Protecting conscience based on subjective considerations

Tom Huddle wonders whether it's possible to base conscience laws on the centrality of a particular belief to the person invoking conscience:

Per your blog posts in the past few days, you suggest “centrality of the particular belief to the believer” as a possible criterion for deciding which claims of conscience might deserve more deference than others.  Surely this is unacceptably subjective and unworkable.  In medicine it might lead to, say, the Jehovah’s Witness physician or blood bank worker who might decide not to offer transfusions being treated with the same deference as the physician unwilling to perform an abortion. 

 

Is it not the case that we must pay some attention to a) the space of a practice which is actually contested in a given societal context (so that in medicine, the 5 widely contested practices enumerated in the HHS conscience rule would be on a different footing than generally accepted medical practices such as blood transfusion) and b) the relationship of a contested practice to the broader practice of which it is a part—so that abortion, explicitly forbidden by codes of conduct in Western medicine for the past 2000 years and arguably contrary to central goals of medicine on anyone’s reading, deserves different treatment than practices that have no such overall problematic character in the practice’s larger context. 

 

I think a privileging of intermediate institutions such as you suggest holds a lot of promise for defusing the all-or-none character of the current debate.  But to the extent that institutions are to be asked to defer to individuals, criteria other than individual attachment to a conscience objection are surely necessary. 

I think I agree with Tom, for the most part.  I tend to be similarly skeptical of the practicality of line-drawing in the area of conscience protection that focuses on the centrality of the belief to the individual.  What I am trying to get at is whether the law is able to distinguish between forcing a doctor to perform an abortion from forcing her to work on Sundays based, at least in part, at the level of dis-integration that the requirements would impose on the doctor.  Also, my fear if we focus solely on the degree to which a practice is contested in society is that it leaves very little space for unpopular conscience claims.