Philosophy & Ethics

You don't have to be a jerk to get the right thing done but sometimes out-of-the-box thinking requires some angry evangelism. Yet even legendary jerks like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison knew you can't use the belligerence strategy too often or the next brilliant idea you have could fall on deaf ears. Samuel Hunter of Pennsylvania State University and Lily Cushenbery of Stony Brook University, writing in the Journal of Business and Psychology, say jerks that are disagreeable by nature, overly confident, dominant, argumentative, egotistic, headstrong or sometimes even hostile are lauded, like…

It's the research that counts. Shutterstock By Ottoline Leyser, University of Cambridge I love my job. I’m trying to understand how plants build themselves out of thin air. It’s exciting, it’s creative, it’s beautiful and on top of all that it’s important and useful. I like working with other people with different perspectives and I like the sharing of ideas and the piece-by-piece building of understanding from careful observation, experiment and analysis. Then there are those rare eureka moments when suddenly something that was obscure makes sense and unconnected ideas fit together to make…

You can be a doctor without becoming an American citizen, people move here all of the time and go to medical school. They just do it legally. The US president has used an executive order to grant amnesty to an unknown number of illegal aliens currently residing in America and now a group of scholars writing in Academic Medicine contend that not only should people in the US be able to go to medical school if they apply, it is an ethical mandate. Not allowing these illegal immigrants - the government calls them "Dreamers" - to attend medical school "represents a kind of unjustified…

You might never know that you're hard of thinking. Robin Zebrowski/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Richard Pancost, University of Bristol It is an unfortunate paradox: if you’re bad at something, you probably also lack the skills to assess your own performance. And if you don’t know much about a topic, you’re unlikely to be aware of the scope of your own ignorance. Type in any keyword into a scientific search engine and a staggering number of published articles appears. “Climate change” yields 238,000 hits; “tobacco lung cancer” returns 14,500; and even the…

Knockaloe Camp. Stefan Manz By Stefan Manz, Aston University The German-Jewish painter and writer Paul Cohen-Portheim had spent a peaceful summer in 1914 visiting friends in Devon and enjoying the beautiful south-west coast. But his idyllic holiday came to an abrupt end after Britain’s entry into war on August 4. Despite there being no suggestion of any sympathy towards his homeland’s military ambitions, Cohen-Portheim was classified as an “enemy alien” and prevented from leaving the country. In May of 1915, he was interned in the Knockaloe Camp on the Isle of Man – and later in the…

This is a commonly used argument, indeed often taken for granted. We can simulate physics on a computer. So, the argument goes, what is to stop us eventually simulating your whole body including your brain? And if so, is it not just a matter of time, and increasing computer power before we have exact simulations of humans as computer programs? Programs whose behaviour is indistinguishable from humans? This is a staple of many science fiction stories of course. But some logicians, philosophers and physicists think there are flaws in this argument. We know the laws of physics are incomplete.…

Proof of life beyond earth is coming. Stargazing image via Shutterstock By David A. Weintraub, Vanderbilt University How will humankind react after astronomers hand over rock-solid scientific evidence for the existence of life beyond the Earth? No more speculating.  No more wondering. The moment scientists announce this discovery, everything will change. Not least of all, our philosophies and religions will need to incorporate the new information. Searching for signs of life Astronomers have now identified thousands of planets in orbit around other stars. At the current rate of…

Old fashioned scandals meet new-fangled complexity. Andy Dean Photography By Mark Israel, University of Western Australia Social scientists have to get better at recognizing and responding to ethical problems. Although economists, political scientists and psychologists have not been responsible for the same level of abuses that have occurred in biomedical research, the social sciences have witnessed their share of old-fashioned scandalous behavior. Social scientists were co-opted into American intelligence and military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Political scientists at Stanford…

How much risk can health workers be asked to take on? Mike Segar/Reuters By Catherine Womack, Bridgewater State University Taking care of sick people has always involved personal risk. From plague to tuberculosis to smallpox to SARS, health-care workers have put themselves in danger in the course of fulfilling their duties to care for others. Many have lost their lives doing just that. The current Ebola outbreak is taking a serious toll on health-care workers: as of now, 443 are infected, with 244 dead. In West Africa, conditions in treatment centers are harsh, and all workers are required…

In 2005, John Ioannidis wrote a paper in PLOS Medicine showing that most published research findings are false.  The reason is because research is subject to a range of biases which mean that misleading or useless work is sometimes pursued and published while work of value is ignored. The risks and rewards of academic careers, the structures and habits of peer reviewed journals, and the way universities and research institutions are set up and governed all have profound effects on what research scientists undertake, how they choose to do it and, ultimately, when it comes to medicine,…