Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP reflected on Australia’s embrace of the “culture of death” last week in his Nicholas Tonti-Filippini Oration, three decades after John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
“Criteria for VAD have proven loose and keep being loosened,” he said. “Suicide and euthanasia are being normalised as ways of dying, and rights of conscientious objection are increasingly denied.”
The right to conscientiously object is being denied, in part, by treating appeals to conscience lightly, or with outright suspicion.
Four leading secular bioethicists co-authored a thoroughgoing attack on conscientious objection this year. In Rethinking Conscientious Objection in Healthcare, they write that “arguments in favour of freedom of conscience tend to be an indirect way of defending or promoting other kinds of ethical views about abortion, end of life, contraception, and any other controversial medical procedure.”
For the authors Alberto Giubilini, Udo Schuklenk, Francesca Minerva and Julian Savulescu, renewed appeals by Christians to the rights of conscience are “a consequence of activists losing the battle of arguments in parliaments, in the court of public opinion, or in courts of law, over issues dear to their hearts.”
Catholics claim that conscience is under attack because of the corruption of the healing profession, following the legalisation of unethical practices like VAD. Secular bioethicists are more likely to see conscience claims as a species of special pleading by doctors who want their personal morals to trump professional obligation and the new laws of the land.
Given this rift, Catholics can do well to show that the profound view of conscience we have formulated in the West “constitutes a significant human achievement in self-understanding,” as Plunkett Centre Director Xavier Symons wrote in a recent “brief history” of conscience.
Conscience is more than a theological artefact of the Middle Ages. Neither is it a philosophical fig leaf hiding Christians’ refusal to concede defeat in the culture wars, as our critics want to hold out.
Rather, a lively defence of the rights of conscience is vital to a medical profession that wants to retain its humanistic character, and avoid the reduction of clinicians to mere technicians.
One of our highest-profile advocates for conscience in healthcare is emergency physician Dr Stephen Parnis, who will deliver this year’s Plunkett Lecture on 5 November, at ACU North Sydney: “Ethics in Healthcare: Principles, or Platitudes?”
Dr Parnis has been a vocal critic of euthanasia laws, an authoritative commentator during the COVID-19 pandemic and a prominent advocate for the rights and responsibilities of health care workers.
Drawing on his extensive clinical and governance experience, he will illustrate the reality and the costs of advocacy in today’s healthcare sector. The lecture is free and refreshments will follow—please register to join us at this link.
A revitalised respect for conscience is the heart of the contemporary Catholic vision of renewing healthcare. But it is not a confessional vision belonging to the church alone. Rather, it is related to the growing realisation that many of the healthcare sector’s chronic problems stem from the need to renew the moral foundations of the healing profession.
For instance, a growing body of medical and philosophical literature suggests that workplaces with a bad “ethical climate” contribute to the crisis of staff burnout. When a person is forced by systemic and structural forces to act against their deeply-held beliefs, burnout may be caused by “moral distress”. Conscience here goes beyond the “issues” and instead describes how a nurse, doctor or allied health professional “conscientiously” undertakes their role.
Persistent moral distress may become a pathology of its own, “moral injury”, the disruption of a person’s sense of their own, others’, or institutions’ goodness—tantamount to a loss of faith.
Patients also receive better care when conscience is respected. In one recent study, nurses who experienced increased levels of “stress of conscience” found themselves struggling to maintain respect for patients’ values, beliefs and dignity.
Given this growing body of research, why would we wish to rethink, rather than resource, the attention given to conscience in the healthcare sector?
Please join us for Dr Parnis’ 2025 Plunkett Lecture by registering at this link.
