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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Consequentialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Consequentialism. Show all posts

Thursday, July 22, 2021

The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe

Williams, E.G. (2015).
Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 
971–982 (2015). 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9567-7

Abstract

This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, the disjunction of all such mistakes should receive significant credence. The article then discusses what our society should do in light of the likelihood that we are doing something seriously wrong: we should regard intellectual progress, of the sort that will allow us to find and correct our moral mistakes as soon as possible, as an urgent moral priority rather than as a mere luxury; and we should also consider it important to save resources and cultivate flexibility, so that when the time comes to change our policies we will be able to do so quickly and smoothly.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Who gets the ventilator in the coronavirus pandemic?

A group of doctors pictured during a surgical operation, with a heart rate monitor in the foreground.Julian Savulescu & Dominic Wilkinson
abc.net.au
Updated on 17 March 20

Here is an excerpt:

4. Flatten the curve: the 'too little, too late' approach

There are two wishful-thinking approaches that try to make the problem go away.

The first is that we need more liberty to impose restrictions on the movement of citizens in an effort to "flatten the curve", reduce the number of coronavirus cases and pressure on hospitals, and allow everyone who needs a ventilator to get one.

That may have been possible early on (Singapore and Taiwan adopted severe liberty restriction and seemed to have controlled the epidemic).

However, that horse has bolted and it is now inevitable that there will be a shortage of life-saving medical supplies, as there is in Italy.

This approach is a case of too little, too late.

5. Paternalism: the 'greater harm' myth

The second wishful-thinking approach is that some people try to argue that it is harmful to ventilate older patients, or patients with a poorer prognosis.

One intensive care consultant wrote an open letter to older patients claiming that he and his colleagues would not discriminate against them:

"But we won't use the things that won't work. We won't use machines that can cause harm."

But all medical treatments can cause harm. It is simply incorrect that intensive care "would not work" in a patient with COVID-19 who is older than 60, or who has comorbidities.

Is a 1/1,000 chance of survival worth the discomfort of a month on a ventilator? That is a complex value judgement and people may reasonably differ. I would take the chance.

The claim that intensive care doctors will only withhold treatment that is harmful is either paternalistic or it is confused.

If the doctor claims that they will withhold ventilation when it is harmful, this is a paternalistic value judgement. Where a ventilator has some chance of saving a person's life, it is largely up to that person to decide whether it is a harm or a benefit to take that chance.

Instead, this statement is obscuring the necessary resource allocation decision. It is sanitising rationing by pretending that intensive care doctors are only doing what is best for every patient. That is simply false.

The info is here.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Moral leaders perform better, but what’s ‘moral’ is up for debate

Matthew Biddle
State University of New York - Buffalo - Pressor
Originally released October 22, 2018

New research from the University at Buffalo School of Management is clear: Leaders who value morality outperform their unethical peers, regardless of industry, company size or role. However, because we all define a “moral leader” differently, leaders who try to do good may face unexpected difficulties.

Led by Jim Lemoine, PhD, assistant professor of organization and human resources, the research team examined more than 300 books, essays and studies on moral leadership from 1970-2018. They discovered that leaders who prioritized morality had higher performing organizations with less turnover, and that their employees were more creative, proactive, engaged and satisfied.

A pre-press version of the study appeared online this month ahead of publication in the Academy of Management Annals in January 2019.

“Over and over again, our research found that followers perceived ethical leaders as more effective and trusted, and those leaders enjoyed greater personal well-being than managers with questionable morality,” Lemoine says. “The problem is, though, that when we talk about an ‘ethical business leader,’ we’re often not talking about the same person.”

The pressor is here.

The research is here.

Abstract
Moral forms of leadership such as ethical, authentic, and servant leadership have seen a surge of interest in the 21st century. The proliferation of morally-based leadership approaches has resulted in theoretical confusion and empirical overlap that mirror substantive concerns within the larger leadership domain. Our integrative review of this literature reveals connections with moral philosophy that provide a useful framework to better differentiate the specific moral content (i.e., deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism) that undergirds ethical, authentic, and servant leadership respectively. Taken together, this integrative review clarifies points of integration and differentiation among moral approaches to leadership and delineates avenues for future research that promise to build complementary rather than redundant knowledge regarding how moral approaches to leadership inform the broader leadership domain.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas

Dries H. Bostyn, Sybren Sevenhant, and Arne Roets
Psychological Science 
First Published May 9, 2018

Abstract

Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people’s responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bogus) to a single mouse or allow five other mice to receive the shock. Our results indicate that responses to hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior, but they are predictive of affective and cognitive aspects of the real-life decision. Furthermore, participants were twice as likely to refrain from shocking the single mouse when confronted with a hypothetical versus the real version of the dilemma. We argue that hypothetical-dilemma research, while valuable for understanding moral cognition, has little predictive value for actual behavior and that future studies should investigate actual moral behavior along with the hypothetical scenarios dominating the field.

The research is here.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Have some evangelicals embraced moral relativism?

Corey Fields
Baptist News Global
Originally posted February 16, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The moral rot we’re seeing among white evangelicals has been hard to watch, and it did not start in 2016. Back in 2009, an article in the evangelical publication Christianity Today bemoaned a survey finding that 62 percent of white evangelicals support the use of torture. Despite a supposed pro-life stance, white evangelicals are also the most likely religious group to support war and the death penalty. Racism and sexual predation among elected officials are getting a pass if they deliver on policy. Charles Mathewes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, put it well: “For believers in a religion whose Scriptures teach compassion, we [white evangelicals] are a breathtakingly cruel bunch.”

Here’s a quote from a prominent evangelical author: “As it turns out, character does matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world!” That was written by James Dobson of Focus on the Family. But he wasn’t talking about Donald Trump. He wrote that about Bill Clinton in 1998. Is this principle no longer in force, or does it only apply to Democrats?

As Robert P. Jones noted, the ends apparently justify the means. “White evangelicals have now fully embraced a consequentialist ethics that works backward from predetermined political ends, refashioning or even discarding principles as needed to achieve a desired outcome.” That’s moral relativism.

The article is here.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Moral Hindsight

Nadine Fleischhut, Björn Meder, & Gerd Gigerenzer
Experimental Psychology (2017), 64, pp. 110-123.

Abstract.

How are judgments in moral dilemmas affected by uncertainty, as opposed to certainty? We tested the predictions of a consequentialist and deontological account using a hindsight paradigm. The key result is a hindsight effect in moral judgment. Participants in foresight, for whom the occurrence of negative side effects was uncertain, judged actions to be morally more permissible than participants in hindsight, who knew that negative side effects occurred. Conversely, when hindsight participants knew that no negative side effects occurred, they judged actions to be more permissible than participants in foresight. The second finding was a classical hindsight effect in probability estimates and a systematic relation between moral judgments and probability estimates. Importantly, while the hindsight effect in probability estimates was always present, a corresponding hindsight effect in moral judgments was only observed among “consequentialist” participants who indicated a cost-benefit trade-off as most important for their moral evaluation.

The article is here.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

The Role of Emotional Intuitions in Moral Judgments and Decisions

Gee, Catherine. 2014.
Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 2 (1): 161–171.

Abstract

Joshua D. Greene asserts in his 2007 article “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul” that consequentialism is the superior moral theory compared to deontology due to its judgments arising from “cognitive” processes alone without (or very little) input from emotive processes. However, I disagree with Greene’s position and instead argue it is the combination of rational and emotive cognitive processes that are the key to forming a moral judgment. Studies on patients who suffered damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex will be discussed as they are real-life examples of individuals who, due to brain damage, make moral judgments based predominately on “cognitive” processes. These examples will demonstrate that the results of isolated “cognitive” mental processing are hardly what Greene envisioned. Instead of superior processing and judgments, these individuals show significant impairment. As such, Greene’s account ought to be dismissed for does not stand up to philosophical scrutiny or the psychological literature on this topic.

The article is here.