Matter Of Conscience Research Articles

Not a Moral Issue: Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty

Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts is a new book of essays edited by Douglas Laycock, Anthony R. Picarello, Jr., and Robin Fretwell Wilson. In this Book Review, I focus on the book’s intellectual center of gravity, Professor Wilson’s essay, Matters of Conscience: Lessons for Same-Sex Marriage from the Healthcare Context, and Professor Laycock’s Afterword. The authors purport to offer a solution that will give Gays and Lesbians access to the benefits of marriage while also recognizing religious objectors’ rights to oppose Gay marriage. The authors endorse specific statutory exemptions in emerging marriage equality legislation allowing anyone asserting individual moral opposition to Gay and Lesbian couples to opt out of the facilitation of a same-sex marriage. The authors want such explicit exemptions for everyone from state employees to individuals providing services in the general stream of commerce. I argue that Professors Wilson and Laycock’s nearly exclusive focus on individual rights analysis in their approach to the same-sex marriage question fails to consider seriously the group-based equality issues at stake. I argue that, contrary to Professors Wilson and Laycock’s assertions, one cannot easily distinguish between religious objections to interracial marriage, as well as religious justification for other forms of inequality, and religious objections to same-sex marriage. I argue that we must analyze the claims of Gays and Lesbians for civil marriage under a substantive equality paradigm, and that the group-based equality interests of Gays and Lesbians should not be subordinated to the individual desires of religious objectors through resort to the descriptive moral counterbalancing inherent in typical, liberal individual rights analysis.

Book Reviews

Book Reviewed in this issues. Van Diemen's Land. By James Boyce Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa. Edited by Norman Etherington Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution. By Raelene Frances Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy. By Peter Cochrane Lucy Osburn, a Lady Displaced: Florence Nightingale's Envoy to Australia. By Judith Godden Australia's Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland 1860‐1930. By Philip Jones and Anna Kenny Bishop of Magnetic Power: James Moorhouse in Melbourne, 1876‐1886. By Moma Sturrock Summer in the Hills: The Nineteenth‐Century Mountain Resort in Australia. By Andrea Inglis Anzacs and Ireland. By Jeff Kildea Designing Australia's Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City Beautiful 1900‐1930. By Robert Freestone From the Hustings to Harbour Views: Electoral Institutions in New South Wales, 1856‐2006. By Marian Simms Jean Beadle: A Life of Labor Activism. By Bobbie Oliver The Coalminers of Queensland: A Narrative History of the Queensland Colliery Employees Union. Volume Two: The Pete Thomas Essays. By Pete Thomas and Greg Mallory The Little History of Australian Unionism. By Sean Scalmer The Voice of the Thunderer: Journalism of H.G. Kippax. Selected and introduced by Harry Heseltine Sir Ronald Wilson: A Matter of Conscience. By Antonio Buti Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard. By Ann Tiernan John Winston Howard: The Biography. By Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom. By Anna Clark John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Thought. By John R. Gibbins A.J.P. Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe. By Chris Wrigley Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord. Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart. Edited by Jürgen Matthäus and Klaus‐Michael Mallmann Prague in Black. Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism. By Chad Bryant Prague in Danger. By Peter Demetz Why is there No Labor Party in the United States? By Robin Archer Anti‐Americanism: History, Causes, Themes, 4 volumes. Edited by Brendon O'Connor Equality. By Stuart White The Political Communication Reader. Edited by Ralph Negrine and James Stanyer The Right Road to Radical Freedom. By Tibor Machan Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. By John Harris

A Matter of Conscience: The Selective Conscientious Objector, Catholic College Students, and the Vietnam War

