Conscientious Objector

Infantry men who once ridiculed and scoffed at Desmond's simple faith and refusal to carry a weapon owed their lives to him. In the midst of a fierce firefight on Okinawa that felled approximately 75 men from the 1st Battalion, Private Doss refused to seek cover and carried his stricken comrades to safety one by one. This and other heroic acts earned him the highest honor America could bestow on one of her soldiers--the Medal of Honor.

What would you do if you were drafted to fight in a war? As a conscientious objector opposed to all wars, Wayne R. Ferren Jr. had to answer that question during the Vietnam War. He called on his religious and scientific backgrounds as well as his environmental activism to argue that he should be excluded from fighting in, or supporting this war. Following a successful defense of his claim, Wayne served two years of alternative civilian service, which influenced his professional and personal life for the next fifty years. Decades after his service, he was shocked to find his name on the Vietnam War Memorial, which turned out to be that of another young man with a similar name born the same year Wayne was born. That man died in 1968 when his plane was hit by artillery fire and crash landed at Khe Sanh Marine Combat Base. He will forever remain a teenage father killed in a senseless war. To this day, the duality haunts the author, and in this multifaceted memoir, he looks back at a lifetime and how his background, scientific training, and transcendentalism have guided him on a path of conscientious objection, service, and conservation, believing all things are sacred.

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.

A look at the broad yet very basic issues every Christian must consider when confronted with military involvement.

This book argues that a conscientiously objecting medical professional should receive an exemption only if the grounds of an objector’s refusal are reasonable. It defends a detailed, contextual account of public reasonability suited for healthcare, which builds from the overarching concept of Rawlsian public reason. The author analyzes the main competing positions and maintains that these other views fail precisely due to their systematic inattention to the grounding reasons behind a conscientious objection; he argues that any such view is plausible to the extent that it mimics the ‘reason-giving requirement’ for conscience objections defended in this work. Only reasonable objections can defeat the prior professional obligation to assign primacy to patient well-being, therefore one who refuses a patient’s request for a legally available, medically indicated, and safe service must be able to explain the grounds of their objection in terms understandable to other citizens within the public institutional structure of medicine. The book further offers a novel policy proposal to deploy the Reasonability View: establishing conscientious objector status in medicine. It concludes that the Reasonability View is a viable and attractive position in this debate. A New Theory of Conscientious Objection in Medicine: Justification and Reasonability will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy of medicine, as well as thinkers interested in the intersections between law, medical humanities, and philosophy.

Although the act of conscientious objection entered modern consciousness most strikingly as a result of the Vietnam War, Americans have long struggled to reconcile their politics, pacifist beliefs, and compulsory military service. While conscientious objection in the twentieth century has been well documented, there has been surprisingly little study of its long history in America's early conflicts, defined as these have been by accounts of patriotism and nation-building. In fact, during the period of conscription from the late 1650s to the end of the Civil War, many North Americans refused military service on grounds of conscience. In this volume, Peter Brock, one of the foremost historians of American pacifism, seeks to remedy this oversight by presenting a rich and varied collection of documents, many drawn from obscure sources, that shed new light on American religious and military history. These include legal findings, church and meeting proceedings, appeals by nonconformists to government authorities, and illuminating excerpts from personal journals. These accounts contain many poignant, often painful, and sometimes even humorous episodes that offer glimpses into the lives of conscientious objectors of the era. One of the most striking features to emerge from these documents is the critical role of religion in the history of American pacifism. Brock finds that virtually all who refused military service in this period were inspired by religious convictions, with Quakers frequently the most ardent dissenters. In the antebellum period, however, the pacifist spectrum expanded to include nonsectarians such as the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Non-Resistance Society. A dramatic, powerful portrait of early American pacifism, Liberty and Conscience presents not only the thought and practice of the objectors themselves, but also the response of the authorities and the general public.