This is not a Sputnik moment. It’s way past that.

From The New York Times:

...Many observers have described this as a Sputnik moment. That's incorrect: America can't re-establish its dominance over the most advanced A.I., because the technology, the data and the expertise that created it are already distributed all around the world. The best way this country can position itself for the new age is to prepare for its impact.

If the inevitable proliferation of A.I. endangers our cybersecurity, for example, instead of just regulating exports, it's time to harden our networked infrastructure — which will also protect it against the ever-present threat of hacking, by random agents or hostile governments. And instead of fantasizing about how some future rogue A.I. could attack us, it's time to start thinking clearly about how corporations and governments could use the A.I. that's available right now to entrench their dominance, erode our rights, worsen inequality. As the technology continues to expand, who will be left behind? What rights will be threatened? Which institutions will need to be rebuilt and how? And what can we do so that this powerful technology with so much potential for good can benefit the public?

It is time, too, to admit that the interests of a few large, multinational companies aren't good proxies for the interests of the people facing such a monumental transformation.

Whatever else DeepSeek may have done to get us here, perhaps forcing that realization is something we can be grateful for.

Zeynep Tufekci
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/ai-deepseek-trump-biden.html?smid=em-share

The war on public health

This Isn't Reform. It's Sabotage.
Musk and Trump are launching a frontal assault on the concept of democratic governance

...The war on public health is just one facet of this ugly diamond, but through it you can see both the breadth and the cruelty of the whole assault — and how it often hides behind an alibi of "reform."

All of a sudden, last Friday, you could not view C.D.C. data about H.I.V., or its guidelines for PrEP, the prophylactic treatment to prevent H.I.V. transmission, or guidelines for other sexually-transmitted diseases. You couldn't find surveillance data on hepatitis or tuberculosis, either, or the youth-risk behavior survey, or any of the agency's domestic violence data. If you were a doctor hoping to consult federal guidance about postpartum birth control, that was down too. As was the page devoted to "Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People," presumably because that last word wasn't "Women." Throughout the pandemic, conservative critics of these institutions complained that their messaging was unequivocal and heavy-handed. The new message seems to be: You are on your own.

In the end, this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s message, too — beyond his claims about vaccines and G.M.O.s. The man who will almost certainly assume control of the country's entire public health apparatus is often described as a late arrival to MAGA, and an unlikely ally — a longtime environmental lawyer and anti-corporate activist who was even considered a potential E.P.A. administrator by Barack Obama. But he nevertheless embodies the broader program, as does the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement for which he serves now as a hood ornament.

In the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, Americans grew increasingly distrustful of many of the country's institutions of health — it wasn't just faith in organizations like the C.D.C. and F.D.A. which fell, but trust in nurses, doctors and pharmacists, too. But the administration isn't proposing reform. Kennedy's core focus is asking sweeping questions about vaccines and about the food system and environmental contamination. This emphasis represents a paradigm shift, from a social and epidemiological view of illness and disease, emphasizing collective responsibility and mutual aid, to one focused on behavior, diet and lifestyle. Which is to say, personal responsibility — in place of public health, health libertarianism...

early in the pandemic it might have been useful to communicate a bit more clearly about the striking difference in risk faced by the old and the young, as I was writing as far back as the spring of 2020, too.

But these were not the questions that Kennedy was asking most conspicuously at the height of the Covid emergency — about how we might do better with guidance and communication and trust, or whether we had done enough to communicate the age skew of the disease or the strength of "natural" immunity. Instead, he was focusing on the horrors of the new vaccines. Indeed, fighting to stop their authorization, and any future authorization for any future Covid vaccine, not just for little children or those who'd already survived infection, but for any American of any age and suffering any health condition.

This was in May 2021. The rollout had begun just six months before, but vaccines had already saved, it was estimated, nearly 140,000 American lives. In the years that followed, they would save perhaps three million more. That is to say, if Kennedy had been successful, the pandemic death toll in this country could have been about three times as high.

