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

Monday, December 31, 2018

How free is our will?

Kevin Mitchell
Wiring The Brain Blog
Originally posted November 25, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Being free – to my mind at least – doesn’t mean making decisions for no reasons, it means making them for your reasons. Indeed, I would argue that this is exactly what is required to allow any kind of continuity of the self. If you were just doing things on a whim all the time, what would it mean to be you? We accrue our habits and beliefs and intentions and goals over our lifetime, and they collectively affect how actions are suggested and evaluated.

Whether we are conscious of that is another question. Most of our reasons for doing things are tacit and implicit – they’ve been wired into our nervous systems without our even being aware of them. But they’re still part of us ­– you could argue they’re precisely what makes us us. Even if most of that decision-making happens subconsciously, it’s still you doing it.

Ultimately, whether you think you have free will or not may depend less on the definition of “free will” and more on the definition of “you”. If you identify just as the president – the decider-in-chief – then maybe you’ll be dismayed at how little control you seem to have or how rarely you really exercise it. (Not never, but maybe less often than your ego might like to think).

But that brings us back to a very dualist position, identifying you with only your conscious mind, as if it can somehow be separated from all the underlying workings of your brain. Perhaps it’s more appropriate to think that you really comprise all of the machinery of government, even the bits that the president never sees or is not even aware exists.

The info is here.

Sunday, December 30, 2018

AI thinks like a corporation—and that’s worrying

Jonnie Penn
The Economist
Originally posted November 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Perhaps as a result of this misguided impression, public debates continue today about what value, if any, the social sciences could bring to artificial-intelligence research. In Simon’s view, AI itself was born in social science.

David Runciman, a political scientist at the University of Cambridge, has argued that to understand AI, we must first understand how it operates within the capitalist system in which it is embedded. “Corporations are another form of artificial thinking-machine in that they are designed to be capable of taking decisions for themselves,” he explains.

“Many of the fears that people now have about the coming age of intelligent robots are the same ones they have had about corporations for hundreds of years,” says Mr Runciman. The worry is, these are systems we “never really learned how to control.”

After the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, which killed 11 people and devastated the Gulf of Mexico, no one went to jail. The threat that Mr Runciman cautions against is that AI techniques, like playbooks for escaping corporate liability, will be used with impunity.

Today, pioneering researchers such as Julia Angwin, Virginia Eubanks and Cathy O’Neil reveal how various algorithmic systems calcify oppression, erode human dignity and undermine basic democratic mechanisms like accountability when engineered irresponsibly. Harm need not be deliberate; biased data-sets used to train predictive models also wreak havoc. It may be, given the costly labour required to identify and address these harms, that something akin to “ethics as a service” will emerge as a new cottage industry. Ms O’Neil, for example, now runs her own service that audits algorithms.

The info is here.

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Woman who inherited fatal illness to sue doctors in groundbreaking case

Robin McKie
The Guardian
Originally published November 25, 2018

Lawyers are bringing a case against a London hospital trust that could trigger major changes to the rules governing patient confidentiality. The case involves a woman who is suing doctors because they failed to tell her about her father’s fatal hereditary disease before she had her own child.

The woman discovered – after giving birth – that her father carried the gene for Huntington’s disease, a degenerative, incurable brain condition. Later she found out she had inherited the gene and that her own daughter, now eight, has a 50% chance of having it.

The woman – who cannot be named for legal reasons – says she would have had an abortion had she known about her father’s condition, and is suing the doctors who failed to tell her about the risks she and her child faced. It is the first case in English law to deal with a relative’s claim over issues of genetic responsibility.

“This could really change the way we do medicine, because it is about the duty that doctors have to share genetic test results with relatives and whether the duty exists in law,” said Anna Middleton, head of society and ethics research at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge.

The info is here.

Friday, December 28, 2018

The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm

Chelsea Schein & Kurt Gray
Personality and Social Psychology Review
Volume: 22 issue: 1, page(s): 32-70
Article first published online: May 14, 2017; Issue published: February 1, 2018

Abstract

The nature of harm—and therefore moral judgment—may be misunderstood. Rather than an objective matter of reason, we argue that harm should be redefined as an intuitively perceived continuum. This redefinition provides a new understanding of moral content and mechanism—the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). TDM suggests that acts are condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived harm. This harm is dyadic, involving an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable patient (A→P). TDM predicts causal links both from harm to immorality (dyadic comparison) and from immorality to harm (dyadic completion). Together, these two processes make the “dyadic loop,” explaining moral acquisition and polarization. TDM argues against intuitive harmless wrongs and modular “foundations,” but embraces moral pluralism through varieties of values and the flexibility of perceived harm. Dyadic morality impacts understandings of moral character, moral emotion, and political/cultural differences, and provides research guidelines for moral psychology.

