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Time for Bioethics to End Talk of Personhood (But Only in the Philosophers’ Sense)
... LIke Clapp et al. (2024), we support a pragmatist approach to language in bioethical inquiry (see also Dranseika et al. 2024). By moving beyond the representationalist assumption that language merely describes reality, and instead recognizing its role in shaping perception, inference, and moral judgment, we can gain a better understanding of how bioethical issues are framed, debated, and acted upon. ...
We agree with Clapp and colleagues (2024) that the representational view of language presents an impoverished account of communicative speech acts. Empirical research shows how people's conceptual inferences and moral reactions to bioethical phenomena often respond to, or reflect, the socio-relational context of a decision among other potential background factors. In this commentary, we propose that methodologies drawn from experimental bioethics (see, e.g., Earp et al. 2021a; Lewis, Demaree-Cotton and Earp 2023) can be used to shed light on such factors and illustrate our contention with a high-level preview of forthcoming research into public perceptions of brain organoids research. This work is based on the pragmatist assumption that how we refer to these stem-cell-based models (e.g., as "mini-brains", "brains-in-a-dish", neural or cerebral organoids), in combination with social and contextual cues, may affect people's intuitions about how these models are, or should be, used, or their willingness to donate biospecimens for such purposes. We explain how empirical-cum-normative investigations into the eliciting factors and cognitive processes that shape people's perceptions and attitudes about such research-and what the ethical upshot of such investigations might be-can support the authors' vision of a "pragmatist" bioethics.
... This question is consistent with recent arguments of Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024), who claims that instead of first having to determine whether an entity is a person to know how it is rational or moral to treat it, we can sometimes make progress on those latter questions by appealing directly to certain properties of the entity, irrespective of whether these are sufficient for personhood (see alsoDranseika et al. 2024; for an alternative perspective, seeKoplin et al. 2024). ...
There is an ongoing debate about the ethics of research on lifespan extension: roughly, using medical technologies to extend biological human lives beyond the current "natural" limit of about 120 years. At the same time, there is an exploding interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create "digital twins" of persons, for example by fine-tuning large language models on data specific to particular individuals. In this paper, we consider whether digital twins (or digital doppelgängers, as we refer to them) could be a path toward a kind of life extension-or more precisely, a kind of person extension-that does not rely on biological continuity. We discuss relevant accounts of consciousness and personal identity and argue that digital doppelgängers may at least help us achieve some of the aims or ostensible goods of person-span extension, even if they may not count as extensions of our personhood on dominant philosophical accounts. We also consider relational accounts of personhood and discuss how digital doppelgängers may be able to extend personhood in a relational sense, or at least secure some of the goods associated with relevant relationships. We conclude by suggesting that a research program to investigate such issues is relevant to ongoing debates about the ethics of extending the human lifespan.
This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be.
While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent.
Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant.
This volume presents a sample of exciting new ‘naturalistic’ work on quasi-perennial topics in the philosophy of medicine, such as the demarcation of disease, life, death, pain and disability. Some chapters engage surveys and vignettes, others use corpus analysis or simulations, while others offer interesting reflections on how such experimental philosophy touches upon other new developments in philosophy (of medicine), such as conceptual engineering. A couple of contributions mainly focus on the limitations of experimental philosophy of medicine, and point out potential problems with its assumptions or goals.
The question of what makes someone the same person through time and change has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. In recent years, the question of what makes ordinary or lay people judge that someone is—or isn’t—the same person has caught the interest of experimental psychologists. These latter, empirically oriented researchers have sought to understand the cognitive processes and eliciting factors that shape ordinary people’s judgments about personal identity and the self. Still more recently, practitioners within an emerging discipline, experimental philosophical bioethics or “bioxphi”—the focus of this chapter—have adopted a similar aim and employed similar methodologies, but with two distinctive features: (a) a special concern for enhanced ecological validity in the examples and populations studied; and (b) an interest in contributing to substantive normative debates within the wider field of bioethics. Our aim in this chapter is to sample illustrative work on personal identity in bioxphi, explore how it relates to studies in psychology covering similar terrain, and draw out the implications of this work for matters of bioethical concern. In pursuing these issues, we highlight recent work in bioxphi that includes the perceived validity of advance directives following neurodegeneration, the right of psychologically altered study participants to withdraw from research, how drug addiction may cause one to be regarded by others as “a completely different person,” the effect of deep-brain stimulation on perceptions of the self, and the potential influence of moral enhancement interventions on intuitive impressions of a person’s character.