This attempt at public-health sabotage towers over the new secretary's meddling in Samoa, which may have contributed to the deaths of dozens by measles in 2019, and it came more recently, concerning millions of American lives. It was also what earned him a spot in the Trump coalition — indeed a starring role. The Covid vaccines were a medical miracle, probably the most consequential American one in several generations. Kennedy did what he could to stop that miracle, which he later called "the deadliest vaccine ever made." When the country encountered a rampaging novel disease, he told us very clearly, he would have preferred we all faced it naked and alone.

This should be disqualifying. Instead, it proved the opposite. In the name of reform and government overhaul, the new administration is approving and ushering in something much more like destruction, with the president imploring his new health secretary to "go wild" in the role. The admonition does not apply just to Kennedy and public health, or even just to Musk and his initiative. A new generation of libertarians is not letting the country's crisis of confidence go to waste. On Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, "Abolish the IRS." Up first, apparently: the Department of Education.

David Wallace-Wells
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-government.html?smid=em-share

Scholars Day

 CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

 

College of Liberal Arts Day for Scholars Week 2025

Thursday, March 20

Peck Hall 207

  

Students and faculty are invited to join us for CLA Scholars Day 2025.  The event will feature scholarly and creative presentations as part of MTSU Scholars Week. Participation from all disciplines within the college is encouraged, as are interdisciplinary proposals.

 

Presentations will be made in the following categories:

 

• Individual Research Presentations by students and faculty (approx. 15 minutes)
• Panel Presentations (30-60 minutes)
• MTSU Arts Projects – creative performances by students and/or faculty

 

To participate, please complete the online form: CLA Scholars Day Presentations.

 

Submissions must be received by Thursday, February 27, 2025.

Details for the 2025 Schedule will be available on the CLA Scholar's Day website.

Meredith Huey Dye, PhD

Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts

Professor of Sociology

Middle Tennessee State University

Todd 231H

615-898-5580

meredith.dye@mtsu.edu

Behind the Chaotic Attempt to Freeze Federal Assistance

…For a century now, the U.S. has led the world on collaboration and impact in health, which has doubled the life expectancy of all of humanity—and delivered similarly outsized results beyond health. If this Administration really wanted to put America first, it would have built on that legacy. Instead, it is demolishing U.S. standing, our world-leading capacity and expertise, and our national security…

— Atul Gawande 
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/behind-the-chaotic-attempt-to-freeze-federal-assistance

Questions FEB 4

 Clinical Ethics (Basics 4); Premonition 4

Basics

1. (T/F) Dignity, respect, and confidentiality are among the aspects of the clinical relationship which emphasize the importance of trust. 

2. What (according to most recognized oaths and conventions) must always be the deciding factor guiding professional decisions? 

3. The idea that the doctor always knows best is called what? 

4. Is a diagnosis of mental illness grounds for establishing a patient's lack of capacity to render competent consent to treatment? 

5. What general principle allows breach of confidentiality? 

6. What term expresses the central ethical concern about "designer babies"? What poet implicitly expressed it?

7. Why have organizations like the WHO opposed any form of organ trading?

8. Besides the Kantian objection, what other major ethical issue currently affects regenerative medicine?

9. What does palliative medicine help recover?

10. What would most of us consider an unwelcome consequence of not retaining the acts/omissions distinction with respect to our response to famine (for example)?

