Ethics in Action Podcast

UMass Boston's Jennifer Radden has made numerous seminal contributions to the philosophy of psychiatry. She has just published an entry on Mental Disorders in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We talk about how philosophy can help us think about mental health and disorders.

What are the moral criteria for triaging patients when the healthcare system is overwhelmed? How is Massachusetts thinking about this? And, more broadly, what is the appropriate balance between preserving public health and limiting an economic meltdown?

Please note: the last 3 minutes of this conversation are missing due to a Zoom malfunction. So it ends a bit abruptly. But the important stuff is all there!

James Hughes is a senior research fellow at the UMass Boston Applied Ethics Center. He is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Since then, he has taught health policy, bioethics, medical sociology, and research methods at Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004) and is the co-editor of Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work (2017). In 2005 he co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) with Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, and since then has served as its executive director. Hughes serves as associate editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, and as co-founder of the Journal of Posthuman Studies. He is also a fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of Humanity+, the Neuroethics Society, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University, and served on the State of Connecticut’s Regenerative Medicine Research Advisory Committee. He speaks on medical ethics, health care policy, and future studies worldwide.

Readings:

Massachusetts Crisis Standards of Care for Covid 19:

https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2020/04/CSC_April-7_2020.pdf

When Can America Reopen From its Corona Virus Shutdown?

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/02/coronavirus-economy-reopen-deaths-balance-analysis-159248

In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides provides a vivid description of the physical and social toll that a terrible plague took on Athens, a year or so into its war with Sparta. What explains the staying power of Thucydides' account? And what can we learn from it as we grapple with our own (albeit far less deadly) Covid 19 crisis?

Greg Fried is Professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Boston University, California State University Los Angeles, and Suffolk University. He teaches and publishes in political philosophy, with a particular interest in responses to challenges to liberal democracy and the rise of ethno-nationalism. He also works in philosophy of law, especially law and hermeneutics; philosophy and race; practical ethics, including just war theory; public philosophy; the history of ethics; Ancient philosophy; and 20th century Continental philosophy, especially Heidegger. Greg's upcoming book is Towards a Polemical Ethics: Between Heidegger and Plato (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, forthcoming 2020). Other works include Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy (London: Rowman & Littlefield International), Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (With Charles Fried. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Reading

• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II (see chapter VII for his account of the plague) http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.2.second.html
• Katherine Kelaidis, "What the Great Plague of Athens Can Teach Us Now." From The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/great-plague-athens-has-eerie-parallels-today/608545/

Eisikovits and Corradetti discuss the relevance of Kant's celebrated essay "Towards Perpetual Peace"

Is peace a process to be constantly managed or an outcome? Why does Kant think that republicanism is conducive to peace? What's the best way to understand his call for creating a world state? Is that a concrete political proposal? A tool for assessing our own political behavior? In what ways is Kant a realist?

Claudio Corradetti is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. He has written extensively on transitional justice and human rights theory.

In this eighth episode of our series on brain-computer interfaces, we are joined by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner. Dr. Sorgner is a philosophy professor at John Cabot University in Rome, Director and Co-Founder of the Beyond Humanism Network, Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), and Editor-in-Chief and Founder of the Journal of Posthuman Studies. Dr. Sorgner is well known for his work on transhumanism, Nietzsche, philosophy of music, and ethics of emerging technologies, and is the author of many books, including most recently We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism and Philosophy of Posthuman Art. In this episode, we discuss several aspects of Dr. Sorgner’s wide-ranging work, including Nietzschean philosophy and its connection to transhumanism, Sorgner’s concept of metahumanism and how it differs from transhumanism and posthumanism, his cyborg thesis, his critique of traditional utopianism, the differing data collection models in the U.S., China, and the EU, his critique of the EU’s GDPR privacy laws, and his proposal for government-managed anonymized medical data collection to enhance technological competitiveness and support universal healthcare, among other topics.