‘Pastorally dangerous’: U.S. bishops risk causing confusion about vaccines, ethicists say

Michael J. O’Loughlin

America Magazine

Originally published March 02, 2021

Here is an excerpt:

Anthony Egan, S.J., a Jesuit priest and lecturer in theology in South Africa, said church leaders publishing messages about hypothetical situations during a crisis is “unhelpful” as Catholics navigate life in a pandemic.

“I think it’s pastorally dangerous because people are dealing with all kinds of crises—people are faced with unemployment, people are faced with disease, people are faced with death—and to make this kind of statement just adds to the general feeling of unease, a general feeling of crisis,” Father Egan said, noting that in South Africa, which has been hard hit by a more aggressive variant, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the only available option. “I don’t think that’s pastorally helpful.”

The choice about taking a vaccine like Johnson & Johnson’s must come down to individual conscience, he said. “I think it’s irresponsible to make a claim that you must absolutely not or absolutely must take the drug,” he said.

Ms. Fullam agreed, saying modern life is filled with difficult dilemmas stemming from previous injustices and “one of the great things about the Catholic moral tradition is that we recognize the world is a messy place, but we don’t insist Catholics stay away from that messiness.” Catholics, she said, are called “to think about how to make the situation better” rather than retreat in the face of complexity and given the ongoing pandemic, receiving a vaccine with a remote connection to abortion could be the right decision—especially in communities where access to vaccines might be difficult.

The info is here.

11th Circuit blocks South FL prohibitions on 'conversion therapy' for minors as unconstitutional

Michael Moline

Florida Pheonix

Originally posted 20 Nov 20

Here is an excerpt:

“We understand and appreciate that the therapy is highly controversial. But the First Amendment has no carve-out for controversial speech. We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny,” Grant wrote.

Judge Beverly Martin dissented, pointing to condemnations of the practice by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American School Counselor Association, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization.

“Today’s majority opinion puts a stop to municipal efforts to regulate ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ (commonly known as ‘conversion therapy’), which is known to be a harmful therapeutic practice,” Martin wrote.

“The majority invalidates laws enacted to curb these therapeutic practices, despite strong evidence of the harm they cause, as well as the laws’ narrow focus on licensed therapists practicing on patients who are minors. Although I am mindful of the free-speech concerns the majority expresses, I respectfully dissent from the decision to enjoin these laws.”

Matt Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the conservative legal organization that represented two counselors who challenged the ordinance, welcomed the ruling.

“This is a huge victory for counselors and their clients to choose the counsel of their choice free of political censorship from government ideologues. This case is the beginning of the end of similar unconstitutional counseling bans around the country,” he said in a written statement.

The info is here.

Small Victories: Texas social workers will no longer be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ Texans and people with disabilities

Edgar Walters

Texas Tribune

Originally posted 27 Oct 20

After backlash from lawmakers and advocates, a state board voted Tuesday to undo a rule change that would have allowed social workers to turn away clients who are LGBTQ or have a disability.

The Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council voted unanimously to restore protections for LGBTQ and disabled clients to Texas social workers’ code of conduct just two weeks after removing them.

Gloria Canseco, who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to lead the behavioral health council, expressed regret that the previous rule change was “perceived as hostile to the LGBTQ+ community or to disabled persons.”

“At every opportunity our intent is to prohibit discrimination against any person for any reason,” she said.

Abbott's office recommended earlier this month that the board strip three categories from a code of conduct that establishes when a social worker may refuse to serve someone.

The info is here.

Congratulations to all who help right a wrong in the mental health profession.

How to motivate people to do good for others

Erez Yoeli
TED Talk

How can we get people to do more good: to go to the polls, give to charity, conserve resources or just generally act better towards others? MIT research scientist Erez Yoeli shares a simple checklist for harnessing the power of reputations -- or our collective desire to be seen as generous and kind instead of selfish -- to motivate people to act in the interest of others. Learn more about how small changes to your approach to getting people to do good could yield surprising results.

There are no good choices

Ezra Klein
vox.com
Originally published 14 Sept 20

Here is an excerpt:

In America, our ideological conflicts are often understood as the tension between individual freedoms and collective actions. The failure of our pandemic response policy exposes the falseness of that frame. In the absence of effective state action, we, as individuals, find ourselves in prisons of risk, our every movement stalked by disease. We are anything but free; our only liberty is to choose among a menu of awful options. And faced with terrible choices, we are turning on each other, polarizing against one another. YouTube conspiracies and social media shaming are becoming our salves, the way we wrest a modicum of individual control over a crisis that has overwhelmed us as a collective.

