Abstract

In Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (2003), Richard B. Miller studies the motives of parents when they refuse medical treatments for their children and offers suggestions for how to balance the norms of beneficence and autonomy in pediatric care. In this chapter, I expand on his work by evaluating the limits of physician autonomy and the appropriate models of mutual decision-making in cases where professional standards cannot be met because of physicians’ religious or moral objections. After surveying important pieces of legislation that protect freedom of conscience in healthcare, I argue that many of these policies and laws attempt to justify the potential threats and burdens to patients that follow from physician refusals by appealing to the goods of moral or religious diversity in medicine. Similarly, medical ethicists and religious scholars who support conscience protections often appeal to the goods of religious diversity in public life and more generally to the unshakeable goods of religion without fully accounting for the material, social, and physical harms that may follow from these protections. Ultimately, these ideas about the goods of religion and religious diversity deplete the power of religious frameworks to find any leverage in materialist critiques of medicine or medical law because they necessitate something Miller has called “recognition-on-demand” or respect and accommodation without questioning. In short, this narrow conceptualization of religion and its place in public life strips religious ideas of their power to engage in social criticism. As such, this chapter contributes to debates on the meaning of a democratic commitment to pluralism and the degree to which individual religious beliefs or moral principles ought to be accommodated in the workplace.