The conventional paradigm for developing new treatments for disease mainly involves either the discovery of new drug targets, or finding new, improved drugs for old targets. However, an ion channel found only in invertebrates offers the potential of a completely new paradigm in which an established drug target can be re‐engineered to serve as a new candidate therapeutic agent. The L‐glutamate‐gated chloride channels (GluCls) of invertebrates are absent from vertebrate genomes, offering the opportunity to introduce this exogenous, inhibitory, L‐glutamate receptor (...) into vertebrate neuronal circuits either as a tool with which to study neural networks, or a candidate therapy. Epileptic seizures can involve L‐glutamate‐induced hyper‐excitation and toxicity. Variant GluCls, with their inhibitory responses to L‐glutamate, when engineered into human neurons, might counter the excitotoxic effects of excess L‐glutamate. In reviewing recent studies on model organisms, it appears that this approach might offer a new paradigm for the development of candidate therapeutics for epilepsy. (shrink)

Reasoning well about risk is most challenging when a woman is pregnant, for patient and doctor alike. During pregnancy, we tend to note the risks of medical interventions without adequately noting those of failing to intervene, yet when it's time to give birth, interventions are seldom questioned, even when they don't work. Meanwhile, outside the clinic, advice given to pregnant women on how to stay healthy in everyday life can seem capricious and overly cautious. This kind of reasoning reflects fear, (...) not evidence. (shrink)

Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted through books, spelling out their expectations through literary references as they corresponded during their frequent separations. Surprisingly, in the process Olivia Langdon reveals herself not as a hypochondriacal hysteric, as many twentieth-century critics have portrayed her, but as a thoughtful intellectual, widely read in literature, history and modern science. Not so surprisingly, Samuel Clemens reveals himself as a critic and a sceptic, lampooning Langdon's physics lessons and her literary heroines. (...) He also shows himself as an astute strategist, carefully manipulating Langdon and her parents. At the same time, Clemens's letters exhibit his own conservatism about women's nature and women's roles, while Langdon's show her carefully choosing from her culture's array of possible role models. (shrink)

An argument that moral functioning is immeasurably complex, mediated by biology but not determined by it. Throughout history, humanity has been seen as being in need of improvement, most pressingly in need of moral improvement. Today, in what has been called the beginnings of “the golden age of neuroscience,” laboratory findings claim to offer insights into how the brain “does” morality, even suggesting that it is possible to make people more moral by manipulating their biology. Can “moral bioenhancement”—using technological or (...) pharmaceutical means to boost the morally desirable and remove the morally problematic—bring about a morally improved humanity? In The Myth of the Moral Brain, Harris Wiseman argues that moral functioning is immeasurably complex, mediated by biology but not determined by it. Morality cannot be engineered; there is no such thing as a “moral brain.” Wiseman takes a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from philosophy, biology, theology, and clinical psychology. He considers philosophical rationales for moral enhancement, and the practical realities they come up against; recent empirical work, including studies of the cognitive and behavioral effects of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine; and traditional moral education, in particular the influence of religious thought, belief, and practice. Arguing that morality involves many interacting elements, Wiseman proposes an integrated bio-psycho-social approach to the consideration of moral enhancement. Such an approach would show that, by virtue of their sheer numbers, social and environmental factors are more important in shaping moral functioning than the neurobiological factors with which they are interwoven. (shrink)

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have gained a degree of prominence across recent moral enhancement literature as a possible intervention for dealing with antisocial and aggressive impulses. This is due to serotonin's purported capacity to modulate persons’ averseness to harm. The aim of this article is to argue that the use of SSRIs is not something worth getting particularly excited about as a practicable intervention for moral enhancement purposes, and that the generally uncritical enthusiasm over serotonin's potential as a moral (...) enhancer is a consequence of the paucity of viable options for envisaging practicable moral enhancement interventions. While there are many conceptual issues raised by the idea of moral enhancement generally, and by the idea of serotonin as a morally affective agent, the aim here is to look at practical concerns. It is argued that SSRIs do not, nor cannot in the reasonably foreseeable future, be made to work as a reliably safe or reliably effective means for moral enhancement, even within the very limited remit of treating “reactive” aggression. SSRIs might be effective as a limited and partial mental health intervention (even this is questionable), but not as a generally effective moral enhancement technology. (shrink)

