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

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Trump eyes mental institutions as answer to gun violence

Kevin Freking
Associated Press
Originally published August 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

But Trump’s support for new “mental institutions” is drawing pushback from many in the mental health profession who say that approach would do little to reduce mass shootings in the United States and incorrectly associates mental illness with violence.

Paul Gionfriddo, president and chief executive of the advocacy group Mental Health America, said Trump is pursuing a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem.

“Anybody with any sense of history understands they were a complete failure. They were money down the drain,” said Gionfriddo.

The number of state hospital beds that serve the nation’s most seriously ill patients has fallen from more than 550,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 38,000 in the first half of 2016, according to a survey from the Treatment Advocacy Center, which seeks policies to overcome barriers to treatment.

John Snook, the group’s executive director, said Trump’s language “hasn’t been helpful to the broader conversation.” But he said the president has hit on an important problem — a shortage of beds for the serious mentally ill.

“There are headlines every day in almost every newspaper talking about the consequences of not having enough hospital beds, huge numbers of people in jails, homelessness and ridiculously high treatment costs because we’re trying to help people in crisis care,” Snook said.

The info is here.

Allegations of sexual assault, cocaine use among SEAL teams prompt 'culture' review

Image result for navy sealsBarbara Starr
CNN.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

In the wake of several high-profile scandals, including allegations of sexual assault and cocaine use against Navy SEAL team members, the four-star general in charge of all US special operations has ordered a review of the culture and ethics of the elite units.

"Recent incidents have called our culture and ethics into question and threaten the trust placed in us," Gen. Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, said in a memo to the entire force.
While the memo did not mention specific incidents, it comes after an entire SEAL platoon was recently sent home from Iraq following allegations of sexual assault and drinking alcohol during their down time -- which is against regulations.

Another recent case involved an internal Navy investigation that found members of SEAL Team 10 allegedly abused cocaine and other illicit substances while they were stationed in Virginia last year. The members were subsequently disciplined.

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"I don't know yet if we have a culture problem, I do know that we have a good order and discipline problem that must be addressed immediately," Green said.

In early July, a military court decided Navy SEAL team leader Eddie Gallagher, a one-time member of SEAL Team 7, would be demoted in rank and have his pay reduced for posing for a photo with a dead ISIS prisoner while he was serving in Iraq. Another SEAL was sentenced in June for his role in the 2017 death of Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, a Green Beret, in Bamako, Mali.

The info is here.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Telehealth use jumps at inpatient settings

Shannon Muchmore
healthcaredive.com
Originally posted August 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Hospital-owned outpatient facilities were more likely to use telehealth than those not owned by hospitals. Outpatient facilities tended to use patient portals or apps more than inpatient respondents but also had broad adoption of hub and spoke models.

Still, providers in a variety of settings keeping a close watch on possibilities and wanting to stay at the forefront of the technology, said Kate Shamsuddin, SVP of strategy at Definitive.

The results "show how telehealth continues to be one of the core linchpins" for providers, she told Healthcare Dive.

The inpatient report found telehealth use jumped from 54% when the survey was first taken in 2014 to 85% in 2019. The most common model is hub and spoke (65%), followed by patient portals or apps (40%), concierge services (29%) and clinical- and consumer-grade remote patient monitoring.

The tech most often used in that setting was two-way video between physician and patient. That is also the category respondents said they were most likely to invest in for the future.​ Shamsuddin said hospitals and health systems tend to have a broader mixture in the types of technologies they use due to their larger budgets and scale.

The info is here.

AI Ethics Guidelines Every CIO Should Read

Image: Mopic - stock.adobe.comJohn McClurg
www.informationweek.com
Originally posted August 7, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Because AI technology and use cases are changing so rapidly, chief information officers and other executives are going to find it difficult to keep ahead of these ethical concerns without a roadmap. To guide both deep thinking and rapid decision-making about emerging AI technologies, organizations should consider developing an internal AI ethics framework.