“The burden of decision-making and risk in this pandemic has been fully transitioned from the top down to the individual,” says Dr. Julia Marcus, a Harvard epidemiologist. “It started with [responsibility] being transitioned to the states, which then transitioned it to the local school districts — If we’re talking about schools for the moment — and then down to the individual. You can see it in the way that people talk about personal responsibility, and the way that we see so much shaming about individual-level behavior.”

But in shifting so much responsibility to individuals, our government has revealed the limits of individualism.

The risk calculation that rules, and ruins, lives

Think of coronavirus risk like an equation. Here’s a rough version of it: The danger of an act = (the transmission risk of the activity) x (the local prevalence of Covid-19) / (by your area’s ability to control a new outbreak).

Individuals can control only a small portion of that equation. People can choose safer activities over riskier ones — though the language of choice too often obscures the reality that many have no economic choice save to work jobs that put them, and their families, in danger. But the local prevalence of Covid-19 and the capacity of authorities to track and squelch outbreaks are collective functions.

The info is here.

Morality has been stripped from public life. Here’s a four-step plan to revive it

Roger Paxton
TheGuardian.com
Originally posted 13 Sept 20

Here is an excerpt:

From the top down, public morality is corroded. If morality, not to mention competence, were valued by the electorate, the approval ratings of Boris Johnson (and Donald Trump) would surely have plummeted, but they haven’t. As others have noted, for many people truth has become unimportant. Selfishness is assumed and encouraged, and opponents, dissenters and people seen as “other” are denigrated and worse. The most important thing is one’s own short-term interest.

What can be done about the crisis? Of course a new government is needed, but even if a Labour government is elected, the divisions and the damage done to public morality will need to be repaired. Just as there is a need to promote physical and mental wellbeing, so morality could be promoted by means of the concept of moral wellbeing.

For physical wellbeing, we have the dietary advice of five-a-day; for mental wellbeing the New Economics Foundation’s five ways to wellbeing, as used by the NHS. For moral wellbeing there is a similar framework that could be useful: the psychological model developed by James Rest, outlining the four components of moral reasoning.

This is a framework for improving thoughtfulness and clarity about moral matters. The first stage is moral sensitivity – recognising when an issue is one of morality, rather than a personal preference or practicality. The second component is moral reasoning. Having identified that a question is one of right and wrong, you then decide what the right thing to do would be. Third comes moral motivation – acknowledging other interests and motives that influence your thinking about the issue, and then weighing up the conflicting motives. The fourth and final stage is moral implementation, which means bringing moral reasoning and moral motivation together to make and act on a decision.

The information is here.

Personality and prosocial behavior: A theoretical framework and meta-analysis

Thielmann, I., Spadaro, G., & Balliet, D. (2020).
Psychological Bulletin, 146(1), 30–90.
https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000217

Abstract

Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between −.18 ≤ ρ̂ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. On the level of traits, we found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem. In sum, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality.

Conclusion

Individual differences in prosocial behavior have consistently been documented over decades of research using economic games – and personality traits have been shown to account for such individual variation. The present meta-analysis offers an affordance-based theoretical framework that can illuminate which, when, and how personality traits relate to prosocial behavior across various interdependent situations. Specifically, the framework and meta-analysis identify a few situational affordances that form the basis for the expression of certain traits in prosocial behavior. In this regard, the meta-analysis also shows that no single trait is capable to account for individual variation in prosocial behavior across the variety of interdependent situations that individuals may encounter in everyday social interactions.  Rather, individual differences in prosocial behavior are best viewed as a result of traits being expressed in response to certain situational features that influence the affordances involved in interdependent situations. In conclusion, research on individual differences in prosocial behavior – and corresponding trait conceptualizations – should consider the affordances
provided in interdependent situations to allow for a complete understanding of how personality can shape the many aspects of human prosociality.

