religion and profession

[cellio]

osewalrus posted an excellent essay on conflicts between religion and one's profession. He and I agree: you are completely free to practice your religion, but if doing so causes complications in your life, you -- not the rest of society -- need to deal with that.

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. I couldn't agree more.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Um... okay. This kind of seemed obvious to me, that if you cannot perform some task in a job description for any reason, that you can request but not demand from an employer a job description which excludes that task.

Maybe I'm just too used to thinking in terms of encapsulation, that I lump physical disabilities in with moral injunctions. :)

How do you avoid...

[(Anonymous)]

this (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13916867/)?

I was ordered by the Medical Command Physician to not provide any treatment to a newborn infant. We were to let the child die. He felt the infant was too young to survive, based on a highly questionable gestational age. I am not trained to evaluate gestational age and had reason to question the mother's report of the gestational age. I refused the order. They sent another physician out to meet our truck enroute to the hospital. The responding physician agreed that I made the correct decision. The infant did die, but had we done nothing, we would have been guilty of abandoning the patient and possibly manslaughter. The MCP apologized to me in person.

I've actually worked in the medical field. I've had to make ethical judgment calls. Repeatedly, we were forced to choose between "following orders" and doing the moral thing. I refused to leave my ethics at home, which is why I was threatened, forced to quit, and eventually vindicated after testifying against my superiors and co-workers.

I do not like what some of these people are doing. Their refusals are obviously harmful. But if we ban conscientious objection in medicine, it's not a slippery slope, it's a cliff we're already dangling on the edge of with only one hand. The question I'd have to ask you is, would you feel the same if their conscientious objection was something you agreed with?

There were people in Stalinist Russia who did not do their jobs. They did not follow orders, and as a result some Jews were not murdered. Should they have either left their ethics at home or quit their jobs? The medical professionals treating the victims of the Tuskegee experiment and the forced sterilizations and exposures of civilians to radioactive agents to study the effect of radiation on humans left their ethics at home.

Some people don't want to be bothered with the "moral thing." They're more interested in what they think they can get away with.

You're asking for something that is without a doubt dangerous.

[amergina.livejournal.com]

The morality of a country shifts over time. And science advances. I wonder how many pharmacists knew when they started their carrier that they would have to prescribe Plan B (and in Oregon, assisted suicide drugs) as part of being a pharmacist?

What if morality shifts in a way that your (wide use) morality/religion opposes? What happens then? Do you quit your job and start over?