The framework won’t be able to account for all the situations an enterprise will encounter on its journey to increased AI adoption. But it can lay the groundwork for future executive discussions. With a framework in hand, they can confidently chart a sensible path forward that aligns with the company’s culture, risk tolerance, and business objectives.

The good news is that CIOs and executives don’t need to come up with an AI ethics framework out of thin air. Many smart thinkers in the AI world have been mulling over ethics issues for some time and have published several foundational guidelines that an organization can use to draft a framework that makes sense for their business. Here are five of the best resources to get technology and ethics leaders started.

The info is here.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Psychologist Found Guilty of Sexual Assault During Psychotherapy

Richard Bammer
www.mercurynews.com
Originally published July 27, 2019

A Solano County Superior Court judge on Friday sentenced to more than 11 years behind bars a former Travis Air Force Base psychologist found guilty last fall of a series of felony sexual assaults on female patients and three misdemeanor counts.

After hearing victim impact testimony and statements from attorneys — but before pronouncing the prison term — Judge E. Bradley Nelson looked directly at Heath Jacob Sommer, 43, saying he took a version of exposure therapy “to a new level” and used his “position of trust” between 2014 and 2016 to repeatedly take advantage of “very vulnerable people,” female patients who sought his help to cope with previous sexual trauma while on active duty.

And following a statement from Sommer — “I apologize … I never intended to be offensive to people,” he said — Nelson enumerated the counts, noting the second one, rape, would account for the greatest number of years, eight, in state prison, with two other felonies, oral copulation by fraudulent representation and sexual battery by fraudulent means, filling out the balance.

Nelson added 18 months in Solano County Jail for three misdemeanor charges of sexual battery for the purpose of sexual arousal. He then credited Sommer, shackled at the waist in a striped jail jumpsuit and displaying no visible reaction to the sentence, with 904 days in custody. Additionally, Sommer will be required to serve 20 years probation upon release, register as a sex offender for life, and pay nearly $10,000 in restitution to the victims and other court costs.

The info is here.

Moral Obstinacy in Political Negotiations

Andrew Delton, Peter DeScioli, and
Timothy Ryan

Abstract:

Research in behavioral economics finds that moral considerations bear on the offers that people make and accept in negotiations. This finding is relevant for political negotiations, wherein moral concerns are manifold. However, behavioral economics has yet to incorporate a major theme from moral psychology: people differ, sometimes immensely, in which issues they perceive to be a matter of morality. We review research about the measurement and characteristics of moral convictions. We hypothesize that moral conviction leads to uncompromising bargaining strategies and failed negotiations. We test this theory in three incentivized experiments in which participants bargain over political policies with real payoffs at stake. We find that participants’ moral convictions are linked with aggressive bargaining strategies, which helps explain why it is harder to forge bargains on some political issues than others. We also find substantial asymmetries between liberals and conservatives in the intensity of their moral convictions about different issues.

Part of the Conclusion:

Looking across our studies, we see substantial convergence in how attitude facets relate to compromise. Specifically, both attitude extremity and moral conviction independently and consistently predicted tough bargaining strategies. In contrast, personal relevance did not affect bargaining, and importance had inconsistent effects. We suggest that the effect of extremity is to be expected because extremity is a sort of omnibus index of attitude strength (Visser et al. 2006, 56).  However, we think that the persistent effect of moral conviction merits further attention, since moral conviction is a less studied dimension of political attitudes. Moreover, the finding that moral conviction predicted resistance to compromise aligns with moral psychology research, which finds that people’s moral judgments are shaped by strong prohibitions and obligations that resist cost benefit considerations (e.g., Cushman 2013; Haidt 2012; Tetlock et al. 2000).

The research is here.

Monday, September 2, 2019

The next election is more about morality than policies. We must heal together.

The next election is more about morality than policies. We must heal together. | OpinionHuma Munir
The Sun Sentinel
Originally published August 9, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

As a Muslim-American, I deeply empathize with those who feel like outsiders. But I take comfort in the following words of the Holy Prophet Muhammad who said: “O people, your Lord is one, you are the progeny of the same father...”