Technology Can Help Us, but People Must Be the Moral Decision Makers

Andrew Briggs
medium.com
Originally posted 8 June 20

Here is an excerpt:

Many individuals in technology fields see tools such as machine learning and AI as precisely that — tools — which are intended to be used to support human endeavors, and they tend to argue how such tools can be used to optimize technical decisions. Those people concerned with the social impacts of these technologies tend to approach the debate from a moral stance and to ask how these technologies should be used to promote human flourishing.

This is not an unresolvable conflict, nor is it purely academic. As the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, society is increasingly faced with decisions about how technology should be used: Should sick people’s contacts be traced using cell phone data? Should AIs determine who can or cannot work or travel based on their most recent COVID-19 test results? These questions have both technical and moral dimensions. Thankfully, humans have a unique capacity for moral choices in a way that machines simply do not.

One of our findings is that for humanity to thrive in the new digital age, we cannot disconnect our technical decisions and innovations from moral reasoning. New technologies require innovations in society. To think that the advance of technology can be stopped, or that established moral modalities need not be applied afresh to new circumstances, is a fraught path. There will often be tradeoffs between social goals, such as maintaining privacy, and technological goals, such as identifying disease vectors.

The info is here.

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

TessWilkinson-Ryan
The Atlantic
Originally published 6 July 20

Here is the conclusion:

At the least, government agencies must promulgate clear, explicit norms and rules to facilitate cooperative choices. Most people congregating in tight spaces are telling themselves a story about why what they are doing is okay. Such stories flourish under confusing or ambivalent norms. People are not irrevocably chaotic decision makers; the level of clarity in human thinking depends on how hard a problem is. I know with certainty whether I’m staying home, but the confidence interval around “I am being careful” is really wide. Concrete guidance makes challenges easier to resolve. If masks work, states and communities should require them unequivocally. Cognitive biases are the reason to mark off six-foot spaces on the supermarket floor or circles in the grass at a park.

For social-distancing shaming to be a valuable public-health tool, average citizens should reserve it for overt defiance of clear official directives—failure to wear a mask when one is required—rather than mere cases of flawed judgment. In the meantime, money and power are located in public and private institutions that have access to public-health experts and the ability to propose specific behavioral norms. The bad judgments that really deserve shaming include the failure to facilitate testing, failure to protect essential workers, failure to release larger numbers of prisoners from facilities that have become COVID-19 hot spots, and failure to create the material conditions that permit strict isolation. America’s half-hearted reopening is a psychological morass, a setup for defeat that will be easy to blame on irresponsible individuals while culpable institutions evade scrutiny.

The info is here.

Can COVID-19 re-invigorate ethics?

Louise Campbell
BMJ Blogs
Originally posted 26 May 20

The COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted ethics into the spotlight.  Questions previously deliberated about by small numbers of people interested in or affected by particular issues are now being posed with an unprecedented urgency right across the public domain.  One of the interesting facets of this development is the way in which the questions we are asking now draw attention, not just to the importance of ethics in public life, but to the very nature of ethics as practice, namely ethics as it is applied to specific societal and environmental concerns.

Some of these questions which have captured the public imagination were originally debated specifically within healthcare circles and at the level of health policy: what measures must be taken to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed if there is a surge in the number of people requiring hospitalisation?  How will critical care resources such as ventilators be prioritised if need outstrips supply?  In a crisis situation, will older people or people with disabilities have the same opportunities to access scarce resources, even though they may have less chance of survival than people without age-related conditions or disabilities?  What level of risk should healthcare workers be expected to assume when treating patients in situations in which personal protective equipment may be inadequate or unavailable?   Have the rights of patients with chronic conditions been traded off against the need to prepare the health service to meet a demand which to date has not arisen?  Will the response to COVID-19 based on current evidence compromise the capacity of the health system to provide routine outpatient and non-emergency care to patients in the near future?

Other questions relate more broadly to the intersection between health and society: how do we calculate the harms of compelling entire populations to isolate themselves from loved ones and from their communities?  How do we balance these harms against the risks of giving people more autonomy to act responsibly?  What consideration is given to the fact that, in an unequal society, restrictions on liberty will affect certain social groups in disproportionate ways?  What does the catastrophic impact of COVID-19 on residents of nursing homes say about our priorities as a society and to what extent is their plight our collective responsibility?  What steps have been taken to protect marginalised communities who are at greater risk from an outbreak of infectious disease: for example, people who have no choice but to coexist in close proximity with one another in direct provision centres, in prison settings and on halting sites?

