A Graded Approach to “Disease” -- Help or Hindrance? Reply to Berridge
AbstractBerridge's nuanced approach to the conceptualization of addiction as a disease is easier for me to accept than most others. In fact, Berridge and I agree on many core features of addiction, but still not on how to label it. When competing definitions reach a standoff on intellectual grounds, we should look at the clinical utility of each. And here I think that Berridge misses a critical insight. Yet, we end by agreeing to keep listening to each other. (Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - May 4, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Choice Isn ’t Simple. Reply to Pickard
AbstractPickard ’s contribution reminds me that conceptualizing choice is no simple matter. Pickard sees choice as entirely voluntary, while I argue that choice is only partially voluntary. Choices are based on appraisals of situations, which fluctuate due to external circumstances and internal states such as emo tion and mood. Habit itself competes with volition, and all these parameters vary with development. Psychological factors such as delay discounting and especially one's belief in one's agency are critical for volitional choice as well. (Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - May 4, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Yes, Precision is a Good thing. Reply to Flanagan
AbstractFlanagan asserts that my model of addiction would apply as well to sonnet writing. (I guess that means he doesn ’t like it.) Yet his most interesting point is that “addiction” is an imprecise label for a cluster of distinct phenomena. I agree with him that we need to examine these distinctions, but that doesn’t negate their shared features. Neuroscience can play an important role in advancing our unde rstanding of both commonalities and distinctions within the phenomena of addiction. (Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - May 4, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Moral Enhancement Should Target Self-Interest and Cognitive Capacity
AbstractCurrent suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation ...
Source: Neuroethics - April 26, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Can the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis Explain Why Addiction is a Medical Disorder?: Reply to Marc Lewis
(Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - April 12, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Erratum to: Threats to Neurosurgical Patients Posed by the Personal Identity Debate
(Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - March 30, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Chronic Automaticity in Addiction: Why Extreme Addiction is a Disorder
AbstractMarc Lewis argues that addiction is not a disease, it is instead a dysfunctional outcome of what plastic brains ordinarily do, given the adaptive processes of learning and development within environments where people are seeking happiness, or relief, or escape. They come to obsessively desire substances or activities that they believe will deliver happiness and so on, but this comes to corrupt the normal process of development when it escalates beyond a point of functionality. Such ‘deep learning’ emerges from consumptive habits, or ‘motivated repetition’, and although addiction is bad, it ferments out of t...
Source: Neuroethics - March 25, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Pushing the Margins of Responsibility: Lessons from Parks ’ Somnambulistic Killing
AbstractDavid Shoemaker has claimed that a binary approach to moral responsibility leaves out something important, namely instances of marginal agency, cases where agents seem to be eligible for some responsibility responses but not others. In this paper we endorse and extend Shoemaker ’s approach by presenting and discussing one more case of marginal agency not yet covered by Shoemaker or in the other literature on moral responsibility. Our case is that of Kenneth Parks, a Canadian man who drove a long way to his mother-in-law’s and killed her in a state of somnambulism. We s upport our claim about Parks’ marginal r...
Source: Neuroethics - March 22, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Amnestic MCI Patients ’ Perspectives toward Disclosure of Amyloid PET Results in a Research Context
ConclusionsMany patients diagnosed clinically with aMCI want to know their brain amyloid test results, even though this knowledge may be disadvantageous to them. Knowing what is going on with their health and the ability to make informed decisions about their future were the two principal advantages mentioned for obtaining their amyloid PET results. Because of the overwhelming consensus of aMCI patients was to disclose their brain amyloid PET scan results, researchers should strongly consider releasing this information to research subjects. (Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - March 21, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
How to Recover from a Brain Disease: Is Addiction a Disease, or Is there a Disease-like Stage in Addiction?
AbstractPeople struggling with addiction are neither powerless over their addiction, nor are they fully in control. Lewis vigorously objects to the brain disease model of addiction (BDMA), because it makes people lose belief in their self-efficacy, and hence hinders their recovery. Although he acknowledges that there is a compulsive state in addiction, he objects to the claim that this compulsion is carved in stone. Lewis argues that the BDMA underestimates the agency of addicted people, and hence hinder their recovery. Lewis ’s work offers us a very much to be welcomed neurobiology of recovery. It offers addicted people...
Source: Neuroethics - March 12, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Introduction: Testing and Refining Marc Lewis ’s Critique of the Brain Disease Model of Addiction
AbstractIn this introduction we set out some salient themes that will help structure understanding of a complex set of intersecting issues discussed in this special issue on the work of Marc Lewis: (1) conceptual foundations of the disease model, (2) tolerating the disease model given socio-political environments, and (3) A third wave: refining conceptualization of addiction in the light of Lewis ’s model. (Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - March 1, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Review of Nada Gligorov: Neuroethics and the Scientific Revision of Common Sense
AbstractThis ambitious book aims to make a substantive contribution to six separate debates within neuroethics — the existence of free will, the impact of cognitive enhancement and (separately) of memory management on personal identity, the nature of mental privacy, the supposed subjectivity of pain, and the proper definition of death — all in the context of a framing argument concerning the relation bet ween common sense psychological concepts and scientific concepts. Gligorov means to rebut skepticism about folk mental states in the face of surprising neuroscientific results by reconceptualizing folk theories as prot...
Source: Neuroethics - February 22, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Addiction and Moralization: the Role of the Underlying Model of Addiction
AbstractAddiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem to resuscitate pro blematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invo...
Source: Neuroethics - February 18, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
“Should We Treat Vegetative and Minimally Conscious Patients as Persons?”
AbstractHow should we treat patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) or minimally conscious state (MCS)? More specifically, should we treat them as having the full moral status of persons? Yes, or so we argue. First, we introduce the medical conditions of PVS, MCS, and the related conditions of Locked-in Syndrome and covert awareness. Second, we characterize the main argument for thinking diagnosed PVS patients are not persons. Third, we contend that this argument is defeated by mounting empirical evidence for the considerable uncertainty of PVS diagnoses. Fourth, we characterize a new argument fo...
Source: Neuroethics - February 14, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Monkey Business? Development, Influence, and Ethics of Potentially Dual-Use Brain Science on the World Stage
(Source: Neuroethics)
Source: Neuroethics - February 10, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
