Technology and the Situationist Challenge to Virtue Ethics.

In this paper, I introduce a "promises and perils" framework for understanding the "soft" impacts of emerging technology, and argue for a eudaimonic conception of well-being. This eudaimonic conception of well-being, however, presupposes that we have something like stable character traits. I therefore defend this view from the "situationist challenge" and show that instead of viewing this challenge as a threat to well-being, we can incorporate it into how we think about living well with technology.

Political bias indicators and perceptions of news.

Introduction: Recently, a variety of political bias indicators for social and news media have come to market to alert news consumers to the credibility and political bias of their sources. However, the effects of political bias indicators on how people consume news is unknown. Creators of bias indicators assume people will use the apps and extensions to become less biased news-consumers; however, it is also possible that people would use bias indicators to confirm their previous worldview and become more biased in their perceptions of news.

How Should Surgeons Communicate About Palliative and Curative Intentions, Purposes, and Outcomes?

How surgeons describe procedures should be accurate, precise, and concordant with patients' values. By focusing on intention rather than realistic goals, terms like and , when applied to high-stakes operations, such as a Whipple pancreaticoduodenectomy, can be confusing to patients. This case commentary argues that surgeons' language choices can influence patients' decisions and experiences.

Who, If Not the FDA, Should Regulate Implantable Brain-Computer Interface Devices?

Implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) and other devices with potential for both therapeutic purposes and human enhancement are being rapidly developed. The distinction between therapeutic and enhancement uses of these devices is not well defined. While the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rightly determines what is safe and effective, this article argues that the FDA should not make subjective, value-laden assessments about risks and benefits when it comes to approval of BCIs for therapy and enhancement.

How do healthcare professionals respond to ethical challenges regarding information management? A review of empirical studies.

Aim: This study is a systematic review that aims to assess how healthcare professionals manage ethical challenges regarding information within the clinical context.

Method And Materials: We carried out searches in PubMed, and Embase, using two search strings; searches generated 665 hits. After screening, 47 articles relevant to the study aim were selected for review.

Crosstalk between Existential Phenomenological Psychotherapy and Neurological Sciences in Mood and Anxiety Disorders.

Psychotherapy is a comprehensive biological treatment modifying complex underlying cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and regulatory responses in the brain, leading patients with mental illness to a new interpretation of the sense of self and others. Psychotherapy is an art of science integrated with psychology and/or philosophy. Neurological sciences study the neurological basis of cognition, memory, and behavior as well as the impact of neurological damage and disease on these functions, and their treatment.

Combining Ethics Inquiry and Clinical Experience in a Premedical Health Care Ethics Internship.

Problem: The professional formation of physicians begins in the premedical years, and educators are now recommending that medical ethics and humanities courses be considered essential components to becoming a physician rather than elective prerequisites for medical school admission. As a result, questions have arisen about how to teach students ethical reasoning skills before their professional training, as they have limited opportunities now to develop these skills and the related competencies in a real-world medical context.

Approach: The authors describe Santa Clara University's Health Care Ethics Internship (HCEI), an undergraduate college experience that emphasizes ethical inquiry and immerses students in health care settings to foster deep learning.

Managing organizational ethics: How ethics becomes pervasive within organizations.

This study analyzes real experiences of culture management to better understand how ethics permeates organizations In addition to reviewing the literature, we used an action-research methodology and conducted semistructured interviews in Spain and in the U.S. to approach the complexity and challenges of fostering a culture in which ethical considerations are a regular part of business discussions and decision making.

Ethical and regulatory issues in human gene editing: Chinese perspective.

This paper focuses on the ethical and regulatory issues raised by gene editing. In the introduction of this paper, authors provide the background where the ethical and regulatory issues by gene editing have been raised including the scientific dimension of gene-editing techniques. In the second part of the paper, the authors focus on ethical issues in human gene editing with the start of Huang Junjiu case and He Jiankui case.

Translational implications of the anatomical nonequivalence of functionally equivalent cholinergic circuit motifs.

Biomedical research is at a critical juncture, with an aging population increasingly beset by chronic illness and prominent failures to translate research from "bench to bedside." These challenges emerge on a background of increasing "silo-ing" of experiments (and experimenters)-many investigators produce and consume research conducted in 1, perhaps 2, species-and increasing pressure to reduce or eliminate research on so-called "higher" mammals. Such decisions to restrict species diversity in biomedical research have not been data-driven and increase the risk of translational failure.

