Historically associated with military service, conscientious objection has become a significant phenomenon in health care. Mark Wicclair offers a comprehensive ethical analysis of conscientious objection in three representative health care professions: medicine, nursing and pharmacy. He critically examines two extreme positions: the 'incompatibility thesis', that it is contrary to the professional obligations of practitioners to refuse provision of any service within the scope of their professional competence; and 'conscience absolutism', that they should be exempted from performing any action contrary to their conscience. He argues for a compromise approach that accommodates conscience-based refusals within the limits of specified ethical constraints. He also explores conscientious objection by students in each of the three professions, discusses conscience protection legislation and conscience-based refusals by pharmacies and hospitals, and analyzes several cases. His book is a valuable resource for scholars, professionals, trainees, students, and anyone interested in this increasingly important aspect of health care.

Whenever the legitimacy of a new or ethically contentious medical intervention is considered, a range of influences will determine whether the treatment becomes accepted as lawful medical treatment. The development and introduction of abortion, organ donation, gender reassignment, and non-therapeutic cosmetic surgery have, for example, all raised ethical, legal, and clinical issues. This book examines the various factors that legitimatise a medical procedure. Bringing together a range of internationally and nationally recognised academics from law, philosophy, medicine, health, economics, and sociology, the book explores the notion of a treatment, practice, or procedure being proper medical treatment, and considers the range of diverse factors which might influence the acceptance of a particular procedure as appropriate in the medical context. Contributors address such issues as clinical judgement and professional autonomy, the role of public interest, and the influence of resource allocation in decision-making. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

An analysis of America's commitment to religious liberty uses political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases to discuss its basis in six principles: equality, respect for conscience, liberty, accommodation of minorities, nonestablishment, and separation of church and state.

Freedom of Conscience. A Comparative Law Perspective addresses the timeliest of topics. Across the European continent as well as in the Anglophone world (including the United States), “freedom of conscience” is at the forefront of issues addressed by judges and legislators. It is also a perennial matter of great importance. Public authorities throughout the ages have struggled to understand, and properly to meld, the necessities of political order and the freedom of competent adults to author their own actions and to constitute themselves by making, and acting upon, their conscientious decisions about what moral truth requires of them. The urgency and gravity of the issues presented by “freedom of conscience” is also matched by their intrinsic complexity. For all these reasons, only a multi-disciplinary, full-orbed approach to these questions will do them justice. This volume rises to the occasion. The comparative perspective supplied by the editor’s recruitment of an international group of scholars, and also by his assignment to some of them the task of investigating additional countries, is utterly invaluable. The papers deftly blend what I might call “lawyer’s law” – that is, a careful presentation of the facts and holdings of courts or the precise details of a particular statutory scheme – with genuine philosophical depth. I should like to emphasize this virtue of the collection by observing that collections of this general sort tend to be either all sail or all anchor, either drowned in the minutiae of law without a care for the big picture, or all philosophy untethered to the reality of the positive law. Blicharz’s book has broken this mold. It promises to appeal to working lawyers, students, judges, and scholars. Gerard V. Bradley, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame, USA This edited volume will be a useful resource to scholars in this area. It has a rich national variety, covering Poland (extensively), Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, and three Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway, and Finland). Anyone interested in the state of the freedom of conscience in notable Western democracies will benefit from this work. Those particularly interested in Poland, a country not always focused on in the literature, will find this book of great value. And that is the hallmark of scholarship – a conversation in the search for truth. James C. Phillips, PhD, Stanford University’s Constitutional Law Center, USA

Rex Ahdar and Ian Leigh present a critique of how religious freedom should be understood in liberal legal systems, based on historical and contemporary controversies.