Jonathan Hiskes
medium.com
Originally posted April 3, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
The most dangerous consequence of the rise of medical crowdfunding, they argue, is the way it trains us to see health care as a personal good to be earned, rather than a universal human right. Other forums, like a public town hall, could provide room for debate on whether we want this state of affairs in our country. The format of GoFundMe steers users toward “hyper-individualized accounts of suffering.”
“Relying on these sites changes how we perceive the problem,” said Kenworthy. “It masks a more open conversation we could be having about the inequities of our health system. There’s no space for a structural critique in your personal appeal.”
In this way, crowdfunding functions as both a symptom and a cause of a health care system designed for austerity.
The article is here.
Monday, April 17, 2017
Who Oversees The President's Ethics?
Alina Selyukh and Lucia Maffei
Maine Public
Originally published March 27, 2017
President Trump continues to own hundreds of businesses around the world, and he has staffed his administration with wealthy people who have ties to a complex web of companies. Those financial entanglements have prompted government ethics experts to raise concerns about conflicts of interest.
They are worried that this president is violating the U.S. Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which bars elected officials from benefiting from foreign governments. Also, in various legal filings and lawsuits, they have raised questions about whether the financial interests of the president and his appointees may be influencing public policy.
As NPR and other media outlets continue to cover these concerns and conflicts of interest, a question frequently arises: Who oversees the ethics of the president and other high-ranking officials? Who has the power to investigate or enforce ethics rules and laws?
The answer can be as entangled as the government bureaucracies involved. Of course, the media, whistleblowers and the courts are key elements of the accountability ecosystem. A number of agencies or government bodies also have a hand in holding presidents and appointees accountable on ethics and conflicts of interest. But a few play an outsize role — though only some of them have direct purview over the activities of the president.
Below is a reference sheet.
The article is here.
Maine Public
Originally published March 27, 2017
President Trump continues to own hundreds of businesses around the world, and he has staffed his administration with wealthy people who have ties to a complex web of companies. Those financial entanglements have prompted government ethics experts to raise concerns about conflicts of interest.
They are worried that this president is violating the U.S. Constitution's Emoluments Clause, which bars elected officials from benefiting from foreign governments. Also, in various legal filings and lawsuits, they have raised questions about whether the financial interests of the president and his appointees may be influencing public policy.
As NPR and other media outlets continue to cover these concerns and conflicts of interest, a question frequently arises: Who oversees the ethics of the president and other high-ranking officials? Who has the power to investigate or enforce ethics rules and laws?
The answer can be as entangled as the government bureaucracies involved. Of course, the media, whistleblowers and the courts are key elements of the accountability ecosystem. A number of agencies or government bodies also have a hand in holding presidents and appointees accountable on ethics and conflicts of interest. But a few play an outsize role — though only some of them have direct purview over the activities of the president.
Below is a reference sheet.
The article is here.
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Yuval Harari on why humans won’t dominate Earth in 300 years
Interview by Ezra Klein
Vox.com
Originally posted March 27, 2017
Here are two excerpts:
I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence. But the thing is that AI will be far more cooperative, at least potentially, than humans. To take a famous example, everybody is now talking about self-driving cars. The huge advantage of a self-driving car over a human driver is not just that, as an individual vehicle, the self-driving car is likely to be safer, cheaper, and more efficient than a human-driven car. The really big advantage is that self-driving cars can all be connected to one another to form a single network in a way you cannot do with human drivers.
It's the same with many other fields. If you think about medicine, today you have millions of human doctors and very often you have miscommunication between different doctors, but if you switch to AI doctors, you don't really have millions of different doctors. You have a single medical network that monitors the health of everybody in the world.
(cut)
I think the other problem with AI taking over is not the economic problem, but really the problem of meaning — if you don't have a job anymore and, say, the government provides you with universal basic income or something, the big problem is how do you find meaning in life? What do you do all day?
Here, the best answers so far we've got is drugs and computer games. People will regulate more and more their moods with all kinds of biochemicals, and they will engage more and more with three-dimensional virtual realities.
The entire interview is here.
Vox.com
Originally posted March 27, 2017
Here are two excerpts:
I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence. But the thing is that AI will be far more cooperative, at least potentially, than humans. To take a famous example, everybody is now talking about self-driving cars. The huge advantage of a self-driving car over a human driver is not just that, as an individual vehicle, the self-driving car is likely to be safer, cheaper, and more efficient than a human-driven car. The really big advantage is that self-driving cars can all be connected to one another to form a single network in a way you cannot do with human drivers.
It's the same with many other fields. If you think about medicine, today you have millions of human doctors and very often you have miscommunication between different doctors, but if you switch to AI doctors, you don't really have millions of different doctors. You have a single medical network that monitors the health of everybody in the world.
(cut)
I think the other problem with AI taking over is not the economic problem, but really the problem of meaning — if you don't have a job anymore and, say, the government provides you with universal basic income or something, the big problem is how do you find meaning in life? What do you do all day?
Here, the best answers so far we've got is drugs and computer games. People will regulate more and more their moods with all kinds of biochemicals, and they will engage more and more with three-dimensional virtual realities.
