Many of you probably read a few weeks ago about the Holy Father’s suggestion to the Italians that pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to dispense particular drugs — obviously contraceptives and abortifacients were the main things he had in mind — if they have moral objections to their use. Under current Italian law, pharmacists are required to fill any prescription given by a doctor (I’m not sure how this works exactly, since it seems strange that they should be required by law to stock every drug a doctor might conceivably prescribe, but perhaps they’re required either to supply on demand, or else to order anything they don’t immediately have available.) Now the Holy Father suggests that Catholics should be permitted to be conscientious objectors against medical practices that they deem immoral.

Obviously I would be happy to see pharmacists, in Italy or elsewhere, following the Holy Father’s advice. But it got me thinking: in a developed economy like ours, even very simply commercial transactions involve a dizzying number of complicit people. It might actually be fairly difficult to avoid being complicit in some way in the provision of birth control or even abortifacients to others. For example, if you’re the checker at a supermarket or at Walgreens, you will obviously be expected to ring up whatever products customers wish to purchase… including condoms or the morning after pill. If you’re a trucker, you might be expected to help ship them. If you’re a school janitor, restocking the condom dispenser might be one of your normal jobs.

How much cooperation is too much? It certainly seems to me that a Catholic should refuse to work in a factory or lab that is making or developing contraceptives. I’m inclined to think he can keep the store clerk or trucking jobs, and the janitor restocking the condom dispenser seems like a grey area to me. But it bothers me that I basically have no principle to go on here, except my own intuitions about how “directly” the person is involved in each case. If it seems worse if it’s a “big” part of your job than if it’s a relatively small detail. But that seems like a distressingly ad hoc way to draw such a distinction.

I’ve heard some suggest a kind of “unique agent” principle for deciding whether a particular action is wrong. The idea is: if my actions uniquely enable someone to sin, then I must desist, but if my conscientious objection would be just a minor wrinkle for which the system would easily compensate, I may continue. This really doesn’t work, though. The store clerk might say, “If I quit my job, nobody would be hindered from buying their contraceptives. Instead of coming to my register, they’d just go to the next register and buy them there.” That’s true, but unless you’re some brilliant medical researcher developing a pill that nobody else would think of, that excuse seems to go all the way to the top. That’s the beauty of capitalism… everybody’s replaceable. And in Catholic moral philosophy, we don’t normally accept the excuse “if I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

I’ve never worked as a store clerk, but I did have concerns of this kind myself when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. The Peace Corps organizes what they call the “warden system” as a measure for enhancing security and distributing information. One person in each region of a particular country will be the “warden” and will be responsible for passing messages to all the other Volunteers on a regular basis, and for organizing them in one spot in case of an emergency evacuation. The warden is also given a special medical kit with prescription drugs that can be distributed to the PCVs on the orders of the medical office. Our Peace Corps doctor wouldn’t want to drive all the way to my site in Andijan (six hours away from the capital) just because I had strep throat, so she would ask my warden to bring me the appropriate antibiotics from the warden kit.

In my first year as a PCV, there were only two Volunteers in my region. My site mate was the warden, and I was the assistant, which meant that I became the warden when she wasn’t around, charged with the heavy responsibility of taking care of… myself. That seemed okay. But in the second year, several other volunteers were sent to our region. I remained the assistant warden, since I had been trained for it, and since I was in any case more of a “veteran” in the region generally. Since my site mate traveled a lot, this meant that I was the warden quite a lot of the time. And it occurred to me one day that, among my many possible duties, I could potentially be asked to distribute the morning after pill to other Volunteers in my region. I wasn’t actually Catholic yet, but I definitely had moral objections to this, and it felt wrong to me that I should be asked to be the agent for disbursing the means to such an immoral act. I understood that they really needed me to do the warden job, but this seemed like a real problem.

Things never came to a head in that case; my warden tried whenever possible to leave the med kit with somebody else, but in any case nobody ever asked for contraceptives. But I worried sometimes about what I would do if it did happen. Would it be all right if I just let them come in and take the pill out of the kit themselves? Or if I just delivered the kit over to them wholesale, knowing perfectly well what they wanted to do with it?

Anyway, my point is that it’s very easy to get into these kinds of situations without even thinking about it. When it is appropriate or necessary to be a conscientious objector?