Physicians sometimes refuse to provide legally permitted medical services on the grounds that they cannot do so in good conscience. Such conscientious refusals are at least as old as the Hippocratic movement. Yet new events, such as the refusal by health care professionals to prescribe or dispense post-coital (‘‘emergency’’) contraception, have kindled new debates about what physicians are obli...

Using the secularization theory and the Marxist notion of religion as masking class conscience one would expect the importance of religion and religious involvement today to wane and be limited to lower class members. To challenge this expectation, using a representative national telephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11–18) and their parents, we attempt to answer the following two questions: How...

Looked at from a general science of law, the effective individualizing agency in the administration of justice is discretion .... Discretion is an authority conferred by law to act in certain conditions or situations in accordance with an official's or an official agency's own considered judgment and conscience .'

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Attitudes about political mavericks (politicians who cross party lines to ‘‘vote their conscience”) depend on whether people construe them in general terms or at the level of specific policy proposals. Three studies examined this hypothesis. In Study 1, participants expressed more positive views of political mavericks described generally than when prompted to consider a maverick of their own po...

The conception of formalism as uninterpreted, but interpretable, systems that was wavering into focus during the 1920s achieved clarity in Godel's 1931 paper. The historical irony here is that while this clarity fulfilled one of Hilbert's demands for firm foundations, the Godel results themselves have been seen as frustrating Hilbert's central epistemological desire. Due in part to Hilbert's va...

In a climate of plurality about the concept of what is "good," one of the most daunting challenges facing contemporary medicine is the provision of medical care within the mosaic of ethical diversity. Juxtaposed with escalating scientific knowledge and clinical prowess has been the concomitant erosion of unity of thought in medical ethics. With innumerable technologies now available in the arma...

ed version of a Chinese landscape, rendered in saturated hues subtly diffused over the surfaces of his canvases. In his art there is a hermetic, secretive quality evidenced in dark tones and subtle nuances of paint. Formally, his works belong with early Abstract Expressionism even though Reinhardt separated himself from the attitudes that intrigued so many of his peers. He viewed art as a tauto...