The entire interview is here.
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Devin Nunes and the Ethics Watchdogs
Ryan Lizza
The New Yorker
Originally posted April 11, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Before taking office, Trump ignored the advice of the federal Office of Government Ethics, which publicly pressed him to operate under the same rules required for his Cabinet members and to fully divest from his business interests. As a result, a key question of the Trump era is whether he might be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits officials from receiving gifts from foreign states, when, for instance, foreign diplomats pay for rooms at Trump hotels. In January, crew filed a lawsuit over the emoluments issue, though several legal scholars have noted that the group may have a tough time making the case that it has standing to sue Trump.
Eisen, who is unfailingly optimistic, disagrees. “I think that the public awareness of this unethical governing environment has something to do with Trump’s mid-thirties approval ratings,” he said. “I think that our emoluments case is going to be the most impactful of all.”
The article is here.
The New Yorker
Originally posted April 11, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Before taking office, Trump ignored the advice of the federal Office of Government Ethics, which publicly pressed him to operate under the same rules required for his Cabinet members and to fully divest from his business interests. As a result, a key question of the Trump era is whether he might be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits officials from receiving gifts from foreign states, when, for instance, foreign diplomats pay for rooms at Trump hotels. In January, crew filed a lawsuit over the emoluments issue, though several legal scholars have noted that the group may have a tough time making the case that it has standing to sue Trump.
Eisen, who is unfailingly optimistic, disagrees. “I think that the public awareness of this unethical governing environment has something to do with Trump’s mid-thirties approval ratings,” he said. “I think that our emoluments case is going to be the most impactful of all.”
The article is here.
GAO to Review Ethics, Funding of Trump Transition
Eric Katz
Government Executive
Originally published April 11, 2017
The federal government’s internal auditor is commencing a review of President Trump’s transition into office, examining potential conflicts of interest, contacts with foreign government and funding sources.
The Government Accountability Office is launching the review after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., requested it. GAO will determine how the General Services Administration managed the transition and its funding mechanisms, what Trump’s transition spent those funds on and how much private funding it collected. The auditors will also probe the Office of Government Ethics to evaluate what information it made available to the transition team and to what extent Trump’s associates took advantage of OGE’s offerings versus the previous two transitions.
The article is here.
Government Executive
Originally published April 11, 2017
The federal government’s internal auditor is commencing a review of President Trump’s transition into office, examining potential conflicts of interest, contacts with foreign government and funding sources.
The Government Accountability Office is launching the review after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., requested it. GAO will determine how the General Services Administration managed the transition and its funding mechanisms, what Trump’s transition spent those funds on and how much private funding it collected. The auditors will also probe the Office of Government Ethics to evaluate what information it made available to the transition team and to what extent Trump’s associates took advantage of OGE’s offerings versus the previous two transitions.
The article is here.
Friday, April 14, 2017
The moral bioenhancement of psychopaths
Elvio Baccarini and Luca Malatesti
The Journal of Medical Ethics
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2016-103537
Abstract
We argue that the mandatory moral bioenhancement of psychopaths is justified as a prescription of social morality. Moral bioenhancement is legitimate when it is justified on the basis of the reasons of the recipients. Psychopaths expect and prefer that the agents with whom they interact do not have certain psychopathic traits. Particularly, they have reasons to require the moral bioenhancement of psychopaths with whom they must cooperate. By adopting a public reason and a Kantian argument, we conclude that we can justify to a psychopath being the recipient of mandatory moral bioenhancement because he has a reason to require the application of this prescription to other psychopaths.
The Journal of Medical Ethics
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2016-103537
Abstract
We argue that the mandatory moral bioenhancement of psychopaths is justified as a prescription of social morality. Moral bioenhancement is legitimate when it is justified on the basis of the reasons of the recipients. Psychopaths expect and prefer that the agents with whom they interact do not have certain psychopathic traits. Particularly, they have reasons to require the moral bioenhancement of psychopaths with whom they must cooperate. By adopting a public reason and a Kantian argument, we conclude that we can justify to a psychopath being the recipient of mandatory moral bioenhancement because he has a reason to require the application of this prescription to other psychopaths.
Ethical Guidelines on Lab-Grown Embryos Beg for Revamping
Karen Weintraub
Scientific American
Originally posted on March 21, 2017
For nearly 40 years scientists have observed their self-imposed ban on doing research on human embryos in the lab beyond the first two weeks after fertilization. Their initial reasoning was somewhat arbitrary: 14 days is when a band of cells known as a primitive streak, which will ultimately give rise to adult tissues, forms in an embryo. It is also roughly the last time a human embryo can divide and create more than one person, and a few days before the nervous system begins to develop. But the so-called 14-day rule has held up all this time partly because scientists could not get an embryo to grow that long outside its mother's body.
Researchers in the U.K. and U.S. recently succeeded for the first time in growing embryos in the lab for nearly two weeks before terminating them, showing that the so-called 14-day rule is no longer a scientific limitation—although it remains a cultural one. Now, a group of Harvard University scientists has published a paper arguing that it is time to reconsider the 14-day rule because of advances in synthetic biology.
