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

Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Monstrous Cruelty of a Just World

It’s easy to want to believe that everything happens for a reason, but how does that affect the way we treat the people the universe has punished?

By Nicholas Hune-Brown
Hazlitt Blog
Originally published January 22, 2015

In the 1960s, a social psychologist named Melvin Lerner noticed something troubling about his colleagues. The therapists at his hospital—generally such nice, sympathetic people—seemed to be acting heartlessly towards some of their mentally ill patients, pushing and prodding them during sessions, describing the vulnerable and disturbed as shiftless manipulators. Why were these professionals, generally so kind and compassionate, treating patients as if they somehow deserved their illness?

The entire blog post is here.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

The Ethics of Enhanced Interrogations and Torture: A Reappraisal of the Argument

William O'Donohuea, Cassandra Snipesa, Georgia Daltoa, Cyndy Sotoa, Alexandros Maragakisa & Sungjin Im
Ethics & Behavior
Volume 24, Issue 2, 2014

Abstract

This article critically reviews what is known about the ethical status of psychologists’ putative involvement with enhanced interrogations and torture (EITs). We examine three major normative ethical accounts (utilitarian, deontic, and virtue ethics) of EITs and conclude, contra the American Psychological Association, that reasonable arguments can be made that in certain cases the use of EITs is ethical and even, in certain circumstances, morally obligatory. We suggest that this moral question is complex as it has competing moral values involved, that is, the humane treatment of detainee competes with the ethical value/duty/virtue of protecting innocent third parties. We also suggest that there is an ethical duty to minimize harm by making only judicious and morally responsible allegations against the psychologists alleged to be involved in EITs. Finally, we make recommendations regarding completing the historical record, improvements in the professional ethics code, and the moral treatment of individuals accused in this controversy.

The entire article is here.

‘Utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial moral dilemmas do not reflect impartial concern for the greater good

By Guy Kahane, Jim A.C. Everett, Brian Earp, Miguel Farias, and Julian Savulescu
Cognition
Volume 134, January 2015, Pages 193–209

Abstract

A growing body of research has focused on so-called ‘utilitarian’ judgments in moral dilemmas in which participants have to choose whether to sacrifice one person in order to save the lives of a greater number. However, the relation between such ‘utilitarian’ judgments and genuine utilitarian impartial concern for the greater good remains unclear. Across four studies, we investigated the relationship between ‘utilitarian’ judgment in such sacrificial dilemmas and a range of traits, attitudes, judgments and behaviors that either reflect or reject an impartial concern for the greater good of all. In Study 1, we found that rates of ‘utilitarian’ judgment were associated with a broadly immoral outlook concerning clear ethical transgressions in a business context, as well as with sub-clinical psychopathy. In Study 2, we found that ‘utilitarian’ judgment was associated with greater endorsement of rational egoism, less donation of money to a charity, and less identification with the whole of humanity, a core feature of classical utilitarianism. In Studies 3 and 4, we found no association between ‘utilitarian’ judgments in sacrificial dilemmas and characteristic utilitarian judgments relating to assistance to distant people in need, self-sacrifice and impartiality, even when the utilitarian justification for these judgments was made explicit and unequivocal. This lack of association remained even when we controlled for the antisocial element in ‘utilitarian’ judgment. Taken together, these results suggest that there is very little relation between sacrificial judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas that dominate current research, and a genuine utilitarian approach to ethics.

Highlights

• Utilitarian’ judgments in moral dilemmas were associated with egocentric attitudes and less identification with humanity.
• They were also associated with lenient views about clear moral transgressions.
• ‘Utilitarian’ judgments were not associated with views expressing impartial altruist concern for others.
• This lack of association remained even when antisocial tendencies were controlled for.
• So-called ‘utilitarian’ judgments do not express impartial concern for the greater good.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics*

By Joshua Greene
Forthcoming in Ethics

Abstract:

In this article I explain why cognitive science (including some neuroscience)
matters for normative ethics. First, I describe the dual-process theory of moral judgment
and briefly summarize the evidence supporting it. Next I describe related experimental
research examining influences on intuitive moral judgment. I then describe two ways in
which research along these lines can have implications for ethics. I argue that a deeper
understanding of moral psychology favors certain forms of consequentialism over other
classes of normative moral theory. I close with some brief remarks concerning the bright
future of ethics as an interdisciplinary enterprise.