In the present chapter, we seek to better understand how laypeople reason about the “true self" of a person with advancing dementia. We are also interested in how such reasoning bears on laypeople’s views about the validity or invalidity of an advance directive (AD) regarding that person’s treatment. Toward that end, we will report the results of two empirical studies we undertook to gain insights into this relationship: namely, between judgments about the true self and whether to follow an AD. To justify our empirical approach, we draw on arguments from the emerging literature on experimental philosophical bioethics, also known experimental bioethics or simply “bioxphi” (Earp, 2019; Lewis, 2020; Mihailov et al., 2021). Bioxphi describes an approach to normative theorizing in bioethics that employs evidence about laypeople’s moral judgments as derived from psychological experiments. In a recent publication, we proposed several means of drawing substantive normative conclusions from argumentative premises that include such evidence (see Earp et al., 2021). We will rehearse some of those proposals in a later section, where we explore potential implications of our findings for competing normative positions in the debate about advanced directives.
This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”), which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (“bioxphi”). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s normative judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments.
Précis: Some people with dementia are transformed by the disease, to the point that family members may describe them as a "different person." These transformations may be negative or positive. What factors affect the judgements of ordinary people about whether an advance directive (AD) should be followed in such cases? We conducted three studies to test the influence of (1) positive versus negative transformation and (2) "treat" versus "withhold treatment" AD on the judgements of US participants (n = 1676) as to whether the AD should be followed and the extent to which the late-stage dementia patient had become a different person. We found that participants generally endorsed following the AD, irrespective of condition, but much less so when the patient had a positive transformation. Participants also favored "treat" over "withhold treatment" ADs. Unexpectedly, we found that AD type affected "different person" judgments: participants registered significantly weaker agreement with the proposition that the patient had become a different person when the AD instructed treatment. We discuss these results in the context of Walsh's (2020) newly proposed normative model for AD decision-making.
There is an ongoing public debate about sex, gender and identity that is often quite heated. This is an edited transcript of an informal lecture I recorded in 2019 to serve as a friendly guide to these complex issues. It represents my best attempt, not to score political points for any particular side, but to give an introductory map of the territory so that you can think for yourself, investigate further, and reach your own conclusions about such controversial questions as "What does mean to be a man or a woman?"
There is a rich tradition in bioethics of gathering empirical data to inform, supplement, or test the implications of normative ethical analysis. To this end, bioethicists have drawn on diverse methods, including qualitative interviews, focus groups, ethnographic studies, and opinion surveys to advance understanding of key issues in bioethics. In so doing, they have developed strong ties with neighboring disciplines such as anthropology, history, law, and sociology. Collectively, these lines of research have flourished in the broader field of “empirical bioethics” for more than 30 years (Sugarman & Sulmasy 2010). More recently, philosophers from outside the field of bioethics have similarly employed empirical methods—drawn primarily from psychology, the cognitive sciences, economics, and related disciplines—to advance theoretical debates. This approach, which has come to be called experimental philosophy (or x-phi), relies primarily on controlled experiments to interrogate the concepts, intuitions, reasoning, implicit mental processes, and empirical assumptions about the mind that play a role in traditional philosophical arguments (Knobe et al. 2012). Within the moral domain, for example, experimental philosophy has begun to contribute to long-standing debates about the nature of moral judgment and reasoning; the sources of our moral emotions and biases; the qualities of a good person or a good life; and the psychological basis of moral theory itself (Alfano, Loeb, & Plakias 2018). We believe that experimental philosophical bioethics—or “bioxphi”—can similarly contribute to bioethical scholarship and debate. Here, we introduce this emerging discipline, explain how it is distinct from empirical bioethics more broadly construed, and attempt to characterize how it might advance theory and practice in this area.
We investigate the features people use in making inferences about continuity of individual persons. Using a transforma- tion paradigm, we show that people weigh both continuity of the brain and continuity of mental content. Across experi- ments, we document instances in which participants are more likely to assert individual continuity than continuity of per- sonhood. We discuss these results in terms of a hierarchical view of concepts and philosophical work on personal identity.
stressed the more abstract information that concepts afford (e.g., Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989), but he still retains a fondness for exemplars. In fact, this tension in Doug’s thinking about concepts is characteristic of a special
In today's bioethical debates, the concept of the person plays a major role. However, it does not hold this role justly. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the concept of the person is unsuited to be a central concept in bioethical debates, because its use is connected with serious problems. First, the concept is superfluous. Secondly, it is a confusing concept and it lacks pragmatic use. Thirdly, its use leads to simplifications. Finally, the concept can easily be used as a cover-up concept. Therefore, it is argued that relinquishing the concept of the person could enhance the clarity and quality of bioethical debate. Moreover, the historic origin of much of the present confusion surrounding the concept of the person is clarified. It is demonstrated that three influences resulting from Locke's ideas on the person and personal identity can be determined as contributing factors to the confusion and controversy within the present bioethical debates centering around the person.
