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 Right and Wrong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Right and Wrong. Show all posts

Monday, July 13, 2015

Chimpanzees can tell right from wrong

By Richard Gray
Daily Mail Online
Originally published June 26, 2015

They are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, capable of using tools and solving problems much like their human cousins, but it appears chimpanzees also share our sense of morality too.
A new study of the apes reacting to an infant chimp being killed by another group has shown the animals have a strong sense of right and wrong.

The researchers found chimpanzees reacted to videos showing the violent scenes in a similar way to humans.

The entire article is here.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

The Point of Studying Ethics According to Kant

Lucas Thorpe
The Journal of Value Inquiry (2006) 40:461–474
DOI 10.1007/s10790-006-9002-3

Many readers of Kant’s ethical writings take him to be primarily concerned with offering guidelines for action. At the least, they write about Kant as if this were the purpose of his ethical writings. For example, Christine Korsgaard, in her influential article Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I, writes that, ‘‘the argument of Groundwork I is an attempt to give what I call a ‘motivational analysis’ of the concept of a right action, in order to discover what that concept applies to, that is, which actions are right.’’  Similar comments are not hard to find in the secondary literature. This, however, is a fundamentally misguided way of reading Kant, since he repeatedly asserts that we do not need to do moral philosophy in order to discover which actions are right.  We already know how to behave morally and do not need philosophers to tell us this. ‘‘Common human reason,’’ Kant argues, ‘‘knows very well how to distinguish in every case that comes up what is good and what is evil, what is in conformity to duty or contrary to duty.’’  Because people with pre-philosophical understanding know how to act morally, the purpose of moral philosophy cannot be to provide us with a set of rules for correct behavior. If we take Kant’s claims about common human reason seriously, then his aim in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals cannot be to discover which actions are right.

The article is here.

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Moral luck: Neiladri Sinhababu

Published on Dec 2, 2013

A talk on moral luck that will examine when blame and virtue can be assigned to human actions through a number of examples. Neil Sinhababu is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His research is mainly on ethics. His paper on romantic relationships with people from other universes, "Possible Girls", was featured in the Washington Post on Valentine's Day.


Saturday, October 15, 2011

The Ethics Of Gallows Humor In Medicine

By Katie Watson
The Hastings Center

Medical professionals regularly joke about their patients’ problems. Some of these jokes are clearly wrong, but are all jokes wrong?

It was 3:00 am and three tired emergency room residents were wondering why the pizza they’d ordered hadn’t come yet. A nurse interrupted their pizza complaints with a shout: “GSW Trauma One—no pulse, no blood pressure.”

The residents rushed to meet the gurney and immediately recognized the unconscious shooting victim: he was the teenage delivery boy from their favorite all-night restaurant, and he’d been mugged bringing their dinner.

That made them work even harder. A surgeon cracked the kid’s rib cage and exposed his heart, but the bullet had torn it open and they couldn’t even stabilize him for the OR. After forty minutes of resuscitation they called it: time of death, 4:00 a.m.

The young doctors shuffled into the temporarily empty waiting area. They sat in silence. Then David said what all three were thinking.

“What happened to our pizza?”

Joe found their pizza box where the delivery boy dropped it before he ran from his attackers. It was face up, a few steps away from the ER’s sliding doors. Joe set it on the table. They stared at it. Then one of the residents made a joke.

“How much you think we ought to tip him?”

The residents laughed. Then they ate the pizza.

Gallows humor is humor that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way. Joking about death fits the term most literally, but making fun of life-threatening, disastrous, or terrifying situations fits the category as well. There is a fair amount of literature on humor in medicine generally, most of which is focused on humor in clinician-patient interactions or humor’s benefit to patients. There is relatively little specifically addressing the topic of this article: gallows humor in medicine, which usually occurs in interactions between health care providers.

Gallows humor is not a feel-good, Patch Adams kind of humor, but it is not synonymous with all cruel humor, either. As one physician put it, the difference between gallows humor and derogatory humor is like “the difference between whistling as you go through the graveyard and kicking over the gravestones.” Many health care providers witness or participate in gallows humor at some point. After reviewing over forty medical memoirs, Suzanne Poirier reports that “Anger and gallows humor are generally accepted forms of expression among undergraduate and graduate medical students . . . but expressions of serious self-doubt or grief are usually kept private or shared with only a trusted few.”

David’s question intrigued me as a bioethicist because it is about moral distress, power imbalances between doctors and patients, and good people making surprising choices. But it also piqued my interest as someone who enjoys joking around—when not teaching bioethics, I teach improv and sketch writing at Second City, where I’m an adjunct faculty member. But David didn’t ask me if the tip joke was funny. He asked about it in ethics’ normative terms of right and wrong.

David told me this story fifteen years after he finished his residency, but the urgency with which he told it made it seem like it happened last night. “You’re the ethicist,” he said. “Was it wrong to make a joke?”


The rest of the story can be read here.  In order to access the entire article, you may have to register with The Hastings Center.