By John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published November 7, 2014
Here are two excerpts:
As you know, metaethics is about the ontology and epistemology of morality. Take a moral claim like “torturing innocent children for fun is wrong”. A metaethicist wants to know what, if anything, entitles us to make such a claim. On the ontological side, they want to know what is it that makes the torturing of innocent children wrong (what grounds or explains the ascription of that moral property to that event?). On the epistemological side, they wonder how it is that we come to know that the torturing of innocent children is wrong (how to we acquire moral knowledge?). Both questions are interesting — and vital to ask if you wish to develop a sensible worldview — but in discussing moral supervenience we are focused primarily on the ontological one.
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The supervenience of the moral on the non-moral is generally thought to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. JL Mackie famously argued that the if the moral truly did supervene on the non-moral, then this was metaphysically “queer”. We were owed some plausible account of why this happens. He didn’t think we had such an account, which is one reason why he was an moral error theorist. Others are less pessimistic. They think there are ways in which to account for moral supervenience.
The blog post is here.
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Friday, December 18, 2015
Physician Burnout Climbs 10% in 3 Years, Hits 55%
By Diana Swift
Medscape
Originally posted December 1, 2015
Professional burnout among US physicians has reached a dangerous level, with more than half of physicians affected, according to the results of a 2014 national survey across various medical specialties and practice settings. Compared with responses from a similar survey in 2011, burnout and satisfaction with work–life balance have worsened dramatically, even though work hours have not increased overall.
"American medicine is at a tipping point," lead author Tait D. Shanafelt, MD, from the Mayo Clinic's Department of Internal Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, told Medscape Medical News. "If a research study identified a system-based problem that potentially decreased patient safety for 50% of medical encounters, we would swiftly move to address the problem. That is precisely the circumstance we are in, and we need an appropriate system level response."
The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe Effect Cases: A Unified Account of the Data
By Mark Alfano, James R. Beebe, and Brian Robinson
The Monist
April 2012
Abstract
Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side-effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one’s action would result in a certain side-effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry and that the belief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Artificial Intelligence Ethics a New Focus at Cambridge University
By Amir Mizroch
Wall Street Journal blog
Originally posted December 3, 2015
A new center to study the implications of artificial intelligence and try to influence its ethical development has been established at the U.K.’s Cambridge University, the latest sign that concerns are rising about AI’s impact on everything from loss of jobs to humanity’s very existence.
The Leverhulme Trust, a non-profit foundation that awards grants for academic research in the U.K., on Thursday announced a grant of £10 million ($15 million) over ten years to the university to establish the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
The entire blog post is here.
Wall Street Journal blog
Originally posted December 3, 2015
A new center to study the implications of artificial intelligence and try to influence its ethical development has been established at the U.K.’s Cambridge University, the latest sign that concerns are rising about AI’s impact on everything from loss of jobs to humanity’s very existence.
The Leverhulme Trust, a non-profit foundation that awards grants for academic research in the U.K., on Thursday announced a grant of £10 million ($15 million) over ten years to the university to establish the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
The entire blog post is here.
Harvard Medical School Eases on Contentious Ethics Rule
By Melissa Bailey
Stat News
Originally published on November 30, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
“Nobody wants conflict-of-interest rules to stop basic research if the conflict can be managed,” he said.
The school also lifted the $30,000 cap for publicly traded companies, saying instead that faculty who accept sponsored research from a company cannot own equity amounting to over 1 percent of that company’s value.
Dr. Donald Ingber, who directs Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, called the changes “subtle” but “a move in the right direction.”
“Whenever there’s greater flexibility, it increases the likelihood of greater translation” of discoveries into clinical applications, he said, which is the goal of the Wyss.
“The higher the wall, the more difficult it is to jump over that wall,” he said. “This’ll make it a little bit easier to collaborate.”
The entire article is here.
Stat News
Originally published on November 30, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
“Nobody wants conflict-of-interest rules to stop basic research if the conflict can be managed,” he said.
The school also lifted the $30,000 cap for publicly traded companies, saying instead that faculty who accept sponsored research from a company cannot own equity amounting to over 1 percent of that company’s value.
Dr. Donald Ingber, who directs Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, called the changes “subtle” but “a move in the right direction.”
“Whenever there’s greater flexibility, it increases the likelihood of greater translation” of discoveries into clinical applications, he said, which is the goal of the Wyss.
“The higher the wall, the more difficult it is to jump over that wall,” he said. “This’ll make it a little bit easier to collaborate.”
The entire article is here.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Arizona again tries to illegally import execution drug
By Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
Originally published October 23, 2015
The Arizona Department of Corrections paid nearly $27,000 to import from overseas an illegal drug for executions by lethal injection, but federal officials stopped the shipment at the airport.
According to heavily redacted documents obtained by The Arizona Republic, the Corrections Department contracted to purchase 1,000 vials of the anesthetic sodium thiopental. And although the seller's name and information are blacked out on the documents, an offer to sell the drug to Arizona is virtually identical to an unredacted offer sent to corrections officials in Nebraska from a pharmaceutical supplier in India.
