Frans de Waal’s “The Bonobo and the Atheist”

By John Archibald Wheerler
Helian Unbound
Originally posted October 12, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

In theory, de Waal is certainly a subjective moralist.  As he puts it, “the whole point of my book is to argue a bottom up approach” to morality, as opposed to the top down approach:  “The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover.”  The “bottom” de Waal refers to are evolved emotional traits.  In his words:

The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather, it arises from ingrained values that have been there since the beginning of time.

and

My views are in line with the way we know the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and also with the way evolution produces behavior.  A good place to start is with an acknowledgment of our background as social animals, and how this background predisposes us to treat each other.  This approach deserves attention at a time in which even avowed atheists are unable to wean themselves from a semireligious morality, thinking that the world would be a better place if only a white-coated priesthood could take over from the frocked one. 

So far, so good.  I happen to be a subjective moralist myself, and agree with de Waal on the origins of morality.  However, reading on, we find confirmation of a prediction made long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche.  In Human, All Too Human, he noted the powerful human attachment to religion and the “metaphysics” of the old philosophers.  He likened the expansion of human knowledge to a ladder, or tree, up which humanity was gradually climbing.  As we reached the top rungs, however, we would begin to notice that the old beliefs that had supplied us with such great emotional satisfaction in the past were really illusions.

The entire blog post is here.

The human race evolved to be fair for selfish reasons

By Rachel Kendal
The Conversation
Originally posted September 19, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Biologists are surprised by this tendency to behave fairly. The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts that individuals should behave in ways to maximise their inclusive fitness. So behaviours are only selected, and hence evolve, if they ensure the survival and reproduction of the actor or kin whom contain copies of the actor’s genes. However, the behaviour displayed by children seems to be at a detriment to themselves, especially when those who benefit from their selfless behaviour are not the children’s kin.

A child’s sense of fairness, egalitarianism, or aversion to inequality can actually be hampered by instruction to “be fair” and rewarding of this behaviour. That is because what is the child’s intrinsic motivation, becomes a need to follow externally imposed rules. And, as we all know, following rules we believe in is far easier than following rules that are imposed upon us, despite attendant punishments for not doing so.

The entire article is here.

The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma on Seeking and Participating in Mental Health Care

Patrick W. Corrigan, Benjamin G. Druss, and Deborah A. Perlick
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 2014, Vol. 15(2) 37–70.

Summary 

Treatments have been developed and tested to successfully reduce the symptoms and disabilities of many mental illnesses. Unfortunately, people distressed by these illnesses often do not seek out services or choose to fully engage in them. One factor that impedes care seeking and undermines the service system is mental illness stigma. In this article, we review the complex elements of stigma in order to understand its impact on participating in care. We then summarize public policy considerations in seeking to tackle stigma in order to improve treatment engagement. Stigma is a complex construct that includes public, self, and structural components. It directly affects people with mental illness, as well as their support system, provider network, and community resources. The effects of stigma are moderated by knowledge of mental illness and cultural relevance. Understanding stigma is central to reducing its negative impact on care seeking and treatment engagement. Separate strategies have evolved for counteracting the effects of public, self, and structural stigma. Programs for mental health providers may be especially fruitful for promoting care engagement. Mental health literacy, cultural competence, and family engagement campaigns also mitigate stigma’s adverse impact on care seeking. Policy change is essential to overcome the structural stigma that undermines government agendas meant to promote mental health care. Implications for expanding the research program on the connection between stigma and care seeking are discussed.

The entire article is here.

The psychology of martyrdom: Making the ultimate sacrifice in the name of a cause

By Jocelyn Belanger, Julie Caouette, Keren Sharvit, and Michelle Dugas
Personality and Social Psychology
107.3 (Sep 2014): 494-515.

Abstract
Martyrdom is defined as the psychological readiness to suffer and sacrifice one’s life for a cause. An integrative set of 8 studies investigated the concept of martyrdom by creating a new tool to quantitatively assess individuals’ propensity toward self-sacrifice. Studies 1A–1C consisted of psychometric work attesting to the scale’s unidimensionality, internal consistency, and temporal stability while examining its nomological network. Studies 2A–2B focused on the scale’s predictive validity, especially as it relates to extreme behaviors and suicidal terrorism. Studies 3–5 focused on the influence of self-sacrifice on automatic decision making, costly and altruistic behaviors, and morality judgments. Results involving more than 2,900 participants from different populations, including a terrorist sample, supported the proposed conceptualization of martyrdom and demonstrated its importance for a vast repertoire of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena. Implications and future directions for the psychology of terrorism are discussed.

