The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis provoked an organizational ethics dilemma: how to develop ethical pandemic policy while upholding our organizational mission to deliver relationship- and patient-centered care. Tasked with producing a recommendation about whether healthcare workers and essential personnel should receive priority access to limited medical resources during the pandemic, the bioethics department and survey and interview methodologists at our institution implemented a deliberative approach that included the perspectives of healthcare professionals and patient stakeholders in the policy development process. Involving (...) the community more, not less, during a crisis required balancing the need to act quickly to garner stakeholder perspectives, uncertainty about the extent and duration of the pandemic, and disagreement among ethicists about the most ethically supportable way to allocate scarce resources. This article explains the process undertaken to garner stakeholder input as it relates to organizational ethics, recounts the stakeholder perspectives shared and how they informed the triage policy developed, and offers suggestions for how other organizations may integrate stakeholder involvement in ethical decision-making as well as directions for future research and public health work. (shrink)

Tribal nations possess the inherent sovereign authority to protect the health and welfare of their people. Without equitable access to public health data, Tribal nations cannot fulfill this essential governmental duty. Federal, state, and local public health agencies must implement Tribal data sovereignty principles to support the exchange and protection of Tribal public health data. The adoption of Tribal data-sharing agreements can provide a framework for strengthening Tribal data sovereignty and recognizing a Tribe’s inherent right to collect and manage their (...) data. (shrink)

I argue that, if naturalistic dualism about consciousness is true, there are many conscious beings in the immediate vicinity of each of us. I give two arguments for this conclusion: an argument from analogy and an argument from inference to the best explanation. Both adapt traditional arguments for the existence of other minds. Together, they pose a novel challenge to naturalistic dualism. They also undermine a recent family of arguments for dualism in general and for substance dualism in particular.

Is it good to have a body? This question seems interesting, but hard to get a grip on, because all familiar welfare subjects have bodies. But we may soon be able to make AI welfare subjects that do not. This prospect helps us imagine what a disembodied life might be like, and compels us to assess its value. I argue that it is good to have a body—both for humans and for AIs. Embodiment provides what I call _physical agency_, constituted (...) by sensory awareness and the capacity to directly and intentionally affect the physical world. I argue that physical agency is an intrinsic welfare good by considering cases in which it is absent or limited and by situating it in a broader picture of the good life. I assess the implications for philosophy of disability, and defend an analogy from human to AI welfare. (shrink)

Medical Humanities the journal started life in 2000 as a special edition of the JME. However, the intellectual taproots of the medical humanities as a field of enquiry can be traced to two developments: calls made in the 1920s for the development of multidisciplinary perspectives on the sciences that shed historical light on their assumptions, methods and practices; refusals to assimilate all medical phenomena to a biomedical worldview. Medical humanities the term stems from a desire to situate the significance of (...) medicine as a product of culture. But despite growing usage over half a century the term defies a unifying encapsulation and continues to conjure up a multitude of discourse communities, including scholars working at the interfaces of health and humanities, arts and health, and medical education and bioethics. The field is intellectually capacious and polymorphous, forming and reforming around critical new research questions and teaching tasks spanning disciplines. (shrink)

The cognitive science of religion has made significant progress in explaining how general human cognitive tendencies give rise to concepts of invisible, powerful, and knowing agents. What these accounts do not fully explain is how the four-feature god concept — adding benevolent responsiveness to human solicitation to the three features already accounted for — could have arisen simultaneously from a single lived experience rather than by piecemeal cultural assembly. This paper proposes such an account. An elder in a pre-religious clan, (...) rather than resisting a problem, elects to accept it fully and deal with its consequences as they arrive. She notices that when she adopts this strategy of acceptance, unexpected events frequently solve the problem for her. It occurs to her that there must be an invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful being willing to solve her problems when she trusts it to do so. She has inferred all four features of the god concept — invisibility, omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolent responsiveness — simultaneously from a single repeating experience, without prior religious instruction and without tacking benevolence onto a pre-existing concept of a powerful agent. The subjectivity objection — that she has fooled herself — is rebutted by the structure of the experience: the resolution arrives not when she expects it but only after she has abandoned any expectation of it. The scenario is distinguished from petitionary prayer, connected to the near-universal religious critique of egotism, and compared to the ontological argument. (shrink)

Bioethics case reports generally treat aspects of moral fathomability, characterised and addressed in different ways. This paper reads the case as a textual model of scenarios and draws attention to its structure, narrative shape, linguistic register, and the effects of tone and temporality on reader expectation and responsiveness. Such textual elements of case composition reflect authorial purpose and influence the interpretation, including moral and ethical interpretation, of bioethics cases.