The info is here.

American Psychiatric Association Presidential Task Force to Address Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry

Press Release
American Psychiatric Association
2 July 2020

The American Psychiatric Association today announced the members and charge of its Presidential Task Force to Address Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry. The
Task Force was initially described at an APA Town Hall on June 15 amidst rising calls from psychiatrists for action on racism. It held its first meeting on June 27, and efforts, including the planning of future town halls, surveys and the establishment of related committees, are underway.

Focusing on organized psychiatry, psychiatrists, psychiatric trainees, psychiatric patients, and others who work to serve psychiatric patients, the Task Force is initially charged with:

1. Providing education and resources on APA’s and psychiatry’s history regarding structural racism;
2. Explaining the current impact of structural racism on the mental health of our patients and colleagues;
3. Developing achievable and actionable recommendations for change to eliminate structural racism in the APA and psychiatry now and in the future;
4. Providing reports with specific recommendations for achievable actions to the APA Board of Trustees at each of its meetings through May 2021; and
5. Monitoring the implementation of tasks 1-4.

The info is here.

Downloading COVID-19 contact tracing apps is a moral obligation

G. Owen Schaefer and Angela Ballantyne
BMJ Blogs
Originally posted 4 May 20

Should you download an app that could notify you if you had been in contact with someone who contracted COVID-19? Such apps are already available in countries such as Israel, Singapore, and Australia, with other countries like the UK and US soon to follow. Here, we explain why you might have an ethical obligation to use a tracing app during the COVID-19 pandemic, even in the face of privacy concerns.

(cut)

Vulnerability and unequal distribution of risk

Marginalized populations are both hardest hit by pandemics and often have the greatest reason to be sceptical of supposedly benign State surveillance. COVID-19 is a jarring reminder of global inequality, structural racism, gender inequity, entrenched ableism, and many other social divisions. During the SARS outbreak, Toronto struggled to adequately respond to the distinctive vulnerabilities of people who were homeless. In America, people of colour are at greatest risk in several dimensions – less able to act on public health advice such as social distancing, more likely to contract the virus, and more likely to die from severe COVID if they do get infected. When public health advice switched to recommending (or in some cases requiring) masks, some African Americans argued it was unsafe for them to cover their faces in public. People of colour in the US are at increased risk of state surveillance and police violence, in part because they are perceived to be threatening and violent. In New York City, black and Latino patients are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of non-Hispanic white people.

Marginalized populations have historically been harmed by State health surveillance. For example, indigenous populations have been the victims of State data collection to inform and implement segregation, dispossession of land, forced migration, as well as removal and ‘re‐education’ of their children. Stigma and discrimination have impeded the public health response to HIV/AIDS, as many countries still have HIV-specific laws that prosecute people living with HIV for a range of offences.  Surveillance is an important tool for implementing these laws. Marginalized populations therefore have good reasons to be sceptical of health related surveillance.

What To Do If You Need to See Patients In Office?

If you are a mental health professional who continues to see (some) patients in the office because of patient needs, the following chart may be helpful.  

To protect my patients, I imagine I am a carrier, even though I have no way of knowing because our government lacks the capacity for adequate COVID-19 testing.

Restoring the Economy Is the Last Thing We Should Want

Douglas Rushkoff
medium.com
Originally published 27 April 20

Everyone wants to know when we’re going to get the economy started up again, and just how many lives we’re willing to surrender before we do. We’ve all been made to understand the dilemma: The sooner we “open up” American and get back to our jobs, the more likely we spread Covid-19, further overwhelming hospitals and killing more people. Yet the longer we wait, the more people will suffer and die in other ways.

I think this is a false choice. Yes, it may be true that every 1% rise in unemployment leads to a corresponding 1% rise in suicides. And it’s true that an extended freeze of the economy could shorten the lifespan of 6.4 million Americans entering the job market by an average of about two years. But such metrics say less about the human cost of the downturn than they do about the dangerously absolute dependence of workers on traditional employment for basic sustenance — an artifact of an economy that has been intentionally rigged to favor big banks and passive shareholders over small and local businesses that actually provide goods and services in a sustainable way.

In reality, the sooner and more completely we restore the old economy, the faster we simply recreate the conditions that got us sick in the first place and rendered us incapable of mounting an effective response. The economy we’re committed to restoring is no more the victim of the Covid-19 crisis than it is the cause. We have to stop asking when will things get back to normal. They won’t. There is no going back. And that’s actually good news.

