The construction of digital simulacra in healthcare and medical research purportedly strives to virtually recreate some aspect of reality, whether that be a piece of human tissue, an entire organ,...

Professional sports with high rates of concussion have become increasingly concerned about the long-term effects of multiple head injuries. In this context, return-to-play decisions about concussion generate considerable ethical tensions for sports physicians. Team doctors clearly have an obligation to the welfare of their patient (the injured athlete) but they also have an obligation to their employer (the team), whose primary interest is typically success through winning. At times, a team’s interest in winning may not accord with the welfare of (...) an injured player, particularly when it comes to decisions about returning to play after injury. Australia’s two most popular professional football codes—rugby league and Australian Rules football—have adopted guidelines that prohibit concussed players from continuing to play on the same day. I suggest that conflicts of interest between doctors, patients, and teams may present a substantial obstacle to the proper adherence of concussion guidelines. Concussion management guidelines implemented by a sport’s governing body do not necessarily remove or resolve conflicts of interest in the doctor–patient–team triad. The instigation of a concussion exclusion rule appears to add a fourth party to this triad (the National Rugby League or the Australian Football League). In some instances, when conflicts of interest among stakeholders are ignored or insufficiently managed, they may facilitate attempts at circumventing concussion management guidelines to the detriment of player welfare. (shrink)

Debates about the ethical and social implications of research that aims to extend human longevity by intervening in the ageing process have paid little attention to the attitudes of members of the general public. In the absence of empirical evidence, conflicting assumptions have been made about likely public attitudes towards life-extension. In light of recent calls for greater public involvement in such discussions, this target article presents findings from focus groups and individual interviews which investigated whether members of the general (...) public identify ethical issues surrounding life-extension, and if so, what these ethical issues are? In this study, while some participants were concerned primarily with the likely personal consequences of life-extension, for others the question of whether or not to pursue interventions to extend longevity, and how they should be implemented, clearly raised important ethical issues, many of which have been prominent in debates among bioethicists. (shrink)

There is currently little empirical information about attitudes towards cognitive enhancement - the use of pharmaceutical drugs to enhance normal brain functioning. It is claimed this behaviour most commonly occurs in students to aid studying. We undertook a qualitative assessment of attitudes towards cognitive enhancement by conducting 19 semi-structured interviews with Australian university students. Most students considered cognitive enhancement to be unacceptable, in part because they believed it to be unethical but there was a lack of consensus on whether it (...) was similar or different to steroid use in sport. There was support for awareness campaigns and monitoring of cognitive enhancement use of pharmaceutical drugs. An understanding of student attitudes towards cognitive enhancement is important in formulating future policy. (shrink)

Response Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11673-010-9253-3 Authors Brad Partridge, Program in Professionalism and Bioethics, Mayo Clinic, 200 First Street S.W., Rochester, MN 55905, USA Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529.

Head injuries are an inherent risk of participating in the major collision sports played in Australia. Protocols introduced by the governing bodies of these sports are ostensibly designed to improve player safety but do not prevent players suffering from repeated concussions. There is evidence that repeated traumatic brain injuries increase the risk of developing a number of long term problems but scientific and popular debates have largely focused on whether there is a causal link between concussion and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (...) We argue that the governing bodies of collision sports played in Australia have used uncertainty about CTE to justify a “wait and see” approach instead of attempting to prevent repeated head injuries. This stance is difficult to defend when these governing bodies claim to give a high priority to protecting player welfare. (shrink)

Neurodevices that collect neural (or brain activity) data have been characterised as having the ability to register the inner workings of human mentality. There are concerns that the proliferation of such devices in the consumer-directed realm may result in the mass processing and commercialisation of neural data (as has been the case with social media data) and even threaten the mental privacy of individuals. To prevent this, some argue that all raw neural data should be conceptualised and regulated as “medical (...) data” even if it is collected from consumer-directed devices in obviously non-clinical settings. In this paper, we argue that without a clearer formulation of what does and does not count as medical data, this approach might also uncritically enlarge the scope for medical influence and an unwarranted medicalisation of everyday aspects of mental life. Indeed, if we were to accept the position that all neural data is medical data because it offers insights into personally sensitive information (such a person’s thoughts, emotions, or intentions) then this could even unnecessarily expand the boundaries of medical data to other forms of data that otherwise seem to be non-clinical. If all brain data (neural activity data) is considered to be medical data even when collected from consumer-directed devices then we might unintentionally reduce meaningful distinctions between what is and what is not rightfully in the purview of medicine. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel view of the concept of cognitive enhancement by taking a population health perspective. We propose four main modifiable healthy lifestyle factors for optimal cognitive functioning across the population for which there is evidence of safety and efficacy. These include i) promoting adequate sleep, ii) increasing physical activity, iii) encouraging a healthy diet, including minimising consumption of stimulants, alcohol and other drugs including nicotine, iv) and promoting good mental health. We argue that it is not ethical (...) to promote or sanction the use of pharmaceutical drugs as putative cognitive enhancers without acknowledging the adverse effects on population cognitive health of failing to encourage the pursuit of healthy behaviours. We conclude with recommendations to increase the public health relevance of bioethical analyses of the cognitive enhancement debate. (shrink)

