Stanley Fish Ain’t for Conscience Clauses for Medical Professionals

As I often say, the culture of death brooks no dissent. Now, none other than the celebrated academic Stanley Fish—perhaps best known for promoting post modernism (although he says he is an anti foundationalist, and who cares anyway)—claims that doctors and nurses who don’t wish to take human life should just get over it. From his NYT (of course) blog:

What’s the big deal [if doctors refuse to perform some procedures], for after all, “If a procedure is legal, a patient will still have the ability to access that service from a medical professional or institution that does not assert a conflict of conscience” (HHS News Release, August 21, 2008).

But should patients be asked to add to the problems they already have the problem of having to figure out (if they have the time) which providers will be willing to treat them? When a professional hangs out his shingle doesn’t he offer his services and skills to the public and not just to members of it who share his morality? Isn’t it a matter of conscience (in Hobbes’s sense) to abide by the rules that define the profession you’ve signed up for?

But taking life is definitely not what many doctors and nurses “signed up for.” Indeed, forty years ago, they would have all been expected to refuse to abort, at least when the request was for an elective abortion, and certainly would have been expected never to euthanize. And it is only very recent trends that have put doctors and other medical professionals in the situation where they may be expected to take life rather than save it.

Medicine is changing, becoming almost as much an on-demand lifestyle choice enhancing technocracy as it is a healing and palliating profession. Some in the field may wish to deprofessionalize themselves by becoming on-demand deadly service providers; the customer is always right. But we should protect those still-professionals who choose to remain wedded to the orthodox Hippocratic view of what it means to be a doctor, or for that matter, nurse, pharmacist, etc.

I doubt Fish would object one iota if doctors refused to be complicit in executions. Nor would I. But surely, if doctors can refuse to have anything to do with the execution of murderers, even if it is merely to declare death, they they should be equally protected against legal medical procedures that kill.

But that’s the thing about post modernism, or anti-foundationalism, or whatever: There is no such thing as concrete concepts of right and wrong or universal principles. It all just depends.