Respect for conscience and conscientious objection is being eroded in the medical profession.

What lies beyond conscience?

Michael Cook

A court last week ruled that the state of Illinois cannot force pharmacists to sell the morning-after pill against their consciences. It was a important win for health professionals.

This rule was particularly iniquitous. In 2005, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (now serving time in a federal jail for attempting to sell President Obama’s vacant Senate seat) issued an “emergency rule”. It decreed that pharmacies must fill prescriptions for drugs, including the morning-after pill. “No delays. No hassles. No lecture. Just fill the prescription,” was the Governor’s decree. It became a final administrative rule later that year.

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If moral questions cannot be settled through reasoned debate, they will have to be settled on arbitrary grounds by the power of the state. What shape this will take is impossible to predict. But if we accept this principle of moral nihilism we shall surely end up as prisoners in the foetid darkness of Mordor. In the eloquent words of someone who lived there, Hermann Göring, “I have no conscience. Hitler is my conscience.”

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