College students played a significant, if not central, role in the anti-Vietnam war movement. With the deployment of the first combat troops in 1965, more college students, predominantly white, began focusing their attention on the government's evolving policy in Vietnam. Two primary reasons for their grow ing interest were, first, white college students' diminishing role in the civil rights movement due to the emergence of black power, and second, male college students' increasing possibility of being drafted due to the government's rising draft calls. Catholic college students, in contrast to their restrained response to the civil rights movement, joined the anti-Vietnam war movement early and remained active until the end of the war in 1973. Like their non-Catholic counterparts, Catholic student activists fostered debate on the war by sponsoring teach-ins on United States foreign policy, encouraging intercollegiate participation in mass demonstrations, and demanding on-campus draft-counseling services. By outward appearances, Catholic college students appeared to be motivated by the same forces as college students nationally. They, too, believed that it was an imperialistic war sponsored by the mil itary-industrial complex, and/or that the draft was not intended primarily to supply troops for the war, but to channel youth into professions deemed to be in the national interest. However, despite these shared beliefs about the war and the draft, many Catholic students' involvement in the anti-war movement was also motivated and

Public-Private Distinctions in Matters of Conscience

Public-Private Distinctions in Matters of Conscience

New evidence of noble and gentry piety in fifteenth-century England and Wales

There has been much recent examination of late medieval lay piety in order to understand the background to Henry VIII's reformation, notably Colin Richmond's studies of the ‘privatised’ religion of the English gentry. Such work has largely over-looked papal sources and the associated issue of relations between English and Welsh society and the papacy. This article seeks to remedy this neglect by presenting new evidence from the registers of the papal penitentiary. In the late middle ages the papal penitentiary was the highest office in the western Church concerned with matters of conscience and the principal source of papal absolutions, dispensations and licences. Petitions seeking such favours were copied in its registers, and this article especially concerns petitions from English and Welsh gentry seeking licences to have a portable altar or to appoint a personal confessor ( littere confessionales). It also examines their requests for various other favours that illustrate their piety, notably regarding fasting, chastity and pilgrimage. The article contests Richmond's notion of ‘privatised’ gentry religion and similar distinctions between elite and popular or personal and collective religion. It appends translations of three significant documents from the penitentiary registers and a statistical table concerning requests for littere confessionales.

Matters of Conscience, Matters of Unity, Matters of Orthodoxy: Trinity and Water Baptism in Early Pentecostal Theology and Practice

AbstractThis article surveys early Pentecostal discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity and water baptism and focuses specifically on baptismal mode and formula. In tracing the discussion from 1906 to the period just after the 1916 General Council of the Assemblies of God, literature from various streams of the tradition is examined. By surveying the periodical literature as well as official documents produced by these various denominations and groups, not only will doctrinal discussions be seen but also the practices associated with water baptism. It is the author's conclusion that there was some degree of flexibility with regard to both formula and mode of baptism before the emergence of the New Issue (1914). However, the research reveals that there was a well thought out doctrine of the Trinity prior to the rise of Oneness theology thereby establishing that Pentecostal theology was Trinitarian in its inception.

ACOG Committee Opinion No. 371: Sterilization of Women, Including Those With Mental Disabilities

Sterilization, like any other surgical procedure, must be carried out under the general ethical principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, and justice. Women requesting sterilization should be encouraged to discuss their decision and associated issues with their husbands or other appropriate intimate partners. The physician who objects to a patient's request for sterilization solely as a matter of conscience has the obligation to inform the patient that sterilization services may be available elsewhere and should refer the patient to another caregiver. The presence of mental capacity does not, in itself, justify either sterilization or its denial. When a patient's mental capacity is limited and sterilization is considered, the physician must consult with the patient's family, agents, and other caregivers in an effort to adopt a plan that protects what the consulted group believes to be the patient's best interests while, at the same time, preserving, to the maximum extent possible, the patient's autonomy.

Joseph (Józef) Rotblat. 4 November 1908 — 31 August 2005

Joseph Rotblat, having suffered considerable hardships in his youth in Warsaw, graduated in physics from the Free University of Warsaw. On a fellowship to work with James (later Sir James) Chadwick FRS in Liverpool, he joined the Manhattan Project early in 1944. Resigning as a matter of conscience when he learned that the bomb was not needed as a deterrent against Hitler's Germany, he subsequently devoted the rest of his life to radiation physics and radiobiology and to the abolition of nuclear weapons and of war itself. He was one of the founders and the moving spirit of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, with whom he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Tube Feedings and Persistent Vegetative State Patients: Ordinary or Extraordinary Means?

