Good morning- All is well with me.  I hope you are enjoying Ethics & Psychology. Given I have been providing these articles and services for the past 13 years, I am finally taking a break. I plan to be off social media for the next month. I will start posting new articles and news stories some time in May. Best wishes ..read more

Phoebe Zerwick The New York Times Originally posted March 12, 2024 Here is an excerpt: At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010, a research fellow, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a family member who, before his death, experienced visions — a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his ..read more

Seth Lazar The New York Times Originally posted 19 June 23 Here is an excerpt: I’ve based my philosophical work on the belief, inspired by Immanuel Kant, that humans have a special moral status — that we command respect regardless of whatever value we contribute to the world. Drawing on the work of the 20th-century political philosopher John Rawls, I’ve assumed that human moral status derives from our rational autonomy. This autonomy has two parts: first, our ability to decide on goals and commit to them; second, our possession of a sense of justice and the ability to resist norms imposed b ..read more

Emily Alpert Reyes Los Angeles Times Originally posted 9 April 24 Months after Kaiser Permanente reached a sweeping agreement with state regulators to improve its mental health services, the healthcare giant is facing union allegations that patients could be improperly losing such care. The National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents thousands of Kaiser mental health professionals, complained earlier this year to state regulators that Kaiser appeared to be inappropriately handing off decisions about whether therapy is still medically necessary. The union alleged that Rula Healt ..read more

Eli Hager Propublica.com Originally posted 18 March 24 Diane Baird had spent four decades evaluating the relationships of poor families with their children. But last May, in a downtown Denver conference room, with lawyers surrounding her and a court reporter transcribing, she was the one under the microscope. Baird, a social worker and professional expert witness, has routinely advocated in juvenile court cases across Colorado that foster children be adopted by or remain in the custody of their foster parents rather than being reunified with their typically lower-income birth parents or ot ..read more

Michael DePeau-Wilson MedPage Today Originally posted 11 April 24 With the rise in patient-facing psychiatric chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the potential need for patient mental health data could drive a boom in cash-for-data scams, according to mental health experts. A recent example of controversial data collection appeared on Craigslist when a company called Therapy For All allegedly posted an advertisement offering money for recording therapy sessions without any additional information about how the recordings would be used. The company's advertisement and websit ..read more

Daniel P. Sulmasy The New England Journal of Medicine March 16, 2024 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2310498 Mind, body, and soul are inseparable. Throughout human history, healing has been regarded as a spiritual event. Illness (especially serious illness) inevitably raises questions beyond science- questions of a transcendent nature. These are questions of meaning, value, and relationship. 1 They touch on perennial and profoundly human enigmas. Why is my child sick? Do I still have value now that I am no longer a "productive" working member of society? Why does brokenness in my body remind me of the ..read more

Rob Stein npr.org Originally posted 12 April 24 Here is an excerpt: Scientific progress prompts ethical concerns But the possibility of an artificial womb is also raising many questions. When might it be safe to try an artificial womb for a human? Which preterm babies would be the right candidates? What should they be called? Fetuses? Babies? "It matters in terms of how we assign moral status to individuals," says Mercurio, the Yale bioethicist. "How much their interests — how much their welfare — should count. And what one can and cannot do for them or to them." But Mercurio is optimis ..read more

Protzko, J., Tobia, K., Strohminger, N.,  & Schooler, J. W. (2023). Cognitive Science, 47(7). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13317 Abstract Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity. But identity also has practical significance: obligations are tagged to one's id ..read more

Eric Lipton The New York Times Originally posted 21 Nov 23 Here is an excerpt: Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and the intense use of drones in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have combined to make the issue that much more urgent. So far, drones generally rely on human operators to carry out lethal missions, but software is being developed that soon will allow them to find and select targets more on their own. The intense jamming of radio communications and GPS in Ukraine has only accelerated the shift, as autonomous drones can often keep operating even when communicati ..read more