Philosophy & Ethics

Our belief in evil influences our feelings about capital punishment, according to Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology at Kansas State University and Russell Webster at St. Mary's College of Maryland. They drew their conclusion after about 200 participants were given a summary of a case in which a murderer confessed to his crime. They then asked each participant about his or her support for different types of sentences, such as jail time with community service, jail time with the opportunity for parole, jail time without the possibility for parole and other options. They then…

If you have been purchasing Blue Buffalo pet food based on its rather suspicious claims about being "byproduct free", well, that is the power of marketing, no different than organic- and gluten-free manufacturers have created a similar health halo for their customers. But competitor Purina didn't like marketing claims that its pet food was inferior. On May 6, 2014, Purina filed a lawsuit against Blue Buffalo for false advertising after testing revealed the presence of poultry by-product meal in Blue Buffalo's top selling pet foods.  After originally claiming the testing was "Voodoo…

Not only that the Theory of Everything cannot be reached by empirical science. Experiment cannot even decide which medium level theory is correct and who was supposedly wrong. Precisely as when I throw a coin so that one me will find itself with heads while the one who will have found tails will be the one who has found tails, so also, at least as long as we have no certainty about what must be rather than what can be, it is equally conceivable that tomorrow we have found clear evidence for that black holes Hawking radiate while in another slightly different variety of worlds, we find…

By Lisa Marie Potter, Inside Science — A group of doctors clad in white lab coats smiles beneath the heading: "Standing behind your cancer care with nationally recognized excellence." The advertisement was part of the 2009 Dartmouth-Hitchcock health care marketing campaign promoting the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, which has locations in Vermont and New Hampshire. The ad focuses on the facility's reputation and backs up its claims by including its awards of recognition. Some cancer centers and hospitals focus on an individual patient's success story for a more emotional approach. Cancer-…

In America, the saying used to be 'my doctor should decide my medical treatment, not an insurance company'.  In Netherlands, Dutch doctors do decide, including whether to withhold or withdraw treatment in a substantial proportion of elderly patients. End of life decisions are not made by patients or their families. Why? It is not ageism, according to a survey in the Journal of Medical Ethics. It may be financial, since long-term care is paid for by the government, but survey respondents say they deny treatment out of respect for patients. Most commonly that means denying simple food and…

Surveying news headlines in recent years, it seems that cheating is rampant. In the athletic arena, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for using performance-enhancing drugs. In business, some of the world’s largest banks have paid nearly $200 billion – the equivalent of the GDP of New Zealand – in fines over the past six years for cheating. Numerous politicians, including Eliot Spitzer, the former Governor of New York, have been forced to resign after cheating on their spouses. Even academia has been rocked by cheating scandals, including recent test-taking…

Since it was revealed that Andreas Lubitz – the co-pilot who purposefully crashed Germanwings Flight 9525, killing 150 people – had been treated for psychiatric illness, a debate has ensued over whether privacy laws regarding medical records should be less strict when it comes to professions that carry special responsibilities. It has been widely argued that Germany’s privacy laws were to blame for the tragedy. The Times, for example, headlined an article: “German obsession with privacy let killer pilot fly.” Similarly, another article published in TIME said “German privacy laws let pilot ‘…

There may be unconscious race and social class biases in trauma and acute-care clinicians, according to a survey, but they did not affects clinical decisions finds an analysis in JAMA Surgery. Unconscious racism? That is the goal of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), it does not try to find out if you are biased, but rather to measure the strength of a person's automatic associations under the assumption that every is biased, even if they have never done anything biased. Unconscious attitudes in this case were assessed according to the speed with which respondents pressed computer keys as a…

The marketing, prescribing and selling of testosterone and growth hormone as panaceas for age-related problems is disease mongering, write the authors of a paper in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society . Disease mongering is inventing new broader definitions of disease in conjunction with widespread marketing to increase sales of specific drugs and therapies. Thomas Perls, MD, MPH, FACP, a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center and professor of Geriatrics and Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, and David Handelsman, MB BS, FRACP, PhD, professor of Reproductive Endocrinology…

The 2015 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures report found that only 45 percent of people with Alzheimer's disease or their caregivers were told the diagnosis by their doctor. That is significantly lower than the 90 percent of people told the diagnosis for the four most common cancers. Why? The reason most commonly cited by health care providers for not disclosing an Alzheimer's diagnosis is fear of causing the patient emotional distress but, according to the report, "studies that have explored this issue have found that few patients become depressed or have other long-term…