This article looks at the late John Paul II's allocution on artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) and the implications his statement will have on the ordinary-extraordinary care distinction. The purpose of this article is threefold: first, to examine the medical condition of a persistent vegetative state (PVS); second, to examine and analyze the Catholic Church's tradition on the ordinary-extraordinary means distinction; and third, to analyze the ethics behind the pope's recent allocution in regards to PVS patients as a matter of conscience. Rather than providing clarification, I argue that the papal allocution has raised many difficult questions. People in situations where decisions must be made about withdrawal or continued ANH are in need of guidance. Moreover, additional analysis is needed to determine whether the papal allocution is in conflict with the traditional Catholic medical ethics understanding of the ordinary-extraordinary care distinction.

Matters of Conscience and Conscientiousness: The Place of Ego Developmentin the Five-Factor Model

The Five-factor model (FFM; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1990) and Loevinger's (1994) theory of ego development are two active research traditions that are often construed as incompatible approaches to the study of personality. For example, each theory proposes a different view of the concept of conscientiousness. Loevinger argued that FFM conscientiousness, which emphasizes attributes such as order, self-discipline, and achievement striving, lacks a moral component and is more similar to the conformist stage in her theory. To investigate these claims, we administered the Revised NEO–Personality Inventory (NEO–PI–R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Hy & Loevinger, 1996) to 120 university students on 2 separate occasions. Together, the five traits of the FFM significantly predicted item sum scores from the WUSCT (multiple R = .54). Unique linear relationships of Openness to Experience and Agreeableness with ego level demonstrated that the two theories proposed similar constructs. We argue that these two FFM dimensions have conceptual relevance to the cognitive and interpersonal aspects of the ego development construct. We draw further connections between these FFM dimensions, ego development, and human values.

English Royal Marriages and the Papal Penitentiary in the Fifteenth Century*

The papal penitentiary was the highest body in the later medieval Church concerned with matters of conscience. It granted absolution in cases reserved for papal authority and issued dispensations and licences that were also a papal monopoly. Requests for these papal favours, where approved by the penitentiary, were recorded in registers, and 150 such registers survive in the Vatican Archives for the pre-Tridentine period. Accessible to researchers only since 1983 they represent a major new body of sources for religious, social and cultural history. This Note shows that they are also important for political and diplomatic history since it presents new evidence from the registers of papal dispensations for four fifteenth-century English royal marriages. The couples in question are Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and Margaret of York; Edward, prince of Wales, and Anne Neville; Richard, duke of Gloucester (later Richard III), and Anne Neville; Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) and Elizabeth of York. The Note includes an edition of the pertinent entries in the registers and of a letter granting a further dispensation for the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York; this was issued by a papal envoy to England and is held in the Archives départementales du Nord (Lille). The Note arises from research for a calendar of entries concerning England and Wales in the penitentiary registers to 1503, currently being prepared by the author and Patrick Zutshi for the Canterbury and York Society.

Patient Counseling and Matters of Conscience

Physicians face ethical dilemmas when patients request medical help in pursuing behavior the physician believes is immoral. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

Hinduism, Christianity, and Liberal Religious Toleration

The Protestant conception of religion as a private matter of conscience organized into voluntary associations informed early liberalism’s conception of religion and of religious toleration, assumptions that are still present in contemporary liberalism. In many other religions, however, including Hinduism (the main though not only focus of this article), practice has a much larger role than conscience. Hinduism is not a voluntary association, and the structure of its practices, some of which are inegalitarian, makes exit very difficult. This makes liberal religious toleration an awkward fit for Hinduism; granting religious toleration in India undermines equality and autonomy in severe ways. Yet Hinduism is not without its virtues, and has historically been what I call externally tolerant—it has been relatively tolerant of other religions. Liberal toleration, by contrast, is internally tolerant—it is tolerant of religions that fit the Protestant model, while its tolerance of others is considerably more qualified. I briefly speculate at the end of the article about how to combine these two models of toleration.

The nature and limits of the physician's professional responsibilities: surgical ethics, matters of conscience, and managed care.

The nature and limits of the physician's professional responsibilities constitute core topics in clinical ethics. These responsibilities originate in the physician's professional role, which was first examined in the modern English-language literature of medical ethics by two eighteenth-century British physician-ethicists, John Gregory and Thomas Percival. The papers in this annual clinical ethics number of the Journal explore the physician's professional responsibilities in the areas of surgical ethics, matters of conscience, and managed care.

A Matter of Conscience: Essays on the World War II Heart Mountain Draft Resistance Movement by Mike Mackey

A Matter of Conscience: Essays on the World War II Heart Mountain Draft Resistance Movement by Mike Mackey

Patient safety, ethics and whistleblowing: a nursing response to the events at the Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals

IN NOVEMBER 2002, in what stands as one of the most significant whistle blowing cases in the history of the Australian health care system, four nurses went public with concerns they had about the management of clinical incidents and patient safety at two hospitals in Sydney, New South Wales. The handling of this case and its aftermath raises important moral questions concerning the nature of whistleblowing in health care domains and the possible implications for the patient safety and quality of care movement in Australia. This paper presents an overview of the case, the moral risks associated with whistleblowing, and some lessons learned. The International Council of Nurses (2000) Code of Ethics stipulates that nurses have a stringent responsibility to 'take appropriate action to safeguard individuals when their care is endangered by a co-worker or any other person'. Other local and international nursing codes of ethics and standards of professional conduct likewise obligate nurses to take appropriate action to safeguard individuals when placed at risk by the incompetent, unethical or illegal acts of others ? including the system. Despite these coded moral prescriptions for responsible and accountable professional conduct, taking appropriate action when others are placed at risk (including making reports to appropriate authorities) is never an easy task nor is it free of risk for nurses. As has been amply demonstrated in the literature, taking a moral stance to protect patient safety and quality of care can be extremely hazardous to nurses (Johnstone 1994, 2002, 2004; Ahern & McDonald 2002). In situations where nurses report their concerns to an appropriate authority but nothing is done to either investigate or validate their claims, nurses are faced with the ethical dilemma and 'choice' of whether to: do nothing ('put up and shut up'); leave their current place of employment (and possibly even the profession); or take the matter further ('blow the whistle') by reporting their concerns to an external authority that they perceive as having the power to do something about their concerns. It is rare for nurses to 'blow the whistle' in the public domain. When they do, it is usually because they perceive that something is terribly wrong and, as a matter of conscience, they cannot just look on as morally passive bystanders. For those nurses who do take a stand, the costs to them personally and professionally are almost always devastating, with no guarantees that the situation on which they have taken a public stance will be improved. Nurses who blow the whistle often end up with their careers and lives in tatters (see case studies in Johnstone 1994 & 2004).

A matter of conscience

There is more heat than light in the current euthanasia debate

Human Rights and the Right to Culture in China

As anthropologists we are often preoccupied with our own circumscribed studies of local communities. Only during World War II did we embrace the global dimensions and importance of cultural differences. Many Western anthropologists who have recently, and as a matter of conscience, become concerned with globalization have abandoned the concept of culture as an organizing principle, perhaps in part because they confuse cultural relativism with moral relativism, and perhaps because it is fashionable to denounce their forebears. As professionals I think we must deal with the cultural dimensions of a problem first before making moral judgements. I remain convinced that the concept of culture is a useful tool for understanding and shaping macro-level political understanding and dialogue, in somewhat the same way as Ruth Benedict and others demonstrated more than half a century ago. American policy failures in the international arena, of which the war in Afghanistan is one result, are related to arrogance (ethnocentrism) which breeds ignorance of other cultures and a lack of comparative perspective on American culture as well. Human rights is one issue where the United States is blindly pushing its own agenda to its own detriment.

Limited confidentiality, academic freedom, and matters of conscience: Where does CPA stand?

Normally, we would not request an opportunity to reply to another author’s response (Zinger, Wichmann, and Gendreau 2001) to our commentary (Palys and Lowman 2001) on one of their articles (Zinger, Wichmann, and Andrews 2001). The purpose of this brief article is two-fold: (a) to clarify our position on limited confidentiality; (b) to address some fundamental (and more general) questions about the Canadian Psychological Association’s (CPA’s) approach to confidentiality. First, we clarify our position and then examine issues arising from the obligations that Zinger and his colleagues cite to justify the limitations on confidentiality they employed in their research on prisoners.

Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie by Giovanni di Garlandia

BOOK REVIEWS451 occurs by the late fourteenth century, that changes were more interactive between church and state, religious and secular players, and notions about charity and social welfare, than any uniform broad social movement or radical change in thinking. Religious motives remained important. However, the scale of welfare institutions changed, and their operations required more and more public funding. With the broadened programs of medical care in large hospitals like Santa Creu in Barcelona, came also specializations in treatments, program delivery , and care packages. Also evident is a distinction between the deserving poor and undesirables like professional prostitutes and beggars. Finally, Brodman argues that the plight of poor people was addressed by two entwined sets of practice, charity and welfare, voluntary acts for individuals and politically governed social programs for the common good. While the author takes care to guard against presentism and read modern notions into medieval practices, conventions, and institutional forms, his theme rings relevant today with our concerns about social welfare, types of poverty, causes and solutions, and distinctions between direct intervention and immediate help for the unfortunate, and longer range social programs for the welfare of elements in society that have been present always. One might have wished that the historical treatment were more informed by the current fields related to social work and health care. The persistence of need for social welfare and Christian charity and our current struggle over forms of program delivery, funding, and matters of conscience, cannot but help make this investigation into the origins of welfare in our history resonate with the contemporary. This is not just a book to recommend to medievalists, therefore, but to the broader audience of social historians and social science, and beyond history as a background to those studying in such professional fields as social work, criminology, counseling , nursing, and allied health. In its pages modern readers will find much to cause them to contemplate notions of charity and welfare that were articulated centuries before, are still relevant, and which prompt heightened consciousness of the human condition and means for helping others. The subject necessarily reminds one of the ever present differences between the haves and have nots, the privileged and unfortunate, the rich and the poor, and their awareness of each other. As such this book is thought-provoking beyond its purely historical dimension. Lawrence J. McCrank Davenport College Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. By Giovanni di Garlandia. Testo critico, traduzione e commento a cura di Antonio Saiani. [Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere "La Colombaria," Studi CXXXIX.] (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 1995. Pp. 682. Ore 130.000.) What has to be considered, unquestionably, the first known lyric of Italian literature , a canzone d'amore in fifty-five decasyllable verses found on the verso 452book reviews of a parchment dated February 28, 1 127, and preserved in the Church Archives of Ravenna, is going to be published by Alfredo Stussi in the next issue of Cultura Neolatina. News concerning this matter can be found in the Sunday literary supplement of Sole 24 Ore (February 28, 1999, p. 29), which carries an ample account by Professor Vittore Branca. Definitely relevant is the fact that the literary text is accompanied by musical neumatic composition. What makes this profane (so to speak) poetry similar to the great religious work ofJohn of Garland (1 195-1272), together with a profound, indeed supernatural, sense of man and world as divine, is the artistic shaping of Delight and Pain in love as dramatis personae. The pattern, as Antonio Saiani shows in his superb commentary , is certainly to be found in classical sources, but scholars of the Middle Ages and historians will find very interesting a wide spectrum of biblical references , above all to the Psalms, mediated through liturgy and early Christian hymnography so well blended in the works of those who had access to cultural education. Medieval studies have given us the excellent subsidia of J. De Ghellinck, L'essor de la literature latine au XIF siècle (2nd ed., Brussels, 1954) and E. R. Curtius,Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern and Munich, 1953; English translation: NewYork, 1963), both to be taken as still fundamental for the amalgam of...