Philosophy & Ethics
Since it is election season in America, we can expect a new wave of social psychology papers claiming that political liberals are smarter and more creative than political conservatives. It makes good mainstream news fodder, just like sexism in hurricane names does. Some of the articles will even bolster their case with fMRI images to seem scientific.
Outside people with confirmation bias, surveys of college students done by psychologists are easily dismissed, but what about genetic data? A paper in Neuron argues that genetic evidence for criminality may be on the horizon.
Some…
In the debate over government control of health care in the United States, critics looked at the UK system and its death panels, which drew an arbitrary line on when to stop treatment. Their recent efforts led to such an outcry that the government has said they were ending the incorrectly named Liverpool Care Pathway and its policy of subtle euthanasia.
Most ethicists in the UK have been in favor of letting government rather than doctors determine patient care but an Emeritus Professor of medical ethics at Imperial College London talking at this year's Euroanaesthesia meeting titled will at…
Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or "no code" status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing the same prognosis.
Hypocritical? No, Hippocratic.
Is that a good thing? You betcha.
V.J. Periyakoil, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine at
Stanford University Medical Center
and lead author of the paper, says it is a disconnect, but to the public it isn't. Making a personal choice is one thing, making a social authoritarian decision for a patient is quite another.
For…
The decision to jettison the controversial approach to dying known as the Liverpool Care Pathway was "too extreme" given that its principles were considered by proponents as the best examples of palliative care in the world, argues a senior ethicist in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
Ethicists have been in favor of the Liverpool Care Pathway, though they are also in favor of infanticide and abortion based on gender so factor their beliefs accordingly.
The
Liverpool Care Pathway
was intended to transfer hospice care to hospitals but once that separation between doctors and end of life…
Reprinted from Scientia Salon. You can read the original here.
It seems like my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson [1] has done it again: he has dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise, and actually advised bright students to stay away from it. It is not the first time Neil has done this sort of thing, and he is far from being the only scientist to do so. But in his case the offense is particularly egregious, for two reasons: first, because he is a highly visible science communicator; second, because I told him not to, several times.
Let’s start with the latest episode, work our way back to a…
For more than two decades, members of the United Nations have sought to forge an agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but international climate negotiations have had limited success.
Why? To start with, the motivations were suspect. During the original climate treaty negotiations, Kyoto, the primary drivers in Europe and France insisted on a 1990 target date. What was so special about 1990? Germany had reunified with East Germany, so meeting a 1990 target was easy - they just needed to close a bunch of high-pollution World War II-era Soviet factories. France added more nuclear…
The Dead Mouse Argument
By whatever choice of words it is often argued that because one thing leads to another, adverse consequences must inevitably follow if the opponent's proposed course of action is taken.
By whatever choice of words, the above purely rhetorical "proof" is a complete load of codswallop.
There are many names for an argument of the form that if we do P, then r,s,t ... z must inevitably follow. "The slippery slope" is well known, as is "the thin end of the wedge". Less well known, at least outside of law, are the "floodgates argument" from US and UK law and "the…
In modern NASA culture, extended spaceflight might as well be science fiction. The no-risk requirement coupled with volumes of employment criteria, rules and regulations were why the Constellation program was going to take far longer to go back to the moon than it took to go there in the first place and there is no serious manned exploration in the works.
Nonetheless, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, would like to get more funding to create a health framework and they even make a recommendation that is positively un-government-like: allow…
I mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching a graduate level seminar on David Hume, and having lots of fun with it. During a recent discussion of sections 4 and 5 of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (“Sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding” and “Sceptic al solutions of these doubts”) the concept of metaphysical necessity came up.
As is well known, Hume wasn’t very keen on metaphysics in general. One of the most famous quotes by him (in section 12 of the very same Enquiry) says: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for…
Can you buy ethics? Are scientists simply paid guns producing research for anyone that writes a check?
It's certainly a common cultural belief. Skeptics about global warming think that academics cozy up to politicians and apply for grants related to whatever is in the news while skeptics about medicine believe that if a researcher gets funding from anywhere except the government they are for sale. In reality, there is more disclosure and less conflict of interest that at any point in the history of science. There was a time when scientists had to read Tarot cards and make astrology charts for…