to what constitutes abortion, influences on beliefs, conflicts of conscience, accommodating conscience and professional obligations. Views were polarised in relation to the role of emergency contraception (EC) as an abortifacient. Religion was often viewed as the reason underpinning CO to abortion. Conflicts in relation to CO to abortion included the role of referral and EC and employability for objectors. Some pharmacists viewed their role of providing patient choice as incompatible with the right of CO to abortion. This study shows the conflicts and challenges surrounding CO to abortion in professional pharmacy practice. While the majority of pharmacists believe CO to abortion should and could be accommodated, this can prove challenging in certain working environments, both in relation to ensuring a duty of care to patients is upheld and due to the ongoing debate concerning EC and whether it has a definitive role in abortion or not.

SOLUTIONS TO CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AND CONFLICTS OF CONSCIENCE

In recent decades, significant changes within medical field have not only facilitated healthcare professionals to conduct their duties but also have created conflicts among healthcare professionals when they make decision to provide medical services to their patients. The major conflicts which physicians commonly confront are the financial conflicts of interest and the conflicts of conscience. The two types of conflicts are unavoidable and impossible to be eliminated, yet it is possible to remedy the conflicts; thereby, both physicians and patients have benefit in the medical settings. The ultimate consequence will be an effective operation within healthcare organizations since the foundation of the success for organizations is a healthy doctor-patient relationship. Several approaches and models have been suggested in attempt to relieve such conflicts within the organizations. However, only some of them are helpful and they are supported by the principle of cooperation. To find the balance amongst all these parties, some models have to be enforced in the health care organization. Principle of cooperation is one of the most effective means to outstand the successful model. The principle of cooperation assists cooperators in making moral decisions when encountering accomplice. The object or the meanings of moral actions play essential role in the principle.

LIBERTAD Y OBJECIÓN DE CONSCIENCIA: FUNDAMENTOS HISTÓRICO-DOGMÁTICOS Y FUNCIONALIDADES CONSTITUCIONALES

Because of increasing state regulatory activity on morally sensitive issues, conflicts of conscience have arisen more frequently in recent years. The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical contribution, based on the history of law and constitutional scholarship, that might inform and shed light on decision-making bodies, and interpreters of law, whenever urged to resolve disputes involving conscientious claims. Based on the need of balancing rights, we intend to address the content, importance and historical reasons behind the rights to freedom of conscience and conscientious objection. Initially, we present a brief history of the affirmation of freedom of conscience as a human right, necessary to understand the reasons that led to the international recognition of this inviolable guarantee, besides highlighting the historical context of the affirmation of conscientious objection, manifestation of that freedom. Then, a brief conceptual construction and presentation of the main features of the conscientious objection will be explored. Finally, the paper turns to the analysis of the constitutional functions of freedom of conscience and conscientious objection, that is, to know which legal virtualities arise from a robust and effective protection of these rights

SOGI Training in Catholic Health Care

In response to activists’ demands and new regulations and guidance, some Catholic health care institutions and systems have begun implementing mandatory sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) training programs for employees. The National Catholic Bioethics Center is con- cerned that such programs may be heavily influenced by, or adapted directly from, transgender advocacy organizations. If these programs fail to accurately reflect Catholic teaching, they can undermine the witness of the Church and create conflicts of conscience for many in Catholic health care.

Book Review: Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise

Book Review: Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise

Submission to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba Re: Draft Statement on Physician Assisted Dying

