#1197 Mark Wicclair: Conscientious Objection in Medicine

Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Mark Wicklair. He is professor of philosophy emeritus at West Virginia University. And today we're going to talk about his book, Conscientious Objection in Medicine.

So, Mark, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you one. Well, thank you for inviting me. So let's start perhaps with a definition or at least an understanding of the main subject we're going to tackle today. So what is conscientious objection?

Well, conscientious objection essentially is a refusal to provide services. And in the case of healthcare, it would be healthcare services, a refusal that is based on the provider's ethical beliefs. And those ethical beliefs can either be based on just straightforward secular principles or they can be based on religious principles. But the important, really essential characteristic of a conscientious objection or a conscientious refusal to provide a service is that it is based on the provider's ethical beliefs because there are a lot of other reasons for refusing to provide medical services. So for example, surgeons frequently we'll just say

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