ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by identifying and organizing the main philosophical theories of conscientious objection in the literature. The major theories are the Genuineness View, Matching View, Incompatibility View, Referral View, and Reasonability View. This chapter argues that the competing theories possess a crucial flaw stemming from their systematic inattention to the reasons supporting an objector’s conscience claim, and this points to the superiority of the Reasonability View. Imagine a medical provider who refuses to dispense emergency contraception on the clinically mistaken basis that such medications act to kill human life post-fertilization. Views that grant accommodations simply on the possession of a genuine belief or willingness to refer will extend an exemption even if the provider’s reason is empirically flawed. The chapter then establishes that competing views can block this absurd result only if they adopt the reason-giving requirement and commit to some standard of reasonability which rules out granting accommodations to objections based on empirical mistake—but then these other views collapse into a species of the Reasonability View. The chapter concludes that reasons-assessment is inescapable since any view which grants an exemption to an objection premised upon clinically flawed data, discrimination, and the like is unacceptable.