Biomedical research is so important that there is a positive moral obligation to pursue it and to participate in itScience is under attack. In Europe, America, and Australasia in particular, scientists are objects of suspicion and are on the defensive.i“Frankenstein science”5–8 is a phrase never far from the lips of those who take exception to some aspect of science or indeed some supposed abuse by scientists. We should not, however, forget the powerful obligation there is to undertake, support, and participate (...) in scientific research, particularly biomedical research, and the powerful moral imperative that underpins these obligations. Now it is more imperative than ever to articulate and explain these obligations and to do so is the subject and the object of this paper.Let me present the question in its starkest form: is there a moral obligation to undertake, support and even to participate in serious scientific research? If there is, does that obligation require not only that beneficial research be undertaken but also that “we”, as individuals and “we” as societies be willing to support and even participate in research where necessary?Thus far the overwhelming answer given to this question has been “no”, and research has almost universally been treated with suspicion and even hostility by the vast majority of all those concerned with the ethics and regulation of research. The so called “precautionary approach”9 sums up this attitude, requiring dangers to be considered more likely and more serious than benefits, and assuming that no sane person would or should participate in research unless they had a pressing personal reason for so doing, or unless they were motivated by a totally impersonal altruism. International agreements and protocols—for example, the Declaration of Helsinki10 and the CIOMS Guidelines11—have been directed principally at …. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, literary theory has become peculiarly fascinated with what language cannot do, and with the impossibility of language meaning what the individual intends it to mean. In Interprive Acts, rather than ask whether communication is possible, Professor Harris explores the issues that arise from the question: how does communication occur?

Is there such a thing as a social conception of disability? Recently two writers in this journal have suggested not only that there is a coherent social conception of disability but that all non-social conceptions, or “medical models” of disability are fatally flawed. One serious and worrying dimension of their claims is that once the social dimensions of disability have been resolved no seriously “disabling” features remain. This paper examines and rejects conceptions of disability based on social factors but notes (...) that physical and mental conditions which disadvantage the individual have social dimensions. (shrink)

The article explores an aspect of spiritual intelligence characterized as a lifelong search for meaning. Slow knowing involves wrestling with perplexity. Periods of such tarrying gradually facilitate an unfolding of meaning. More than just the content of one's knowledge, it is the relationship, the how or manner of one's relationship with meaning that grounds the spiritual generativity of the seeking. Slow knowing is presented as an existential orientation, a lifelong process akin to ongoing conversion. Part 1 distinguishes such slow knowing (...) from other senses of slow in current discourse (Kahneman's fast/slow thinking framework, and meditative concepts of slow mind). Part 2 explores slow knowing through the lenses of lectio divina and the use of metaphor in religious language. Slow knowing is characterized as having both individual and social dimensions. The article concludes with the concern that the conditions needed for slow knowing—and thus for spiritual intelligence—are undermined by the hasty pace of contemporary life. (shrink)

The article explores the interaction of verbal and nonverbal semantic levels in the performance of Christian ritual. The article maps the distinction between theoretical and performative knowledge onto Barnard and Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Systems model to give a (partial) account of how meaning emerges in ritual participation. With Christian ritual, both know-how and know-that are needed. Above all, it is their interaction that generate the richness of meaning in ritual performance. Three core claims are made. First, many contemporary concepts of (...) ritual have at least one flaw in that they do not grasp the relationality between verbal and nonverbal, wherein both dimensions have a semantic integrity of their own. Second, there is an ideological valuation of the semantic levels. The experiential level is not only meaningful in its own right, but the fundamental ground of spiritual knowing. Third, combining learning styles and kinds of attention can be valuable for eliciting the full semantic richness of ritual participation. (shrink)

This introductory article to the thematic section on “Spiritual Intelligence” sets out the ways in which spiritual intelligence is currently conceptualized. Most prominently, spiritual intelligence is understood as an adaptive intelligence which enables people to develop their values, vision, and capacity for meaning. Questions arise as to whether spiritual intelligence is a distinct form of intelligence, and how to frame it if it is. It is questionable whether psychometric approaches justify concluding there is a distinct spiritual intelligence, and the authors (...) reject any notion of a God spot in the brain specifically dedicated to spiritual intelligence, which is a much more broadly embodied phenomenon. The authors suggest that spiritual intelligence most likely makes use of existing cognitive architecture, though applied in a distinctive way. This article finishes with a brief introduction to the four main articles in this thematic section, which present spiritual intelligence as a kind of participation in transcendent being. The four articles approach the cognitive, embodied, meditative, and ritual aspects of spiritual intelligence as participation. (shrink)