The review is here.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

You Snooze, You Lose: Insurers Make The Old Adage Literally True

Justin Volz
ProPublica
Originally published November 21, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

In fact, faced with the popularity of CPAPs, which can cost $400 to $800, and their need for replacement filters, face masks and hoses, health insurers have deployed a host of tactics that can make the therapy more expensive or even price it out of reach.

Patients have been required to rent CPAPs at rates that total much more than the retail price of the devices, or they’ve discovered that the supplies would be substantially cheaper if they didn’t have insurance at all.

Experts who study health care costs say insurers’ CPAP strategies are part of the industry’s playbook of shifting the costs of widely used therapies, devices and tests to unsuspecting patients.

“The doctors and providers are not in control of medicine anymore,” said Harry Lawrence, owner of Advanced Oxy-Med Services, a New York company that provides CPAP supplies. “It’s strictly the insurance companies. They call the shots.”

Insurers say their concerns are legitimate. The masks and hoses can be cumbersome and noisy, and studies show that about third of patients don’t use their CPAPs as directed.

But the companies’ practices have spawned lawsuits and concerns by some doctors who say that policies that restrict access to the machines could have serious, or even deadly, consequences for patients with severe conditions. And privacy experts worry that data collected by insurers could be used to discriminate against patients or raise their costs.

The info is here.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Therapy Is No Longer a Politics-Free Zone

Peggy Drexler
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted November November 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

A May 2018 survey published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology—which devoted an entire issue to how mental health professionals can understand and deal with the dramatic increase in clients feeling politics-related anxiety—found that of 604 psychotherapy patients from 50 states, only 32 percent said their therapist didn’t disclose their political beliefs, while 30 percent said their therapists divulged their views and the other 38 percent said their therapists very clearly made their beliefs known. “The old rules are pretty straightforward: Don’t talk about it,” says Dr. Steven Schlozman. a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “But our country right now is so about what side you’re on that almost every interaction people have these days is characterized by that.”

Full disclosure may be surprising, but it isn’t necessarily unwelcome. A 2018 poll conducted by market research firm Branded Research found that 61 percent of more than 8,000 therapy patients surveyed say it is “very” or “somewhat” important that they and their therapist share the same political values. Manhattan clinical psychologist Sarah Gundle, the co-clinical director of Octave, a “behavioral health studio” that opened in October offering individual and group therapy—including support groups for those feeling politics-related stress or anxiety—recalls a recent patient who wanted to know where she stood.

The info is here.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Medical Ethicist Calls Trump Approved Medicaid Work Requirements Cruel

Jason Turesky
www.wgbh.org
Originally posted November 26, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Medical ethicist Art Caplan called the idea of Medicaid work requirements “cruel” on Boston Public Radio Monday, and believes there are no clear benefits to these new rules. “It’s not really something that I think is going to instill good habits or get people off Medicaid,” Caplan said.

Caplan pointed out that many of the people on Medicaid in Kentucky may not be physically able to fulfill the 80 hour requirement.

“Remember, the overwhelming majority of people on Medicaid in Kentucky, and every state, are disabled or children or single head of household females, so getting them out 80 hours per month to do anything is very difficult, unless we are going to re-institute child labor,” he said.

The info is here.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met

Emily Zulz
www.thinkadvisor.com
Originally posted November 16, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“Intuitions of master chess players when they look at the board [and make a move], they’re accurate,” he said. “Everybody who’s been married could guess their wife’s or their husband’s mood by one word on the telephone. That’s an intuition and it’s generally very good, and very accurate.”

According to Kahneman, who’s studied when one can trust intuition and when one cannot, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to trust one’s intuition.

The first is that there has to be some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn.

“So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it,” Kahnemen explained.

However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it.

“Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained.

The second condition for accurate intuition is “a lot of practice,” according to Kahneman.

And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.”

The info is here.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

Fresh urgency in mapping out ethics of brain organoid research

Julian Koplin and Julian Savulescu
The Conversation
Originally published November 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But brain organoid research also raises serious ethical questions. The main concern is that brain organoids could one day attain consciousness – an issue that has just been brought to the fore by a new scientific breakthrough.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, recently published the creation of brain organoids that spontaneously produce brain waves resembling those found in premature infants. Although this electrical activity does not necessarily mean these organoids are conscious, it does show that we need to think through the ethics sooner rather than later.

Regulatory gaps

Stem cell research is already subject to careful regulation. However, existing regulatory frameworks have not yet caught up with the unique set of ethical concerns associated with brain organoids.

Guidelines like the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research protect the interests of those who donate human biological material to research (and also address a host of other issues). But they do not consider whether brain organoids themselves could acquire morally relevant interests.

This gap has not gone unnoticed. A growing number of commentators argue that brain organoid research should face restrictions beyond those that apply to stem cell research more generally. Unfortunately, little progress has been made on identifying what form these restrictions should take.

The info is here.