The Project finds the proposed policy concerning the exercise of physician freedom of conscience generally satisfactory. Unfortunately, in its current form, the proposed policy could be understood to mean that objecting physicians cannot or should not discuss euthanasia and assisted suicide with patients. This is inconsistent with recent advice from the College of Family Physicians, and it inadvertently introduces bias against objecting physicians. However, this can easily be corrected by rewording the draft to bring it more closely into line with existing College policy on moral or religious beliefs.The draft does not clearly indicate that patients must be advised about the possibility that the drugs may not cause death as expected. The patient should be asked to provide direction as to what the physician should do in the event of incapacitation by failed physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. This situation would be particularly problematic for physicians willing to assist with suicide but not provide euthanasia. The killing of an incapacitated patient in such circumstances may be legally questionable even within the terms of the Carter ruling. At a minimum, the Project suggests that physicians should not undertake to provide assisted suicide unless they are also willing to provide euthanasia.The proposed policy seems to envisage the possibility of delegation of aspects of the lethal act to other physicians or health care workers. This increases the likelihood of conflicts of conscience, particularly in urgent situations. While it seems unlikely that physicians will be expected to provide euthanasia and assisted suicide on an urgent basis, there is evidence that this expectation could develop when there is a delay between final approval and the provision of the procedures. Among other things, the Project recommends that the responsible physician should personally administer the lethal drug or be personally present when it is ingested, remain with the patient until death ensues, and be continuously available for this purpose once the procedure has been approved.This submission also recommends that the policy should include provisions to protect physicians, applicants for medical school and medical students from discrimination. The Project's view is that if the draft policy is revised in accordance with its recommendations, the result will be entirely satisfactory from the perspective of ensuring protection of conscience for physicians, without impeding patient access to euthanasia and assisted suicide.Finally, it is unlikely that the College will encounter procedures more contentious than euthanasia and assisted suicide. If the revisions proposed in this submission are accepted, the Project suggests that the part of the policy dealing with physician freedom of conscience could be adopted as a standard policy applicable to all morally contested procedures and services. This would very likely make it unnecessary for the College to revisit the issue of physician freedom of conscience every time social and technological developments give rise to new morally contested procedures.

Book Review: Commentary on Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise by Holly Fernandez Lynch

Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care was published in 2008 as the 24th volume in the Basic Bioethics series from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is an American book dealing with the American political and legal controversies over freedom of conscience in health care. However, the discussion of the American experience by Holly Fernandez Lynch is relevant elsewhere, since the United States has the most extensive and varied network of protection of conscience legislation in the world.While acknowledging that freedom of conscience is of concern to all health care workers and institutions, Fernandez Lynch focuses exclusively on physicians. This carefully and deliberately restricted focus is one of the strengths of the book.After a preface and introduction, discussion and argument occupy about 260 pages, supplemented by 53 pages of end notes, many of which offer expanded comment on the text. A good 12 page index has been included, as well as four pages of cited statutes and cases. The earliest source found in a list of 300 references is from 1951; the rest date from 1972 to 2007.As the subtitle of the book indicates, the author is seeking a compromise that will provide maximal liberty for all parties. She believes that freedom of conscience for physicians and the provision of legal medical services are both important social goals, and that they are not incompatible. Quoting the Protection of Conscience Project, she affirms that all legitimate concerns can be met by dialogue, prudent planning, and the exercise of tolerance, imagination and political will.Fernandez Lynch advises readers to strive to at least take a neutral position and adopts this approach herself. She does not always succeed in this, but her effort has produced a book that is notably free of the self-righteousness and rancour one sometimes encounters in this debate. Regardless of their perspectives on the issues, readers will welcome many of the author’s trenchant observations. Her extensive discussion of practical issues is commendable, and she offers what appear to be novel suggestions. However, an attentive reading must take into account the effects of two underlying elements: some form of anti-religious prejudice, and dogmatic moral pluralism.Further, the author warns that her book is not about moral philosophy; she wants to leave philosophy to philosophers. It is sufficient, for her purposes, to solve the problems freedom of conscience is causing in modern health care. Thus, the book explains how to help patients obtain services when some of the physicians who control access to them are uncooperative. It is not a book about freedom of conscience. The problem with this approach is that we cannot know whether or not what the author proposes will safeguard freedom of conscience if we do not know what it is. Nonetheless, the author has been remarkably successful and the strategy she proposes is promising. Within the context of a book about patient access to services, she has offered arguments about the importance of freedom of conscience that are accessible and that many people will find convincing.

