The Ethics of Hope - A Moral Imperative for Oncologists
How much responsibility do clinicians have in “managing hope?” These authors argue it’s quite a bit. They propose a framework for thinking about how hope moves through a clinical encounter - through goals, pathways, and agency. I’ve written before that we should be careful in thinking in ways similar this (not that we should discount their system entirely), as it may nudge us to believe hope can submit to medicine’s technical interventions. Sometimes trying to foster hope can feel like clinicians practicing sleight-of-hand, but the best moments involve clinicians and patients working together to behold hope where they may not have thought any existed.
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
writes a helpful response to ’s piece on “dopamine culture.” Sacasas frames our challenges with technology in terms of habit and responsibility in an attempt to wrest back agency from the reductionistic narrative that would enslave us to our neurotransmitters. This, of course, turns toward explicitly moral considerations that some might find more uncomfortable than such biological determinism: “So it may be, then, that we are not just turning compulsively to our devices in order to divert ourselves from the threat of existential dread. We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.”Conscientious refusal or conscientious provision: we can’t have both
Ryan Kulesa and Alberto Giubilini argue that how we understand conscience depends on how we understand the end of medicine: is it to treat disease or to satisfy preferences? If it’s to treat disease, then clinicians should refrain from (and even object to) services that harm. If it’s to satisfy preferences, then clinicians should do just that.
Is it a good idea to surmount grief by using artificial intelligence to technologically “resurrect” a dead loved one, in image and in speech? What if you use them for some other purpose? Daniel Walden is suspicious that this is in any way a good idea: “The reason we must safeguard the silence of the dead is because it means confronting the fact that a person is gone, that we now lack something irreplaceable. … It is the fullness of personhood that makes the loss of someone so profound, and full personhood is the only foundation on which a right relationship can ever be built.”