In this paper a plea is made for an unprincipled approach to biomedical ethics, unprincipled of course just in the sense that the four principles are neither the start nor the end of the process of ethical reflection. While the four principles constitute a useful “checklist” approach to bioethics for those new to the field, and possibly for ethics committees without substantial ethical expertise approaching new problems, it is an approach which if followed by the bioethics community as a whole (...) would, the author believes, lead to sterility and uniformity of approach of a quite mindbogglingly boring kind. Moreover, much of bioethics is not concerned with identifying the principles or values appropriate to a particular issue, but rather involves analysing the arguments that are so often already in play and which present themselves as offering solutions in one direction or another. Here, as I try to show in discussion of these four scenarios, the principles allow massive scope in interpretation and are, frankly, not wonderful as a means of detecting errors and inconsistencies in argument. (shrink)

How we engage in epistemic practice, including our methods of knowledge acquisition and transmission, the personal traits that help or hinder these activities, and the social institutions that facilitate or impede them, is of central importance to our lives as individuals and as participants in social and political activities. Traditionally, Anglophone epistemology has tended to neglect the various ways in which these practices go wrong, and the epistemic, moral, and political harms and wrongs that follow. In the past decade, however, (...) there has been a turn towards the non-ideal in epistemology. This volume gathers new works by emerging and world-leading scholars on a significant cross section of themes in non-ideal epistemology. Articles focus on topics including intellectual vices, epistemic injustices, interpersonal epistemic practices, and applied epistemology. In addition to exploring the various ways in which epistemic practices go wrong at the level of both individual agents and social structures, the papers gathered herein discuss how these problems are related, and how they may be addressed. -/- Contributors: Alison Bailey, Olivia Bailey, Simon Barker, Heather Battaly, Havi Carel, Quassim Cassam, Charlie Crerar, Miranda Fricker, Trystan S. Goetze, Heidi Grasswick, Keith Harris, Casey Rebecca Johnson, Ian James Kidd, and Alessandra Tanesini. (shrink)

In this article, I urge that mainstream discussions of abortion are dissatisfying in large part because they proceed in polite abstraction from the distinctive circumstances and meanings of gestation. Such discussions, in fact, apply to abortion conceptual tools that were designed on the premiss that people are physically demarcated, even as gestation is marked by a thorough-going intertwinement. We cannot fully appreciate what is normatively at stake with legally forcing continued gestation, or again how to discuss moral responsibilities to continue (...) gestating, until we appreciate in their own terms the goods and evils distinctive of gestational connection. To underscore the need to explore further the meanings of gestation, I provide two examples of the difference it might make to legal and moral discussions of abortion if we appreciate more fully that gestation is an intimacy. (shrink)

Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could one day pose an existential risk to humanity. Today, recent advancements in the field AI have been accompanied by a renewed set of existential warnings. But what exactly constitutes an existential risk? And how exactly does AI pose such a threat? In this chapter we aim to answer these questions. In particular, we will critically explore three commonly cited reasons for thinking that AI poses an existential (...) threat to humanity: the control problem, the possibility of global disruption from an AI race dynamic, and the weaponization of AI. (shrink)

NICE must not say people are not worth treatingThe National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has proposed that drugs for the treatment of dementia be banned to National Health Service patients on the grounds that their cost is too high and “outside the range of cost effectiveness that might be considered appropriate for the NHS”i.1This is despite NICE’s admission that these drugs are effective in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and despite NICE having approved even more expensive treatments. The (...) effect is that thousands of Alzheimer’s patients will be denied the only treatment available. It is difficult to think of this as anything but wickedness or folly or more likely both. At the same time, and with no apparent sense of irony, NICE has launched a public consultation document3 on its guidelines on social value judgments. As we shall see these guidelines are ethically illiterate as well as socially divisive.Assuming permanently scarce resources it is clearly crucial that such healthcare resources as are available are not wasted. This point is often made in terms of cost effectiveness and it is argued, not implausibly, that to talk of cost effectiveness implies that we are able to measure just how cost effective each treatment is. To do so of course we need a standard of measurement. NICE has adopted the ubiquitous, but justly infamous QALY, the Quality Adjusted Life Year.The QALY combines life expectancy after treatment with measures of the expected quality of that life. There are two ways in which QALYS can be used. They might be used to determine which of rival therapies to give to a particular patient or which procedure to use to treat a particular condition, in short which of two different treatments is the more …. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