Conflicts of conscience in health care: an institutional compromise

Physicians in the United States who refuse to perform a variety of legally permissible medical services because of their own moral objections are often protected by clauses. These laws, on the books in nearly every state since the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade, shield physicians and other health professionals from such potential consequences of refusal as liability and dismissal. While some praise conscience clauses as protecting important freedoms, opponents, concerned with patient access to care, argue that professional refusals should be tolerated only when they are based on valid medical grounds. In Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care, Holly Fernandez Lynch finds a way around the polarizing rhetoric associated with this issue by proposing a compromise that protects both a patient's access to care and a physician's ability to refuse. This focus on compromise is crucial, as new uses of medical technology expand the controversy beyond abortion and contraception to reach an increasing number of doctors and patients. Lynch argues that doctor-patient matching on the basis of personal moral values would eliminate, or at least minimize, many conflicts of conscience, and suggests that state licensing boards facilitate this goal. Licensing boards would be responsible for balancing the interests of doctors and patients by ensuring a sufficient number of willing physicians such that no physician's refusal leaves a patient entirely without access to desired medical services. This proposed solution, Lynch argues, accommodates patients' freedoms while leaving important room in the profession for individuals who find some of the capabilities of medical technology to be ethically objectionable.

Professional insecurities: A guide to understanding and career management

Professional insecurities include the expectation that one’s job or career, and all that depends upon it, are at risk through denial of tenure, dismissal from an official position, or other sanctions for non-compliance with established practices. The expanding subdivision of work in modern society exacerbates professional insecurities by precipitating conflicts of conscience and by proliferating practices that are often ambiguous and incompatible, but nevertheless must be taken seriously because they are expected to be enforced with severe sanctions. This article suggests how the problem of professional insecurities might be understood and managed by aspiring policy scientists especially, and by others as well. There are no universal or final solutions to the problem, but there are better working solutions for particular persons and situations if we are intelligent enough to find them through applications of central theory.

Mandatory overtime: conflicts of conscience?

Mandatory overtime: conflicts of conscience?

Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History

This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' euthanasia measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective. McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having lives unworthy of living. While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

Freedom of Conscience and the Needs of the Patient

The theme of this conference - New Developments - New Boundaries - reminds us that developing technologies have the potential to deliver improved health care, but will probably force you to deal with increasingly frequent or complex conflicts of conscience in your work. It is becoming more important - not less - to talk about freedom of conscience in health care. Today I am going to focus on the terms in the title of this presentation - freedom, conscience, and needs - touching, in one place, upon ethics, and concluding with a reflection upon faith and the notion of moral neutrality. You will note that I have not attempted an apology for freedom of conscience, so you will not leave here with slogans to brandish, a handy list of pros and cons or practical advice on how to avoid being sued. Instead, I offer a number of observations and reflections on words that we too often take for granted, and cause us to stumble: needs, ethics, freedom, conscience, and faith. In preparing this presentation, my goal has been to establish the foundation for constructive reflection and respectful discussion over the longer term. Ultimately, I hope that your discussions with colleagues will be more productive and your disagreements more fruitful for having considered the points I have put before you.

Book Review: Conflicts of Conscience: Fritz Haber—Chemiker, Nobelpreisträger, Deutscher, Jude. By D. Stoltzenberg

Angewandte Chemie International Edition in EnglishVolume 34, Issue 1 p. 119-120 Book Review Book Review: Conflicts of Conscience: Fritz Haber—Chemiker, Nobelpreisträger, Deutscher, Jude. By D. Stoltzenberg Boy Cornils, Boy Cornils Hoechst AG, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)Search for more papers by this author Boy Cornils, Boy Cornils Hoechst AG, Frankfurt/Main (Germany)Search for more papers by this author First published: January 16, 1995 https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.199501191AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume34, Issue1January 16, 1995Pages 119-120 RelatedInformation

