Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Bioethics. 2019 May;33(4):522-523. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12552. Epub 2019 Jan 18.
Benjamin Zolf, in his recent paper 'No conscientious objection without normative justification: Against conscientious objection in medicine', attempts to establish that in order to rule out arbitrary conscientious objections, a reasonability constraint is necessary. This, he contends, requires normative justification, and the subjective beliefs that ground conscientious objections cannot easily be judged by normative criteria. Zolf shows that the alternative of using extrinsic criteria, such as requiring that unjustified harm must not be caused, are likewise grounded on normative criteria. He concludes that conscientious objection is therefore untenable. Here, I present an alternative account, based on the value we are willing to place on conscientious objection as an expression of freedom of conscience and religion. Using an extrinsic criterion such as harm, we can make a judgement of what degree of harm should be tolerated as the cost of permitting conscientious objection. A normative criterion for judging individual claims is therefore not required.
本杰明·佐尔夫（Benjamin Zolf）在其最近的论文《没有规范理由就没有出于良心的反对：反对医学中的出于良心的反对》中试图证明，为了排除任意的出于良心的反对，有必要设定合理性约束。他认为，这需要规范的理由，而作为出于良心的反对基础的主观信念不能轻易地用规范标准来判断。佐尔夫表明，使用外在标准的替代方案，例如要求不得造成不合理的伤害，同样是基于规范标准的。他的结论是，出于良心的反对因此是站不住脚的。在这里，我提出了一种替代方案，该方案基于我们愿意将出于良心的反对视为良心和宗教自由的表达而赋予它的价值。使用伤害等外在标准，我们可以对允许出于良心的反对所应容忍的伤害程度做出判断。因此，不需要用于判断个人主张的规范标准。
