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

Monday, June 5, 2017

AI May Hold the Key to Stopping Suicide

Bahar Gholipour
NBC News
Originally posted May 23, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

So far the results are promising. Using AI, Ribeiro and her colleagues were able to predict whether someone would attempt suicide within the next two years at about 80 percent accuracy, and within the next week at 92 percent accuracy. Their findings were recently reported in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

This high level of accuracy was possible because of machine learning, as researchers trained an algorithm by feeding it anonymous health records from 3,200 people who had attempted suicide. The algorithm learns patterns through examining combinations of factors that lead to suicide, from medication use to the number of ER visits over many years. Bizarre factors may pop up as related to suicide, such as acetaminophen use a year prior to an attempt, but that doesn't mean taking acetaminophen can be isolated as a risk factor for suicide.

"As humans, we want to understand what to look for," Ribeiro says. "But this is like asking what's the most important brush stroke in a painting."

With funding from the Department of Defense, Ribeiro aims to create a tool that can be used in clinics and emergency rooms to better find and help high-risk individuals.

The article is here.

Can Psychologists Tell Us Anything About Morality?

John M. Doris, Edouard Machery and Stephen Stich
Philosopher's Magazine
Originally published May 10, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Some psychologists accept morally dubious employment. Some psychologists cheat. Some psychology experiments don't replicate. Some. But the inference from some to all is at best invalid, and at worst, invective. There's good psychology and bad psychology, just like there's good and bad everything else, and tarring the entire discipline with the broadest of brushes won’t help us sort that out. It is no more illuminating to disregard the work of psychologists en masse on the grounds that a tiny minority of the American Psychological Association, a very large and diverse professional association, were involved with the Bush administration’s program of torture than it would to disregard the writings of all Nietzsche scholars because some Nazis were Nietzsche enthusiasts! To be sure, there are serious questions about which intellectual disciplines, and which intellectuals, are accorded cultural capital, and why. But we are unlikely to find serious answers by means of innuendo and polemic.

Could there be more substantive reasons to exclude scientific psychology from the study of ethics? The most serious – if ultimately unsuccessful – objection proceeds in the language of “normativity”. For philosophers, normative statements are prescriptive, or “oughty”: in contrast to descriptive statements, which aspire only to say how the world is, normative statements say what ought be done about it. And, some have argued, never the twain shall meet.

While philosophers haven’t enjoyed enviable success in adducing lawlike generalisations, one such achievement is Hume’s Law (we told you the issues are old ones), which prohibits deriving normative statements from descriptive statements. As the slogan goes, “is doesn’t imply ought.”

Many philosophers, ourselves included, suppose that Hume is on to something. There probably exists some sort of “inferential barrier” between the is and the ought, such that there are no strict logical entailments from the descriptive to the normative.

The article 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.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules

Lachlan Markay
The Daily Beast
Originally published May 31, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Andrew Olmem, another White House economist and a former lobbyist for a host of large financial services and insurance firms, will be free to work with former clients on specific issues affecting bank capital requirements, financial regulation of insurers, and the Puerto Rican debt crisis, all issues on which he has recently lobbied.

Those officials have been given freer rein to advance their former clients’ financial interests, but ethics rules have also been waived for every other “commissioned officer”—staffers who report directly to the president—in the White House who has worked for a political group in the past two years.

That will allow a number of White House staffers to collaborate with pro-Trump advocacy operations. The West Wing is stacked with officials who have made significant sums working, consulting for, or representing high-profile political organizations, including networks of groups financed by the Trump-backing Mercer family and the libertarian Koch family.

Conway herself consulted for more than 50 political, policy, and advocacy organizations last year, according to a White House financial disclosure statement.

The article is here.

Friday, June 2, 2017

The meaning of life in a world without work

Yuval Noah Harari
The Guardian
Originally posted May 8, 2017

Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The article is here.

The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm

Chelsea Schein, Kurt Gray
Personality and Social Psychology Review 
First Published May 14, 2017

Abstract

The nature of harm—and therefore moral judgment—may be misunderstood. Rather than an objective matter of reason, we argue that harm should be redefined as an intuitively perceived continuum. This redefinition provides a new understanding of moral content and mechanism—the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). TDM suggests that acts are condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm. This harm is dyadic, involving an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient (A→P). TDM predicts causal links both from harm to immorality (dyadic comparison) and from immorality to harm (dyadic completion). Together, these two processes make the “dyadic loop,” explaining moral acquisition and polarization. TDM argues against intuitive harmless wrongs and modular “foundations,” but embraces moral pluralism through varieties of values and the flexibility of perceived harm. Dyadic morality impacts understandings of moral character, moral emotion, and political/cultural differences, and provides research guidelines for moral psychology.

The article is here.

Thursday, June 1, 2017

Nudges in a post-truth world

Neil Levy
Journal of Medical Ethics 
Published Online First: 19 May 2017

Abstract

Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events.

The article is here.

There is no liberal right to sex with students

Maya J. Goldenberg, Karen Houle, Monique Deveaux, Karyn L. Freedman, & Patricia Sheridan
The Times Higher Education
Originally posted May 4, 2017

There is a long and distinguished history of conceptualising liberal democracy in terms of basic rights to which, all other things being equal, everyone is entitled. Sexual freedom is rightly counted among these. But should this right apply where one person is in a position of power and authority over the other? Doctors are sanctioned if they have sex with their patients, as are lawyers who sleep with their clients. Should sexual relationships between professors and students in the same department also be off limits?

Neil McArthur thinks not. As Times Higher Education has reported, the associate professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba, in Canada, recently published a paper criticising the spread of bans on such relationships. But we believe that his argument is flawed.

The article is here.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

4 questions for Paul Bloom

By Lea Winerman
May 2017, Vol 48, No. 5
Print version: page 27

Here is an excerpt:

Why do you believe this kind of empathy is overrated?

I should be clear that I'm not against empathy in general. I think it's a great source of pleasure, for instance, and it plays some role in intimate ­relationships. But when it comes to moral judgments, empathy makes a very poor guide.

One reason is that it's biased. You naturally empathize with people who in some way are part of your circle, who look like you, who maybe share your ethnicity. So, for example, if you base your charitable giving choices on empathy, you find yourself inevitably giving to people who [are like you], and ignoring the plight of thousands, maybe millions of others.

Another problem is that empathy is innumerate. It's a spotlight—you zoom in on one person, as opposed to many. Some people think that this is one of its advantages. But real-world moral decisions involve coping with numbers. They often involve a recognition, for instance, that helping just one person can make lives worse for hundreds or thousands of others. The innumeracy of empathy often leads to paradoxical situations where we're desperate to help a single person—or even a cute puppy—while ignoring crises like climate change, because although millions of people will be affected by it, there's no identifiable victim to zoom in on.

A third problem is that empathy can be weaponized. So, unscrupulous politicians use our empathy for victims of certain crimes to motivate anger and hatred toward other, marginalized, groups. We saw a lot of that in the last election season.

The article is here.