The info is here.

What do we mean by 'killing' and 'letting die'?

Ivar R. Hannikainen, Anibal Monasterio-Astobiza, & David Rodríguez-Arias
www.bioxphi.org
Originally published 22 Feb 20

Bioethicists have long asked how to distinguish killing from letting die. Opponents of the legalization of euthanasia routinely invoke this distinction to explain why withholding life-sustaining treatment may be morally permissible, while euthanasia is not. The underlying assumption is that, when physicians refrain from applying life-sustaining treatment, they merely let the patient die. In contrast, a doctor who provided a lethal injection would thereby be 'killing' them. At a broader level, this view implies that 'killing' and 'letting die' are terms we use to distinguish actions from omissions that result in death.

Theorists such as Gert, Culver and Clouser (1998/2015) advanced a radically different understanding of this fundamental bioethical distinction. In a germinal paper, they argue that to 'kill' involves a contextual assessment of whether the doctor violated a prior duty. In turn, whether the doctor violated their duty—namely, to preserve the patient's life—depends on the patient's preferences. (They actually argued for a more sophisticated view according to which only some preferences, i.e., refusals, constrain a doctor's duty—while others, i.e., requests, do not.) This view is qualitatively different from the first (what we call commissive) view. On this alternative view, which we refer to as deontic, 'killing' and 'letting die' serve to differentiate patient deaths that result from breaches of medical duty from those that do not.

How well does each of these theoretical perspectives capture people's use of the killing versus letting die distinction? In a recent paper published in Bioethics, our goal was to develop an understanding of the considerations that carve this bioethical distinction in non-philosophers' minds.

We invited a group of laypeople, unfamiliar with this bioethical debate and lacking any formal training in the health sciences, to take part in a short study. Each participant was asked to consider a set of three hypothetical scenarios in which a terminally ill patient dies, while we manipulated two features of the scenario: (1) the physician's involvement, and (2) the patient's wishes.

The info is here.

Difficult Conversations: Navigating the Tension between Honesty and Benevolence

E. Levine, A. Roberts, & T. Cohen
PsyArXiv
Originally published 18 Jul 19

Abstract

Difficult conversations are a necessary part of everyday life. To help children, employees, and partners learn and improve, parents, managers, and significant others are frequently tasked with the unpleasant job of delivering negative news and critical feedback. Despite the long-term benefits of these conversations, communicators approach them with trepidation, in part, because they perceive them as involving intractable moral conflict between being honest and being kind. In this article, we review recent research on egocentrism, ethics, and communication to explain why communicators overestimate the degree to which honesty and benevolence conflict during difficult conversations, document the conversational missteps people make as a result of this erred perception, and propose more effective conversational strategies that honor the long-term compatibility of honesty and benevolence. This review sheds light on the psychology of moral tradeoffs in conversation, and provides practical advice on how to deliver unpleasant information in ways that improve recipients’ welfare.

From the Summary:

Difficult conversations that require the delivery of negative information from communicators to targets involve perceived moral conflict between honesty and benevolence. We suggest that communicators exaggerate this conflict. By focusing on the short-term harm and unpleasantness associated with difficult conversations, communicators fail to realize that honesty and benevolence are actually compatible in many cases. Providing honest feedback can help a target to learn and grow, thereby improving the target’s overall welfare. Rather than attempting to resolve the honesty-benevolence dilemma via communication strategies that focus narrowly on the short-term conflict between honesty and emotional harm, we recommend that communicators instead invoke communication strategies that integrate and maximize both honesty and benevolence to ensure that difficult conversations lead to long-term welfare improvements for targets. Future research should explore the traits, mindsets, and contexts that might facilitate this approach. For example, creative people may be more adept at integrative solutions to the perceived honesty-dilemma conflict, and people who are less myopic and more cognizant of the future consequences of their choices may be better at recognizing the long-term benefits of honesty.

The info is here.

This research has relevance to psychotherapy.

A Test: Can You Make Morally Mature Choices In A Crisis?

Rob Asghar
Forbes.com
Originally posted 10 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Crisis Ethics in a COVID-19 Context

Of course, SARS-Cov-2 and the rise of the COVID-19 threat have sharpened the issues and heightened the stakes.

