Liberty to Request Exemption as Right to Conscientious Objection.

There is a regulatory option for conscientious objection in health care that has yet to be systematically examined by ethicists and policymakers: granting a liberty to request exemption from prescribed work tasks without a companion guarantee that the request is accommodated. For the right-holder, the liberty's value lies in the ability to seek exemption without duty-violation and a tangible prospect of reassignment. Arguing that such a liberty is too unreliable to qualify as a right to conscientious objection leads to the problem of consistently distinguishing its effects from those of a right to conscientious objection that is made conditional on an individual assessment of the objector's motivation.