Introduction

Dying for a cause? The very concept seems perplexing and bizarre. How could people in their right mind be willing to sacrifice their lives for an idea? Are we not hedonistic beings created to seek pleasure and avoid pain and motivated to survive above all? Yet the phenomenon of self-sacrifice is real enough, and suicide bombing seems to have become terrorists’ weapon of choice in recent years. Though social scientists’ interest in the psychology of self-sacrifice has been accentuated as of late (e.g., Gambetta, 2006; Kruglanski, Chen, Dechesne, & Fishman, 2009; Kruglanski et al., 2014; Pape, 2006), the idea of self-sacrifice or martyrdom is hardly new: Accounts of individuals dying on the altar of religious and political ideologies existed long before the tragedy of 9/11, the Japanese kamikaze of World War II, or even the crucifixion of Jesus Christ millennia ago. Yet it appears that no quick and easy answer can be conjured up to explain this phenomenon.

The entire article is here, behind a paywall.

Doctors Net Billions From Drug Firms

By Peter Loftus
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted September 30, 2014

Drug and medical-device companies paid at least $3.5 billion to U.S. physicians and teaching hospitals during the final five months of last year, according to the most comprehensive accounting so far of the financial ties that some critics say have compromised medical care.

The figures come from a new federal government transparency initiative. The 2010 Affordable Care Act included a provision dubbed the Sunshine Act, which requires manufacturers of drugs and medical devices to disclose the payments they make to physicians and teaching hospitals each year for services such as consulting or research. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services compiled the records into a database posted online Tuesday, though the agency said that about 40% of the payment information won't identify the recipients because of data problems.

The entire article is here.

When Medicine Is Futile

By Barron Lerner

The New York Times

Originally published September 18, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The medical futility movement, which argued that doctors should be able to withhold interventions that they believed would merely prolong the dying process, did not experience great success. Physicians declaring things to be “futile” sounded too much like the old system of medical paternalism, in which doctors had made life-and-death decisions for patients by themselves. It was this mind-set that bioethics, appropriately, had sought to correct. Patients (or their families) were supposed to be in charge.

The problem was that the new system did not account for one thing: Patients often demanded interventions that had little or no chance of succeeding. And physicians, with ethicists and lawyers looking over their shoulders, and, at times, with substantial money to be made, provided them.

The entire article is here.

Reification and compassion in medicine: A tale of two systems

By Anna Smajdor
Clinical Ethics 
December 2013 vol. 8 no. 4 111-118

Abstract

In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Report raises important questions concerning the nature of a healthcare system that harms rather than helps patients. If something is failing in modern healthcare, those in charge should naturally seek to remedy it. I will investigate whether this is due to the disappearance of compassion, and if so, what is it that is emerging to fill its place. I will consider whether we need to rehabilitate or enforce compassion in the system, or to acknowledge that our modern healthcare systems are incompatible with compassion and how we can make the best of what remains.

The entire article is here.

Here is an excerpt:

Compassion is neither necessary nor sufficient for the provision of good healthcare

The following assumptions are commonly made about compassion in healthcare:

1. Compassion is intrinsically, rather than instrumentally valuable
2. Compassion is incommensurable
3. Compassion is a necessary attribute for healthcare professionals

In this paper, I do not question the first two assumptions, though it seems plausible that they
could be challenged. Rather, I want to suggest that if we accept the first two assumptions, the
third cannot follow as a matter of course.

Panel Urges Overhauling Health Care at End of Life

By Pam Belluck
The New York Times
Originally posted on September 17, 2014

The country’s system for handling end-of-life care is largely broken and should be overhauled at almost every level, a national panel concluded in a report released on Wednesday.

The 21-member nonpartisan committee, appointed by the Institute of Medicine, the independent research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, called for sweeping change.

“The bottom line is the health care system is poorly designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life,” said David M. Walker, a Republican and a former United States comptroller general, who was a chairman of the panel. “The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly.”

The entire article is here.

Could Deep-Brain Stimulation Fortify Soldiers’ Minds?

By S. Matthew Liao
Scientific American Blog
Originally posted September 4, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Brain implants that reduce or eliminate our sense of morality are morally undesirable and are not really enhancements as such. Efforts should therefore be made to ensure that the kind of brain implants we develop do not have these unwanted side effects. In the short term, the brain implants we develop may well be imperfect in just such a way. If so, this would be a good reason to ban such devices in the short term. The interesting theoretical issue is what happens when we have perfected the technology and have brain implants that would enable a soldier to kill at the right time, for the right reasons, and in a proportionate manner? Would we still have ethical problems with soldiers using such a technology

The entire blog post is here.