There are people in this country who discriminate against those who have a different skin color or those who speak a different language. In fact, some of my Muslim friends have been told to take off their headcovering because “this is America.” This is hard to bear.

As a citizen of this country, it is hard to see fellow citizens act in such a barbaric manner. But the Holy Quran says our different skin colors and our different tongues are meant for “easy recognition” and nothing else (30:23).

The way to peace, unity and coexistence is realizing that our differences cannot erase our humanity. We must have compassion in our hearts for all people.

I would also encourage our political leaders to reject racism vehemently. President Trump needs to embrace pluralism rather than make people feel alienated in their own country. Our leaders should represent their citizens equally and without any discrimination.

The info is here.


The Robotic Disruption of Morality

John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published August 2, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

2. The Robotic Disruption of Human Morality

From my perspective, the most interesting aspect of Tomasello’s theory is the importance he places on the second personal psychology (an idea he takes from the philosopher Stephen Darwall). In essence, what he is arguing is that all of human morality — particularly the institutional superstructure that reinforces it — is premised on how we understand those with whom we interact. It is because we see them as intentional agents, who experience and understand the world in much the same way as we do, that we start to sympathise with them and develop complex beliefs about what we owe each other. This, in turn, was made possible by the fact that humans rely so much on each other to get things done.

This raises the intriguing question: what happens if we no longer rely on each other to get things done? What if our primary collaborative and cooperative partners are machines and not our fellow human beings? Will this have some disruptive impact on our moral systems?

The answer to this depends on what these machines are or, more accurately, what we perceive them to be. Do we perceive them to be intentional agents just like other human beings or are they perceived as something else — something different from what we are used to? There are several possibilities worth considering. I like to think of these possibilities as being arranged along a spectrum that classifies robots/AIs according to how autonomous or tool-like they perceived to be.

At one extreme end of the spectrum we have the perception of robots/AIs as tools, i.e. as essentially equivalent to hammers and wheelbarrows. If we perceive them to be tools, then the disruption to human morality is minimal, perhaps non-existent. After all, if they are tools then they are not really our collaborative partners; they are just things we use. Human actors remain in control and they are still our primary collaborative partners. We can sustain our second personal morality by focusing on the tool users and not the tools.

The blog post is here.

Sunday, September 1, 2019

There is no Universal Objective Morality

An Interview with Homi Bhabha
Interviewer: Paula Erizanu

Here is an excerpt:

What does that imply for human rights conventions?

Those who assert the absolute nature of morality are not aware of how much power – political and personal power – gets mixed into the moral idea. The same person who would kneel in church and pray for God’s notion of universal love and brotherhood would go and lynch a person of colour, or would do violence to an untouchable in India. So, morality has to be understood in terms of power and authority in addition to circumstances, cases, forms of interpretation.

Moralities  are enlightened recommendations about how to live your life in a way that is fair and responsible towards others. But at the same time, the question of morality gets so mixed in with political power, with issues of affect, making people anxious, nervous about their conditions, making people feel like they live in a world of insecurity and threat. You know, it’s a much more complex package than can be understood in terms of universal moralities on the one hand, or objective and subjective moralities on the other.

For a number of important legal and political reasons, we want to go with the UDHR and absolutely support the view that all people are born equal, that all people have a foundational dignity, and therefore deserve the protections and provisions of human rights. Having said that, we know from long and bitter experience that only too often states find ways of violating the human rights of their own peoples and the rights of other peoples and countries. They do so with a kind of international impunity, and if I may say so, a collusive insouciance.

There always seem to be forms of legal architecture – however well-intentioned – that make the perfect the enemy of the good, and that is putting it generously. On the negative side, executive orders and states of exception are the enemies of the good. Look at the way in which the basic human rights of Mexicans on the Texan border are being violated on a daily basis. Let me simply refer to a recent comment from the NYT that puts the issue poignantly and pointedly:

“In fact the migrants are mostly victims of the broken immigration system. They are not by and large killers, rapists or gang members. Most do not carry drugs. They have learned how to make asylum claims, just as the law allows them to do.”

The info is here.