The use of polyurethane swimsuits at the 2009 World Aquatics Championships resulted in world records being set for almost all swimming events. This paper explores the implications that the use of these performance-enhancing swimsuits had on fairness in relative and absolute outcomes in swimming. I claim that the use of ?super swimsuits? unfairly influenced relative outcomes within the competition because not all swimmers used, or had access to, the same types of swimsuit (some of which were clearly ?faster? than others). (...) Furthermore, I claim that the use of performance-enhancing swimsuits by current competitors unfairly influences inter-temporal relative outcomes. It is evident that competitors and coaches in elite swimming place great importance on making inter-temporal comparisons on the basis of absolute outcomes in the sport (as measured by a swimmer's race time). A ban on the use of super swimsuits may be justified in order to preserve the fairness of such inter-temporal comparisons, and records set using performance-enhancing swimsuits at the 2009 World Championships should be demarcated from others. (shrink)

Debates about the ethical and social implications of research that aims to extend human longevity by intervening in the ageing process have paid little attention to the attitudes of members of the general public. In the absence of empirical evidence, conflicting assumptions have been made about likely public attitudes towards life-extension. In light of recent calls for greater public involvement in such discussions, this target article presents findings from focus groups and individual interviews which investigated whether members of the general (...) public identify ethical issues surrounding life-extension, and if so, what these ethical issues are? In this study, while some participants were concerned primarily with the likely personal consequences of life-extension, for others the question of whether or not to pursue interventions to extend longevity, and how they should be implemented, clearly raised important ethical issues, many of which have been prominent in debates among bioethicists. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 66-67, December 2011.

Concussion and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury affect millions of people worldwide. mTBI has been called the “signature injury” of the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, affecting thousands of active duty service men and women, and veterans. Sport-related concussion represents a significant public health problem, with elite and professional athletes, and millions of youth and amateur athletes worldwide suffering concussions annually. These brain injuries have received scant attention from neuroethicists, and the focus of this special issue is on defining the (...) ethical considerations and developing and elucidating the neuroethical contributions to the discussion about concussion and mTBI. (shrink)

The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injuries to the global medical and sport research communities, and has significantly impacted brain injury-related practices and rules of international sport. Despite being the global repository of state-of-the-art science, diagnostic tools and guides to clinical practice, the ensuing consensus statements remain the object of ethical and sociocultural criticism. The purpose of this paper is to bring to bear a broad range of multidisciplinary challenges to the processes and (...) products of sport-related concussion movement. We identify lacunae in scientific research and clinical guidance in relation to age, disability, gender and race. We also identify, through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis, a range of ethical problems resulting from conflicts of interest, processes of attributing expertise in sport-related concussion, unjustifiably narrow methodological control and insufficient athlete engagement in research and policy development. We argue that the sport and exercise medicine community need to augment the existing research and practice foci to understand these problems more holistically and, in turn, provide guidance and recommendations that help sport clinicians better care for brain-injured athletes. (shrink)

Dutch Book arguments have been presented for static belief systems and for belief change by conditionalization. An argument is given here that a rule for belief change which under certain conditions violates probability kinematics will leave the agent open to a Dutch Book.

The problem of the man who met death in Damascus appeared in the infancy of the theory of rational choice known as causal decision theory. A straightforward, unadorned version of causal decision theory is presented here and applied, along with Brian Skyrms’ deliberation dynamics, to Death in Damascus and similar problems. Decision instability is a fascinating topic, but not a source of difficulty for causal decision theory. Andy Egan’s purported counterexample to causal decision theory, Murder Lesion, is considered; a simple (...) response shows how Murder Lesion and similar examples fail to be counterexamples, and clarifies the use of the unadorned theory in problems of decision instability. I compare unadorned causal decision theory to previous treatments by Frank Arntzenius and by Jim Joyce, and recommend a well-founded heuristic that all three accounts can endorse. Whatever course deliberation takes, causal decision theory is consistently a good guide to rational action. (shrink)

The non-reductive physicalist would like to believe that mental properties are not identical to physical properties; that there are complete causal explanations of all events in terms of physical properties; and that there are sometimes explanations of events in terms of mental properties. However, some have argued that these claims cannot all be true, since they are collectively inconsistent with a principle of causal exclusion. In this paper I argue that the best formulation of the interventionist theory of causation entails (...) the falsity of the exclusion principle. However, I argue that it does so at the cost of revealing a weakness in the interventionist theory itself. (shrink)

