Personal morality and professional obligations: rights of conscience and informed consent

This article examines the issue of expanding rights of conscience for health-care professionals to include rights grounded in claims of complicity. Our concerns relate to the nature of professional expertise, on the one hand, and an individual's right to live by his or her values, on the other. The fact that a patient is dependent on a physician's counseling about treatment options requires limiting conscience-based refusal to provide information, since allowing refusal would deprive patients of even knowing the options that exist for them. Sanctioning such claims of conscience not only would supplant one person's moral judgment with another's, it would also allow professional standing to be used as a justification for imposing one person's moral views on another.