Christopher Cowley

In a recent Bioethics editorial, Udo Schuklenk argues against allowing Canadian doctors to conscientiously object to any new euthanasia procedures approved by Parliament. In this he follows Julian Savulescu's 2006 BMJ paper which argued for the removal of the conscientious objection clause in the 1967 UK Abortion Act. Both authors advance powerful arguments based on the need for uniformity of service and on analogies with reprehensible kinds of personal exemption. In this article I want to defend the practice of conscientious objection in publicly-funded healthcare systems, at least in the area of abortion and end-of-life care, without entering either of the substantive moral debates about the permissibility of either. My main claim is that Schuklenk and Savulescu have misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors. However, I acknowledge Schuklenk's point about differential access to lawful services in remote rural areas, and I argue that the health service should expend more to protect conscientious objection while ensuring universal access

I claim that the dominant moral-realist understanding of action and moral responsibility cannot provide a comprehensive account of morality since it neglects the irreducibly personal component of the individual’s moral experience. This is not to embrace non-cognitivism, however; indeed, I challenge the whole realist framework of most contemporary moral philosophy. To this end I explore the phenomenon of moral necessity, exemplified by Luther’s declaration that he “has to” continue his protests against the church. I am careful to distinguish this kind of necessity from physical or psychological necessity, from means-end necessity and from the Categorical Imperative, and I suggest that it is far more widespread and far more complex than the realist or non-cognitivist would allow. Thesedeclarations are personal in that they do not entail any necessary universalisability of the judgement; however, their personal nature does not mean that they must collapse into the merely personal realm of whim and preference. Instead, Luther can be said to experience a legitimately objective demand that he behave thus and so, even though others would not experience such a demand in a relevantly similar situation. This irreducible heterogeneity of the moral, I suggest, lies at the heart of the intractability of many moral arguments. My argument can be derived as broadly Wittgensteinian (without being exegetical), and draws on the work of Peter Winch and Bernard Williams.

Forgiveness is one possible response by a 'victim' to a specific act of wrongdoing, especially when the 'wrongdoer' apologises and invites joint condemnation of the act , perhaps explaining the source of misjudgement or ignorance that brought it about. In this paper, however, I will ask what the victim can do when faced with an unrepentant wrongdoer, perhaps some-one who even refuses to acknowledge that a wrong act was committed or that the victim 'really' suffered . Importantly, I will ask if it is possible to forgive some-one just for being who they are - for example, estranged parents - without necessarily implying an attempt to resume a broken relationship. This will involve a conceptual analysis of the term as used in the situation, in parallel to a phenomenological analysis of how the victim is to come to see the wrongdoer and her act in order to forgive her. My account will stress two aspects of the 'wrongdoing situation' in order to relocate the problem rather than attempt to solve it - first, the wrongdoer's unique narrative history, and the more or less intelligible role played by the wrong act within such a self-understanding; second, the fundamental uncertainty of motive that lies at the heart of all human action and thus impedes one's ability to ever fully understand a wrong act, whether committed by others or by oneself

According to its simplest definition, supererogation means freely and intentionally doing good beyond the requirements of duty. A more complex definition incorporates the responses of third parties: the supererogatory act is one that is praiseworthy if performed, but not blameworthy if omitted, as long as one does one's duty. This collection of essays, based on papers delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's Annual Conference in Dublin in June 2014, explores a broad range of philosophical problems that stem from various definitions of supererogation. How can something be good and yet not required? How relevant is the agent's motivation to our assessment of that agent's sacrifice? What is the difference between supererogation and virtue? Is supererogation essential to friendship and love? Do all of us have the genuine capacity to be saints and heroes?