The article is here.
The Arizona Republic
Originally published October 23, 2015
The Arizona Department of Corrections paid nearly $27,000 to import from overseas an illegal drug for executions by lethal injection, but federal officials stopped the shipment at the airport.
According to heavily redacted documents obtained by The Arizona Republic, the Corrections Department contracted to purchase 1,000 vials of the anesthetic sodium thiopental. And although the seller's name and information are blacked out on the documents, an offer to sell the drug to Arizona is virtually identical to an unredacted offer sent to corrections officials in Nebraska from a pharmaceutical supplier in India.
The article is here.
Where to Draw the Line on Gene-Editing Technology
New techniques that could make germline genetic engineering unprecedentedly easy are forcing policymakers to confront the ethical implications of moving forward
By Jonathan D. Moreno
Scientific American
November 30, 2015
The biologists have done it again. Not so long ago it was cloning and embryonic stem cells that challenged moral imagination. These days all eyes are on a powerful new technique for engineering or “editing” DNA. Relatively easy to learn and to use, CRISPR has forced scientists, ethicists and policymakers to reconsider one of the few seeming red lines in experimental biology: the difference between genetically modifying an individual’s somatic cells and engineering the germline that will be transmitted to future generations. Instead of genetic engineering for one person why not eliminate that disease trait from all of her or his descendants?
This week, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K. Royal Society are trying to find ways to redraw that red line. And redraw it in a way that allows the technology to help and not to hurt humanity. Perhaps the hardest but most critical part of the ethical challenge: doing that in a way that doesn’t go down a dark path of “improvements” to the human race.
The article is here.
By Jonathan D. Moreno
Scientific American
November 30, 2015
The biologists have done it again. Not so long ago it was cloning and embryonic stem cells that challenged moral imagination. These days all eyes are on a powerful new technique for engineering or “editing” DNA. Relatively easy to learn and to use, CRISPR has forced scientists, ethicists and policymakers to reconsider one of the few seeming red lines in experimental biology: the difference between genetically modifying an individual’s somatic cells and engineering the germline that will be transmitted to future generations. Instead of genetic engineering for one person why not eliminate that disease trait from all of her or his descendants?
This week, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K. Royal Society are trying to find ways to redraw that red line. And redraw it in a way that allows the technology to help and not to hurt humanity. Perhaps the hardest but most critical part of the ethical challenge: doing that in a way that doesn’t go down a dark path of “improvements” to the human race.
The article is here.
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Is Human Morality a Product of Evolution?
By Emily Esfahani Smith
The Atlantic
Originally posted on December 2, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
There are many theories for why humans became ultra-social. Tomasello subscribes to the idea that it’s at least partly a consequence of the way early humans fed themselves. After humans and chimpanzees diverged from their common ancestor around 6 million years ago, the two species adopted very different strategies for obtaining food: Chimpanzees, who eat mostly fruit, gather and eat the majority of their food alone; humans, by contrast, became collaborative foragers. The fossil record shows that as early as 400,000 years ago, they were working together to hunt large game, a practice that some researchers believe may have arisen out of necessity—when fruits and vegetables were scarce, early humans could continue the difficult work of foraging and hunting small game on their own, or they could band together to take home the higher reward of an animal with more meat.
Chimps show no signs of this ability. “It is inconceivable,” Tomasello has said, “that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” In one of the earliest studies of chimpanzee cooperation, published in 1937, chimpanzees only worked together to pull in a board with food on it after they’d been extensively trained by an experimenter—they showed no natural ability to do it on their own. (Even when chimpanzees do collaborate, there’s been no evidence to date that they have the ability to adopt complementary roles in group efforts or establish a complex division of labor.)
The entire article is here.
The Atlantic
Originally posted on December 2, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
There are many theories for why humans became ultra-social. Tomasello subscribes to the idea that it’s at least partly a consequence of the way early humans fed themselves. After humans and chimpanzees diverged from their common ancestor around 6 million years ago, the two species adopted very different strategies for obtaining food: Chimpanzees, who eat mostly fruit, gather and eat the majority of their food alone; humans, by contrast, became collaborative foragers. The fossil record shows that as early as 400,000 years ago, they were working together to hunt large game, a practice that some researchers believe may have arisen out of necessity—when fruits and vegetables were scarce, early humans could continue the difficult work of foraging and hunting small game on their own, or they could band together to take home the higher reward of an animal with more meat.
Chimps show no signs of this ability. “It is inconceivable,” Tomasello has said, “that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” In one of the earliest studies of chimpanzee cooperation, published in 1937, chimpanzees only worked together to pull in a board with food on it after they’d been extensively trained by an experimenter—they showed no natural ability to do it on their own. (Even when chimpanzees do collaborate, there’s been no evidence to date that they have the ability to adopt complementary roles in group efforts or establish a complex division of labor.)
The entire article is here.
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Gordon Pennycook, Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, & Jonathan A. Fugelsang
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563
Abstract
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.
The entire paper is here.
Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 10, No. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563
Abstract
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.
The entire paper is here.
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