At the moment, we do have a global near-consensus on many things: Stay at home. Conduct your religious gatherings online. Do what you can to protect your family's health and that of others.

But the consensus quickly breaks down. How long can we truly afford to do this, especially given evidence that the virus returns once stricter measures are relaxed? How do we judge the misery caused by the virus against other impending miseries? Will an entire generation be economically shattered?

Here, a number of values grind against one another.

For a good number of idealists, sentimentalists and technocrats, it's inconceivable that society could do anything other than to shutter for as long as necessary to prevent further coronavirus spread. Anything else reveals utter contempt for the elderly and the vulnerable. They argue that lockdowns must be draconian and extended, because those countries that initially had success containing the virus witnessed new outbreaks as soon as they loosened restrictions.

Utilitarians, pushing back, raise concerns about how lockdowns have unintended consequences that grow more dangerous over time. Idealists and technocrats tend to dismiss them as Fox News-addicted ogres who are all too eager to dig a grave for Grandma in order to protect their precious stock portfolios.

But at some point, painful realities do have to be reckoned with. As Liz Alderman wrote in the New York Times recently, European officials are walking a high wire in their efforts to provide massive relief efforts. "European leaders are wary of relaunching the economy before the epidemic is proved to be under control," Alderman wrote. "The tsunami of fiscal support by France and its neighbors — over €2 trillion in spending and loan guarantees combined — can be sustained only a few months, economists say."

The info is here.

Don't just look for the helpers. Be a helper

Elissa Strauss
cnn.com
Originally posted 3 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

One of the easiest ways to teach your children to be helpers is by doing more helping yourself.

"Modeling, also called observational learning, is one of the most underestimated and poorly used tools by parents," said Alan Kazdin, professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University.

Kazdin said modeling generosity can begin by simply appreciating generosity in others. Hear about something nice someone did for someone else? Point it out.

When parents do it themselves, they should make a habit of telling their children about it. Though, importantly, do not boast about it. "Be instructive, kind and gentle, rather than righteous," Kazdin said. (This should not be an opportunity for parents to toot their own horns.)

The amazing thing about modeling, Kazdin explained, is how it can teach our children skills without them ever actually doing anything. We can change who they are just by being the people we want them to become.

Kazdin said the brain's mirror networks — the marvelous trick of the mind that allows us to feel as though we are doing what we see others doing — is probably responsible. Our kids can experience the arc of giving, the initial flush of generosity, the execution of act and the helper's high, through us.

The info is here.

Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract

Editorial Board
Financial Times
Originally published 3 April 20

If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.

Today’s crisis is laying bare how far many rich societies fall short of this ideal. Much as the struggle to contain the pandemic has exposed the unpreparedness of health systems, so the brittleness of many countries’ economies has been exposed, as governments scramble to stave off mass bankruptcies and cope with mass unemployment. Despite inspirational calls for national mobilisation, we are not really all in this together.

The economic lockdowns are imposing the greatest cost on those already worst off. Overnight millions of jobs and livelihoods have been lost in hospitality, leisure and related sectors, while better paid knowledge workers often face only the nuisance of working from home. Worse, those in low-wage jobs who can still work are often risking their lives — as carers and healthcare support workers, but also as shelf stackers, delivery drivers and cleaners.

The info is here.

The ethics of ordering non-essential items online during the coronavirus lockdown

Laura Steele
MNAFM.com
Originally posted 3 April 20

In response to the Coronavirus crisis, the UK government announced that all retail outlets, except for those considered to provide essential goods and services, were to close with immediate effect. Online retail is, however, 'still open and encouraged'.

So, does that mean we can click with a clear conscience?

Business academics Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten argue that a decision has an ethical dimension to it if it has a significant effect on others it is characterised by choice, and it is perceived as ethically relevant to one or more parties.

Most of us would likely agree that ordering essential items, such as food or medicine, is ethically acceptable. Especially if there is no alternative, as is currently the case for millions of people who have been deemed at high risk due to underlying health conditions, are self-isolating as the result symptoms of COVID-19, or are otherwise unable to shop in person.

But what about goods that are not absolutely necessary, such as clothing that is wanted but not needed, home decor, toys and games, garden furniture and accessories, beauty products or even, depending on your view on the matter, the humble Easter egg?

The info is here.