The paper presents an argument for respecting conscientious refusals based on the Thomistic account of conscience; the argument does not employ the notion of right. The main idea is that acting against one’s conscience necessarily makes the action objectively wrong and performed in bad faith, and expecting someone to act against his or her conscience is incompatible with requiring him or her to act in good faith. In light of this idea I also examine the issue of obligations imposed on objectors as well as the claims that conscientious objectors should change their profession.
In the paper I show the reasons for which the Aristotelian principle vivere viventibus est esse is relevant for the understanding of actual existence; there are three sorts of these reasons: (i) some metaphilosophical reasons which I offer in p. 2; (ii) the possibility of illustrating some key metaphysical theses (which I list in p. 3) concerning actual existence on the example of life; (iii) a connection between ignoring actual existence and some way of treating life (that I show on the example of Francis Suarez and John Punch). In the course of the argument I distinguish between three senses of the predicate ‘is alive’ and the concept of life (the accidental, the essential and the actual one) and I focus on some key differences between the ways the concept of life is introduced in Aquinas and in Suarez and Punch.
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