Premonition

1. What's the "real waste" in government?

2. What misdirected pandemic narrative did Bob Glass think Homeland Security got "wrapped up" in?

3. What hit Richard Hatchett like a lightning bolt or thunderclap?

4. What was the biggest difference between Expert and computer models of disease?

5. What in Rajeev's mind made Hatchett a "philosopher type"?

6. There's no better system for transmitting disease than what?

7. Who is least capable of original thought?

8. Why was the 1918 St. Louis death rate half of Philadelphia's?

9. What was the moment when the CDC accepted social distancing as a viable tool in a pandemic?

DQ

• How do you generally go about establishing trust in a new relationship? Do such general considerations apply equally to the clinical relationship? How does "professionalism" relate to trust?
• Considering the "demented professor" (81) and other instances of patients whose expressed "best interests" may conflict with a clinician's therapeutic impulses: how important is the patient's present happiness, in influencing your clinical evaluation?
• What's wrong, if in fact the doctor does possess more accurate information and more relevant experience, with treating the patient after the analogy of parent and child?
• What would Dr. House do about patients who make (in his opinion) foolish decisions regarding their care? Would you hire him to work in your hospital?
• Under what circumstances would you NOT violate confidentiality and inform a patient's partner that they were HIV positive?
• What concept is more relevant in evaluating the ethical status of abortion: viability, humanity, personhood, maternal rights, or... ?
• What do you think of Thomson's violinist analogy (91-2)?
• Can a baby really have five parents (as opposed to five co-progenitors)? How do you define parenthood?
• Should surrogacy, organ trafficking, and transplant tourism be regulated? How, and by whom? 
• Do you think our society has a healthy attitude towards mental illness? Is it possible to declare a politically and ideologically neutral standard of sanity?
• How would you counsel patients who insist they no longer value their "quality of life" and refuse potentially effective treatment and medication?  
• Can the medical profession ever fully embrace the concept of ars moriendi, the art of dying?
• Can you imagine ever facilitating a suicide, professionaly or personally?
• Is there anything wrong with displaying cadavers in a museum exhibit (as in "Bodies: The Exhibition")? What guidelines should be followed?

Fool's errand

How to Break Public Schools: A Republican Playbook

The Tennessee General Assembly has never cared whether its constituents support the laws it passes, and it doesn't care now. We are on our own.

...Everybody wants to know how the underage Antioch shooter got his hands on a deadly weapon, but tracing the provenance of a gun in Tennessee is "a fool's errand," according to WPLN's Paige Pfleger, whose joint investigative reporting with ProPublica has tracked the deadly ramifications of Tennessee's lax gun laws. "State laws have made it really, really easy to possess guns here without any permitting process," she said last week on "This Is Nashville." "Background checks are not required for private sales, including sales online or at gun shows. That's not to mention the ubiquity of guns — guns stolen from cars, and that's very common."

Down here, school shootings inspire weaker gun laws. In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, when other states were tightening gun laws, Tennessee invited gun manufacturers to come on down. After the Waffle House shooting, legislators proposed an open-carry law that was opposed by parents, physicians, pastors, police officers, public-health officials — just about everybody. It passed anyway...

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/opinion/nashville-guns-public-schools.html?smid=em-share

Character and consequences

Can you square a concern for character with a concern for consequences?

A bioethical question for the NYT Ethicist (scroll down)…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/magazine/religious-group-india-whatsapp-ethics.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Another Aging Hall of Famer

An inspiring addition to my Hall of Vibrant and Creative Aging - the female barrister who aspired to be the first Communist British Prime Minister, still bashing on at 92…

Nemone Lethbridge, lawyer and writer

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027l20?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

(And see U@d - Russell's happy merger)

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Stupidity vs. Rationality

"…The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it's rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don't live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices..."

— David Brooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/opinion/trump-executive-orders.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Loretta Ford, ‘Mother’ of the Nurse Practitioner Field, Dies at 104

She transformed nursing by making it an area of clinical practice and research and recasting nurses as colleagues of doctors, not assistants.

Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, then spent decades transforming the field of nursing into an area of serious clinical practice, education and research, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Wildwood, Fla. She was 104...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/health/loretta-ford-dead.html?smid=em-share

Air safety is a bioethical issue

In response to Trump's comments, Buttigieg posted: "Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again."

HCR

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-30-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

DeepSeek

Just heard this timely discussion of AI and DeepSeek…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_fourfm?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

And this...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0027cv4?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Questions Jan 30

I'll be coming from the library today (you're welcome to join us if you like), in case I'm a little late.

Perspectives (Basics 3); Premonition 3. Share your thoughts, questions (etc.) in the comments section below.

1. Chapter 3 begins by asking if our bioethical perspective ("vision") is skewed by _____... (a) cultural assumptions, (b) gender bias, (c) religious faith, (d) all of the above

2. What's the leading global cause of death among women of reproductive age?

3. (T/F) The "feminist critique" says bioethics has been dominated by culturally masculine thinking.

4. What ethical perspective did Nel Noddings (supported by Carol Gilligan's research) describe as the "feminine approach"?

