Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Controversy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Controversy. Show all posts

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Genocide hoax tests ethics of academic publishing

Reuben Rose-Redwood
The Conversation
Originally posted July 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

What exactly "merits exposure and debate" in scholarly journals? As the editor of a scholarly journal myself, I am a strong supporter of academic freedom. But journal editors also have a responsibility to uphold the highest standards of academic quality and the ethical integrity of scholarly publications.

When I looked into the pro-Third World Quarterly petition in more detail, I noticed that over a dozen signatories were themselves editors of scholarly journals. Did they truly believe that "any work—however controversial" should be published in their own journals in the name of academic freedom?

If they had no qualms with publishing a case for colonialism, would they likewise have no ethical concerns about publishing a work advocating a case for genocide?

The genocide hoax

In late October 2017, I sent a hoax proposal for a special issue on "The Costs and Benefits of Genocide: Towards a Balanced Debate" to 13 journal editors who had signed the petition supporting the publication of "The Case for Colonialism."

In it, I mimicked the colonialism article's argument by writing: "There is a longstanding orthodoxy that only emphasizes the negative dimensions of genocide and ethnic cleansing, ignoring the fact that there may also be benefits—however controversial—associated with these political practices, and that, in some cases, the benefits may even outweigh the costs."

As I awaited the journal editors' responses, I wondered whether such an outrageous proposal would garner any support from editors who claimed to support the publication of controversial works in scholarly journals.

The information is here.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Disgraced Chapel Hill Ethicist Says Claims Against Her Are Totally False

by Andy Thomason
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 2, 2016

Jan Boxill, the ethicist and former faculty chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose apparent participation in the shocking academic fraud there left observers amazed, says all the allegations against her are false.

In a letter responding to the National Collegiate Athletic Association on Tuesday, Ms. Boxill’s lawyer, Randall M. Roden, said the claims made against her in a report by a former federal prosecutor, Kenneth L. Wainstein, were untrue.

“It did not happen,” the defiant letter reads. “Not one of the allegations against Jan Boxill is true,” Mr. Roden continued, referencing allegations made by the NCAA, which relied on the so-called Wainstein report.

The article is here.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Planned Parenthood And Fetal Tissue Sale: Manufactured Controversy And The Real Ethical Debate

I. Glenn Cohen
Health Affairs Blog
March 9, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The Real Debate (We Already Had)

As a bioethicist, what was perhaps most upsetting to me was the way the kabuki political theater obscured the fact that there was a real set of ethical questions to be discussed.

These are questions about complicity. For those who think abortion is seriously wrong, in what ways does the use of tissue from abortion make the user or downstream beneficiary of research complicit in that sin?

This is an interesting question that bioethicists have wrestled with for a long time. But when it comes to law, it is one the law has explicitly resolved in a way that allows fetal tissue use.

As my friend Alta Charo noted in a piece for The Washington Post:
Fetal tissue research is legal in all but a handful of states, and it has been conducted in the United States, with federal support, for decades, except for a brief moratorium on the use of National Institutes of Health funds in the 1980s. It is regulated by federal law, and was funded by the Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations, most recently to the tune of about $76 million per year.
The blog post is here.

Friday, July 25, 2014

A new tactic to halt child abuse in Maryland

Focus now on helping low-risk families instead of punishing

By Yvonne Wenger
The Baltimore Sun
Originally posted July 5, 2014

Baltimore is changing the way it handles cases of alleged child abuse and neglect — part of a broad social-services strategy that has been touted by Maryland officials but abandoned in some other states.

The new approach, which is designed to lessen the adversarial relationship between families and caseworkers, puts cases on different tracks depending on whether they are deemed high or low risk. The tiered response, used in 23 states, is regarded as a best practice by many child advocates.

The entire story is here.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Undercover Doctor: Cure Me, I'm Gay

By Christian Jessen
Channel 4
Originally published March 20, 2013

In this one-off documentary Dr Christian Jessen goes undercover to both investigate and undertake controversial gay 'cures' in the UK and the USA.

Christian is shocked to find that not only are there people who believe that homosexuality is a disorder which should be cured, but that there is a growing number of therapists and self-styled healers who believe that they have the 'cure' for the 'illness'.

He sets out to prove or disprove their claims by offering himself up as a suitable case for treatment.


Saturday, May 18, 2013

Why the Fuss Over the D.S.M.-5?

By Sally Satel
The New York Times - Opinion
Originally published on May 11, 2013

LATER this month, the American Psychiatric Association will unveil the fifth edition of its handbook of diagnoses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourteen years in the making, the D.S.M.-5 has been the subject of seemingly endless discussion.
      
The charges are familiar: the manual medicalizes garden-variety distress, leads doctors to prescribe unnecessary medications, serves as a cash cow for the association, and so forth.
      
But many critics overlook a surprising fact about the new D.S.M.: how little attention practicing psychiatrists will give to it.
      
There are dozens of revisions in the D.S.M. — among them, the elimination of a “bereavement exclusion” from major depressive disorder and the creation of binge eating disorder — but they won’t alter clinical practice much, if at all.
      
This is because psychiatrists tend to treat according to symptoms.
      
So why the fuss over D.S.M.-5? Because of the unwarranted clout that its diagnoses carry with the rest of society: They are the passports to insurance coverage, the keys to special educational and behavioral services in school and the tickets to disability benefits.
      
This is a problem because the D.S.M. is an imperfect guide to predicting what treatments will benefit patients most — a reality tied to the fact that psychiatric diagnoses are based on clinical appearances that tend to cluster, not on the mechanism behind the illness, as is the case with, say, bacterial pneumonia.