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 Cultural Norms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cultural Norms. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

The evolution of human cooperation

Coren Apicella and Joan Silk
Current Biology, Volume 29 (11), pp 447-450.

Darwin viewed cooperation as a perplexing challenge to his theory of natural selection. Natural selection generally favors the evolution of behaviors that enhance the fitness of individuals. Cooperative behavior, which increases the fitness of a recipient at the expense of the donor, contradicts this logic. William D. Hamilton helped to solve the puzzle when he showed that cooperation can evolve if cooperators direct benefits selectively to other cooperators (i.e. assortment). Kinship, group selection and the previous behavior of social partners all provide mechanisms for assortment (Figure 1), and kin selection and reciprocal altruism are the foundation of the kinds of cooperative behavior observed in many animals. Humans also bias cooperation in favor of kin and reciprocating partners, but the scope, scale, and variability of human cooperation greatly exceed that of other animals. Here, we introduce derived features of human cooperation in the context in which they originally evolved, and discuss the processes that may have shaped the evolution of our remarkable capacity for cooperation. We argue that culturally-evolved norms that specify how people should behave provide an evolutionarily novel mechanism for assortment, and play an important role in sustaining derived properties of cooperation in human groups.

Here is a portion of the Summary

Cooperative foraging and breeding provide the evolutionary backdrop for understanding the evolution of cooperation in humans, as the returns from cooperating in these activities would have been high in our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Still, explaining how our ancestors effectively dealt with the problem of free-riders within this context remains a challenge. Derived features of human cooperation, however, give us some indication of the mechanisms that could lead to assortativity. These derived features include: first, the scope of cooperation — cooperation is observed between unrelated and often short-term interactors; second, the scale of cooperation — cooperation extends beyond pairs to include circumscribed groups that vary in size and identity; and third, variation in cooperation — human cooperation varies in both time and space in accordance with cultural and social norms. We argue that this pattern of findings is best explained by cultural evolutionary processes that generate phenotypic assortment on cooperation via a psychology adapted for cultural learning, norm sensitivity and group-mindedness.

The info is here.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Physicians, Firearms, and Free Speech

Wendy E. Parmet, Jason A. Smith, and Matthew Miller
N Engl J Med 2017; 376:1901-1903
May 18, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The majority’s well-reasoned decision, in fact, does just that. By relying on heightened rather than strict scrutiny, the majority affirmed that laws regulating physician speech must be designed to enhance rather than harm patient safety. The majority took this mandate seriously and required the state to show some meaningful evidence that the regulation was apt to serve the state’s interest in protecting patients.

The state could not do so for two reasons. First, the decision to keep a gun in the home substantially increases the risk of death for all household members, especially the risk of death by suicide, and particularly so when guns are stored loaded and unlocked, as they are in millions of homes where children live.  Second, the majority of U.S. adults who live in homes with guns are unaware of the heightened risk posed by bringing guns into a home.  Indeed, by providing accurate information about the risks created by easy access to firearms, as well as ways to modify that risk (e.g., by storing guns unloaded and locked up, separate from ammunition), a physician’s counseling can not only enhance a patient’s capacity for self-determination, but also save lives.

Given the right to provide such counsel, professional norms recognize the responsibility to do so. Fulfilling this obligation, however, may not be easy, since the chief impediments to doing so — and to doing so effectively — are not and never have been legal barriers. Indeed, the court’s welcome ruling does not ensure that most clinicians will honor this hard-won victory by exercising their First Amendment rights.

The article is here.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Cognitive science suggests Trump makes us more accepting of the morally outrageous

Joshua Knobe
Vox.com
Updated January 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

At the core of this research is a very simple idea: When people are reasoning, they tend to think only about a relatively narrow range of possibilities. You are sitting there in a restaurant, trying to decide what to order. Almost immediately, you determine that you are going to get either the chocolate cake or the cheese plate. You then start to consider the merits and drawbacks of each option. "Should I get the chocolate cake? Nah, too many carbs. Better get the cheese plate." One important question about human cognition is how people end up choosing one option over the other in a case like this.

But there is another question here that is even more fundamental — so fundamental that it’s easy to overlook. How did you pick out those two options in the first place? After all, there’s an enormous range of other options that would, at least in principle, have been possible. You could have stormed into the kitchen and started eating directly out of the chef's saucepan. You could have reached under the table and started trying to eat your own shoe. Yet somehow you manage to reject all of these possibilities before the reasoning process even begins. It’s not as though you think, "Should I try to eat my shoe? No, it’s not very tasty, or even edible." Rather, possibilities like this one never even enter your reasoning at all.

This is where the notion of normality plays its most essential role. Of all the zillions of things that might be possible in principle, your mind is able to zero in on just a few specific possibilities, completely ignoring all the others. One aim of recent research has been to figure out how people do this. Though the research itself has been quite complex, the key conclusion is surprisingly straightforward: People show an impressive systematic tendency to completely ignore the possibilities they see as abnormal.

