Teaching economics has been shown to encourage students to defect in a prisoner's dilemma game. However, can ethics training reverse that effect and promote cooperation? We conducted an experiment to answer this question. We found that students who had the ethics module had higher rates of cooperation than students without the ethics module, even after controlling for communication and other factors expected to affect cooperation. We conclude that the teaching of ethics can mitigate the possible adverse incentives of the prisoner's (...) dilemma, and, by implication, the adverse effects of economics and business training. (shrink)
Beyond Consent examines the concept of justice, and its application to human subject research, through the different lenses of various research populations: children, the vulnerable sick, captive and convenient populations, women, people of colour, and subjects in international settings. Separate chapters address the evolution of research policies, implications of the concept of justice for the future of human subject research, and the ramifications of this concept throughout the research enterprise.
Public health raises critical ethics issues and concerns, making public heath ethics an essential topic for students and public health professionals. The 73 chapters in this volume examine public health ethics across a broad range of public health topics both in the U.S. and globally. It is the first ever comprehensive collection devoted to public health ethics.
This paper examines varieties of naiveté manifested in the world of sport. In particular, I examine epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical naiveté. My contention is that virtually from cradle to grave forms of naiveté toward sport are present. We are tempted and all too often succumb to the temptation to accept appearances. But the initial appearances of sport often disappoint, and the underlying reality that confronts us is sometimes a hard reality. Faced with disappointment and exposed illusions, one’s next step may (...) be to adopt a hermeneutics of suspicion towards sport. There is no going back to the earlier naive stance. But is this the final word on the matter? Once one has adopted a critical perspective towards sport, is it possible to join the hermeneutics of suspicion to what Wendy Doniger refers to as a “hermeneutics of retrieval”? That is, after the first naiveté toward sport is exposed as inadequate, is it possible to arrive at what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls a “second naiveté.. (shrink)
It has been proposed that inferring personal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one’s action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would . Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator – consistency between one’s action and a subsequent event – was manipulated, and its effects on binding (...) and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency enhanced both binding and self-reported authorship, supporting the hypothesis that binding arises from an inference of authorship. At the same time, evidence for a dissociation emerged, with consistency having a more robust effect on self-reports than on binding. Taken together, these results suggest that binding and self-reports reveal different aspects of the sense of authorship. (shrink)
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on every aspect of our social, cultural and commercial lives, including the world of sport. This book examines the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the intersection of COVID-19 and sport. The book goes beyond simple description of the impact of the pandemic on sport to offer normative judgments about how the sporting world responded to challenges posed by COVID-19, as well as philosophical speculation as to how COVID-19 will change our understanding and appreciation (...) of sport in the long term. It examines the considerations that either influenced - or arguably should have influenced - decisions to continue or to resume the playing of organized sport in the midst of a pandemic. As a part of this analysis, a spotlight is shone on how sport intersected with political issues surrounding COVID-19. It also explores the configuration and meaning of sport in the COVID-19 era, touching on themes such as the nature of sport, and its integrity, and sport's relationship to technology. Other themes include the changed nature of spectatorship, suffering in sport during pandemic times, and the impact of COVID-19 on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. A final chapter looks ahead and asks what sport might look like in a post-COVID world. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the ethics and philosophy of sport, the sociology of sport, event studies, politics or public health. (shrink)
Resolving the Vexing Question of Credentialing: Finding the Aristotelian Mean Content Type Journal Article Pages 263-273 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9100-2 Authors Jeffrey P. Spike, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit, Director of the Campus Wide Ethics Program 6431 Fannin, JJL 400 Houston Texas 77030 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 3.
Of Goals and Goods and Floundering About: A Dissensus Report on Clinical Ethics Consultation Content Type Journal Article Pages 275-291 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9101-1 Authors Jeffrey P. Bishop, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Joseph B. Fanning, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Mark J. Bliton, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, (...) Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 3. (shrink)
This book investigates the chaotic end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean through the lens of Homeric poetry, with an emphasis on the description of piratical activities described in the Odyssey’s “Second Cretan Lie,” and on the impact of revolutionary seafaring technology in this watershed period in Mediterranean history.
