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

Friday, February 5, 2016

Lawyer told police of client's alleged plot after speaking with ethics hotline

By Debra Cassens Weiss
American Bar Association Journal
Originally published January 12,2016

A Pennsylvania lawyer revealed his client’s alleged plot “take back” the home of his ex-girlfriend using an AR-15 rifle and body armor after consulting with the state bar’s ethics hotline, police say.

Revelations by the lawyer, Seamus Dubbs of York, likely saved lives, police say. The York Daily Record has a story.

The client, Howard Timothy Cofflin Jr., told police after his arrest that he planned to kill the ex-girlfriend as well as anyone who tried to stop him, according to court records cited by the York Daily Report. Charging documents said he planned to decapitate the ex-girlfriend and to go to war with state police, Pennlive.com reports. He also had a plan to bomb state police barracks, police said.

The article is here.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

French drug trial leaves one brain dead and five critically ill

By Angelique Chrisafis
The Guardian
Originally published January 15, 2916

Here is an excerpt:

Touraine said the study was a phase one clinical trial, in which healthy volunteers take the medication to “evaluate the safety of its use, tolerance and pharmacological profile of the molecule”.

Medical trials typically have three phases to assess a new drug or device for safety and effectiveness. Phase one entails a small group of volunteers and focuses only on safety. Phase two and three are progressively larger trials to assess the drug’s effectiveness, although safety remains paramount.

Testing had already been carried out on animals, including chimpanzees, starting in July, Touraine said.

Bial said it was committed to ensuring the wellbeing of test participants and was working with authorities to discover the cause of the injuries, adding that the clinical trial had been approved by French regulators.

The story is here.

Empathy can be learned by sharing positive experiences

Yahoo News
Originally published December 28, 2015

A study by researchers at the University of Zurich indicates that empathy towards strangers can be learned and that positive experiences with others influence empathic brain responses.

According to a recent Swiss study, we are all capable of feeling empathy towards strangers. By repeating positive experiences with strangers, our brain learns and develops empathic responses.

The article is here.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

What Make Us Cheat? Experiment 3

by Simon Oxenham
BigThink
Originally published January 13, 2016

Dan Ariely, the psychologist who popularised behavioral economics, has made a fascinating documentary exploring what makes us dishonest. I’ve just finished watching it and it’s something of a masterpiece of psychological storytelling, delving deep into contemporary tales of dishonesty, and supporting its narrative with cunningly designed experiments that have been neatly reconstructed for the film camera.

Social Norms

Whether or not we cheat has less to do with the probability of being caught, than whether or not we feel cheating is socially acceptable within our social circle.



The article is here.

Note: There is more research to show that those who witness unethical behavior in the workplace are more likely to engage in that unethical behavior if there are no consequences.

Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality

L. Ngo, M. Kelly, C. G. Coutlee, R. M. Carter, W. Sinnott-Armstrong & S. A. Huettel
Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 17390 (2015)
doi:10.1038/srep17390

Abstract

Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.

The article is here.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

The spreading of misinformation online

M. Del Vicarioa , A. Bessib , F. Zolloa , F. Petronic , A. Scalaa, G. Caldarellia, H. E. Stanley, and W. Quattrociocchia
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

The article is here.

What Makes Us Cheat? Experiment 2

by Simon Oxenham
BigThink
Originally published January 13, 2016

Dan Ariely, the psychologist who popularised behavioral economics, has made a fascinating documentary exploring what makes us dishonest. I’ve just finished watching it and it’s something of a masterpiece of psychological storytelling, delving deep into contemporary tales of dishonesty, and supporting its narrative with cunningly designed experiments that have been neatly reconstructed for the film camera.

Self-Deception



The article is here.

Monday, February 1, 2016

What Makes Us Cheat? Experiment 1

by Simon Oxenham
BigThink
Originally published January 13, 2016

Dan Ariely, the psychologist who popularised behavioral economics, has made a fascinating documentary exploring what makes us dishonest. I’ve just finished watching it and it’s something of a masterpiece of psychological storytelling, delving deep into contemporary tales of dishonesty, and supporting its narrative with cunningly designed experiments that have been neatly reconstructed for the film camera.

Matrix Experiments and Big Cheaters vs Little Cheaters




The article is here.

How You Justified 10 Lies (or Didn’t)

By Gerald Dworkin
The New York Times - The Stone
Originally published January 14, 2016

Thanks to Stone readers who submitted a response — there were more than 10,000 — to my article, “Are These 10 Lies Justified.” Judging from the number of replies, the task of determining when it is or is not acceptable to lie is obviously one that many people have faced in their own lives. Many of you gave your own examples of lies told and why you believed they were or were not justified. It was heartening to find so many people prepared to reason thoughtfully about important moral issues.

With few exceptions, readers disagreed with me about the legitimacy of one or more of the lies, all of which I believe are justified. (You can revisit the original article, here.)

The results, as well as the original scenarios that you were asked to respond to, are below.

The article is here.