The article is here.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

How US prisons violate three principles of criminal justice

Judith Lichtenberg
aeon.co
Originally published September 19, 2016

The United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population but 25 per cent of its prisoners. Right now, 2.2 million people are locked up across the country, and while crime has been decreasing since the 1990s, rates of imprisonment are at historic highs. Americans across the political spectrum are deeply dissatisfied with this state of affairs, and agree that mass incarceration costs too much and achieves too little. But there’s also much disagreement – about the role of systemic racism, about the causes of police violence, about the importance of personal responsibility and retribution.

Nevertheless, people can find common ground on three fundamental moral norms that should govern the use of imprisonment as punishment. First, punishments should be proportional to crimes. Second, like cases should be treated alike. Third, criminal punishment should not do more harm than good. Unfortunately, the US system violates each of these principles.

Proportionality requires that the punishment fit the crime. This is more than a mere cliché. It means punishments should be neither excessive nor insufficient. Imprisonment for a parking ticket would be wrong, but so would a slap on the wrist for rape.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Legal and ethical aspects of organ donation after euthanasia in Belgium and the Netherlands

Jan Bollen, Rankie ten Hoopen, Dirk Ysebaert, Walther van Mook, & Ernst van Heurn
J Med Ethics doi:10.1136/medethics-2015-102898

Abstract

Organ donation after euthanasia has been performed more than 40 times in Belgium and the Netherlands together. Preliminary results of procedures that have been performed until now demonstrate that this leads to good medical results in the recipient of the organs. Several legal aspects could be changed to further facilitate the combination of organ donation and euthanasia. On the ethical side, several controversies remain, giving rise to an ongoing, but necessary and useful debate. Further experiences will clarify whether both procedures should be strictly separated and whether the dead donor rule should be strictly applied. Opinions still differ on whether the patient's physician should address the possibility of organ donation after euthanasia, which laws should be adapted and which preparatory acts should be performed. These and other procedural issues potentially conflict with the patient's request for organ donation or the circumstances in which euthanasia (without subsequent organ donation) traditionally occurs.

The article is here.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Why the Free Will Debate Never Ends

By Julian Baggini
The Philosophers Magazine
Originally published October 13, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Smilansky is speculating about optimism and pessimism. But one study has come up with some empirical evidence that extraversion and introversion are correlated with beliefs about free will, concluding that “extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions.”

Many are appalled by this idea as it goes against the whole notion that philosophy is about arguments, not arguers. But you only need to read the biographies and autobiographies of great philosophers to see that their personalities are intimately tied up with their ideas. W V O Quine, for instance, recalled how as a toddler he sought the unfamiliar way home, which he interpreted as reflecting “the thrill of discovery in theoretical science: the reduction of the unfamiliar to the familiar.” Later, he was obsessed with crossing state lines and national borders, ticking each off on a list as he did so. Paul Feyerabend recalled how, not yet ten, he was enchanted by magic and mystery and wasn’t affected by “the many strange events that seemed to make up our world.” Only a philosopher with delusions of her subject's objectivity would be surprised to find out that Quine and Feyerabend went on to write very different kinds of philosophy: Quine’s in a formal, logical, systematising tradition (though typically on the limits of such formalisations); Feyerabend’s anti-reductive and anti-systematising. It would take a great deal of faith in the objectivity of philosophy and philosophers to think that Feyerabend and Quine arrived at their respective philosophical positions simply by following the arguments where they led, when their inclinations so obviously seem to be in tune with their settled conclusions.

The entire article is here.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

How foreign language shapes moral judgment

By J. Geipel, C. Hadjichristidis, and L. Surian
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 59, July 2015, Pages 8–17

Abstract

We investigated whether and how processing information in a foreign language as opposed to the native language affects moral judgments. Participants judged the moral wrongness of several private actions, such as consensual incest, that were depicted as harmless and presented in either the native or a foreign language. The use of a foreign language promoted less severe moral judgments and less confidence in them. Harmful and harmless social norm violations, such as saying a white lie to get a reduced fare, were also judged more leniently. The results do not support explanations based on facilitated deliberation, misunderstanding, or the adoption of a universalistic stance. We propose that the influence of foreign language is best explained by a reduced activation of social and moral norms when making moral judgments.

Highlights

  • We investigated whether and how foreign language influences moral judgment.
  • Foreign language prompted more lenient judgments for moral transgressions.
  • Foreign language reduced confidence in people's moral evaluations.
  • Violations of everyday norms were judged less harshly in a foreign language.
  • Foreign language might act through a reduced activation of social and moral norms.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Debating Dishonesty in Context of Morality and Culture

Cross-Coursera Dishonesty Debate
Originally published on April 3, 2014

Watch the legendary moral philosopher Peter Singer, the distinguished psychologist Paul Bloom, and the expert behavioral economist Dan Ariely as they join hands to discuss their views and research on dishonesty, morality, and ethics.

The three authorities will try not to cross moral boundaries as they cross the digital divisions of their online classes: Singer's "Practical Ethics," Bloom's "Moralities of Everyday Life," and Ariely's "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior."