Many professional associations have policies explaining when it is or is not acceptable for health-care professionals to refuse to participate in the administration of certain interventions on grounds of conscience. In both Canada and the United States, nursing associations tend to have much more detailed, permissive policies than medical associations. There are reasons to think that this distinction is not justifiable, and I argue that some specific North American medical associations should endorse policies regarding conscientious refusals that are modeled on those endorsed by nursing associations and the United Kingdom’s General Medical Council.
The main guiding assumption of this paper is that there is need for a taxonomy of ethical sentences (a reliable way for differentiating ethical from non-ethical sentences) that does not overgenerate, yet can make useful contributions to debates about certain controversial sentences (such as conditionals with a non-ethical antecedent and ethical consequent). After surveying the recent literature and concluding that no extant taxonomy that satisfies both of these conditions is available to us, I propose and explain a novel taxonomy which does satisfy them. I then defend my proposal from five potential objections.
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