The Silence of Good People and Non-Cooperation with Evil: A Response to Prof. R. Alta Charo

It is especially noteworthy that, in an essay about the exercise of freedom of conscience by health care workers, Professor R. Alta Charo has virtually nothing to say about freedom or conscience “Conscience clauses,” yes: conscientious objection, to be sure: and she mentions acts of conscience and the right of conscience. But nothing about freedom, and, on the subject of conscience itself, the most she can muster is, “Conscience is a tricky business.” Given her silence on freedom and suspicious distrust of conscience, it is not surprising that her quotes from Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and C.S. Lewis are no more than crumbs from their tables, for these men had robust views of freedom and conscience that Professor Charo does not share. King, a Protestant, the Catholic Aquinas and Anglican Lewis and Gandhi, a Hindu, understood that freedom and conscience are essential to human nature and inextricably linked to the primordial obligation to choose good and avoid evil. King spoke a language widely understood and accepted by friends and foes alike - but not by Professor Charo. For what differentiates the latest round of battles about conscience from those fought by Gandhi and King is not, as Professor Charo and Ms. Goodman would have it, that objectors are seeking “conscience without consequence.” It is that Gandhi and King shared the same moral universe with their opponents, and Charo and Goodman do not.