This Essay explores how physicians may handle conflicts or conscience facing Roman Catholic Health practitioners regarding "human life" issues, especially through conscience clauses. In five parts, the author examines "first, why conscientious objection is so important in our day; second, the moral grounding for freedom in the exercise of conscience; third, the components of the physician's con...

In this study, we present a hardware implementation of the conscience mechanism in Kohonen self-organizing maps. The proposed realization of the conscience mechanism is important to the functioning of the neural network as it eliminates so-called dead (inactive) neurons. As a result the network learning, the level quantization error can be reduced. The conscience mechanism and the Winner Take A...

Lack of clarity about the proper limits of conscientious refusal to participate in particular healthcare practices has given rise to fears that, in the absence of clear parameters, conscience-based exemptions may become increasingly widespread, leading to intolerable burdens on health professionals, patients, and institutions. Here, we identify three factors which clarify the proper scope of co...

The literature on conscience in medicine has paid little attention to what is meant by the word 'conscience.' This article distinguishes between retrospective and prospective conscience, distinguishes synderesis from conscience, and argues against intuitionist views of conscience. Conscience is defined as having two interrelated parts: (1) a commitment to morality itself; to acting and choosing...

This article critically evaluates the conception of conscience underlying the debate about the proper place and role of conscience in the clinical encounter. It suggests that recovering a conception of conscience rooted in the Catholic moral tradition could offer resources for moving the debate past an unproductive assertion of conflicting rights, namely, physicians' rights to conscience versus...

Study of the relationship between episodic or continuous moral malfunctioning and psychopathology is an undeveloped field in child and adolescent psychiatry. An empirically derived theory of conscience provides a normative base from which to launch such studies. This work reviews five normative stages of functioning within five domains of conscience: conceptualization, moralization of attachmen...

983 guishing claims of conscience from other types of claims. Certainly, if abortion providers’ conscience-based claims require scrutiny, so do conscience-based refusals, to ensure that refusals are indeed motivated by conscience and not by political beliefs, stigma, habit, erroneous understanding of medical evidence, or other factors. Despite nearly four decades of debate about conscientious r...