This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be.
While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent.
Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant.
This volume presents a sample of exciting new ‘naturalistic’ work on quasi-perennial topics in the philosophy of medicine, such as the demarcation of disease, life, death, pain and disability. Some chapters engage surveys and vignettes, others use corpus analysis or simulations, while others offer interesting reflections on how such experimental philosophy touches upon other new developments in philosophy (of medicine), such as conceptual engineering. A couple of contributions mainly focus on the limitations of experimental philosophy of medicine, and point out potential problems with its assumptions or goals.
Regulations implemented by World Athletics (WA) require female athletes with differences of sexual development to suppress their blood testosterone levels in order to participate in certain women's sporting competitions. These regulations have been justified by reference to fairness. In this paper, we reconstruct WA's understanding of fairness, which requires a "level playing field" where no athlete should have a significant performance advantage based on factors other than talent, dedication, and hard work over an average athlete in their category. We demonstrate that by placing regulations only on testosterone levels, while ignoring physical as well as socioeconomic advantages, WA consistently fails to meet its own definition of fairness. We then discuss several ways in which this definition could be met. Our analysis shows that a categorical system, in which athletes are divided into categories based on properties leading to significant performance advantages, is best suited for meeting WA's definition of fairness.
The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of "personhood" is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood.
Background: The American Academy of Neurology recently emphasized the importance of communicating with patients’ families to better reflect patient values in clinical care. However, little is known about how decisions about continuing rehabilitative care made by family caregivers and healthcare providers working with minimally conscious patients are informed by conceptualizations of consciousness and moral status.
Methods: We explored these issues in interviews with 18 family caregivers and 20 healthcare professionals caring for minimally conscious patients. Data were analyzed using thematic content analysis.
Results: Results suggest that family members and healthcare professionals share similar views of what consciousness is (“being there”) and what it is indicated by (“a look in the eyes,” and/or an “ability to do”/agency). They also share a belief that the presence (or “level”) of consciousness does not determine whether rehabilitative care should be discontinued. Rather, it should be determined by considerations of suffering and well-being. Providers were more likely to view suffering as rationale for discontinuation of care, while family members viewed suffering as an indicator of and motivator for potential recovery.
Conclusion: Findings can help optimize family-provider communications about minimally conscious patients by acknowledging shared assumptions and interpretations of consciousness, as well as key areas where perspectives diverge.
• Implications for rehabilitation
• Family and professional caregivers’ interpretations of consciousness and suffering are implicated in decisions about continuing rehabilitation for minimally conscious patients.
• Family members and healthcare providers both rely to some extent on non-observable evidence to evaluate consciousness, which may be an adaptive and philanthropic response to clinical uncertainty.
• Acknowledging shared assumptions and interpretations of consciousness, as well as diverging perspectives, can help to optimize family-provider communications.
In this paper I argue that the concept of person as utilized in legal and ethical discourse has no stable meaning, which often leads to premature conclusions and confusion. I identify three different ways of philosophical understanding of ‘person’ – the classical, the psychological and the ethical. I further observe that in the law the term is used as a technical device, which has little to do with the philosophical conceptions of the person. Finally, I claim that ‘person’ is also a part of the conceptual repertoire of folk psychology, and hence cannot be simply dispensed with. Rather, its use in legal and ethical debates should be accompanied by methodological awareness and caution.
What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean.
In a paper in Philosophical Psychology, Nichols & Bruno (2010) claim that the folk judge that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article we attempt to evaluate this claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity but rely on different concepts of a person and of identity of an individual. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence suggesting that (if we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off their use of proper names) psychological continuity is not considered by the folk to be necessary for an individual to be placed in a category of person and for ascribing identity over time and transformations. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity judgments. We conclude that these claims give us a good reason to be skeptical about prospects of using folk intuitions in philosophical theorizing about personal identity.
Conceptualizations of
- K M Kostick
- A Halm
- K O'brien
- S Kothari
- J S Blumenthal-Barby
Kostick, K. M., A. Halm, K. O'Brien, S. Kothari, and J. S.
Blumenthal-Barby.
2021.
Conceptualizations
of