This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) draws attention, once again, to the bioethicist’s revisionist deployment of the notion of “conscientious objection.” Indeed, the post is designed to bolster my problematization (in Foucault’s sense) of the politically potent way in which bioethicists have mobilized the notion. In my last post of 2024 (here), I wrote:

The troubling alliances (and complicity with them) that the neoliberal individualism of bioethics requires and constitutes were thrown into relief–as I explicated in “Disaster Ableism, Epistemologies of Crisis, and the Mystique of Bioethics“–by philosophical and professional commitments that the editors of The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics have espoused, commitments that echo the assertions of (neoliberal and libertarian) bioethicists Julian Savulescu, Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer, editors of The Journal of Controversial Ideas.

With Udo Schüklenk–the champion in Canadian philosophy of euthanasia/assisted suicide (MAiD)–some of the latter editors have recently coauthored a forthcoming book that advances the bioethicist’s neoliberal spin on the concept of conscientious objection–a revisionist and reactionary conception of the notion of conscientious objection that feminist bioethicists have accepted, reproduced, and expanded. (Bioethicists are, on the whole, essentially conformists, notwithstanding the various public pronouncements and performances to the contrary by some of them.)

The final 2024 post also included the text of an earlier quote-of-the-week post that provided a cursory genealogy of the notion of conscientious objection. As I wrote in the earlier post:

Historically, the term conscientious objection has been associated with the refusal—based on one’s political, moral, or religious convictions—to engage in military combat and service. Thus, conscientious objection has been traced back to at least AD 295 when Maximilian Tebessa, who refused to serve in the Roman army due to his Christian religious beliefs, was consequently beheaded, and thus martyred. In the 16th century, the conviction was developed into a doctrine by Mennonites and, beginning in the 18th century, was authoritatively recognized by the British government in response to unsuccessful attempts to conscript Quakers (for instance, see here). Due to the predominance of the American empire and hence widespread media coverage of events in the United States, many people nowadays are likely to associate the terms conscientious objection and conscientious objector with resistance to the Vietnam War in the mid twentieth century and the refusal of young American men (pejoratively dubbed as “draft dodgers”) to serve in the American military during that war. In other words, the term conscientious objection has historically been regarded as signifying a principled, idealistic anti-government position, a position not necessarily associated with religious belief.

In recent years, bioethicists have worked diligently to overturn this understanding of the term conscientious objection, arguing that the term signifies a regressive, orthodox, sectarian, and outdated stance that poses a threat to secular moral and political values such as individual autonomy and rights and therefore ought to be condemned. … These bioethical arguments against “conscientious objections” cast the objections as value-laden, uninformed, and ideological departures from standard medical practice which, by contrast, is represented as impartial, grounded in scientific inquiry, and therefore objective, guided by professional doctrine and stringent norms rather than by external influences such as structural biases or the subjective moral and political values and views of individuals. Yet this distinction should not be accepted.

In short, the final post of 2024 was intended to support my claim that the bioethicist’s deployment of the notion is tendentious and contentious, not widely held, and conceals the neoliberal assumptions and commitments on which the field of bioethics rests. Thus, I was delighted to learn of a discussion that took place yesterday between two prominent people on the Left in which the term conscientious objector is invoked in a way that counters Schüklenk and other bioethicists.

On yesterday’s broadcast of Democracy Now!, that is, Amy Goodman interviewed Canadian activist, documentary film-maker, and politician Avi Lewis about Trudeau’s resignation, Trump’s threats to annex Canada, and his own social positioning, during the course of which interview they discuss Vietnam war resisters. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Before we end, I wanted to ask you about Jimmy Carter. His state funeral is taking place in National Cathedral in Washington Thursday, which President Biden has declared a national day of mourning. He died December 29th at the age of 100. When he was inaugurated in 1977, Carter fulfilled a campaign promise to pardon those who resisted the Vietnam War draft. He issued Proclamation 4483 on his first full day in office. Avi Lewis, many American war resisters fled to Canada, your homeland, among them your father-in-law, Naomi Klein’s father. During an interview in 1999, Carter reflected on his decision to pardon Vietnam draft resisters, many of them conscientious objectors.

AVI LEWIS: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it was a moving — it has been a moving moment in Canada. Obviously, lots of bad things happen under any American president, and we’ve had a healthy debate about, you know, things that the American Empire did under Jimmy Carter that were not to be celebrated. But, you know, actually turning down the thermostat and putting solar panels on the White House and saying, “Hey, if it’s cold, put on a sweater,” commonsense forecasting of the climate emergency to come and the energy emergencies that have been serial in the period of climate breakdown and fossil fuel dominance, that was really memorable.

His pardoning of the war resisters of Vietnam — I mean, that was a generation of 35,000 idealistic young people. There were doctors. There were professionals and others, like Naomi’s dad, who came and helped us build our single-payer universal healthcare system. And that’s — you know, talking about Trudeau now, part of his legacy is that since the pandemic, the privatization of healthcare in Canada has been absolutely terrifying. You can now pay 150 bucks to get on the phone with a doctor in Canada. And that’s what the draft dodger generation and the ’70s generation, that nostalgia that we have for Carter, that was when we really built up our public healthcare system. And we have to fight now the corporate welfare bums and the rising right to rescue that vision of taxing the super rich and using that money to build back our universal public services, so that people can go to the doctor, and to complete the dream of — Tommy Douglas’s dream of Canadian healthcare, our grandfather, our socialist grandfather of universal Medicare, to include eyes and teeth and mental health and medicine in the vision of universal healthcare.

To watch the entire interview and read the original transcript, go here: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/1/8/justin_trudeau_resigns_as_pm_2025