Daniels on executioners and pharmacists

Regarding our recent discussions of pharmacists' and doctors' conscience-based objections to morning-after pills and lethal injections, Kim Daniels (a lawyer with the St. Thomas More Law Center) writes:

Just a quick note from the trenches regarding the MOJ discussion [about doctors, pharmacists, and conscience].  I think that in fact there are important similarities between a doctor's refusal to participate in imposition of the death penalty and a pharmacist's refusal to prescribe certain drugs.

Prof. Penalver notes that in the death penalty case,  the doctors were not acting merely on their personal views, but on their "professional obligations."  I'm not clear on the moral difference between these two categories; after all, to value professional obligations is itself a personal moral view, and the doctors were "obligated" to act the way they did only because they share the widely-held views of their profession.  While the doctors may or may not have faced professional consequences as a result of their actions, this was just a factor in their personal moral evaluation of the situation they faced.

Prof. Penalver next argues that  "in one case, doctors are being asked to directly cooperate in the killing of a human being; in the other case, they are being asked to sell someone something that is not even considered evil in itself."  But the current pharmacist cases largely involve Plan B, an abortifacient that these pharmacists are unwilling to dispense precisely because they believe that doing so amounts to illicit cooperation in the intrinsically evil act of abortion.  As far as I know, in those cases involving pharmacists' refusal to fill prescriptions for hormonal contraceptives, the pharmacists similarly objected to the abortifacient actions of those medications.

18 USC s3597(b) prevents any state or federal employee or service provider from being required "as a condition of that employment or service obligation" to attend or participate in an execution "if such participation is contrary to the moral or religious convictions of the employee."  I heartily support this law; I'm still unclear, though, as to why pharmacists who object to cooperating in the taking of a life don't deserve similar protection.