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

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Google Doesn't Want to Accidentally Make Skynet, So It's Creating an AI Off Switch

Darren Orf
Gizmodo
Originally posted June 3, 2017

There are two unmistakable sides to the debate concerning the future of artificial intelligence. In the “boom” corner are companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft aggressively investing in technology to make AI systems smarter and smarter. And in the “doom” corner are prominent thinkers like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who’ve said that AI is like “summoning the demon.”

Now, one of the the most advanced AI outfits, Google’s DeepMind, is taking safety measures in case human operators need to “take control of a robot that is misbehaving [that] may lead to irreversible consequences,” which I assume includes but is not limited to killing all humans. However, this paper doesn’t get nearly so apocalyptic and keeps examples simple, like intelligent robots working in a factory.

The article is here.

Creativity in unethical behavior attenuates condemnation and breeds social contagion when transgressions seem to create little harm

Scott S. Wiltermuth, Lynne C. Vincent, Francesca Gino
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 139, March 2017, Pages 106–126

Abstract

Across six studies, people judged creative forms of unethical behavior to be less unethical than less creative forms of unethical behavior, particularly when the unethical behaviors imposed relatively little direct harm on victims. As a result of perceiving behaviors to be less unethical, people punished highly creative forms of unethical behavior less severely than they punished less-creative forms of unethical behavior. They were also more likely to emulate the behavior themselves. The findings contribute to theory by showing that perceptions of competence can positively color morality judgments, even when the competence displayed stems from committing an unethical act. The findings are the first to show that people are judged as morally better for performing bad deeds well as compared to performing bad deeds poorly. Moreover, the results illuminate how the characteristics of an unethical behavior can interact to influence the emulation and diffusion of that behavior.

The article is here.

Monday, February 27, 2017

King Introduces End-of-Life Counseling Bill

Jan 11, 2017
Press Release

Congressman Steve King released the following statement after re-introducing the End-of-Life Counseling Bill:

“A year ago this month, the government increased control over one of the most highly personal healthcare decisions an individual can make when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began paying doctors to counsel patients about end-of-life care,” said King. “Allowing the federal government to marry its need to save dollars with the promotion of end-of-life counseling is not in the interest of millions of Americans who were promised life-sustaining care in their older years in exchange for their compelled funding of the program during their working years.

Furthermore, this exact provision was removed from the final draft of Obamacare in 2009 as a direct result of public outcry. The worldview behind the policy has not changed since then and government control over this intimate choice is still intolerable to those who respect the dignity of human life. My legislation prohibits Medicare payments for end-of-life counseling, blocking this harmful regulation before our government imposes yet another life-devaluing policy on the American people. ”

The bill is here.

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." -Pericles

Enhancing responsibility: Nicole Vincent at TEDxSydney 2014



Published on Jun 2, 2014

Performance enhancing has dominated debate in sport the world over. But what about in the rest of our lives? In this thought-provoking talk, Nicole Vincent discusses the fact that, whether we are aware of it or not, people have been actively pursuing ways and means to enhance their performance for years, even decades.

At work, while studying, or on stage, pressure to perform better is also increasing. This is being driven by many factors: competition, consumer demand, societal and even employer expectations. Dr Nicole Vincent proposes that with enhanced abilities comes greater responsibility. And, she says in this fascinating talk, unless we recognise and even regulate this new reality, our ability to choose may be lost.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

The Disunity of Morality

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
In Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality

Here is an excerpt:

What Is the Issue?

The question is basically whether morality is like memory. Once upon a time, philosophers and psychologists believed that memory is monolithic. Now memory is understood as a group of distinct phenomena that need to be studied separately (Tulving 2000). Memory includes not only semantic or declarative memory, such as remembering that a bat is a mammal, but also episodic memory, such as remembering seeing a bat yesterday. Memories can also be long-term or short-term (or working) memory, and procedural memory includes remembering how to do things, such as how to ride a bike.

Thus, there are many kinds of memory, and they are not unified by any common and distinctive feature. They are not even all about the past, since you can also remember timeless truths, such as that pi is 3.14159 …, and you can also remember that you have a meeting tomorrow, even if you do not remember setting up the meeting or even who set it up. These kinds of memory differ not only in their psychological profiles and functions but also in their neural basis, as shown by both fMRI and by patients, such as H. M., whose brain lesions left him with severely impaired episodic memory but largely intact procedural and semantic memory. Such findings led most experts to accept that memory
is not unified.

