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Oxford Martin School Seminar: Robert Rogers and Paul Van Lange on Social Dilemmas

In a joint event on November 15th, Prof Robert Rogers and Prof Paul van Lange presented their scientific work related to social dilemmas.

Social dilemmas are situations in which private interests conflict with collective interests. This means that people facing a social dilemma have to decide whether to prioritise either their own short-term interests or the long-term interests of a group. Many real-life situations are social dilemmas. For example, as individuals we would (economically) benefit from using public motorways without paying taxes to maintain them, but if all acted according to their self-interest, no motorways would be built and the whole society would be worse off. In the academic literature, the three types of social dilemmas that are discussed most prominently are the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Public Goods Dilemma, and the Tragedy of the Commons. All three types have been modelled as experimental games, and research from different fields like psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural economics uses these games to tackle the question of under which conditions people are willing to cooperate with one another in social dilemmas, instead of maximising their self-interest. The ultimate goal of such research is to be able to give recommendations about how to solve social dilemmas in society.

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Is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?

Concussions are prevalent in high-impact and much-beloved sports such as American and Australian football, rugby, and hockey. Concussions are harmful – recent studies link repeated concussions to degraded cognitive performance along a number of measures (Randolph et al. 2013), as well as an increased risk of neurodegenerative conditions such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (McKee et al. 2013). Concussions are much in the news. Recent events such as the suicide of Dave Duerson and the suicide of Junior Seau have been linked to the long-term effects of repeated concussions, and the governing bodies of many high-impact sports have, of late, been scrambling to address the problems posed by growing awareness of the danger of concussions.

A number of ethical questions arise in connection with this growing awareness. (What should the governing bodies of sports leagues do to protect players? What do teams owe players in such sports? Is the decision to play such a sport, or to continue playing in spite of suffering a concussion, really autonomous? Should fans speak up about player protection, and if not, are they complicit in the harm done to players? And so on.) Here I want to consider one question that has received little attention. It involves the role of parents in fostering participation in high-impact sports.Read More »Is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?

Beyond 23andMe’s Shutdown: The Role of the FDA in the Future of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing

Kyle Edwards, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford Caroline Huang, The Ethox Centre, University of Oxford An article based on this blog post has now been published in the May – June 2014 Hastings Center Report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.310/full. Please check out our more developed thoughts on this topic there!

Caesarean Sections, Autonomy and Consent

 

In the past week in the UK, an Italian woman has claimed that a health trust had carried out a Caesarean section on her against her will. Whilst details of the case are still emerging, it appears that the woman had been detained under the Mental Health Act whilst pregnant after suffering a panic attack (which, it is reported, was possibly a result of a failure to take medication for a pre-existing mental health condition). Having been hospitalized for a number of weeks, the woman was given a Caesarean section whilst under sedation without consent. It appears that a health trust had been granted permission to carry out the procedure from the Court of Protection. Further to this, Essex social services also decreed that the mother was unfit to raise the child, and took the child into its care.Read More »Caesarean Sections, Autonomy and Consent

In praise of insult

You have no right to be free from insult. Indeed, sometimes you may deserve to be insulted. Let us take a case that brings this into sharp focus: the Tory chief whip who lost his job because… well, we still don’t know exactly why because it now turns out that what the police claimed at the time wasn’t true. And maybe he should have lost his job: I don’t know. But one of the underlying assumptions throughout seems to have been that nobody should ever be sworn at. And that is flatly false. Sometimes people deserve to be sworn at. People in power deserve it when they stupidly, arrogantly or indifferently muck up our lives, something they do routinely. They deserve it most especially when they misuse their authority, such as when they do so to display their power by make someone’s life worse or for the purpose of getting  their own back on someone who resists their misuse of power.Read More »In praise of insult

The new offence of ‘wilful neglect’ – what’s new?

It was announced last week that a new offence of ‘wilful neglect or mistreatment’ is to be created for NHS hospital staff whose conduct amounts to the deliberate or reckless mistreatment of patients. This offence will be modeled on an existing offence under the Mental Capacity Act which punishes the wilful neglect or ill-treatment of patients lacking capacity. Currently, a medical worker convicted of this offence faces a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment, or an unlimited fine. The sanctions for the proposed new offence are likely to be of a similar severity.

The creation of the offence comes in the wake of the inquiry into the widespread negligence that occurred at Mid Staffordshire hospital. Intended principally to deter healthcare workers from mistreating patients, the new offence has been proposed following review of patient safety. The leader of the review, Professor Don Berwick, emphasized that patient safety must become the top priority and that the measure was needed to target the worst cases of a ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude that led to ‘wilful or reckless neglect or mistreatment’.

Concerns about its impact

Whilst most would agree that patient safety should clearly be a priority, there has been concern that the new criminal sanction could create a ‘climate of fear’ amongst healthcare workers and that individual workers will be penalised for mistakes that are the result of inadequate staffing or simple human error, rather than blameworthy acts of malice.Read More »The new offence of ‘wilful neglect’ – what’s new?

If you’re female, your face is worth 48-67% more than mine

If you’re a young woman, your face is worth between 48-67% more than that of a young man. That’s the gist of the Judicial College’s Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages in Personal Injury Cases, 12th Edition (2013) – one of the canonical texts used by lawyers. For ‘Very Severe Scarring’ ‘in relatively young… Read More »If you’re female, your face is worth 48-67% more than mine

Financial Incentives, Coercion and Psychosis

In a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal, Tim Kendall draws attention to a recent study that suggests that modest financial incentives can significantly improve adherence in people treated with depot drugs for schizophrenia and other psychoses in the UK. This study looks set to reignite the debate regarding the moral permissibility of offering financial incentives as a part of medical care. Whilst those who support this practice point out that we already offer non-financial rewards to many patients, others have criticised the practice as, among other things, amounting to coercion. In this post, I shall contest this particular objection to the practice of offering financial incentives to patients as part of medical care.Read More »Financial Incentives, Coercion and Psychosis

What Fuels the Fighting: Disagreement over Facts or Values?

In a particularly eye-catching pull quote in the November issue of The Atlantic, journalist and scholar Robert Wright claims, “The world’s gravest conflicts are not over ethical principles or disputed values but over disputed facts.”[1]

The essay, called “Why We Fight – And Can We Stop?” in the print version and “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality” in the online version, reviews new research by psychologists Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom on the biological foundations of our moral impulses. Focusing mainly on Greene’s newest book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, Wright details Greene’s proposed solution to the rampant group conflict we see both domestically and internationally. Suggesting that we are evolutionarily wired to cooperate or ‘get along’ with members of groups to which we belong, Greene identifies the key cause of fighting as different groups’ “incompatible visions of what a moral society should be.”[2] And his answer is to strive for a ‘metamorality’ – a universally shared moral perspective (he suggests utilitarianism) that would create a global in-group thus facilitating cooperation.

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Breaking the mould: genetics and education

Tonight I participated in BBC’s “The Moral Maze”, discussing the recent reactions to a report by Dominic Cummings, an advisor to the education secretary, that mentioned that genetic factors have a big impact on educational outcomes. This ties in with the recent book G is for Genes by Kathryn Asbury (also on the program) and Robert Plomin where they argue that children are not blank slates and that genetic information might enable personalized education. Ah, children, genetics, IQ, schools – the perfect mixture for debate!

Unfortunately for me the panel tore into my transhumanist views rather than ask me about the main topic for the evening, so I ended up debating something different. This is what I would have argued if there had been time:

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