Beliefs can subjectively shape our perception of the external world so as to reflect and confirm themselves. To deter this, scientists objectively suspend their beliefs so that they perceive, not what they believe or expect, but what is actually there. No raw perception is exonerated from doubt and no scientist is considered immune to bias. This paper asks what the implications would be if even the initial perception that the world is external arose from some unacknowledged belief. It may be (...) that the ego is merely a belief that we are autonomous observers of the world, and that this belief is reflected in the illusory perception that the world is external. If so, then suspending that belief should dissolve the perception of externality and reveal a non-dual reality in which self and world are unified. This echoes the mystical experience of oneness, and is achieved in the same way, by relinquishing our attachment to the self. Thus, idealist realism proposes, not that the external world is not real, but that the real world is not external. This unity of self and world might also account for a second religious phenomenon — divine intervention, the solicitude of the world toward those who trust and accept it rather than resisting it by acting to compel it to change. Finally, the paper proposes a conventional experiment designed to evaluate the hypothesis that externality reflects autonomy. (shrink)

Beliefs can subjectively shape our perception of the external world so as to reflect and confirm themselves. To deter this, scientists objectively suspend their beliefs so that they perceive, not what they believe or expect, but what is actually there. No raw perception is exonerated from doubt and no scientist is considered immune to bias. This paper asks what the implications would be if even the initial perception that the world is external arose from some unacknowledged belief. It may be (...) that the ego is merely a belief that we are autonomous observers of the world, and that this belief is reflected in the illusory perception that the world is external. If so, then suspending that belief should dissolve the perception of externality and reveal a non-dual reality in which self and world are unified. This echoes the mystical experience of oneness, and is achieved in the same way, by relinquishing our attachment to the self. Thus, idealist realism proposes, not that the external world is not real, but that the real world is not external. This unity of self and world might also account for a second religious phenomenon — divine intervention, the solicitude of the world toward those who trust and accept it rather than resisting it by acting to compel it to change. Finally, the paper proposes a conventional experiment designed to evaluate the hypothesis that externality reflects autonomy. (shrink)

The identification of additional subunits of the cGMP-gated cation channel suggests exciting questions about their regulatory roles and about structure/functional relationships. How do the different subunits interact? How is the complex assembled into the plasma membrane? Divalent cations have been implicated in the regulation of adaptation. One often overlooked cation is magnesium. Could this ion play a role in phototransduction?

The first part of the book, dedicated to 'Rhetorical and Epistemological Aspects of Science Writing', addresses how scientific pursuits and methods feed into multi-level texts that generate responses within science, society, and culture.

A widely accepted component of any answer to the question ‘What is it to do good medical ethics?’ is the commitment to benefit people's health, in principlist terminology, ‘beneficence’. This paper addresses deliberate maleficence and the cultural otherness with which it is associated, focusing on the activities of the serial killer Dr Harold Shipman. It finds an uncanny ‘fit’ between the normal operation of healthcare services and this sort of alterity which has attracted little attention from bioethicists but has been (...) addressed by novelists. To the extent that the medical humanities offers useful insights into hard moral problems, its capacities rest on taking account of both the fictional and the real. (shrink)

A general practitioner (GP) recounts events which unfolded after visiting a patient at home. She was found to be suffering from an entirely curable clinical condition which was worsening as a result of refusal to accept effective medical treatment. The effects upon a grown-up son of the patient's refusal, and the increasing burden of care falling upon local district nursing services, were factors which influenced the GP's thinking and decision making.

