Despite serious challenges to the identity of Catholic health institutions in the United States, both Church and society should continue to see them as privileged places of moral discernment. This discernment occurs in “institutional conscience,” namely, a dialogue among all those authorized to act on the institution’s behalf about institutional actions, for example, medical interventions. The ...

Work towards the development of a “wearable conscience” that helps individuals make healthy decisions in their everyday lives is described. To be effective, such a system must be portable, sense key elements of the user's environment, have knowledge of counseling and health behavior change techniques, be able to effectively communicate with the user, and have social competencies for maintaining...

Although conscience has been the focus of reflection for centuries, fundamental questions regarding its organization have not been fully answered. To address those questions, the authors applied structural equation modeling techniques to longitudinal data comprising multiple behavioral measures of children's conscience, obtained in parallel fashion at 33 and 45 months. The measures encompassed ...

The aims of the research presented here are as follows: (a) to define the degree of perceived meaning in life and the level of sensitivity of conscience in groups of students with a high (H) and low (L) level of experience of God’s absence; and (b) to show the relationship between perceived meaning in life and sensitivity of conscience in groups of students with a high (H) and low (L) level of ...

n engl j med 367;11 nejm.org september 13, 2012 981 provision of abortion care is also conscience-based. The persistent failure to recognize abortion provision as “conscientious” has resulted in laws that do not protect caregivers who are compelled by conscience to provide abortion services, contributes to the ongoing stigmatization of abortion providers, and leaves theoretical and practical bl...

The first cases of what would come to be recognized as the beginning of the HIV epidemic were reported without a lot of fanfare in the US CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report [1]. The report of five homosexual men with a rare pneumonia was presented as a case series, but, in retrospect, established a working surveillance case definition for a new disease. Dr. James Curran, the scientist ...

This article examines the ethical and legal implications of conscience clauses, which allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for oral contraceptives due to their belief that they may constitute abortifacients. The author provides an informative background on contraception and the history of how abortion has been viewed in this country, then takes a critical look at some of the consci...

BACKGROUND Associations between early mother-child mutually responsive orientation (MRO) and children's conscience have been previously established, but the mechanisms accounting for those links are not understood. We examined three such mediational mechanisms: (a) the child's enhanced enjoyment of interactions with the mother, (b) increased committed, self-regulated compliance with the mother,...

This essay is predicated on the belief that ethics educators should guide students toward a proper understanding of conscience. To that end, conscience and the qualities that are intertwined with it and make it possible are set forth.