The U.S. has no law against growing embryos beyond two weeks—as long as the research is not funded with federal dollars. But most scientific journals will not publish studies that violate the 14-day rule, and the International Society for Stem Cell Research requires its members to agree to the rule in order to qualify for membership.
The article is here.
Scientific American
Originally posted on March 21, 2017
For nearly 40 years scientists have observed their self-imposed ban on doing research on human embryos in the lab beyond the first two weeks after fertilization. Their initial reasoning was somewhat arbitrary: 14 days is when a band of cells known as a primitive streak, which will ultimately give rise to adult tissues, forms in an embryo. It is also roughly the last time a human embryo can divide and create more than one person, and a few days before the nervous system begins to develop. But the so-called 14-day rule has held up all this time partly because scientists could not get an embryo to grow that long outside its mother's body.
Researchers in the U.K. and U.S. recently succeeded for the first time in growing embryos in the lab for nearly two weeks before terminating them, showing that the so-called 14-day rule is no longer a scientific limitation—although it remains a cultural one. Now, a group of Harvard University scientists has published a paper arguing that it is time to reconsider the 14-day rule because of advances in synthetic biology.
The U.S. has no law against growing embryos beyond two weeks—as long as the research is not funded with federal dollars. But most scientific journals will not publish studies that violate the 14-day rule, and the International Society for Stem Cell Research requires its members to agree to the rule in order to qualify for membership.
The article is here.
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Humans selectively edit reality before accepting it
Olivia Goldhill
Quartz
Originally published March 26, 2017
Knowledge is power, so the saying goes, which makes it all the more striking how determined humans are to avoid useful information. Research in psychology, economics, and sociology has, over the course of several decades, highlighted countless examples of cases where humans are apt to ignore information. A review of these earlier studies by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature, shows the extent to which humans avoid information and so selectively edit their own reality.
Rather than highlighting all the myriad ways humans fail to proactively seek out useful information, the paper’s authors focus on active information avoidance: Cases where individuals know information is available and have free access to that information, yet choose not to consider it. Examples of this phenomenon, revealed by the previous studies, include investors not looking at their financial portfolios when the stock market is down; patients taking STD tests and then failing to obtain the results; professionals refusing to look at their colleagues’ feedback on their work; and even the propensity of wealthy people to avoid poor neighborhoods so they don’t feel awareness of and guilt over their own privilege.
The article is here.
Quartz
Originally published March 26, 2017
Knowledge is power, so the saying goes, which makes it all the more striking how determined humans are to avoid useful information. Research in psychology, economics, and sociology has, over the course of several decades, highlighted countless examples of cases where humans are apt to ignore information. A review of these earlier studies by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature, shows the extent to which humans avoid information and so selectively edit their own reality.
Rather than highlighting all the myriad ways humans fail to proactively seek out useful information, the paper’s authors focus on active information avoidance: Cases where individuals know information is available and have free access to that information, yet choose not to consider it. Examples of this phenomenon, revealed by the previous studies, include investors not looking at their financial portfolios when the stock market is down; patients taking STD tests and then failing to obtain the results; professionals refusing to look at their colleagues’ feedback on their work; and even the propensity of wealthy people to avoid poor neighborhoods so they don’t feel awareness of and guilt over their own privilege.
The article is here.
Identity change and informed consent
Karsten Witt
Journal of Medical Ethics
Published Online First: 20 March 2017.
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2016-103684
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on a kind of medical intervention that is at the same time fascinating and disturbing: identity-changing interventions. My guiding question is how such interventions can be ethically justified within the bounds of contemporary bioethical mainstream that places great weight on the patient's informed consent. The answer that is standardly given today is that patients should be informed about the identity effects, thus suggesting that changes in identity can be treated like ‘normal’ side effects. In the paper, I argue that this approach is seriously lacking because it misses important complexities going along with decisions involving identity changes and consequently runs into mistakes. As a remedy I propose a new approach, the ‘perspective-sensitive account’, which avoids these mistakes and thus provides the conceptual resources to systematically reflect on and give a valid consent to identity-changing interventions.
The article is here.
Editor's note: While this article deals with medical interventions, such as Deep Brain Stimulation, the similar concerns might be generalized to psychotherapy and/or psychopharmacology.
Journal of Medical Ethics
Published Online First: 20 March 2017.
doi: 10.1136/medethics-2016-103684
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on a kind of medical intervention that is at the same time fascinating and disturbing: identity-changing interventions. My guiding question is how such interventions can be ethically justified within the bounds of contemporary bioethical mainstream that places great weight on the patient's informed consent. The answer that is standardly given today is that patients should be informed about the identity effects, thus suggesting that changes in identity can be treated like ‘normal’ side effects. In the paper, I argue that this approach is seriously lacking because it misses important complexities going along with decisions involving identity changes and consequently runs into mistakes. As a remedy I propose a new approach, the ‘perspective-sensitive account’, which avoids these mistakes and thus provides the conceptual resources to systematically reflect on and give a valid consent to identity-changing interventions.
The article is here.
Editor's note: While this article deals with medical interventions, such as Deep Brain Stimulation, the similar concerns might be generalized to psychotherapy and/or psychopharmacology.
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