This recognition enabled progress. Neuroscientists could never find a neural basis for memory as such while they lumped together all kinds of memory. Psychologists could never formulate reliable generalizations about memory as long as they failed to distinguish kinds of memories. And philosophers could never settle how memory is justified if they conflated remembering facts and remembering how to ride a bicycle. Although these problems remain hard, progress became easier after recognizing that memory is not a single natural kind.

My thesis is that morality is like memory. Neither of them is unified, and admitting disunity makes progress possible in both areas. Moral neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy will become much more precise and productive if they give up the assumption that moral judgments all share a distinctive essence.

The book chapter is here.

Why We Love Moral Rigidity

Matthew Hutson
Scientific American
Originally published on November 1, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

We don't evaluate others based on their philosophical ideologies per se, Pizarro says. Rather we look at how others' moral decisions “express the kind of motives, commitments and emotions we want people to have.” Coolheaded calculation has its benefits, but we want our friends to at least flinch before personally harming others. Indeed, people in the study who had argued for pushing the man were trusted more when they claimed that the decision was difficult.

Politicians and executives should pay heed. Leading requires making hard trade-offs—is a war or a cut in employee benefits worth the pain it inflicts? According to Pizarro, “you want your leader to genuinely have or at least be really good at displaying the right kinds of emotions when they're talking about that decision, to show that they didn't arrive at it callously.” Calmly weighing costs and benefits may do the most good for the most people, but it can also be a good way to lose friends.

The article is here.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Sorry is Never Enough: The Effect of State Apology Laws on Medical Malpractice Liability Risk

Benjamin J. McMichaela, R. Lawrence Van Hornb, & W. Kip Viscusic

Abstract:
 
State apology laws offer a separate avenue from traditional damages-centric tort reforms to promote communication between physicians and patients and to address potential medical malpractice liability. These laws facilitate apologies from physicians by excluding statements of apology from malpractice trials. Using a unique dataset that includes all malpractice claims for 90% of physicians practicing in a single specialty across the country, this study examines whether apology laws limit malpractice risk. For physicians who do not regularly perform surgery, apology laws increase the probability of facing a lawsuit and increase the average payment made to resolve a claim. For surgeons, apology laws do not have a substantial effect on the probability of facing a claim or the average payment made to resolve a claim. Overall, the evidence suggests that apology laws do not effectively limit medical malpractice liability risk.

The article is here.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Make business ethics a cumulative science

Jonathan Haidt & Linda Trevino
Nature - Human Behavior


Business ethics research is not currently a cumulative science, but it must become one. The benefits to humanity from research that helps firms improve their ethics could be enormous, especially if that research also shows that strong ethics improves the effectiveness of companies.

Imagine a world in which medical researchers did experiments on rats, but never on people. Furthermore, suppose that doctors ignored the rat literature entirely. Instead, they talked to each other and swapped tips, based on their own clinical experience. In such a world medicine would not be the cumulative science that we know today.

That fanciful clinical world is the world of business ethics research. University researchers do experiments, mostly on students who come into the lab for pay or course credit. Experiments are run carefully, social and cognitive processes are elucidated, and articles get published in academic journals. But business leaders do not read these journals, and rarely even read about the studies second-hand. Instead, when they think and talk about ethics, they rely on their own experience, and the experience of their friends. CEOs share their insights on ethical leadership. Ethics and compliance officers meet at conferences to swap ‘best practices’ that haven't been research-tested. There are fads, but there is no clear progress.

The article is here.

Why Are Conservatives More Punitive Than Liberals? A Moral Foundations Approach.

Jasmine R. Silver and Eric Silver
Law and Human Behavior, Feb 02 , 2017,

Morality is thought to underlie both ideological and punitive attitudes. In particular, moral foundations research suggests that group-oriented moral concerns promote a conservative orientation, while individual-oriented moral concerns promote a liberal orientation (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Drawing on classical sociological theory, we argue that endorsement of group-oriented moral concerns also elicits higher levels of punitiveness by promoting a view of crime as being perpetrated against society, while endorsement of individual-oriented moral concerns reduces punitiveness by directing attention toward the welfare of offenders as well as victims. Data from 2 independent samples (N = 1,464 and N = 1,025) showed that endorsement of group-oriented moral concerns was associated with more punitive and more conservative attitudes, while endorsement of individual-oriented moral concerns was associated with less punitive and less conservative attitudes. These results suggest that the association between conservatism and punitiveness is in part spurious because of their grounding in the moral foundations. Consequently, studies that do not take the moral foundations into account are at risk of overstating the relationship between conservatism and punitiveness.

The abstract is here.