Procedural Moral Enhancement

G. Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu
Neuroethics  pp 1-12
First online: 20 April 2016

Abstract

While philosophers are often concerned with the conditions for moral knowledge or justification, in practice something arguably less demanding is just as, if not more, important – reliably making correct moral judgments. Judges and juries should hand down fair sentences, government officials should decide on just laws, members of ethics committees should make sound recommendations, and so on. We want such agents, more often than not and as often as possible, to make the right decisions. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of enhancing the moral reliability of such agents. In particular, we advocate for a procedural approach; certain internal processes generally contribute to people’s moral reliability. Building on the early work of Rawls, we identify several particular factors related to moral reasoning that are specific enough to be the target of practical intervention: logical competence, conceptual understanding, empirical competence, openness, empathy and bias. Improving on these processes can in turn make people more morally reliable in a variety of contexts and has implications for recent debates over moral enhancement.

The article is here.

Cadaver study casts doubts on how zapping brain may boost mood, relieve pain

By Emily Underwood
Science
Originally posted April 20, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Buzsáki expects a living person’s skin would shunt even more current away from the brain because it is better hydrated than a cadaver’s scalp. He agrees, however, that low levels of stimulation may have subtle effects on the brain that fall short of triggering neurons to fire. Electrical stimulation might also affect glia, brain cells that provide neurons with nutrients, oxygen, and protection from pathogens, and also can influence the brain’s electrical activity. “Further questions should be asked” about whether 1- to 2-milliamp currents affect those cells, he says.

Buzsáki, who still hopes to use such techniques to enhance memory, is more restrained than some critics. The tDCS field is “a sea of bullshit and bad science—and I say that as someone who has contributed some of the papers that have put gas in the tDCS tank,” says neuroscientist Vincent Walsh of University College London. “It really needs to be put under scrutiny like this.”

The article is here.

Editor's note:

This article represents the importance of science in the treatment of human suffering. No one wants sham interventions.

However, the stimulation interventions may work, and work effectively, in light of other models of how the brain functions. The brain creates an electromagnetic field that moves beyond the skull.  If the cadaver's brain is shut off, this finding may be irrelevant as the stimulation affects the field that moves beyond the skull.  In other words, how these stimulation procedures influence the electromagnetic field of the brain may be a better model to explain improvement.

Therefore, using dead people to nullify what happens in living people may not be the best standard to evaluate a procedure when researching brain activity.  It is a step to consider and may help develop a better working model of what actually happens with TMS.

By the way, scientists are not exactly certain how lithium or antidepressants work, either.

Where do minds belong?

by Caleb Scharf
Aeon
Originally published March 22, 2016

As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lately those strands have begun to merge. From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves.

These ruminations offer a potential solution to the long-debated Fermi Paradox: the seeming absence of intelligent alien life swarming around us, despite the fact that such life seems possible. If machine intelligence is the inevitable end-point of both technology and biology, then perhaps the aliens are hyper-evolved machines so off-the-charts advanced, so far removed from familiar biological forms, that we wouldn’t recognise them if we saw them. Similarly, we can imagine that interstellar machine communication would be so optimised and well-encrypted as to be indistinguishable from noise. In this view, the seeming absence of intelligent life in the cosmos might be an illusion brought about by our own inadequacies.

The article is here.

How Animals Think

By Alison Gopnik
The Atlantic
May 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Psychologists often assume that there is a special cognitive ability—a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form. De Waal points out various examples, and there are many more. New Caledonian crows make elaborate tools, shaping branches into pointed, barbed termite-extraction devices. A few Japanese macaques learned to wash sweet potatoes and even to dip them in the sea to make them more salty, and passed that technique on to subsequent generations. Western scrub jays “cache”—they hide food for later use—and studies have shown that they anticipate what they will need in the future, rather than acting on what they need now.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that these human abilities also appear in other species. After all, the whole point of natural selection is that small variations among existing organisms can eventually give rise to new species. Our hands and hips and those of our primate relatives gradually diverged from the hands and hips of common ancestors. It’s not that we miraculously grew hands and hips and other animals didn’t. So why would we alone possess some distinctive cognitive skill that no other species has in any form?