Tradeoff Negotiation: The Importance of Getting in the Game Comment on "Swiss-CHAT: Citizens Discuss Priorities for Swiss Health Insurance Coverage".

Swiss-CHAT's playful approach to public rationing can be considered in terms of deliberative process design as well as in terms of health policy. The process' forced negotiation of trade-offs exposed unexamined driving questions, and challenged prevalent presumptions about health care demand and about conditions of public reasoning that enable transparent rationing. While the experiment provided grounds for optimism that public deliberation can contribute to the design of fair insurance service-packages, it also left unanswered questions.

Terminal lucidity in the teaching hospital setting.

Terminal lucidity is an unpredictable end-of-life experience that has invaluable implications in preparation for death. We retrospectively evaluated terminal lucidity at a university teaching hospital. Of 338 deaths that occurred during the study period (187 in the ICU and 151 in general wards), terminal lucidity was identified in 6 cases in general wards.

Effect of the Contents in Advance Directives on Individuals' Decision-Making.

Completing an advance directive offers individuals the opportunity to make informed choices about end-of-life care. However, these decisions could be influenced in different ways depending on how the information is presented. We randomly presented 185 participants with four distinct types of advance directive: neutrally framed (as reference), negatively framed, religiously framed, and a combination.

Considering the ethics of big data research: A case of Twitter and ISIS/ISIL.

This is a formal commentary, responding to Matthew Curran Benigni, Kenneth Joseph, and Kathleen Carley's contribution, "Online extremism and the communities that sustain it: Detecting the ISIS supporting community on Twitter". This brief review reflects on the ethics of big data research methodologies, and how novel methods complicate long-standing principles of research ethics. Specifically, the concept of the "data subject" as a corollary, or replacement, of "human subject" is considered.

Measles Vaccination is Best for Children: The Argument for Relying on Herd Immunity Fails.

This article examines an argument which may negatively influence measles vaccination uptake. According to the argument, an individual child in a highly vaccinated society may be better off by being non-vaccinated; the child does not risk vaccine adverse effects and is protected against measles through herd immunity. Firstly, the conclusion of the argument is challenged by showing that herd immunity's protection is unreliable and inferior to vaccination.

Navigating the Paradoxes of Neoliberalism: Quiet Subversion in Mentored Service-Learning for the Pre-Health Humanities.

In describing the foundations of our pedagogical approaches to service-learning, we seek to go beyond the navel-gazing-at times, paralyzing-paradoxes of neoliberal forces, which can do "good" for students and their communities, yet which also call students into further calculative frameworks for understanding the "value" of pre-health humanities education and social engagement. We discuss methods to create quiet forms of subversion that call for a moral imagination in extending an ethics of care to students as well as to the communities with which they engage. While we recognize the partiality and limitations of our attempts, framing mentored service-learning in unexpected ways can help students and practitioners to understand their role within broader social, historical, cultural, and emotional contexts and encourage them to act intentionally toward the communities they seek to serve in response to this new self-knowledge.

AIC and the challenge of complexity: A case study from ecology.

Philosophers and scientists alike have suggested Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and other similar model selection methods, show predictive accuracy justifies a preference for simplicity in model selection. This epistemic justification of simplicity is limited by an assumption of AIC which requires that the same probability distribution must generate the data used to fit the model and the data about which predictions are made. This limitation has been previously noted but appears to often go unnoticed by philosophers and scientists and has not been analyzed in relation to complexity.

Acceptance, values, and probability.

This essay makes a case for regarding personal probabilities used in Bayesian analyses of confirmation as objects of acceptance and rejection. That in turn entails that personal probabilities are subject to the argument from inductive risk, which aims to show non-epistemic values can legitimately influence scientific decisions about which hypotheses to accept. In a Bayesian context, the argument from inductive risk suggests that value judgments can influence decisions about which probability models to accept for likelihoods and priors.

Anticipatory Life Cycle Analysis of In Vitro Biomass Cultivation for Cultured Meat Production in the United States.

Cultured, or in vitro, meat consists of edible biomass grown from animal stem cells in a factory, or carnery. In the coming decades, in vitro biomass cultivation could enable the production of meat without the need to raise livestock. Using an anticipatory life cycle analysis framework, the study described herein examines the environmental implications of this emerging technology and compares the results with published impacts of beef, pork, poultry, and another speculative analysis of cultured biomass.