This article analyzes the idea of a legal right to conscientious refusal for healthcare professionals from a basic legal ethical standpoint, using refusal to perform tasks related to legal abortion (in cases of voluntary employment) as a case in point. The idea of a legal right to conscientious refusal is distinguished from ideas regarding moral rights or reasons related to conscientious refusal, and none of the latter are found to support the notion of a legal right. Reasons for allowing some sort of room for conscientious refusal for healthcare professionals based on the importance of cultural identity and the fostering of a critical atmosphere might provide some support, if no countervailing factors apply. One such factor is that a legal right to healthcare professionals’ conscientious refusal must comply with basic legal ethical tenets regarding the rule of law and equal treatment, and this requirement is found to create serious problems for those wishing to defend the idea under consideration. We conclude that the notion of a legal right to conscientious refusal for any profession is either fundamentally incompatible with elementary legal ethical requirements, or implausible because it undermines the functioning of a related professional sector (healthcare) or even of society as a whole.

Discussions of conscientious objection (CO) in healthcare often concentrate on objections to interventions that relate to reproduction, such as termination of pregnancy or contraception. Nevertheless, questions of conscience can arise in other areas of medicine. For example, the intensive care unit is a locus of ethically complex and contested decisions. Ethical debate about CO usually concentrates on the issue of whether physicians should be permitted to object to particular courses of treatment; whether CO should be accommodated. In this article, I focus on the question of how clinicians ought to act: should they provide or support a course of action that is contrary to their deeply held moral beliefs? I discuss two secular examples of potential CO in intensive care, and propose that clinicians should adopt a norm of conscientious non-objection (CNO). In the face of divergent values and practice, physicians should set aside their personal moral beliefs and not object to treatment that is legally and professionally accepted and provided by their peers. Although there may be reason to permit conscientious objections in healthcare, conscientious non-objection should be encouraged, taught, and supported.

Bennett wrote in a variety of instrumental and vocal genres. Some of his most popular pieces during his lifetime comprise anthems, oratorios and cantatas. But his enduring legacy resides with his instrumental output, in particular works that include a pianist. This article begins with an examination of performances that occurred in Britain and in Germany, where Bennett’s close associations with the Mendelssohn circle provided him with substantial encouragement during his formative years. Advances in transportation and increasing globalization led touring artists to travel farther to cities worldwide, bringing with them Bennett repertoire to foreign shores. George Loder, for example, conducted the US premiere of The Wood Nymphs overture at the New York Philharmonic in 1848. Arabella Goddard gave an early American performance of the Piano Sonata Op. 46 (Die Jungfrau von Orleans) in 1875, just two years after its premiere in London. In addition, émigrés from Britain and Germany, especially to Australia, New Zealand and America, contributed to the movement of British music across the globe. In both small towns and large cities, from Melbourne to Auckland, San Francisco to Boston, audiences heard Bennett compositions. In tracing performances of Bennett’s instrumental music before the First World War in both his own country and selected areas outside the British Isles, this research contributes to our understanding of developments in modern concert life as well as the transmission of British music within the Empire and beyond.

Healthcare professionals are not currently obliged to justify conscientious objections. As a consequence, there are currently no practical limits on the scope of conscience-based refusals in healthcare. Recently, a number of bioethicists, including Christopher Meyers, Robert D. Woods, Robert Card, Lori Kantymir, and Carolyn McLeod, have raised concerns about this situation and have offered proposals to place principled limits on the scope of conscience-based refusals in healthcare. Here, I seek to adjudicate among their proposals. I argue that to adjudicate among them properly it is important to consider the theoretical bases for conscientious objection. I further argue that there are two such bases to be considered. Some conscientious objections are justified by appeal to all-things-considered moral judgments, and some are justified by appeal to the “dictates of conscience.” I argue that both of these bases are legitimate and that both should be accommodated in any principled scheme to limit the scope of conscientious refusals in healthcare.

The present article explores the travel diaries William Sterndale Bennett kept on his three extended journeys from London to Leipzig between 1836 and 1842. In the autumn of 1836 the young pianist and composer embarked on the first and longest of ultimately three residencies in Leipzig. Invited by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, he came to the burgeoning centre for instrumental music in order to spend productive time in the artistic circle surrounding Mendelssohn. Bennett began keeping a diary, in which he recorded his experiences – from mundane to musical – and which de facto evolved into a silent travel companion. He repeated this process on his subsequent two travels. The diaries offer valuable first-hand accounts of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts under Mendelssohn’s leadership (who served as its Kapellmeister from 1835 to 1847) as well as the semi-private soirées in the prestigious salons of the city. In the privacy of the personal journal, Bennett did not shy away from making bold statements concerning compositions, performance practices, the quality of musical instruments or socio-cultural idiosyncrasies. Especially intriguing is the congenial connection he made with Robert Schumann. The two artists shared an ad hoc, allusive affinity and community of solidarity that has been overlooked in the past. All of this is the more revealing in light of his otherwise soft-spoken and reserved personality, particularly since Bennett’s journaling also offers a view into his own compositional and creative process during this important phase of his career. Apart from tracing musical opinions expressed, aesthetic positions maintained and cultural differences observed, this article follows the artistic bond between William Sterndale and Robert Schumann.

This article first critically reviews the major philosophical positions in the literature on conscientious objection and finds that they possess significant flaws. A substantial number of these problems stem from the fact that these views fail to assess the reasons offered by medical professionals in support of their objections. This observation is used to motivate the reasonability view, one part of which states: A practitioner who lodges a conscientious refusal must publicly state his or her objection as well as the reasoned basis for the objection and have these subjected to critical evaluation before a conscientious exemption can be granted (the reason-giving requirement). It is then argued that when defenders of the other philosophical views attempt to avoid granting an accommodation to spurious objections based on discrimination, empirically mistaken beliefs, or other unjustified biases, they are implicitly committed to the reason-giving requirement. This article concludes that based on these considerations, a reason-giving position such as the reasonability view possesses a decisive advantage in this debate.

Sterndale Bennett has often been characterized as an imitator of Mendelssohn. While it is true and unsurprising that there are similarities in the two composers’ musical language, actual imitation is difficult to substantiate. Bennett’s reputation as a composer has passed through several phases in the last 200 years. It was high in his lifetime in Germany as well as in Britain, when resemblance to Mendelssohn was counted as a positive asset, but later assailed by promoters of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’, who needed a preceding dark age and tended to dismiss early Victorians as copiers of Mendelssohn. Recent writers have shown a more positive attitude to the Victorian period in general. Bennett’s individuality has in fact been fully recognized from the first by such widely differing commentators as Mendelssohn himself, Robert Schumann, Henry Heathcote Statham, Frederick Ouseley, Charles Gounod, Charles Stanford, Geoffrey Bush, Peter Horton and Larry Todd. His style was founded on the Austro-German classical tradition and the London Pianoforte School headed by Clementi and Cramer, through his teacher Cipriani Potter, as is confirmed by early sources. This article surveys some of Bennett’s most characteristic piano pieces, and ends by analysing notably original features of his harmonic style that owe nothing to Mendelssohn, such as the inverted pedal note, evaded resolution of dissonance, and harmonic anticipation.