9/9/2019 Introducing bioXphi – The New Experimental Philosophy Blog Menu ABOUT US GUIDELINES FOR COMMENTS LABS RESOURCES Menu Introducing bioXphi Posted 02/08/2019 by Brian Earp in Calls for papers, Geography of Philosophy, Methods, Moral Psychology, By Brian D. Earp (Yale University) Bioethics grew out of the need to make real-world moral decisions in response to gross human rights abuses, from Nazi war crimes to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in the context of rapid technological innovations in healthcare. In the aftermath of World War II, there were incredible advances in life-sustaining medicine, with a corresponding need to decide who should have access to certain treatments in the face of limited resources, and to develop an agreed-upon moral foundation to guide the use of new technologies and prevent their misapplication. Notions of informed consent, respect for persons (autonomy), bene cence, non-male cence, and justice soon dominated bioethical analysis. But how do these and other principles apply to particular cases? What does it really mean for a person to give informed consent — and what goes into that process, psychologically? How do doctors actually think about harm and bene t, especially when there is disagreement about what constitutes a harm or bene t for a particular patient? What is the role of social context in shaping these kinds of judgements? When policymakers decide about fair distribution of resources, what factors in uence their intuitions about what justice demands? And how do proxy decision makers make sense of respect for persons when the nature of one’s personhood is not entirely clear, as in the case of fetuses, or individuals with advanced dementia? Although bioethicists have occasionally drawn on empirical data to supplement normative bioethical analysis, the emerging eld of experimental philosophical bioethics — or bioXphi — seeks to systematically characterize the underlying cognitive processes that bear on moral judgments in a healthcare context. We see this work as having serious signi cance for https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi/ 1/10 9/9/2019 Introducing bioXphi – The New Experimental Philosophy Blog medical policy and clinical judgment: generalized research on psychological processes may not apply to real-world decision making in the kinds of life-or-death situations that doctors often face. And formalized models of informed consent may have little to do with the facts on the ground when it comes to factors that in uence a patient’s decision to give permission for a surgery. Work by recent Yale Ph.D. Roseanna Sommers, for example, sheds light on the complex ways that ordinary people understand and apply the concept of consent. Consistent with standard accounts, she nds that coercion and incapacity are seen as undermining the validity of a person’s consent, but, surprisingly, that deception is not seen this way: “A substantial portion of survey respondents believe that morally valid consent can be granted despite the presence of signi cant and wrongful deception. Their intuitive judgments thus defy the prevailing legal and philosophical understandings of consent.” The ordinary notion of consent also plays a pivotal role in shaping bioethical judgments. For instance, in research spearheaded by Blanca Rodríguez López, participants were asked to read about patients undergoing end-of-life care. When treatment was consented, respondents thought the patient’s death was caused by the patients’ pre-existing illness. If treatment was unconsented, however, it was the doctor’s actions that were viewed as the cause of death. The same pattern emerged when surveying experienced doctors. Thus, patient consent can transform the way we causally describe two otherwise identical medical treatments. Knowing how real people intuitively think about consent has obvious importance for how formalized processes of informed consent might be designed and implemented. To choose another example, with Gus Skorburg, Jim A. C. Everett, and Julian Savulescu (with support from Josh Knobe), I have recently published work on the effects of drug addiction on lay judgments about personal identity persistence: the extent to which an individual is seen as the same person before and after a transformative experience. Drawing on recent work from psychology showing that mental representations of the self are highly moralized (we tend to think of people as having a ‘good true self’ that is fundamental to who they are), we showed that American participants see addiction as driving individuals away from their good true self, leading to a strong impression that they are not the same person as they were before becoming addicted. This may have implications for more effective approaches to treatment, framed as ‘rediscovering’ one’s true identity. Still other work has looked at judgements of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases, the attitudes of health care professionals about physician-assisted death (analyzing justi cations given and the role of different terminology in shaping intuitions about permissibility), and the structure of popular beliefs about the unacceptability of cognitive enhancement. A major purpose of bioXphi is to make bioethical theorizing increasingly responsive to empirical insights in the formulation of clinical practice, institutional policy, and ongoing theoretical debate. To explore these issues, I am co-organizing an international bioXphi conference with colleagues at Yale and Oxford universities, to take place October 3-5, 2019 at the Whitney https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi/ 2/10 9/9/2019 Introducing bioXphi – The New Experimental Philosophy Blog Humanities Center at Yale in New Haven, CT. We are incredibly grateful to the Whitney Humanities Center for hosting the event and for awarding us a grant from its Humanity/Humanities program, which allows us to bring together scholars from around the world for this rst-ever workshop dedicated to bioXphi speci cally. We aim to highlight the latest work in experimental philosophical bioethics through traditional presentations of