5. What's a furor therapeuticus?

6. Does Campbell consider the outlawing of female genital mutilation culturally insensitive?

7. What's allegedly distinctive about "Asian bioethics"?

8. What western ethical preconception is "somewhat alien" in the eastern dharmic traditions?

9. What gives Buddhists and Hindus a "whole new perspective" on bioethical issues?

10. What does Campbell identify as a "tension in the Christian perspectives" on bioethics?

Premonition

1. What book "more of less" led to the invention of U.S. pandemic planning? Have you read it? Will its lessons again be forgotten before the next pandemic?

2. Who is Richard Hatchett? Do you think many people in health care possess the souls of poets?

3. What did Hatchett not know about "social distance"? Is that the best term for what it purports to describe?

4. What did Carter Mecher "notice" about most medical students? Would you expect a higher percentage of those who choose a medical career to be calm and collected in a health emergency than the general population, or better at learning from their mistakes?

5. What did Mecher think was a good way to reduce medical error?

6. What was the gist of Mecher's Lessons Learned report to the VA?

DQs:

• How do you think your own attitudes and assumptions about gender, religion, etc. influence your Bioethical perspective?
• What do Plato's Euthyphro and the Biblical story of Abraham & Isaac suggest to you about the place of religion in addressing biotethical issues? (61-2)
• What is Buddhism's bioethical relevance? (69)
• How should medical professionals treat and care for children whose parents object to medical intervention on religious grounds?
• Is it best for caregivers to try and limit their personal knowledge of patients' particular perspectives, beliefs, identities (religious, political, cultural etc.) so as to avoid conscious or unconscious bias in treatment, or does this unduly sacrifice the humane dimension of medical practice?
• Post your DQs

 

Lesson unlearned

The most important lesson from the last pandemic was that we were not prepared. You'd hope that lesson had been learned at the top of govt.

wapo.st/4gj124a

https://bsky.app/profile/peaseroland.bsky.social/post/3lgs7sk533s2u

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Agnes Callard

The U of Chicago prof and author of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, and our upcoming Lyceum speaker, interviewed by Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. She defends arguing Socratically, not to be confused with arguing Monty Python-ishly...

 

And, another interview: 

Argue Your Way to a Fuller Life
Refute your friends and family, never be satisfied. Philosopher Agnes Callard on life lessons from Socrates...

Callard discovered Socrates in high school, and by the time she was a senior in college, she was obsessed. “I didn’t just want to interpret Socrates,” she writes. “I wanted to be Socrates.” She started hanging out on the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and would walk up to strangers and ask if they wanted to have a philosophical discussion. At first, they were intrigued, but then they just wanted to get away from her. “I’ve kind of spent my whole life since then trying to figure out how to do that but not make people run away from me,” she said with a laugh... (continues)

Questions Jan 28

Remember, you don't have to respond to my questions if you can come up with relevant comments on your own. But some of them will be on the exam, so you should still read the texts that address them. 

    [Catch up on last time's questions first...]

Moral Theories (Basics 2); Premonition 2

1. (T/F) In Anna's story, why did she wish not to be resuscitated?

2. Which theory has been dominant in bioethics and often used by many health professionals?

3. In deontological theory, what is the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives?

4. What ethical principle (and whose), in the name of rational consistency, absolute dutifulness, and mutual respect, "requires unconditional obedience and overrides our preferences and desires" with respect to things like lying, for example?

5. What would Kant say about Tuskegee, or about the murderer "at our door"?

6. What more do we want from a moral theory than Kant gives us?

7. What is the distinctive question in virtue ethics?

8. What Greek philosopher was one of the earliest exponents of virtue ethics?

9. What is the Harm Principle, and who was its author?

10. Name one of the Four Principles in Beauchamp and Childress's theories on biomedical ethics?

 [Premonition...]