Erratum to: Echo Calling Narcissus: What Exceeds the Gaze of Clinical Ethics Consultation? Content Type Journal Article Pages 171-171 DOI 10.1007/s10730-010-9132-7 Authors Jeffrey P. Bishop, Saint Louis University Tenet Chair of Health Care Ethics, Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics Salus Center, Room 527, 3545 Lafayette Ave St. Louis MO 63104-1314 USA Joseph B. Fanning, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Ave., 4th Floor, Suite 400 Nashville TN 37203 USA Mark J. Bliton, Vanderbilt (...) University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Ave., 4th Floor, Suite 400 Nashville TN 37203 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 22 Journal Issue Volume 22, Number 2. (shrink)
Belief in free will is widespread. The present research considered one reason why people may believe that actions are freely chosen rather than determined: they attribute randomness in behavior to free will. Experiment 1 found that participants who were prompted to perform a random sequence of actions experienced their behavior as more freely chosen than those who were prompted to perform a deterministic sequence. Likewise, Experiment 2 found that, all else equal, the behavior of animated agents was perceived to be (...) more freely chosen if it consisted of a random sequence of actions than if it consisted of a deterministic sequence; this was true even when the degree of randomness in agents’ behavior was largely a product of their environments. Together, these findings suggest that randomness in behavior—one’s own or another’s—can be mistaken for free will. (shrink)
Informed consent is the single most important concept for understanding decision-making capacity. There is a steady pull in the clinical world to transform capacity into a technical concept that can be tested objectively, usually by calling for a psychiatric consult. This is a classic example of medicalization. In this article I argue that is a mistake, not just unnecessary but wrong, and explain how to normalize capacity assessment.Returning the locus of capacity assessment to the attending, the primary care doctor, and (...) even to ethics consultation in today's environment will require a substantial effort to undo a strong but illusory impression of capacity assessment. Hospital attorneys as well as clinical ethicists with a sophisticated understanding of health law can be in the vanguard of this reorientation. (shrink)
In this paper, a new method of quantitatively assessing continuity and discontinuity of visual attention is developed. The method is based on representing narrative information using graph theory. It is applicable to any type of narrative report. Since dream reports are often described as bizarre, and since bizarreness is partially characterized by discontinuities in plot, we chose to test our method on a set of dream data. Using specific criteria for identifying and arranging objects of visual attention, dream narratives from (...) 10 subjects were obtained and mapped onto graphs. The interrater reliabilities were 76% and 91% . Discontinuities in visual attention were quantified by plotting transitions from one part of a graph to another, which provided a spatiotemporal map of attention shifts within a narrative. This procedure was compared with other approaches to discontinuity and also applied to a set of 10 fantasy reports from the same subjects. The results showed that our method includes but transcends other approaches and has the capability to distinguish dream and fantasy reports. To our knowledge, the method provides the most rigorous and reliable measure to date of continuity and discontinuity of attention in narrative reports. (shrink)
The call for a narrative medicine has been touted as the cure-all for an increasingly mechanical medicine. It has been claimed that the humanities might create more empathic, reflective, professional and trustworthy doctors. In other words, we can once again humanise medicine through the addition of humanities. In this essay, I explore how the humanities, particularly narrative medicine, appeals to the metaphysical commitments of the medical institution in order to find its justification, and in so doing, perpetuates a dualism of (...) humanity that would have humanism as the counterpoint to the biopsychosociologisms of our day. (shrink)
In this paper I explore the nature, varieties, causes and meanings of comebacks related to sport. I argue that comebacks have an axiological dimension, and that the best comebacks involve personal growth. I attempt to show that a major reason that comebacks connected to sport are often inspiring is that we are all in need of a comeback at some point in our lives. When improbable comebacks occur in the world of sport, they expand our sense of possibility.