Here is an excerpt:

Likewise, it would be a cognitive miracle if we had reliably good moral instincts about
unfamiliar* moral problems. This suggests the following more general principle:
The No Cognitive Miracles Principle: When we are dealing with unfamiliar*
moral problems, we ought to rely less on automatic settings (automatic
emotional responses) and more on manual mode (conscious, controlled
reasoning), lest we bank on cognitive miracles.
This principle is powerful because it, when combined with empirical knowledge of
moral psychology, offers moral guidance while presupposing nothing about what is
morally good or bad. A corollary of the NCMP is that we should expect certain
pathological individuals—VMPFC patients? Psychopaths? Alexithymics? —to make 32
better decisions than healthy people in some cases. (This is why such individuals are no
embarrassment to the view I will defend in the next section.)

The author's copy is here.

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms

By Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD
American Journal of Public Health: February 2015, Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 240-249.
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242

Abstract

Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat.


The entire article is here.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Moral Realism

Sayre-McCord, Geoff, "Moral Realism"
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Here is an excerpt:

Nonetheless, realists and anti-realists alike are usually inclined to hold that Moore’s Open Question Argument is getting at something important—some feature of moral claims that makes them not well captured by nonmoral claims.

According to some, that ‘something important’ is that moral claims are essentially bound up with motivation in a way that nonmoral claims are not (Ayer 1936, Stevenson 1937, Gibbard 1990, Blackburn 1993). Exactly what the connection to motivation is supposed to be is itself controversial, but one common proposal (motivation internalism) is that a person counts as sincerely making a moral claim only if she is motivated appropriately. To think of something that it is good, for instance, goes with being, other things equal, in favor of it in ways that would provide some motivation (not necessarily decisive) to promote, produce, preserve or in other ways support it. If someone utterly lacks such motivations and yet claims nonetheless that she thinks the thing in question is good, there is reason, people note, to suspect either that she is being disingenuous or that she does not understand what she is saying. This marks a real contrast with nonmoral claims since the fact that a person makes some such claim sincerely seems never to entail anything in particular about her motivations. Whether she is attracted by, repelled by, or simply indifferent to some color is irrelevant to whether her claim that things have that color are sincere and well understood by her.

The entire entry is here.

Editor's Note: This article is for those psychologists more inclined to read philosophy.

Physician guidelines for Googling patients need revision

By Jennifer Abbasi
Penn State News
Originally posted February 2, 2015

With the Internet and social media becoming woven into the modern medical practice, Penn State College of Medicine researchers contend that professional medical societies must update or amend their Internet guidelines to address when it is ethical to "Google" a patient.

"As time goes on, Googling patients is going to become more and more common, especially with doctors who grew up with the Internet," says Maria J. Baker, associate professor of medicine.

Baker has dealt with the question first hand in her role as a genetic counselor and medical geneticist. In a case that inspired her recent paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, a patient consulted her regarding prophylactic mastectomies. The patient's family history of cancer could not be verified and then a pathology report revealed that a melanoma the patient listed had actually been a non-cancerous, shape-changing mole.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Montco woman, Temple professor not a licensed psychologist

By Jo Ciavaglia
Bucks County Courier Times
Originally posted February 4, 2015

Susan Schecter-Cornbluth swore under oath that she was a practicing clinical psychologist in Pennsylvania, as well as licensed to practice family and marriage therapy in New Jersey.

But Solebury police say that the 41-year-old Montgomery County woman, who also teaches psychology at Temple University, lied.

They said Schecter-Cornbluth, of Ambler, committed perjury in December 2013 when she testified as an “expert witness” in a Bucks County family court hearing that she was a “licensed clinical psychologist” in New Jersey.

The entire article is here.

Online processing of moral transgressions: ERP evidence for spontaneous evaluation

Hartmut Leuthold, Angelika Kunkel, Ian G. Mackenzie and Ruth Filik
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci (2015)
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsu151

Abstract

Experimental studies using fictional moral dilemmas indicate that both automatic emotional processes and controlled cognitive processes contribute to moral judgments. However, not much is known about how people process socio-normative violations that are more common to their everyday life nor the time-course of these processes. Thus, we recorded participants’ electrical brain activity while they were reading vignettes that either contained morally acceptable vs unacceptable information or text materials that contained information which was either consistent or inconsistent with their general world knowledge. A first event-related brain potential (ERP) positivity peaking at ∼200 ms after critical word onset (P200) was larger when this word involved a socio-normative or knowledge-based violation. Subsequently, knowledge-inconsistent words triggered a larger centroparietal ERP negativity at ∼320 ms (N400), indicating an influence on meaning construction. In contrast, a larger ERP positivity (larger late positivity), which also started at ∼320 ms after critical word onset, was elicited by morally unacceptable compared with acceptable words. We take this ERP positivity to reflect an implicit evaluative (good–bad) categorization process that is engaged during the online processing of moral transgressions.

The article is here.