11. What was Dr. Hosea's diagnostic style? (And of what classic Greek philosopher might it remind you?)

12. What misleading practice of self-promotion did doctors of orthopedic medicine engage in?

13. How did Dr. Dean learn to persuade elected officials to finance disease control?

14. What was the root of the CDC's reluctance to support Dr. Dean's decisions?

15. What famous ethical problem did the Casa Dorinda mudslide resemble?


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• In Anna's story, do you find yourself more concerned with the specifying and insisting on the respective duties of Anna, her physician, and the ethics committee dealing with her DNR request, or with its consequences? 
• Do you consider yourself more an ethical consequentialist/utilitarian, pragmatist, deontologist, virtue ethicist, or none of the above? Is it possible to be ethically responsible without first clarifying and claiming your own theoretical ethical commitments? 
• Do you agree with Peter Singer that the ethical choice which best serves the goal of minimizing pain and suffering requires ending lives?
• Is a felicific calculus such as Jeremy Bentham proposed possible, or practical?
• Would life in Huxley's Brave New World really be nightmarish and dystopian, if universal happiness were its result?
• Kant's categorical imperative requires always treating individuals respectfully, as ends in themselves and never as means to any other social or collective good. Can you imagine any scenario in which it would be ethically correct to violate that imperative, in the name of medical progress or social welfare?
• Is virtue ethics "elitist and utopian" in its quest to articulate the conditions of a good life and death for all? Are virtues and vices culturally relative? 36-7
• 
  

The Race for All-Powerful Pot

At Stiiizy, the best-selling cannabis brand in America, the goal is explicit: producing powerful and cheap marijuana.

Inside its Los Angeles headquarters, crews dust joints with concentrated THC, the intoxicating component of cannabis. They package pocket-size vape cartridges that promise "the highest potency possible." On its website, the company declares that "it has never been easier (or quicker) to get silly high for an affordable price."

Dispensaries operating under the brand of another leading company, Cookies, have promoted "powerful medical benefits," including "cancer fighting" qualities. A cannabis-infused chocolate bar was, until recently, described as containing properties "beneficial to those suffering" from glaucoma, bacterial infections and Huntington's disease, a devastating genetic illness.

More than a decade after states began legalizing recreational marijuana, businesses are enticing customers with unproven health claims, while largely escaping rigorous oversight. A New York Times review of 20 of the largest brands found that most were selling products with such claims, potentially violating federal and state regulations. And as companies compete, potency has gone up — with some products advertised as having as much as 99 percent THC — and prices have gone down...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/marijuana-thc-health-claims-potency.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science

Medical advances have beaten back many relentless assassins in recent decades, such as cancer and heart disease. A wide range of treatments share credit: surgery, medicines, radiation, genetic therapies and healthful habits. Mortality rates for those two diseases, the top causes of death in the United States, have fallen sharply. But in an aging population, Alzheimer's death rates have gone in the opposite direction.

The disease afflicts nearly seven million Americans, about one in every nine people over the age of 65, making it a leading cause of death among older adults. Up to 420,000 adults in the prime of life — including people as young as 30 — suffer from early-onset Alzheimer's. The annual number of new cases of dementia is expected to double by 2050.

Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer's cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. That dismal lack of progress is partly because of the infinite complexity of the human brain, which has posed insurmountable challenges so far. Scientists, funders and drug companies have struggled to justify billions in costs and careers pursuing dead-end paths. But there's another, sinister, factor at play.

Over the past 25 years, Alzheimer's research has suffered a litany of ostensible fraud and other misconduct by world-famous researchers and obscure scientists alike, all trying to ascend in a brutally competitive field. During years of investigative reporting, I've uncovered many such cases, including several detailed for the first time in my forthcoming book...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/alzheimers-fraud-cure.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Derek Humphry, Pivotal Figure in Right-to-Die Movement, Dies at 94

His own experience assisting his terminally ill wife in ending her life set him on a path to founding the Hemlock Society and writing a best-selling guide.

Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and to publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94.

His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family.

With a populist flair and a knack for speaking matter-of-factly about death, Mr. Humphry almost single-handedly galvanized a national conversation about physician-assisted suicide in the early 1980s, at a time when the idea had been little more than an esoteric theory batted around by medical ethicists.

“He was the one who really put this cause on the map in America,” said Ian Dowbiggin, a professor at the University of Prince Edward Island and the author of “A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine” (2005). “The people who support the notion of physician-assisted suicide absolutely owe him a big thanks.”

In 1975, Mr. Humphry was working as a reporter for The Sunday Times of London when Jean Humphry, his wife of 22 years, was in the final stages of terminal bone cancer. Hoping to avoid prolonged suffering, she asked him to help her die...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/health/derek-humphry-dead.html?smid=em-share

Information blockade

"…Trump's team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories, scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of the Washington Post report that the CDC was expected this week to publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down Georgia's poultry industry..."

