20 - Institutional Conscience, Corporate Persons, and Hobby Lobby

Summary

Christopher Tollefsen addresses institutions’ conscience rights. The Supreme Court’s description in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby of the rights of religious corporations affects that question. Institutional conscience attracts more skepticism than individual conscience. Skeptics wonder if an institution can have a conscience or make others respect it. Some medical institutions, looking to exercise conscience, ask if they should be forced to offer patients all services the law allows, including abortion, sterilization, physician-aided suicide and gender transition. If they don’t, others fear unwanted costs to clients and employees. Hobby Lobby involved a closely-held corporation’s refusal to obey a law mandating the purchase of health insurance covering drugs and devices that could destroy an embryo. In other institutional conscience cases, religion could be exercised by the group-subject’s doing or abstaining from acts, as a group and for religious reasons. As in Hobby Lobby, shielding group conscience claims, through corporations, vindicates humans’ rights to achieve certain ends: business efficiencies and the goods of working as a family and as co-believers.