Interesting. I don’t see how anyone can call it “immoral” to give emergency contraception to a rape victim. That’s the funny thing about “morality,” it’s completely subjective and arbitrary…which is why it’s inappropriate for employees in drugstores to impose a personal “morality” on the cutomers.
I don’t see how he’s “imposing” anything on anybody; at worst, he’s forcing the lady to patronize a different store. He isn’t forcing her or anyone else to adopt his particular belief system. And while his conduct may well violate company policy, the outcome of that infraction is simply a business decision for management to deal with.
He’s depriving a woman of her right to buy a legal product and he’s depriving the business he works for of the right to sell that legal product. He’s placing himself in between a transaction between a buyer and a seller and impeding them from making that transaction. He is trying to force other people to adhere to his personal morality when he has no personal stake or interest in that transaction.
Aand what if there were no other stores nearby, as is sometime the case in rural area. Emergency contraception is an emergency. Theoretically, if there was no other way for a rape victim to obtain emergency contraception would a disinterested party still have the right to prevent her from getting it? Does he have a right to prevent the business he works for from selling that product?
Here’s a thought though, taking a step away from this particular case; what if the town is small and remote, and it is the ONLY drugstore for 100 miles or so? Denying an extremely time-dependent prescription like the MAP in that case WOULD be forcing his belief system on someone else.
Does a pharmacy in a very remote area have a different moral obligation in terms of what drugs it dispenses, than one in an area where customers have more stores to choose from?
This is not purely hypothetical. It’s happening in many small towns all over. Wal*Mart won’t carry the MAP, yet it’s often the only pharmacy in a couple of hundred miles.
There is no such “right” to buy this (or any other) product from a particular vendor; while the constitution may prevent government from restricting those types of choices, those restrictions do not apply to actors in the private sector.
And while the business emphatically has the right to sell the product, that only means the government can’t interfere with the sale. They have the ultimate say in the degree to which they consider that right important when dealing with their employee – again, they can choose to discipline, fire, or let off the hook this employee as they see fit.
No, he’s just electing not to be a party to conduct he finds immoral. If his employer is willing to live with that, or to only slap him on the wrist when it causes problems, then all is well – no one’s been forced into doing anything.
Again, there is no right to buy a particular product from a particular vendor. One would imagine that in such a rural-store scenario (assuming the pharmacy owner is willing to sell these particular drugs) that the employer would penalize the employee quite severely, including firing, simply for the negative publicity – they can’t fall back on the “take your business elsewhere” out. But again, that is a matter for the individual employee and individual employer to work out amongst themselves.
I do wonder, Dio – take a pharmacy that is a sole proprietorship in a rural area. The owner and the clerk are one and the same. The owner has moral objections to birth control, and so doesn’t stock those drugs. Is this owner infringing on the woman’s rights when she comes seeking those drugs? Would you impose an obligation on all pharmacists to carry these types of medications?
The pharmacist wasn’t the vendor. There most definitely is a right to buy a product from a vendor who wants to sell it.
If I am a Hindu, do I have a right to try to stop people from buying hamburgers at McDonalds?
Again, the pharmacist wasn’t the vendor.
I’ve already said in this thread that the owner of the business has the right to refuse to sell anything at all. By that same token, no other individual has the right tp [i
prevent* the owner from selling a legal product. My objection in this case is that a disinterested party is blocking a transaction between a willing seller and a willing buyer. If there were no other sellers around then he would be effectively removing the buyer’s right to buy a legal product from a willing seller. It’s no different than blocking the door to a McDonalds.
Once again, we have narrow law and order thinking rearing its ugly head and ultimately enabling immoral behavior. In the scenario that you describe, I am sure that the hypothetical proprietor would be well within the law to do this. He would also be wrong to do so. Sure, sooner or later the market would take care of things, people would either move away to live in a town that exists in the 21st century, or perhaps an entrepreneurial soul would set up shop to fill the demand, but in the mean time people are suffering.
Hell, what if this hypothetical pharmacist was a Christian Scientist and refused to carry antibiotics because the good lord would heal folks if they only believed enough. Should we all smile and congratulate him on his expression of free will or can we condemn him as the immoral bastard that he is?
See, there is a point where the line between “business that can do whatever it wants” and “business that provides a service to the public (especially surrounding health) and therefore should have some written in stone codes of conduct” become a little blurred, in spite of how much you law and order folks would like to pretend otherwise.
Just another example of how the folks that claim to be the most moral are usually pretty immoral in their acts.