The term “listening niche” refers to the contexts in which people listen to music including what music they are listening to, with whom, when, where, and with what media. The first experiment investigates undergraduate students’ music listening niches in the initial COVID-19 lockdown period, 4 weeks immediately after the campus shut down abruptly. The second experiment explores how returning to a hybrid semester, the “new normal,” further affected these listening habits. In both experiments, the participants provided a list of their (...) most frequently listened-to songs during the respective period of time. From these, they identified one song that seemed most associated with this period, their “signature song,” and stated why this song seemed relevant. These reasons were coded on nine underlying themes. Three clusters were found to underlie the themes: emotional responses memory associations, and discovery of new music. We identified songs and reasons for selecting them that represented the three clusters and related these to the lyrical content. Compared to before the pandemic, participants in both experiments report listening more in general and on Spotify, but there were no differences in listening between lockdown and the new normal. Whom they were listening with shifted overtime from family members to significant others and finally to other friends and roommates. These results demonstrate how students listen to and find new music that is meaningful to them during this unprecedented pandemic. (shrink)

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The diverse array of plants at Kew is a haven for wildlife throughout the year. In spring, enchanting wildlfowl babies appear; summer flowers attract a host of insect pollinators; come autumn, parakeets and squirrels raid chestnuts, while in winter swans court – this is Heather Angel’s Wild Kew. In all, a stunning array of photographs and advice, the result of devoting a year to capturing Kew’s wildlife.

Philosophers have long speculated that individual differences in temperament influence philosophical thinking, yet empirical research has rarely explored the role of neurodivergent traits in this domain. In this large online study (N = 1,254), we investigated whether participants with training in philosophy differ from the general population when it comes to six psychological traits – autism, ADHD, aphantasia, anendophasia, anauralia, and representational manipulation – and also whether these traits correlate with responses to two widely studied philosophical thought experiments: the “trolley (...) problem” and the “rollback deterministic universe.” Compared to the general population, participants with training in philosophy had higher scores on measures of ADHD, internal verbalization, and representational manipulation, but lower scores on measures of visual imagery. These cognitive traits were also correlated with participants’ moral and metaphysical judgments (independent of their level of philosophical training) – e.g. participants who scored higher in visualization were less likely to judge that hitting the switch in the trolley problem is permissible but not obligatory, and also less likely to attribute free will and moral responsibility to agents in the rollback universe. Finally, we employed machine learning to develop predictive models that classify a randomly selected participant as either a philosopher or a non-philosopher. Models trained solely on responses to measures for neurodivergent traits achieved better performance than models trained solely on responses to philosophical thought experiments. This suggests that stable, trait-level neurodivergent characteristics may be more diagnostic of philosophical interest, aptitude, or training than judgments philosophers make on domain-relevant problems. (shrink)

I argue that it is better to live an extremely long, drab life than a happy life of normal length. I rely on four premises, concerning (1) the separability of well-being in time, (2) the circumstances in which we should prolong someone’s life, (3) the shape-of-a-life hypothesis, and (4) tradeoffs between different levels of well-being within a life. I show that the conclusion has implications for the Millian lexical superiority view and for population ethics. It may also have implications for (...) the well-being of animals in captivity and artificially intelligent welfare subjects. (shrink)

I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it (...) sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Whenever justification of classroom punishment has been attempted it has usually been on grounds that punishment acts either appropriately pedagogically, teaching students how to behave morally, or is a necessary evil that enables the practical running of the school so that it may carry out its educational business. By itself the first justification leaves punishment in schools as only an extension of wider social attitudes about the virtue of punishing perceived moral wrongdoing, rather than providing any distinct argument for punishment (...) specific to the special circumstances of the school. By highlighting an entanglement between the moral and the conventional, and between discipline and punishment, within the context of the school, I shall argue that the essentially contested nature of education and its purpose, and the related question of the school’s suitability as a venue for it, means that the school’s most promising defence of its use of punishment—that punishment of students might somehow be necessary for enabling the important educative business of the school—becomes undone. Schooling and education are not necessarily synonymous, and as schools provide only one vision of education—and this vision is contestable—then upholding the business of any one school in order for it to achieve its particular unsettled and disputed purpose is not a morally sufficient reason to coerce a student’s compliance through regimes of ‘harm intended as harm’. (shrink)

A conventional experiment is proposed to resolve the realist/idealist debate by challenging the premise that double blinding and an attitude of objectivity in general deter the corroborative influence which preconceptions exert on perception. The possibility that objectivity enhances corroboration would not contradict empirical findings, and would account for the success of science.

A simple propositional operator is introduced which generalizes pairwise equivalence and occurs widely in mathematics. Attention is focused on a replacement theorem for this notion of generalized equivalence and its use in producing further generalized equivalences.