empirical work, but also to engage in foundational theorizing about the very nature of this emerging discipline: one of the major components of the workshop will be a brainstorming and planning summit with key stakeholders to map out a coherent vision for future work in this area. Among the key issues to be clari ed are how historically and socially contextualized, normative work in the medical humanities can both inform and be informed by empirical work in the cognitive sciences. In what ways should bioXphi be understood as a descriptive enterprise, aimed at understanding how and why we evaluate bioethical issues in the ways we do? For example, what are the underlying principles that generate our intuitions about various bioethical scenarios? And in what ways is bioXphi an appropriate vehicle for shaping prescriptive debates: Can it help us answer the question of what we should do in a given healthcare situation? I am proud to direct your attention to a new website, bioxphi.org, that will hopefully become the main hub for research and discussion in this area over the years to come. We will soon be launching a blog and publication archive associated with the site, which has been made possible due to support from the Program for Biomedical Ethics at Yale University (directed by Mark Mercurio) and the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics (directed by Stephen Latham). Thanks to Julia Kolak for help with the website and co-organizing the conference, along with Mikey Dunn and Michael Parker at Oxford, who are sending representatives from the Ethox Centre to the conference, plus Erik Parens at The Hastings Center and Joshua Knobe and Molly Crockett at Yale for being such steadfast advocates of the whole project. And a shout out to Ivar Hannikainen, Emilian Mihailov, Vilius Dranseika, Blanca López Rodriguez, and Karen Kolb for contributing lots of ideas and good advice along the way. If you are interested in bioXphi, would like to attend the upcoming conference (the speakers are con rmed but the workshop is open to the public), or have a publication in this area you would like to have listed on our website, please feel free to contact me at brian.earp@yale.edu or Julia Kolak at jkolak@gradcenter.cuny.edu. Sample references 2019 Chan, E. Y. (2019). The politics of intent: Political ideology in uences organ donation intentions. Personality and Individual Differences 142, 255-259. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886918306573 https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi/ 3/10 9/9/2019 Introducing bioXphi – The New Experimental Philosophy Blog Conrad, E. C., Humphries, S., & Chatterjee, A. (2019). Attitudes toward cognitive enhancement: the role of metaphor and context. AJOB Neuroscience, 10(1), 35-47. http://ccn.upenn.edu/chatterjee/assets/pdf/publications/Conrad_Humphries_Chatterjee_2019_01.pdf Earp, B. D., Skorburg, J. A., Everett, J. A., & Savulescu, J. (2019). Addiction, identity, morality. AJOB Empirical Bioethics, 10(2), 136-153. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23294515.2019.1590480 2018 Beverley, J., & Beebe, J. (2018). Judgments of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases. Bioethics, 32(2), 83-93. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bioe.12412 2017 Braverman, D. W., Marcus, B. S., Wakim, P. G., Mercurio, M. R., & Kopf, G. S. (2017). Health care professionals’ attitudes about physician-assisted death: an analysis of their justi cations and the roles of terminology and patient competency. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 54(4), 538-545. https://www.jpsmjournal.com/article/S08853924(17)30287-7/abstract 2016 De Vries, R. G., Tomlinson, T., Kim, H. M., Krenz, C., Haggerty, D., Ryan, K. A., & Kim, S. Y. (2016). Understanding the public’s reservations about broad consent and study-by-study consent for donations to a biobank: results of a national survey. PloS ONE, 11(7), e0159113. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159113 Faber, N. S., Savulescu, J., & Douglas, T. (2016). Why is cognitive enhancement deemed unacceptable? The role of fairness, deservingness, and hollow achievements. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 232. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00232/full 2015 Faber, N. S., Douglas, T., Heise, F., & Hewstone, M. (2015). Cognitive enhancement and motivation enhancement: an empirical comparison of intuitive judgments. AJOB Neuroscience, 6(1), 18-20. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21507740.2014.991847 2014 Fitz, N. S., Nadler, R., Manogaran, P., Chong, E. W., & Reiner, P. B. (2014). Public attitudes toward cognitive enhancement. Neuroethics, 7(2), 173-188. https://philpapers.org/archive/FITPAT-4.pdf 2008 https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi/ 4/10 9/9/2019 Introducing bioXphi – The New Experimental Philosophy Blog Cushman, F., Knobe, J., & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008). Moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Cognition, 108(1), 281-289. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708000358 Leave a Reply Enter your comment here... RECENT POSTS CFA/CONF: X-phi New Zealand 6-7 Dec 2019 The Stability of Philosophical Intuitions: Failed Replications of Swain et al. (2008) Introducing bioXphi Unusual cases, routine inferences: Adapting a psycholinguistic paradigm for x-phi Actual Causation and Compositionality Symposium on E. Fischer et al.’s “Experimental Ordinary Language Philosophy: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Default Inferences” at Brains Blog (Reminder) Job: University of Waikato Creativity in light of darkness Job: University of Waikato A New Finding for Causal Judgments RECENT COMMENTS Adrian Ziółkowski on The Stability of Philosophical Intuitions: Failed Replications of Swain et al. (2008) Tim Kraft on The Stability of Philosophical Intuitions: Failed Replications of Swain et al. (2008) Joshua Knobe on Actual Causation and Compositionality Justin Sytsma on Actual Causation and Compositionality Joshua Knobe on Actual Causation and Compositionality https://xphiblog.com/introducing-bioxphi/ 5/10