Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze
By Doug McConnell
Recently a large, loosely coordinated group of individual ‘retail investors’ have been buying up stocks that certain hedge funds had bet against (i.e. ‘shorted’). In doing so, the retail investors have driven up the price of those stocks. This has caused hedge funds that shorted the stock to lose billions of dollars and enabled a number of retail investors to get rich in the process. The phenomenon is anthropologically interesting because it is symbolic of a shift in power away from the traditional Wall Street players towards less wealthy, less well-connected individuals. But what are the ethics of this? Did Average Joe Trader just bring a measure of justice to Wall Street? Or did the mob unethically manipulate the market? If they did, are their actions any more unethical than the usual behaviour of institutional investors? Continue reading
Dementia, Pagal, or Neurocognitive Disorder: What Is In a Name?
By Doug McConnell
A recent BBC news story has drawn attention to the fact that there isn’t a word for “dementia” in many South Asian languages and some South Asian people living in the UK still use the stigmatising Punjabi word “pagal”, meaning “crazy” or “mad”. The news story implicitly assumes that the word “dementia” is non-stigmatising but this is disputed. If the word “dementia” is itself stigmatizing, are anglophones really in a position to criticize other languages? Can we adopt a non-stigmatising word for dementia? Continue reading
Pandemic Ethics: Key Workers Have a Stronger Claim to Compensation and Hazard Pay for Working During The COVID-19 Pandemic Than The Armed Forces Do When on Deployment
By Doug McConnell and Dominic Wilkinson
Post originally appeared on the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog
While the general public enjoy the relative safety of social distancing, key workers are at a higher risk of both contracting COVID-19 and transmitting it to their families. This is especially the case for ‘frontline’ workers who are frequently exposed to the virus and may not have access to adequate personal protective equipment (PPE). Tragically, many key workers have died of COVID-19 around the world already, including over 100 in the UK.
Although it is relatively rare for key workers to die from COVID-19, the risk of death is obviously much greater than one would usually expect in these roles and key workers clearly have good reason to be anxious. For ‘frontline’ workers, the distress is compounded by working in harrowing conditions where so many are dying alone. Furthermore, frontline workers have to take on the burdens of ensuring they do not transmit infections to their families, by moving in with patients, living in hotels, or maintaining rigorous social distancing in their own homes.
These atypical costs, risks, and burdens suggest that key workers are owed compensation in addition to their usual pay and a few instances of nationally coordinated applause. Continue reading
Pandemic Ethics: How Much Risk Should Social Care Workers and Their Families Be Expected to Take?
By Doug McConnell
Recently many of the staff at an aged-care home in Sydney, Australia called in sick the day after the report of a CoVid-19 outbreak at that facility.1 Upon investigation of these absences, one of the reasons the workers gave was that they were concerned about protecting their own families. They didn’t want to act as a vector transferring the disease from the aged care home to their own homes. So how much risk should social care workers and their families be obliged to take when responding to infectious diseases like CoVid-19? Continue reading
Mr Broccoli Versus Piers Morgan: Hypocrisy and Environmental Action
Written by Doug McConnell
Everywhere we look environmentalists are being exposed as hypocrites. But is this relevant to the arguments these environmentalists are making and, if not, how can we improve the quality of public debate on environmental issues? Continue reading
Conscientious Objection, Professional Discretionary Space, and Good Medicine
By Doug McConnell
Some argue that good medicine depends on physicians having a wide discretionary space in which they can act on their consciences (Sulmasy, 2017). Interestingly, those who are against conscientious objection in medicine make the exact opposite claim – giving physicians the freedom to act on their consciences will undermine good medicine. So who is right here?
Should Religious Homophobia be a Firing Offence?
By Doug McConnell
It looks as if Isreal Folau will lose his job as a professional rugby player for expressing his apparently genuine religious belief that drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, and idolators are all going to hell. Morgan Begg, a research fellow at the Australian conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, has recently argued that this is the result of a “totalitarian” and “authoritarian desire to impose ideological orthodoxy on Australians.” I respond that it is, in fact, Begg’s ideological position that is more amenable to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Continue reading
Is Addiction an Expression of One’s Deep Self?
By Doug McConnell
Chandra Sripada (2016) has recently proposed a conative self-expression account of moral responsibility which claims that we are responsible for actions motivated by what we care for and not responsible for actions motivated solely by other desires. He claims that this account gives us the intuitively correct answers when used to assess the responsibility of Harry Frankfurt’s Willing Addict and Unwilling Addict. This might be true; however, I argue that it provides a counterintuitive assessment of real-world cases of addiction because it holds people struggling to recover morally responsible for their relapses. Continue reading
Harnessing the Power of Moral Identity to Improve Morality
Written by Doug McConnell
Over the last 25 years there has been an explosion of psychological research investigating the influence of ‘moral identity’ on agency with a recent meta-analysis of 111 studies concluding that people’s moral identity has as much of an effect on agency is either their moral emotion or powers of moral reasoning (Hertz & Krettenauer, 2016). Although the mainstream view of moral psychology is that moral self-concept plays a significant role in moral agency, the practical ethical implications of this view remain underexplored. Here, I argue that one of those implications is that, in situations where we need to improve morality, such as decision-making in the boardroom, consumer behaviour, and reform of criminal offenders, we should do so (in part) by developing people’s moral identities. Indeed, in many cases, changes to moral identity have the potential to efficiently deliver relatively large moral improvements. Continue reading
What’s Wrong With Simulation in Football?
Written by Doug McConnell
The 2018 edition of the football world cup has brought with it a renewed bout of hand wringing over ‘simulation’, e.g. players falling, diving, and tumbling under imaginary fouls, rolling around in mock pain, or clasping their faces pretending to have been hit. Stuart James writes in the Guardian that “play-acting has been commonplace at this World Cup. It’s become a cancer in the game, not just a stain on it, and Fifa needs to find a cure.” But what exactly is wrong with this behaviour? Why is the rise of this behaviour ‘a cancer in the game’? Continue reading
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