Using reasonableness, we examine the U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to provisions of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Weaving contributions from theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence, we emphasize the reasonable importance of mental health therapy for women within a relevant Catholic/Christian dialogue, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on healthcare. We princip...

Health care providers occasionally may find that providing indicated, even standard, care would present for them a personal moral problem—a conflict of conscience—particularly in the field of reproductive medicine. Although respect for conscience is important, conscientious refusals should be limited if they constitute an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients, negatively affect a...

Throughout all of Rousseau’s works there is tension between reason and conscience. Reason binds men when they think correctly, but divides them when they place it at the service of self-interest. Conversely, the universality of conscience is immediate and transparent: it transmits the truth of the existence of God and of the universal principles that underlie human action, despite the differenc...

Using the secularization theory and the Marxist notion of religion as masking class conscience one would expect the importance of religion and religious involvement today to wane and be limited to lower class members. To challenge this expectation, using a representative national telephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11–18) and their parents, we attempt to answer the following two questions: How...

Looked at from a general science of law, the effective individualizing agency in the administration of justice is discretion .... Discretion is an authority conferred by law to act in certain conditions or situations in accordance with an official's or an official agency's own considered judgment and conscience .'