This paper argues that the HFEA’s recent report on sex selection abdicates its responsibility to give its own authentic advice on the matters within its remit, that it accepts arguments and conclusions that are implausible on the face of it and where they depend on empirical claims, produces no empirical evidence whatsoever, but relies on reckless speculation as to what the “facts” are likely to be. Finally, having committed itself to what I call the “democratic presumption”, that human freedom will (...) not be constrained unless very good and powerful reasons can be produced to justify such infringement of liberty, the HFEA simply reformulates the democratic presumption as saying the opposite—namely that freedom may only be exercised if powerful justifications are produced for any exercise of liberty. (shrink)

The question of whether or not either elderly people or those whose life expectancy is short have commensurately reduced claims on their fellows, have, in short, fewer or less powerful rights than others, is of vital importance but is one that has seldom been adequately examined. Despite ringing proclamations of justice and equality for all, the fact is that most societies discriminate between citizens on the basis both of age and life expectancy.

The panic occasioned by the birth of Dolly sent international and national bodies and their representatives scurrying for principles with which to allay imagined public anxiety. It is instructive to note that principles are things of which such people and bodies so often seem to be bereft. The search for appropriate principles turned out to be difficult since so many aspects of the Dolly case were unprecedented. In the end, some fascinating examples of more or less plausible candidates for the (...) status of moral principles were identified; central to many of them is the idea of human dignity and how it might be affected by human mitotic reproduction. (shrink)

This article explores the overlap between systems biology and predictive neuroscience, placing them in their larger context, the contemporary trend of bioinformatic convergence across the sciences. These two domains overlap with respect to their interest in data accumulation and data integration; their reliance on computational statistical correlation; and their translational goals, that is, producing practical fruits and applications from the interscientific cross-pollination that contemporary data-integrative approaches make possible. The interventions that such translational conversations generate are medical and social in nature, (...) and are aimed at both prevention and treatment. It will be argued that such approaches, socially and medically applied, contain potential for conveying both agency-enhancing and agency-diminishing social messages. The article concludes with a call to balance the overwhelmingly quantitative focus characteristic of predictive neuroscience with more qualitative empirical methodologies. This would represent a double helical approach. (shrink)

I develop two different epistemic roles for emotion and desire. Caring for moral ends and people plays a pivotal though contingent role in ensuring reliable awareness of morally salient details; possession of various emotions and motives is a necessary condition for autonomous understanding of moral concepts themselves. Those who believe such connections compromise the "objective" status of morality tend to assume rather than argue for the bifurcated conception of reason and affect this essay challenges.

This paper sets out to discuss what precisely is meant by ‘‘benefit" when we talk of the requirement that the health care system concern itself with health gain or with maximizing beneficial health care. In particular I argue that in discharging the duty to do what is most beneficial we need to choose between rival conceptions of what is meant by beneficial. One is the patient's conception of benefit and the second is the provider's or funder's conception of benefit. I (...) argue that it is the patient's conception of benefit which is paramount and that if this is followed it commits us to a conception of patient care which must be blind to prognosis in so far as prognosis is thought to bear upon issues of prioritisation or resource allocation. (shrink)

This paper sets out to discuss what precisely is meant by ‘‘benefit" when we talk of the requirement that the health care system concern itself with health gain or with maximizing beneficial health care. In particular I argue that in discharging the duty to do what is most beneficial we need to choose between rival conceptions of what is meant by beneficial. One is the patient's conception of benefit and the second is the provider's or funder's conception of benefit. I (...) argue that it is the patient's conception of benefit which is paramount and that if this is followed it commits us to a conception of patient care which must be blind to prognosis in so far as prognosis is thought to bear upon issues of prioritisation or resource allocation. (shrink)

The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to eliminate or severely restrict access to legal abortion care in the United States. We a...