HCR 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-22-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

A little less crowded, maybe

I've set in motion the process of getting us officially moved to the larger classroom next door, which apparently stands empty at present. I think we could go ahead and do it unofficially now, though the authorities frown on that. But I'm willing, if y'all are. We can discuss it.

jpo

#13

 I was searching for a list of the "Top 20 Bioethics feeds" ... We're in it:

13. Bioethics RSS Feed

RSS Feed bioethjpo.blogspot.com/feeds.. Follow RSS Website bioethjpo.blogspot.com
Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond. Follow this blog to know about bioethics.MOREFrequency 23 posts/year Since Apr 2012Subscribe RSS

https://rss.feedspot.com/bioethics_rss_feeds/

==

The NYTimes Health section often reports on bioethical issues...

Where else do you all find health news of interest? Respond in comments, please.

Introductions

Welcome, Bioethics class of '25! Let's introduce ourselves (my bio's in the right sidebar, scroll down 'til you see "JPO bio"). Who are you? Why are you here? What else, by way of introduction, would you like to share?

Looking forward to meeting everyone on January 21.

jpo (Dr. Oliver)

phil.oliver@mtsu.edu

Questions January 23

Questions pertaining to the assigned reading will normally be posted prior to each class. Always share your thoughts (not just the textual facts) in the comments space below each day's post (at least three comments per class, so you can shade the whole diamond on the scorecard when you come to class and receive full participation credit each time... more than that gets you extra credit). Give yourself a base on the scorecard for every question you posted a response to before class. (You can also respond to your own questions(s) or your classmates' posted comments. Again, respond not merely with the authors' textual statements but also with your own thoughts & reflections.) 

What is Bioethics? (Basics 1); Premonition Intro/prologue/1

1. "Bioethics" just means what?
2. What 40-year U.S. study denied information and treatment to its subjects?
3. What did Ivan Ilich warn about in Medical Nemesis?
4. In what issues has the WHO been very active?
5. How has Bioethics broadened its horizons?
6. Bioethics has broken free of what mentality?
7. With what must the main method of Bioethics be concerned?
8. Are there any important bioethical issues you think Campbell has neglected to mention in ch.1 

1. Lewis's previous book asked what question?
2. What did The Lancet point out about the COVID death rate in the U.S.?
3. Bob Glass learned what, that he'd had no idea of, in The Great Influenza? Did you know that, before COVID?
4. How did young Charity Dean cheer herself up?
5. (Your Premonition questions)

A Bioethics MOOC-

 

Some Bioethics TED Talks - https://www.ted.com/topics/bioethics

Michael Lewis on The Premonition-

In 2018, Michael Lewis published “The Fifth Risk,” which argued, in short, that the federal government was underprepared for a variety of disaster scenarios. Guess what his new book is about? Lewis visits the podcast this week to discuss “The Premonition,” (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/bo...) which recounts the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

“It wasn’t just Trump,” Lewis says. “Trump made everything worse. But there had ben changes in the American government, and changes in particular at the C.D.C., that made them less and less capable of actually controlling disease and more and more like a fine academic institution that came in after the battle and tried to assess what had happened; but not equipped for actual battlefield command. The book doesn’t get to the pandemic until Page 160. The back story tells you how the story is going to play out.”

Fwd: olympic gymnist centenarian who just died

You can all post items like this directly, once you become authors on the site. Let me know when you want to.

Begin forwarded message:

This might be a good addition to your list on the Bio ethics blog.

Gary

From: "Gary L. Wedgewood" <gary.wedgewood@gmail.com>
Date: January 21, 2025 at 5:16:09 PM CST
To: Phil Oliver <Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] olympic gymnist centenarian who just died - Search

https://www.bing.com/search?pc=AMAZ&form=AMAZWB&q=olympic%20gymnist%20centenarian%20who%20just%20died&ptag=AMA1ZZZ411282

Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds [“ethics of life” indeed!]

Her search for what one human can be to another

"Arnold Brooks, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, came to Agnes Callard's office hours every week to talk about Aristotle. At the last session of the quarter, in the spring of 2011, they discussed Aristotle's treatise Metaphysics, and what it means to be one—as opposed to more than one. "It was the sort of question where I felt it would be reasonable to feel ecstatic if you made some kind of progress," Arnold told me. Agnes was the only person he'd ever met who seemed to feel the same way.

Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, but she is also a public philosopher, writing popular essays about experiences—such as jealousy, parenting, and anger—that feel to her like "dissociated matter," falling outside the realm of existing theories. She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. "How has it come to pass," she writes, "that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?"

She was married to another philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, Ben Callard, and they had two young sons. To celebrate the end of the term, Agnes had made cookies for her students, and she gave an extra one to Arnold, a twenty-seven-year-old with wavy hair that fell to his shoulders, who was in his first year of the graduate program in philosophy. As Arnold ate the cookie, Agnes, who was thirty-five, noticed that he had "just this incredibly weird expression on his face. I couldn't understand that expression. I'd never seen it before." She asked why he was making that face.

"I think I'm a little bit in love with you," he responded.

Agnes had felt that there was something slightly odd about her weekly sessions with Arnold, but she hadn't been sure what it was. Now the nature of the oddness became apparent. "I think I'm in love with you, too," she told him. They both agreed that nothing could happen. They leaned out her window and smoked a cigarette. Then Arnold left her office.

The next day, Agnes and her sons flew to New York to visit her parents. Ben had gone to Philadelphia to see his mother, who was recovering from surgery. On the plane, Agnes said, "it felt like I was having a revelation in the clouds." For the first time in her life, she felt as if she had access to a certain "inner experience of love," a state that made her feel as if there were suddenly a moral grail, a better kind of person to be. She realized that within her marriage she didn't have this experience. If she stayed married, she would be pretending…"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/agnes-callard-profile-marriage-philosophy

Autonomy and dignity

Polio redux?

As Polio Survivors Watch Kennedy Confirmation, All Eyes Are on McConnell

Their numbers are dwindling now, the faded yellow newspaper clippings reporting their childhood trips to the hospital tucked away in family scrapbooks. Iron lungs, the coffin-like cabinet respirators that kept many of them alive, are a thing of the past, relegated to history books and museums. Some feel the world has forgotten them.

Now the nation's polio survivors are reliving their painful memories as they watch events in Washington, where the Senate will soon consider the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fierce critic of vaccines, to be the nation's next health secretary. And they are keeping a close eye on one of their own: Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader.

It has been nearly 70 years since Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was pronounced "80 to 90 percent effective" against the paralytic form of the disease. Although the government does not keep official numbers, advocacy groups say there are an estimated 300,000 survivorsin the United States. Mr. Kennedy's nomination has prompted some to speak out...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/kennedy-confirmation-polio-survivors.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Centuries-Old, Incredibly Male Quest to Live Forever

The longevity industry is coming off perhaps its best run on record. The expected span of an American life has increased by about three decades since 1900 — to around 78 as of 2023. But for many people, even 78 years just won't do.

The Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity, for example, wants to "make 90 the new 50," and scientists at one biotechnology firm have argued that, unencumbered by disease, the body could potentially make it all the way to age 150. Even more optimistic estimates put the number closer to 1,000.

​​Whatever the maximum human life span may be, people appear increasingly determined to find it — in particular men, who are more inclined to favor radically extending life, maybe even indefinitely. Last year, nearly 6,000 studies of longevity made their way onto PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences papers; that's almost five times as many as two decades ago.

Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a sizable supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, search out life-extending diets and even try to reverse aging itself. It's the same mix of solid science, quixotic experimentation and questionable advice that has, for much of recorded history, defined the pursuit...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/well/longevity-history.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Disruptive avatar

That's another name for Philosopher, at least the sort fashioned in a Socratic mold. Agnes Callard's new book is out just in time for the start of our semester. (And she'll be our Lyceum guest in March.) Can't wait to resume my disruptive vocation on Tuesday. There will be questions, starting as always with "Who are you? Why are you here?" And why are we?

"Socrates did not write great books. And yet he is responsible for one truly great creation: the character of Socrates. Socrates made himself into someone that other people could be. He fashioned his very person into a kind of avatar or mascot for anyone who ventures to ask the sorts of questions that disrupt the course of a life."

— Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard