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 Government Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Government Policy. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at CIA Black Site, Psychologist Testifies

Carol Rosenberg and J. E. Barnes
The New York Times
Originally posted 4 JUN 22

During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA in 2018, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a CIA black site in Thailand where al-Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the CIA officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former CIA director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected al-Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Haspel.

The CIA has never acknowledged Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time al-Nashiri was being tortured, which Mitchell described in his testimony.

Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities: A Literature Review

Harris, J., Anthis, J.R. 
Sci Eng Ethics 27, 53 (2021). 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00331-8

Abstract

Ethicists, policy-makers, and the general public have questioned whether artificial entities such as robots warrant rights or other forms of moral consideration. There is little synthesis of the research on this topic so far. We identify 294 relevant research or discussion items in our literature review of this topic. There is widespread agreement among scholars that some artificial entities could warrant moral consideration in the future, if not also the present. The reasoning varies, such as concern for the effects on artificial entities and concern for the effects on human society. Beyond the conventional consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethicist ethical frameworks, some scholars encourage “information ethics” and “social-relational” approaches, though there are opportunities for more in-depth ethical research on the nuances of moral consideration of artificial entities. There is limited relevant empirical data collection, primarily in a few psychological studies on current moral and social attitudes of humans towards robots and other artificial entities. This suggests an important gap for psychological, sociological, economic, and organizational research on how artificial entities will be integrated into society and the factors that will determine how the interests of artificial entities are considered.

Concluding Remarks

Many scholars lament that the moral consideration of artificial entities is discussed infrequently and not viewed as a proper object of academic inquiry. This literature review suggests that these perceptions are no longer entirely accurate. The number of publications is growing exponentially, and most scholars view artificial entities as potentially warranting moral consideration. Still, there are important gaps remaining, suggesting promising opportunities for further research, and the field remains small overall with only 294 items identified in this review.

These discussions have taken place largely separately from each other: legal rights, moral consideration, empirical research on human attitudes, and theoretical exploration of the risks of astronomical suffering among future artificial entities. Further contributions should seek to better integrate these discussions. The analytical frameworks used in one topic may offer valuable contributions to another. For example, what do legal precedent and empirical psychological research suggest are the most likely outcomes for future artificial sentience (as an example of studying likely technological outcomes, see Reese and Mohorčich, 2019)? What do virtue ethics and rights theories suggest is desirable in these plausible future scenarios?

Despite interest in the topic from policy-makers and the public, there is a notable lack of empirical data about attitudes towards the moral consideration of artificial entities. This leaves scope for surveys and focus groups on a far wider range of predictors of attitudes, experiments that test the effect of various messages and content on these attitudes, and qualitative and computational text analysis of news articles, opinion pieces, and science fiction books and films that touch on these topics. There are also many theoretically interesting questions to be asked about how these attitudes relate to other facets of human society, such as human in-group-out-group and human-animal interactions.

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay

Ed Yong
The Atlantic
Originally posted 7 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

The field of public health demands a particular way of thinking. Unlike medicine, which is about saving individual patients, public health is about protecting the well-being of entire communities. Its problems, from malnutrition to addiction to epidemics, are broader in scope. Its successes come incrementally, slowly, and through the sustained efforts of large groups of people. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, “The pandemic is a huge problem, but I’m not afraid of huge problems.”

The more successful public health is, however, the more people take it for granted. Funding has dwindled since the 2008 recession. Many jobs have disappeared. Now that the entire country needs public-health advice, there aren’t enough people qualified to offer it. The number of epidemiologists who specialize in pandemic-level infectious threats is small enough that “I think I know them all,” says Caitlin Rivers, who studies outbreaks at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The people doing this work have had to recalibrate their lives. From March to May, Colin Carlson, a research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in infectious diseases, spent most of his time traversing the short gap between his bed and his desk. He worked relentlessly and knocked back coffee, even though it exacerbates his severe anxiety: The cost was worth it, he felt, when the United States still seemed to have a chance of controlling COVID-19.

The info is here.

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

How Salesforce Makes Decisions on Ethics and Social Issues

Kristin Broughton
The Wall Street Journal
Originally published 17 Feb 20

After facing public backlash in 2018 for doing business with U.S. immigration authorities amid the separation of migrant families at the southern U.S. border, Salesforce.com Inc., a company known for speaking up on social issues, hired a resident ethicist.

Paula Goldman joined the business software company early last year as chief ethical and humane use officer, a new role tasked with developing a framework for making decisions on complicated political issues.

Although the company’s contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection remains in place, Salesforce has tackled other controversial issues. In her first year on the job, Ms. Goldman supervised the development of a corporate policy that prohibits customers from using Salesforce’s software to sell military-style firearms to private citizens.

She also is responsible for ensuring Salesforce’s products are developed with ethics in mind, particularly those involving artificial intelligence. One way she has done that is by introducing a process known as “consequence scanning,” an exercise that requires employees to document the potential unintended outcomes of releasing a new function, she said.

“We’re in this moment of correction where it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this is our responsibility to integrate this question into the way we do business,’” Ms. Goldman said.

The info is here.

Monday, September 9, 2019

China approves ethics advisory group after CRISPR-babies scandal

Hepeng Jia
Nature.com
Originally published August 8, 2019

China will establish a national committee to advise the government on research-ethics regulations. The decision comes less than a year after a Chinese scientist sparked an international outcry over claims that he had created the world’s first genome-edited babies.

The country's most powerful policymaking body, the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, headed by President Xi Jinping, approved at the end of last month a plan to form the committee. According to Chinese media, it will strengthen the coordination and implementation of a comprehensive and consistent system of ethics governance for science and technology.

The government has released few details on how the committee will work. But Qiu Renzong, a bioethicist at the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, says it could help to reduce the fragmentation in biomedical ethics regulations across ministries, identifying loopholes in the enforcement of regulations and advise the government on appropriate punishments for those who violate the rules.

The info is here.

Monday, December 17, 2018

How Wilbur Ross Lost Millions, Despite Flouting Ethics Rules

Dan Alexander
Forbes.com
Originally published December 14, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

By October 2017, Ross was out of time to divest. In his ethics agreement, he said he would get rid of the funds in the first 180 days after his confirmation—or if not, during a 60-day extension period. So on October 25, exactly 240 days after his confirmation, Ross sold part of his interests to funds managed by Goldman Sachs. Given that he waited until the last possible day to legally divest the assets, it seems certain that he ended up selling at a discount.

The very next day, on October 26, 2017, a reporter for the New York Times contacted Ross with a list of questions about his ties to Navigator, the Putin-linked company. Before the story was published, Ross took out a short position against Navigator—essentially betting that the company’s stock would go down. When the story finally came out, on November 5, 2017, the stock did not plummet initially, but it did creep down 4% by the time Ross closed the short position 11 days later, apparently bolstering his fortune by $3,000 to $10,000.

On November 1, 2017, the day after Ross shorted Navigator, he signed a sworn statement that he had divested everything he previously told federal ethics officials he would. But that was not true. In fact, Ross still owned more than $10 million worth of stock in Invesco, the parent company of his former private equity firm. The next month, he sold those shares, pocketing at least $1.2 million more than he would have if he sold when he first promised to.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Sarah Sanders tweet violates ethics laws

Morgan Gstalter
thehill.com
Originally posted June 23, 2018

The former director of the Office of Government Ethics said on Saturday that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s decision to tweet about being kicked out of a Virginia restaurant violated ethics laws.

Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., on Friday night, but confirmed the incident in a Saturday morning tweet.

“Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for [President Trump] and I politely left,” Sanders tweeted. “Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”

The information is here.

Yes, Ms. Sanders could have used her personal twitter account, which would not have violated any government ethical codes or laws.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Ethics must be at heart of Artificial Intelligence technology

The Irish Times
Originally posted April 16, 2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) must never be given autonomous power to hurt, destroy or deceive humans, a parliamentary report has said.

Ethics need to be put at the centre of the development of the emerging technology, according to the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee.

With Britain poised to become a world leader in the controversial technological field international safeguards need to be set in place, the study said.

Peers state that AI needs to be developed for the common good and that the “autonomous power to hurt, destroy or deceive human beings should never be vested in artificial intelligence”.

The information is here.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Reminder: the Trump International Hotel is still an ethics disaster

Carly Sitrin
Vox.com
Originally published August 8, 2017

The Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, has been serving as a White House extension since Donald Trump took office, and experts think this violates several governmental ethics rules.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the Trump International Hotel has played host to countless foreign dignitaries, Republican lawmakers, and powerful actors hoping to hold court with Trump appointees or even the president himself.

Since visitation records at the Trump International Hotel are not made public, the Post sent reporters to the hotel every day in May to try to identify people and organizations using the facilities.

What they found was a revolving door of powerful people holding galas in the hotel’s lavish ballrooms and meeting over expensive cocktails with White House staff at the bar.

They included Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whom Politico recently called "Putin’s favorite congressman”; Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), who chairs the General Services Administration, the Trump hotel's landlord; and nine other Republican Congress members who all hosted events at the hotel, according to campaign spending disclosures obtained by the Post. Additionally, foreign visitors such as business groups promoting Turkish-American relations and the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and his wife also rented out rooms.

The article is here.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

An erosion of ethics oversight should make us all more cynical about Trump

The Editorial Board
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published August 4, 2017

President Trump’s problems with ethics are manifest, from his refusal to make public his tax returns to the conflicts posed by his continued stake in the Trump Organization and its properties around the world — including the Trump International Hotel just down the street from the White House, in a building leased from the federal government he’s now in charge of. The president’s stubborn refusal to hew to the ethical norms set by his predecessors has left the nation to rightfully question whose best interests are foremost in his mind.

Some of the more persistent challenges to the Trump administration’s comportment have come from the Office of Government Ethics, whose recently departed director, Walter M. Shaub Jr., fought with the administration frequently over federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Under agency rules, chief of staff Shelley K. Finlayson should have been Shaub’s successor until the president nominated a new director, who would need Senate confirmation.

But Trump upended that transition last month by naming the office’s general counsel, David J. Apol, as the interim director. Apol has a reputation within the agency for taking contrarian — and usually more lenient — stances on ethics requirements than did Shaub and the consensus opinion of the staff (including Finlayson). And that, of course, raises the question of whether the White House replaced Finlayson with Apol in hopes of having a more conciliatory ethics chief without enduring a grueling nomination fight.

The article is here.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

On ethics, Trump is leading America in the wrong direction

Jeffrey D. Sachs
CNN.com
Originally published July 26, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

So here we are. Bribes are no longer bribes, campaign funds from corporations are free speech, and the politicians are just being good public servants when they accept money from those who seek their favor. Crooked politicians are thrilled; the rest of us look on shocked at the pageantry of cynicism and immorality. Senior officials in law-abiding countries have told me they can hardly believe their eyes as to what is underway in the United States.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. Trump seems to know no limits whatsoever in his commingling of the public interest and his personal business interests. He failed to give up his ownership interest in his businesses upon taking office. (Trump resigned from positions in his companies and said his two sons are in charge.)

Government and Republican Party activities have been booked into Trump properties. Trump campaign funds are used to hire lawyers to defend Donald Trump Jr. in the Russia probe. Campaign associates such as Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn have been under scrutiny for their business dealings with clients tied to foreign governments.

In response to the stench, the former head of the government ethics office recently resigned, declaring that the United States is "pretty close to a laughingstock at this point." The resignation was not remarkable under the circumstances. What was remarkable is that most Republicans politicians remain mum to these abuses. Of course too many politicians of both parties are deeply compromised by financial dependence on corporate campaign donors.

The article is here.

Saturday, July 8, 2017

Israeli education minister's ethics code would bar professors from expressing political opinions

Yarden Skop
Haaretz
Originally posted June 10, 2017

An ethics code devised at Education Minister Naftali Bennett's behest would bar professors from expressing political opinions, it emerged Friday.

The code, put together by Asa Kasher, an ethics and philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University, would also forbid staff from calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

Bennett had asked Kasher a few months ago to write a set of rules for appropriate political conduct at academic institutions. Kasher had written the Israel Defense Forces' ethics code.
The contents of the document, which were first reported by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Friday, will soon be submitted for the approval of the Council for Higher Education.

The article is here.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Ethics experts question Kushner relatives pushing White House connections in China

Allan Smith
Business Insider
Originally published May 8, 2017

Ethics experts criticized White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's relatives for using White House connections to enhance a presentation to Chinese investors last weekend.

Members of Kushner's family gave multiple presentations in China detailing an opportunity to "invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States" through a controversial visa program and promoting ties to Kushner and President Donald Trump, according to media reports.

Richard Painter, who was President George W. Bush's top ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007 and is now a professor at the University of Minnesota, told Business Insider the presentation was "obviously completely inappropriate."

He added that the Kushner family "ought to be disqualified" from the EB-5 visa program they were promoting. The visa is awarded to foreign investors who invest at least $500,000 in US projects that create at least 10 full-time jobs.

The article is here.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Ethics office details conflict of interest rules for Ivanka Trump

Olivia Beavers
The Hill
Originally posted May 1, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Shaub said the ethics rules prevent top White House appointees “from participating personally and substantially in particular matters directly and predictably affecting their financial interests.” They typically do so by recusing themselves from “particular issues that would affect the appointee's personal and imputed financial interests.”

The ethics office plans to review Ivanka Trump’s disclosures after they are filed.

“After the report is revised, OGE seeks information about how the White House is addressing any potential conflicts of interest identified during the review process,” Shaub continued. “OGE then makes a determination regarding apparent compliance with financial disclosure and conflict of interest rules and either certifies or declines to certify the financial disclosure report.”

The article is here.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Groups File Ethics Complaints Over State Department’s Mar-a-Lago Blog Post

Avalon Zoppo and Abigail Williams
NBC.com
Originally posted April 25, 2017

An ethics advocacy group has filed a complaint calling for an investigation into the State Department's glowing description of President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club on its website.

The complaint, filed Tuesday with the Office of Government Ethics by the group Common Cause, is in response to a blog post published on the State Department's ShareAmerica website that referred to Mar-a-Lago as the "winter White House" and noted that it is open to paying members.

Published in early April, prior to a meeting with China's president Xi Jinping at the Palm Beach club, the post detailed the history of Mar-a-Lago and appeared on websites for the U.S. Embassies in the United Kingdom and Albania.

By Monday the post was removed, replaced by a brief note that said it was only meant to inform. "We regret any misperception and have removed the post," the note said. State Department Acting Spokesperson Mark Toner said Tuesday it was not intended to promote any private business.

The article is here.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

White House Ethics Loophole for Ivanka 'Doesn't Work,' Say Watchdogs

Nika Knight
Common Dreams
Originally posted on March 24, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

The ethics advocates express "deep concern about the highly unusual and inappropriate arrangement that is being proposed for Ivanka Trump, the President's daughter, to play a formalized role in the White House without being required to comply with the ethics and disclosure requirements that apply to White House employees," arguing that the "arrangement appears designed to allow Ms. Trump to avoid the ethics, conflict-of-interest, and other rules that apply to White House employees."

(cut)

"The basic problem in the proposed relationship is that it appears to be trying to create a middle space that does not exist," the letter explains. "On the one hand Ms. Trump's position will provide her with the privileges and opportunities for public service that attach to being a White House employee. On the other hand, she remains the owner of a private business who is free from the ethics and conflicts rules that apply to White House employees."

The article is here.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

By Richard Thaler
The New York Times - The Upshot
Originally published October 31, 2015

Here are two excerpts:

Whenever I’m asked to autograph a copy of “Nudge,” the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, “Nudge for good.” Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation.

Three principles should guide the use of nudges:

■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.

■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.

■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.

(cut)

Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.

I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”

The entire article is here.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

The cheapest way to end homelessness is ridiculously simple

By Drake Baer
Business Insider
Originally published May 28, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

What's counterintuitive about housing first is that people get to keep their homes even if they keep using drugs or alcohol. As we reported last February, this method is better at keeping people from lapsing back into homelessness than traditional housing methods, where homeless people have to lock down jobs and stay sober to keep their temporary housing.

So you could say that the Housing First method isn't just more compassionate to the people who suffer from homelessness, it's also more effective at keeping them off the streets and preventing the drain on community funds.

"If you move people into permanent supportive housing first, and then give them help, it seems to work better,” Nan Roman, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Homelessness, told The New Yorker in September. “It's intuitive, in a way. People do better when they have stability."

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Economics as a moral science

by INGRID ROBEYNS on OCTOBER 31, 2013
The Crooked Timber

Here are some excerpts:

Why is it relevant now? In the lively discussion on what kind of science (or something else) economics is which is currently raging on the blogs, we should also consider the view of those who have argued that economics is a moral science. This, in Tony Atkinson’s words means that “Economists need to be more explicit about the relation between the welfare criteria and the objectives of government, policymakers and individual citizens”. Atkinson traces the expression back to Keynes, who had written in a letter that ‘economics is essentially a moral science’. More recent defenders of that view include Kenneth Boulding in his 1968 AEA presidential address, who defended the strong view that economics inherently depends on the acceptance of some values, and thus inherently has an ethical component.

(cut)

My view is this: economics shouldn’t aspire to be a value-free science, but an intellectual enterprise that combines elements from the sciences with elements from ‘the arts’ done in a manner that makes it value-commitments explicit. Values in economics have many sources. There are values involved in the choice of questions that are asked (and not asked). Value judgements are embedded in the normative principles (such as the Pareto-criterion) that are endorsed. Value judgments flow from the choices in how basic categories and notions are conceptualized (is ‘labour’ only what we do for pay, or also what we do to reproduce the human species?).

The entire post is here.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

'Moral Mondays' are here to stay

By William J. Barber
The Guardian
Originally published June 10, 2013

Here is one excerpt:

It is not surprising, then, that a couple of months ago, when we called for moral witnesses based on Gandhi and Dr King's brilliant examples of nonviolent direct action, we had 17 ministers and other leaders answer the call and participate in the first inaugural "Moral Monday".

We were pleased, but not shocked, when 29 additional North Carolinians came the second Monday; 49 the third, 59 the fourth, and 151 last Monday, 3 June. Each week, the number of supporters multiplies; from about 300 the first week to more than 4,000 on 3 June.

The appeal for each Moral Monday has been the same: urging legislators to govern for the good of the whole, rather than for the wealthy. We didn't come to this decision lightly. In fact, we made several attempts to meet with the far-right legislative leadership. Governor Pat McCrory invited us to his house for a 20-minute chat. We said we wanted to work with him to be sure he governed for the good of the whole, as the US constitution requires him to do. But it was clear he was marching to the beat of a different drummer.

Since then, we have tried repeatedly to meet with legislative leaders. No luck. Once they refused to meet and refused to stop their destructive campaign, we had no choice but to commit our constitutional responsibility to instruct our legislators by engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.

The entire story is here.