Protecting claims of conscience can function to fairly balance burdens among relevant parties without first having to resolve an underlying and intractable moral disagreement. Recently, a number of theorists have argued that the relevant criteria for protecting negative appeals to conscience in health care can (suitably modified) be equally well-satisfied in cases of positive appeals. I argue that, when it comes to certain practices, the justification of positive appeals to conscience does in fact depend upon contested claims in the debate (...) over the moral permissibility of those practices. This fact threatens to undermine one of the central functions of protecting appeals to conscience: that we can agree to disagree. (shrink)

A peer commentary on an AJOB article by Kyle Fritz called "Unjustified Asymmetry: Positive Claims of Conscience and Heartbeat Bills.".

Kyle Fritz argues for the following conditional statement: if healthcare providers should be allowed to conscientiously object to providing abortions in jurisdictions where abortions...

Should doctors ever be allowed to offer care that their state or employer forbids? What if their deeply held personal values or beliefs demand they treat patients in need? We’re used to hearing abo...

The controversy around the accommodation of conscientious objections in medicine persists, especially for such contentious services as abortions. COs are typically considered in their negativ...

Fritz argues that there is an “unjustified asymmetry” in legislation that allows physicians and health care institutions to refuse to provide elective abortions and other morally contested l...

We appreciate Fritz’s thoughtful analysis of the asymmetry between legal protections for negative and positive conscience claims and are particularly interested in further exploring the conc...

The target article by Kyle Fritz draws attention to the asymmetry debate, an under-analyzed issue within the broader debate over the proper role of physician conscience in healthcare. The as...