Die Bedeutung des Gewissens für Christen in Kirche und Staat

Abstract The demand for a right to military tax refusal aims at the protection from those conflicts of conscience that are resulting from an indirect involvement of the citizen in a state's capability of warfare. This raises the generat question of the relevance of conscience for public law. Normative and functional theories of conscience can only insufficiently explain the experience ofthe human conscience. The protestant concept of a freed conscience includes the possibility, that a Christian takes the responsibility for non-intended effects ofhis actions. In the case of a legal right to refuse military tax, an equal right ought tobe granted to persans whose conscience is worried by other kinds of conflicts. But this would be hardly compatible with the principle of democracy. The burden of conscience of those who refuse military taxes should be taken into account by individual regulations but not regulated by law

Appeals to Conscience

Unfortunately the phrase "appeals to conscience" is ambiguous. First, it may indicate an appeal to another person's conscience in order to convince him to act in certain ways. Second, it may mean the invocation of one's own conscience to interpret and justify one's conduct to others. Third, it may indicate the invocation of conscience in debates with oneself about the right course of action, conscience being understood as a participant in the debate, a referee, or a final arbiter. Although it is possible to distinguish these three meanings of "appeals to conscience," they are usually intertwined in our moral discourse. Nevertheless, I shall concentrate on the second meaning, referring to the other two only when it is necessary to fill out the picture.1 Appeals to conscience in the second sense raise important issues of justification and public policy which can be considered apart from the other meanings of appeals to conscience. My concern is with what we might call "conscientious objection"

Ética y derechos humanos - hacia una fundamentación de la bioética


 
 
 La presencia del otro en nuestras vidas, su implicancia, la dependencia que esta presencia genera no es reconocida cuando pensamos al ser humano como un ser que se basta a sí mismo, como un sujeto individual que debe arreglar todas sus cuentas consigo mismo y resolver todos los conflictos desde su conciencia individual. La ética como justificación de los actos frente a otros y como asunción de la responsabilidad: respuesta, frente a otros es un resultado de esta cualidad de social del ser humano. La mayor expresión de este modo de ser propio del hombre es el lenguaje y un modo especial de ese lenguaje que es la razón. La modernidad viene destacando desde el siglo XV el valor de la razón y la necesidad de que aparezca en la relación interpersonal, especialmente en la ética. La ética, básicamente justificadora, necesita ser justificada, lo que en lenguaje moderno significa ser fundamentada. El propósito de este trabajo es buscar una justificación para la bioética, es decir, una fundamentación, en la medida en que la bioética es un ejercicio ético. Esa búsqueda es orientada hacia los derechos humanos.
 
 

Missions and the New Nationalism

The term needs definition. Nationalism is not new except relatively speaking. The national state emerged in Europe in modern times, and only in the course of the nine teenth century assumed that mystical or quasi-religious character which is the principal ingredient in nationalism. Conflicts of con science in the hearts and minds of Christians over allegiance to God and allegiance to the state became increasingly more numerous and sharp in the twentieth century. Nationalism is more than patriotism or good as some would call it. It tends to make absolute claims for the state. One result of the First World War was an interlude of internationalism. However, the mystical religion of nationalism was revived with greater force by the Nazis and Fascists; and, despite the general denunciation of nationalism, the society of western nations had continued to be infected with this virus often disguised under the name of patriotism. The two original fonts of nationalism in Asia are Japan and India. The western nations forced an entrance into Japan. Japan then stepped over night from medieval isolation into modern international society. She chose elements of western technology and methodology in order to modernize and protect herself from aggression. Nationalism was one of the imports and was quickly united with the traditional belief in the uniqueness and supe riority of the Japanese. As in the West, nationalism found ex pression in imperialism. India caught nationalism by contagion from her British rulers through higher education in which English literature was employed. Japanese conquests in Asia and the Pacific virtually destroyed colonialism and the prestige of the western powers, but also fanned the tiny flame of incipient nationalism into a raging wildfire. President Wilson's Four teen Points and the creation of the League of Nations a gener ation earlier had popularized the notion that every people is by natural right entitled to self-determination, usually understood to mean statehood. The ninety-nine nations membership of the United Nations Organization is an amazing demonstration of the extent to which recently subject people have attained this status. Some of these nations are so small in territory or so weak in