The article is here.

What I Learned From Tickling Apes

By Franz de Waal
New York Times Sunday Review
Originally posted on April 8, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

One reason this whole debate is as heated as it is relates to its moral implications. When our ancestors moved from hunting to farming, they lost respect for animals and began to look at themselves as the rulers of nature. In order to justify how they treated other species, they had to play down their intelligence and deny them a soul. It is impossible to reverse this trend without raising questions about human attitudes and practices. We can see this process underway in the halting of biomedical research on chimpanzees and the opposition to the use of killer whales for entertainment.

Increased respect for animal intelligence also has consequences for cognitive science. For too long, we have left the human intellect dangling in empty evolutionary space. How could our species arrive at planning, empathy, consciousness and so on, if we are part of a natural world devoid of any and all steppingstones to such capacities? Wouldn’t this be about as unlikely as us being the only primates with wings?

The article is here.

Neuroscience is changing the debate over what role age should play in the courts

By Tim Requarth
Newsweeek
Originally posted April 18, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The Supreme Court has increasingly called upon new findings in neuroscience and psychology in a series of rulings over the past decade (Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana) that prohibited harsh punishments—such as the death penalty and mandatory life without parole—for offenders under 18. Due to their immaturity, the argument goes, they are less culpable and so deserve less punishment than those 18 or older. In addition, because their wrongdoing is often the product of immaturity, younger criminals may have a greater potential for reform. Now people are questioning whether the age of 18 has any scientific meaning.

“People are not magically different on their 18th birthday,” says Elizabeth Scott, a professor of law at Columbia University whose work was cited in the seminal Roper case. “Their brains are still maturing, and the criminal justice system should find a way to take that into account.”

The article is here.

Letting them die: parents refuse medical help for children in the name of Christ

by Jason Wilson
The Guardian
Originally published April 15, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Mariah is 20 but she’s frail and permanently disabled. She has pulmonary hypertension and when she’s not bedridden, she has to carry an oxygen tank that allows her to breathe. At times, she has had screws in her bones to anchor her breathing device. She may soon have no option for a cure except a heart and lung transplant – an extremely risky procedure.

All this could have been prevented in her infancy by closing a small congenital hole in her heart. It could even have been successfully treated in later years, before irreversible damage was done. But Mariah’s parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.

As she grew sicker and sicker, Mariah’s parents would pray over her and use alternative medicine. Until she finally left home two years ago, she did not have a social security number or a birth certificate.

The article is here.

Complex ideas can enter consciousness automatically

Science Daily
Originally posted April 18, 2016

Summary

New research provides further evidence for 'passive frame theory,' the groundbreaking idea that suggests human consciousness is less in control than previously believed. The study shows that even complex concepts, such as translating a word into pig latin, can enter your consciousness automatically, even when someone tells you to avoid thinking about it. The research provides the first evidence that even a small amount of training can cause unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation.

Here is an excerpt:

This surprising effect offers further evidence that the contents of our consciousness -- the state of being awake and aware of our surroundings -- are often generated involuntarily, said Morsella, an assistant professor of psychology. In fact, the study published in the journal Acta Psychologica provides the first demonstration that even a small amount of training can cause unintentional, high-level symbol manipulation.

The article is here.

How Not to Explain Success

By Christopher Chabris and Joshua Hart
The New York Times - Gray Matter
Originally posted April 8, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

This finding is exactly what you would expect from accepted social science. Long before “The Triple Package,” researchers determined that the personality trait of conscientiousness, which encompasses the triple package’s impulse control component, was an important predictor of success — but that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were equally or even more important.

Our second finding was that the more successful participants did not possess greater feelings of ethnocentrism or personal insecurity. In fact, for insecurity, the opposite was true: Emotional stability was related to greater success.

Finally, we found no special “synergy” among the triple package traits. According to Professors Chua and Rubenfeld, the three traits have to work together to create success — a sense of group superiority creates drive only in people who also view themselves as not good enough, for example, and drive is useless without impulse control. But in our data, people scoring in the top half on all three traits were no more successful than everyone else.

The article is here.