Technology tends toward perpetual innovation. Technology, enabled by both political and economic structures, propels society forward in a kind of technological evolution. The moment a novel piece of technology is in place, immediately innovations are attempted in a process of unending betterment. Bernard Stiegler suggests that, contra Heidegger, it is not being-toward-death that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. Rather, it is technological innovation that shapes human perception of time, life, death, and meaning. In fact, for Stiegler, (...) human evolution has always been part of technological evolution. While one can quibble with the notion of human-technology co-evolution, there is something to be said for the way in which human perception of time, of ageing, and of death seems to be judged against the horizon of perpetual evolution of technological innovation. In this technological imaginary, of which modern medicine is constituent, ageing and death seemingly may be infinitely deferred, and it is this innovating deferral that shapes the contemporary social imaginary around ageing and death in modern medicine. Yet, the reality of living and dying always manifests itself differently than the scripts given to us by the technological imaginary with its myth of endless innovation. In fact, I shall argue that, where the Church created an ars moriendi, the technological imaginary gives us an ars ad mortem when it becomes clear that ageing and death cannot be infinitely deferred. And further, I shall argue that the Church must revivify its ars vivendi—that is to say, its liturgies, its arts, its technics—as a counter narrative to the myth of perpetual innovation that shapes the technological imaginary. (shrink)
Guiding our response in this essay is our view that current efforts to demarcate the role of the clinical ethicist risk reducing its complex network of authorizations to sites of power and payment. In turn, the role becomes susceptible to various ideologies—individualisms, proceduralisms, secularisms—that further divide the body from the web of significances that matter to that body, where only she, the patient, is located. The security of policy, standards, and employment will pull against and eventually sever the authorization secured (...) by authentic moral inquiry. Instead of asking “What do I need to know?”, the question animating the drive to standardize will be “What is the policy or standard?” The claims of the authors in this issue of HEC Forum confirm these suspicions. (shrink)
It is a common refrain in sports discourse that one should try one's hardest in sports, or some other variation on this theme. In this paper I argue that there is no generalized duty to try one's hardest in sports, and that the claim that one should do so is ambiguous. Although a number of factors point in the direction of my conclusion, particularly salient is the claim that, in the end, the putative requirement is too stringent for creatures like (...) human beings. The putative duty to try one's hardest in sports does not comport with psychological realism. That being said, there are contexts in which it is reasonable to expect athletes to try hard. Perhaps there is even a duty to put forth such effort. Even so, this obligation does not rise to the level of a generalized duty to try one's hardest in sports. (shrink)
This paper explores three phenomena in sport that are connected to narratives of hope: underdogs, upsets, and overachievers. Each of these phenomena is complex. I seek not only to understand the intrinsic nature of these phenomena, but also to explain why they captivate the imagination. After exploring some partial explanations of their enduring appeal, I focus on how the drama associated with underdogs, upsets, and overachievers in sport illuminates the human condition and awakens our sense of possibility when the odds (...) are against us. (shrink)
It is commonly held that Christian ethics generally and Christian bioethics particularly is the application of Christian moral systems to novel problems engaged by contemporary culture and created by contemporary technology. On this view, Christianity adds its moral vision to a technology, baptizing it for use. In this essay, I show that modern technology is a metaphysical moral worldview that enacts its own moral vision, shaping a moral imaginary, shaping our moral perception, creating moral subjects, and shaping what we imagine (...) as moral intentions. In fact, modern technics has its own liturgics, which is foreign to Christian Divine Liturgy. Divine Liturgy is world forming, showing us a different world than the one that comes into relief in the ersatz liturgy of modern medical technics. (shrink)
I, along with others, have been critical of the social construction of brain death and the various social factors that led to redefining death from cardiopulmonary failure to irreversible loss of brain functioning, or brain death. Yet this does not mean that brain death is not the best threshold to permit organ harvesting—or, as people today prefer to call it, organ procurement. Here I defend whole-brain death as a morally legitimate line that, once crossed, is grounds for families to give (...) permission for organ donation. I do so in five moves. First, I make the case that whole-brain death is a social construction that transformed one thing, coma dépassé, into another thing, brain death, as a result of social pressures. Second, I explore the way that the 1981 President’s Commission tried to establish the epistemological certainty of brain death, hoping to avoid making arcane metaphysical claims and yet still utilizing metaphysical claims about human beings. Third, I explore the moral meaning of the social construction of a definition that cannot offer metaphysical certainty about the point at which somebody becomes just some body. Fourth, I describe how two moral communities—Jewish and Catholic—actually ground their metaphysical positions with regard to brain death in the normativity of prior social relations. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the aesthetic-moral enterprise of the metaphysical-epistemological apparatus of brain death, concluding that only such an aesthetic-moral approach is sufficiently strong to stave off the utility-maximizing tendencies of late-modern Western cultures. (shrink)
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind showcases the leading contributors to the field, debating the major questions in philosophy of mind today. Comprises 20 newly commissioned essays on hotly debated issues in the philosophy of mind Written by a cast of leading experts in their fields, essays take opposing views on 10 central contemporary debates A thorough introduction provides a comprehensive background to the issues explored Organized into three sections which explore the ontology of the mental, nature of the mental (...) content, and the nature of consciousness. (shrink)
To test the notion that shifts in visual imagery and attention are correlated with experiences of emotion, we studied 10 dream reports using an affirmative probe of emotion and a quantitative measure of plot discontinuity. We found that emotion, especially changes in emotion, are correlated with discontinuities in visual imagery. These correlations are quantified using a new graph theoretical method for analyzing narrative reports.
The process-dissociation procedure was used to estimate the influence of spatial and form-based processing in the Simon task. Subjects made manual responses to the direction of arrows . The results provide evidence that the form and spatial location of a single stimulus can have functionally independent effects on performance. They also indicate the existence of two kinds of automaticity—an associative component that reflects prior S-R mappings and a nonassociative component that reflects the correspondence between stimulus and response codes.