The radical contingencies attending human reproduction indicate that attempts to improve the living conditions of future generations result in generations populated by different individuals than would otherwise have been born. This remarkable consequence challenges the widespread belief that the present generation has responsibilities to its remote successors. I contend, first, that while the radical genetic contingency and epistemological indeterminacy of future persons obsolves us of obligations to act "in behalf of" them as individuals, this moral absolution does not entail a (...) permission to disregard entirely the remote consequences of our policies. Since relevant moral principles bind us to persons in general, not to particular individuals, we remain obligated to improve the life prospects of whatever individuals eventually come into being. Second, I suggest that by applying an analogous argument within the lives of persons rather than to the long history of civilization, we arrive at the morally repugnant result of negating long-term obligations to contemporary persons. Conversely, the condition of continuity which affords moral legitimacy of personal obligations among contemporaries likewise entails moral responsibility for the life conditions of distant generations. (shrink)

Alan Carter correctly argues that Thomas Schwartz's 'future persons paradox' applies with equal force to utilitarianism, rights theory and Aristotelian ethics. His criticism of Rawls's 'justice between generations' is less successful, because of his failure (and perhaps Rawls's as well) to fully appreciate the hypothetical nature of the 'original position'. Cater's attempt to refute Schwartz's argument by focusing on the individuality of moral action fails, since it evades the essential point of Schwartz's argument. The best response to Schwartz is to (...) concede the essential validity of his argument and then to turn that argument into an ad absurdum refutation of his central premise, 'the person affecting principle'. (shrink)

What can rational deliberation indicate about belief? Belief clearly influences deliberation. The principle that rational belief is stake-invariant rules out at least one way that deliberation might influence belief. The principle is widely, if implicitly, held in work on the epistemology of categorical belief, and it is built into the model of choice-guiding degrees of belief that comes to us from Ramsey and de Finetti. Criticisms of subjective probabilism include challenges to the assumption of additive values (the package principle) employed (...) by defenses of probabilism. But the value-interaction phenomena often cited in such challenges are excluded by stake-invariance. A comparison with treatments of categorical belief suggests that the appeal to stake-invariance is not ad hoc. Whether or not to model belief as stake-invariant is a question not settled here. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 38, Issue 1, pp 71 - 105 Grotius’s theory of punishment provides a unique lens through which to view his evolving thought on sovereignty between _De Indis_ and _De iure belli ac pacis_ and the implications of that evolution for Grotius’s theory of the ius in bello. Throughout both works, Grotius attempted to leave open the possibility of private punishment and private warfare, a position not easily squared with prevailing views of sovereign authority. Initially, Grotius was content (...) with a theory marrying the private right of punishment with more traditional Scholastic views of sovereignty through a transfer of the private right from individuals into the hands of the sovereign. This theory also adopted traditional views of subject responsibility for sovereign acts—and, by extension, the exposure of subjects to punishment for the acts of their sovereign. By the time of his mature work, however, Grotius turned away from natural law justifications for collective responsibility and collective punishment, denying that subjects had to answer for the acts of their sovereign as a necessary incident of the compact creating civil society. This led Grotius to refer virtually all forms of collective responsibility, such as reprisal or punishment exacted through war, to the law of nations. This sharp reduction of the natural consequences of the creation of sovereign power also enabled Grotius’s argument that the private right of war, and in particular the private right of punishment, remained available after the creation of civil society. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kantattempts to unravel the problem of Übergang that threatens his CopernicanRevolution. Having opened up a ``chasm'' betweensensible and supersensible, betweenepistemological and ontological, Kant facesboth the specter of empirical chaos in whichthe noumenal refuses to conform to theunderstanding's attempts to legislate over themanifold of intuition, and the problem offinding a place for freedom to have effectswithin the seamless phenomenal realm ofefficient causality. Central to Kant's attemptto overcome these problems is his notion of theheautonomy of reflective judging, (...) in whichjudgment subjectively legislates its ownactivity. The net effect of this strategy isto preserve the integrity of the architectonicby permitting judgment use of ontologicalprinciples in regulating its own activity, butalways placing these ontological principlesunder an epistemological ``as if'' that cannot becarried over into the noumenal realm (e.g.,judgment can subjectively operate under theprinciple that the world appears ``as if'' it haspurpose, but this cannot be thought to apply tothe noumenal). Kant shields his architectonicby allowing it to encounter onlyepistemologically neutered noumena. This paperargues that Hick faces an analogousÜbergang problem, explores his``heautonomous'' attempt to blunt the problem,and concludes that the attempt fails, leavingHick with an unresolved problem of``onto-ethical discontinuity.''. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is to further a discussion of codes of ethics as institutionalized organizational structures that extend some form of legitimacy to organizations. The particular form of legitimacy is of critical importance to our analysis. After reviewing various theories of legitimacy, we analyze the literature on how legitimacy is derived from codes of ethics to discover which specific form of legitimacy is gained from their presence in organizations. We content analyze a sample of codes to consider the (...) question of whether a strategic, self-interested rationale lies behind the adoption of a code of ethics. We propose that the process of employing codes of ethics in this strategic manner has become, through isomorphism, an institutionalized practice that itself confers a cognitive form of legitimacy to the organization and further distances the codes from their moral foundation. (shrink)

An amateur photographer's astonishing collection of images that showcase the often unexpected psyche of a developing American suburb in the 1950s and 60s.

Neuroscience research has improved our understanding of the long term consequences of sports-related concussion, but ethical issues related to the prevention and management of concussion are an underdeveloped area of inquiry. This article exposes several examples of conflicts of interest that have arisen and been tolerated in the management of concussion in sport (particularly professional football codes) regarding the use of computerized neuropsychological (NP) tests for diagnosing concussion. Part 1 outlines how the recommendations of a series of global protocols for (...) dealing with sports-related concussions (the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Consensus Statements on Concussion in Sport) have endorsed the use of NP testing. The development of these protocols has involved experts who have links with companies that sell computerised NP tests for concussion management. Part 2 describes how some professional football leagues—in particular the National Football League (NFL), the Australian Football League (AFL) and the National Rugby League (NRL)—have mandated specific NP testing products. They have done so on the basis of these international guidelines and by engaging experts who have conflicts of interest with NP testing companies. These decisions have also been taken despite evidence that casts doubt on the reliability and validity of NP tests when used in these ways. (shrink)

According to color realism, object colors are mind-independent properties that cover surfaces or permeate volumes of objects. In recent years, some color scientists and a growing number of philosophers have opposed this view on the grounds that realism about color cannot accommodate the apparent unitary/binary structure of the hues. For example, Larry Hardin asserts, the unitary-binary structure of the colors as we experience them corresponds to no known physical structure lying outside nervous systems that is causally involved in the perception (...) of color. This makes it very difficult to subscribe to a color realism that is supposed to be about red, green, blue, black, and white—that is, the colors with which we are perceptually acquainted.1 Similarly, Evan Thompson says. (shrink)

Sequel to Armendt 1986, ‘A Foundation for Causal Decision Theory.’ The representation theorem for causal decision theory is slightly revised, with the addition of a new restriction on lotteries and a new axiom (A7). The discussion gives some emphasis to the way in which appropriate K-partitions are characterized by relations found among the agent’s conditional preferences. The intended interpretation of conditional preference is one that embodies a sensitivity to the agent’s causal beliefs.

This book reconstructs in detail the older Stoic theory of the psychology of action, discussing it in relation to Aristotelian, Epicurean, Platonic, and some of the more influential modern theories. Important Greek terms are transliterated and explained; no knowledge of Greek is required.

I defend an account of explanatory depth according to which explanations in the non-fundamental sciences can be deeper than explanations in fundamental physics.

I argue that van Fraassen’s selectionist explanation for the success of science is superior to the realists’ explanation. Whereas realists argue that our current theories are successful because they accurately reflect the structure of the world, the selectionist claims that our current theories are successful because unsuccessful theories have been eliminated. I argue that, unlike the explanation proposed by the realist, the selectionist explanation can also account for the failures of once successful theories and the fact that sometimes two competing (...) theories are both equally successful. (shrink)

Discussion of moral explanation has reached animpasse, with proponents of contemporaryethical naturalism upholding the explanatoryintegrity of moral facts and properties, andopponents – including both anti-realists andnon-naturalistic realists – insisting thatsuch robustly explanatory pretensions as moraltheory has be explained away. I propose thatthe key to solving the problem lies in thequestion whether instances of moral propertiesare causally efficacious. It is argued that,given the truth of contemporary ethicalnaturalism, moral properties are causallyefficacious if the properties of the specialsciences are. Certain objections are rebuttedinvolving (...) the nature of causation, on the onehand, and putative special features of themoral realm, on the other. (shrink)

Brad Inwood presents a selection of his most influential essays on the philosophy of Seneca, the Roman Stoic thinker, statesman, and tragedian of the first century AD. Including two brand-new pieces, and a helpful introduction to orient the reader, this volume will be an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand Seneca's fertile, wide-ranging thought and its impact on subsequent generations.

This paper begins by celebrating Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics. It then discusses Sidgwick's moral epistemology and in particular the coherentist element introduced by his argument from common-sense morality to utilitarianism. The paper moves on to a discussion of how common-sense morality seems more appealing if its principles are formulated as picking out pro tanto considerations rather than all-things-considered demands. Thefinal section of the paper considers the question of which version of utilitarianism follows from Sidgwick's arguments.