Isn’t this just projecting your own moral worldview onto the proprietor? The proprietor has moral objections to birth control. Why is it “immoral” for him to refuse to participate in conduct he finds morally reprehensible?
I’m trying to wrap my head around the notion of a Christian Scientist working as a pharmacist, given that basically every aspect of his business would violate the tenets of his religious faith. I think we can agree it’s a fairly absurd example.
A point I took up in my second paragraph, which was conspicuously absent from your reply.
Again, this is a fairly absurd example, given that the overwhelming majority of the products sold at McDonald’s involve beef in some way. I do not see how a Hindu could long maintain a job at such an establishment. This is different from the pharmacy, which dispenses a wide manner of medications that are wholly unrelated to birth control.
However, having said that, if a McDonald’s manager is willing to hire a practicing Hindu and isn’t bothered by her refusal to sell beef products (or is content to only slap her on the wrist every now and then), then there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Not hardly. The employee is there at the pleasure of the employee, and if the employer doesn’t want to put up with that stuff, the employee can be pinkslipped. Not so with a door-blocker.
You’re right about the schooling, but I’ll disagree on the part about not being “health care professionals”. Pharmacists are a part of the chain, and I always value their input. (I probably call our hospital’s pharmacy twice a day with questions.) No, it is not their job to make medical decisions, and those concerns should be relayed back to the doctor. And yes, some are boneheads. Still, I don’t want to discount the role they play in providing health care.
Leaving aside the employee vs. owner thing, I would not begrudge someone who didn’t offer a particular treatment he felt to be morally wrong, if alternative sources are available. (I might choose to refer patients to the alternate sources, but I wouldn’t really think less of them.)
However, in my opinion, it is NEVER correct to lecture a patient on morals, anywhere along the chain of care. If the pharmacist doesn’t want to give the medicine out, the professional way to do it is to not carry it in his store or not work in a store that carries it; requests for the drug can then simply be answered with, “I’m sorry, we don’t carry that drug,” and ideally with a referral to a place that does. Elaborating on your moral objections that led to that policy is unprofessional, even if they can be inferred.
Doing this in opposition to store policy is just unthinkable. If I were a local doc, I would encourage my patients to go elsewhere until I was convinced that the store had disciplined these employees appropriately and had taken steps to prevent this sort of issue in the future.
Dr. J
That was sort of the point. I guess that I really don’t see the difference between a troglodyte that worships a Bronze Age blood god refusing to dispense emergency contraception and a believer in faith healing refusing to dispense antibiotics. Perhaps in addition to the separation of church and state we should be demanding the separation between church and science.
That aside, to answer the question that you pose about how it is immoral for a pharmacist to refuse to participate in conduct that he finds morally reprehensible, I am not sure that I can do so in a way that will make sense to you. You seem rather caught up in some letter of the law definition of morality, whereas I view the letter of the law as the best attempt of humanity to codify morality.
Basically, what it comes down to is this: Just because a person may believe that conception begins the moment a man pulls his pants down, and believes that premarital sex is wrong and that sex should only be for reproductive purposes does not mean that people will not still fall for each other and have recreational sex. It also will not prevent rapes, incest, sexually transmitted disease and so forth.
So, to return to the hypothetical pharmacist in the small town that has cornered that market, the thing is this; that person is ignoring the reality of the human condition in the name of his archaic, punitive morality. In doing so, he is not providing goods and services that could help to alleviate suffering. That is immoral, and points to a worldview that ignores logic and reality. To be honest, I would rather that people that are this stupid and evil be relegated to sweeping gutters, as they have no place in the health care industry or any other occupation that carries any level of responsibility.
v
Why on earth would be he be wrong? He isn’t allowed to make his own choices? The choices of possible patrons trump his?
It’s nice to get up on a moral high horse and say that people should get whatever they want whenever and wherever they want it, no matter who else’s perspectives must be trampled in order to make that happen, but the reality doesn’t jive with that idea at all.
By your standard, every community in America would have to have a level one medical center. I mean, there are a lot of medical services which aren’t generally available to people in smaller towns and rural areas – MRIs, trauma centers, burn centers, advanced surgical procedures, P/NICUs – services that urban dwellers take entirely for granted, services that can and do save people’s lives every single day. How is that moral? There are hospitals in small communities, but the people who run them are making the choice to deny that level of care to the patients, how dare they?
Maybe they dare because this is something that people are aware of when they choose to live in places where their choices are limited. As such, I’m hard-pressed to figure out why there should there be any difference between the hands-on aspects of health care and the pharmaceutical aspects of health care.
Amen. Would that more doctors understood that. (Though it should be noted that in this case, the patient – the rape victim – wasn’t lectured, her friend was getting the prescription on her behalf.)
[QUOTE=Coldfire]
Wow.Does the Vatican own 80% of Walmart or something?
QUOTE]
Yeah, and the Elders of Zion own 15%, with the Palladian Masonic Council of Thirty-three taking the rest.
:rolleyes:
Btw, if indeed the pharmacy stocks the MAP, the pharmacist should have supplied it. He should have kept all opinions to himself. Disciplinary action is in order. I’m 95% pro-life (the part that must be owned by the Vatican G) but rape is definitely part of the other 5%. I’m amazed tho the ER didn’t have access to MAP to give her itself. I’d think that would be offered as standard rape treatment- so what if it’s not a commonly requested med, that’s why it’s called an EMERGENCY room.
I wish I worked in a book store so I could refuse to sell people junk literature. “You don’t want that Dean R. Koontz. Let me show you some nice Robert Louis Stevenson.” I wouldn’t last long, I reckon.
This may be a bit simplistic, but isn’t it the job of the pharmacist to act as an agent of the prescribing physician? You just can’t go into a pharmacy and buy any drug you wish. A physician has the responsibility to decide what is best for the patient, and THEN authorize the pharmacist to dispense the appropriate medication(s). Sure, the pharmacist must clearly interpret the physician’s instructions, make sure the drugs are still in date, check for possible interactions/contraindications and be satisfied that the prescription was obtained legally[if in doubt, a quick call to the physician’s office can allay that fear] The physician calls the shots, and the pharmacist[to his financial gain] relieves the physician of the onerous chore of maintaining a huge supply of medications. It’s a supply and demand system. No moralizing, no lectures, no rolleyes. I’d be interested to know why he just didn’t tell the woman that the MAP isn’t stocked there, or was out of stock. She probably would’ve left, accepting the information on its face value[why would a pharmacist lie and not dispense me what my physician ordered] and found another pharmacy to oblige her. If he got caught in the lie, it’s easy to say an error was made. I feel he should be disciplined, though not lose his job. In this business climate I don’t wanna’ see anyone lose their job, if at all possible. If he’s “re-educated” about company/store policy and truly plans to follow it, then that, and an apology to that woman, should be the end of it.
[QUOTE=TeaElle]
Why on earth would be he be wrong? He isn’t allowed to make his own choices? The choices of possible patrons trump his?..QUOTE]
Perhaps we have a different concept of the choice involved here. This pharmacist chose to work in an establishment that carries this drug. He accepted the responsibility to dispense the products that his employer chooses to carry. A person came in to legally obtain that product, and was denied. This is dereliction of duty. I guess that I would say that the choices that he made in accepting this job override his choice to cherry pick what medications he will dispense.
Lets use another hot button topic around here to make a point. Say that I choose to accept a job at a convenience store that also sells gasoline. Let us further suppose that I decide that SUVs are evil, and refuse to sell gas to people that drive up in one and lecture them about the evil of their ways. Do you think that I would keep that job very long?
At the end of the day, this pharmacist is in the wrong, and I am rather amazed that folks could argue differently.
I appreciate the fact that the decision whether to fire, discipline or do nothing is a matter between the pharmacist and his employer. Personally, I’d fire his ass but perhaps he’s such an outstanding employee that he’s worth keeping anyway after giving him a slap on the wrist.
Suppose that you, as the employer, have a little talk with him and he says that if the situation comes up again he would do the exact same thing, including his little moralistic lecture. Then what would you do?
Haj
Y’know, it’s funny that you use phrases like “letter of the law” to describe my view, which are clearly designed to suggest my view is narrowminded and inflexible, and yet here is your view laid bare. You think your moral worldview is “correct,” to the point that those who dispute it are not just wrong, but “troglodytes” that are “stupid and evil” who should be consigned to “sweeping gutters.”
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine who is actually more openminded and flexible in their approach.
Not unless the physician owns the pharmacy.
The pharmacist is just a seller of goods. The law (correctly) imposes some duties on him as a seller, including verifying that the medications sold are validly prescribed by a licensed physician, but in no way is the pharmacist obligated to carry or fill any particular set of prescribed medications. Like any other business with which you are dissatisfied, if your pharmacist refuses to fill a particular bit of scrip, your recourse is to find a better pharmacist.
I agree that a slap on the wrist should be enough at first. But no matter how good an employee he is otherwise, if he said he’s do the same thing again, he’d be out of my hypothetical pharmacy.
Even from a purely economic standpoint, it makes sense. He’s refusing business.