Consequentialist Research Articles

Ontology of doctor and patient relationship and bioethics: from Aristotle's teleology to Pellegrino's philosophy of medicine.

Some philosophical and metaethical theories have tried to provide a fundamental background for bioethics but miss the fundamental question about what medicine is, its nature and its end. We argue that the philosophy of medicine, through the development that Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma gave to this field of study, allied with Aristotle's practical and teleological ethics, can provide an ontological background for bioethics beyond the tradition of principles and deontology, with particular emphasis on the uniqueness of the doctor-patient encounter. Some difficulties and criticisms of this ontological model are also examined.

Creating constellations of coexistence through connections between people in human-wildlife conflict areas.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a critical challenge to human development and well-being and threatens biodiversity conservation. Ideally, HWC mitigation should benefit both wildlife and communities and limit the costs associated with living alongside wildlife. However, place- and context-dependent realizations of conflict are often overlooked in HWC mitigation. Social and systemic dimensions of human-wildlife relationships often receive limited consideration in HWC as a concept and in mitigation strategies implemented globally. In recognizing our collective symmetries as a diverse group of researchers, we pose the idea of constellations of coexistence, based on Atallah etal.'s "constellation of co-resistance." Building on literature and our interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral experiences of working with diverse species inhabiting different sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscapes, we considered evidence of cultural nuances (e.g., sociocultural dimensions of human-elephant and human-lion interactions in East Africa and India) in HWC mitigation and argue that failing to incorporate them in mainstream practices poses a myriad of ethical and practical consequences. Locally situated but globally relevant, participation of local and Indigenous communities in HWC mitigation activities produces better conservation outcomes. Centering communities in the ideation, implementation, and evaluation of HWC mitigation promotes more equitable and sustainable management strategies for long-term human-wildlife coexistence.

Integrating ChatGPT into the Inquiry-Based Science Curriculum for Primary Education

The integration of ChatGPT into an inquiry-based science curriculum for elementary school is investigated in this paper with an eye on increasing student involvement and learning results. Artificial intelligence-driven tools will help teachers enable individualized learning opportunities that foster young students’ critical thinking and curiosity. The study emphasizes the need for a solid basis in scientific education since it develops critical thinking and problem-solving abilities necessary to negotiate the natural world’s complexity. It also tackles the difficulties of using inquiry-based learning, including the pressure of standardized testing and the necessity of professional growth to provide instructors with successful approaches. The research concludes that including artificial intelligence in the classroom prepares students for a technologically driven future. It calls for careful evaluation of ethical consequences and thorough educator training to optimize its possible value. This research prepares the stage for following investigations on AI integration in different educational environments, possibly changing accepted teaching strategies.

Exploring explainable AI: a bibliometric analysis

Over the past few years, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has become increasingly popular as a result of the demand for AI systems that are simpler to comprehend and with greater interpretability. This study provides a conceptual framework and a quick assessment of the work done in explainable artificial intelligence. Using the Vosviewer application, the researchers analyzed 4781 research publications from the Scopus database, spanning 2004 to 2023. Observations indicate a rapid and exponential growth in the quantity of publications, commencing in 2018. The importance of the study is shown by the analysis of publishing activities according to the year of publication and the geographical area, together with citation analysis, research methodologies, and data analysis techniques. The researchers have highlighted ten interesting areas that require further study from future researchers. Moreover, the work emphasizes the legal, ethical, and social consequences for the researchers.

Binaries and Blurred Lines: The Ethical Stress of Child Protection Social Work in the Grey of Extra-Familial Harm

ABSTRACT Social care responses to extra-familial harm require social workers to work across the binaries of welfare and justice, victim and perpetrator, parent and professional, risk and protection. This paper examines the ethical consequences of working in this manner, through qualitative data (focus groups, interviews, observations, case file analysis and documentary review) from three children's social care organisations in England who trialled new child protection pathways for significant harm outside of family homes/relationships. The extent to which these pathways created five conditions for a welfare response to extra-familial harm are considered, before these results are brought into conversation with Bourdieu’s meta theory of capital, habitus and doxa, and Fenton's practice theory of ethical stress. The challenges identified evidence of the importance foregrounding social work values in the pursuit of welfare-based response to extra-familial harm. They also offer a rationale for studying theories of care ethics in social work in the context of interagency practice.

Artificial Intelligence and Theology

This bibliographic essay provides a starting point for theological librarians to engage the history, anthropology, ethics, theology of artificial intelligence. What it shows is that despite seeming to appear ex nihilio, artificial intelligence for writing has a long history, profound ethical consequences beyond academic integrity, and latent theology. While theological librarians may or may not have the computer science background necessary to engage the technicalities of AI, they certainly have the disciplinary knowledge and skill to engage the topic in a meaningful and theological way.

Body transformations: An opportunity to work on the ethical perspective through photovoice and bodymapping

BackgroundBody transformations are alterations of the body due to symbolic, aesthetic, religious or cultural reasons. The increase in frequency, especially among young people, raises ethical questions. Future nurses must understand the ethical implications of social phenomena. AimThe aim was to find out how nursing students perceive bodily transformations from the perspective of Foulcauldian self-care and to determine the ethical value and health consequences of these transformations. Research designA qualitative study based on the socio-critical paradigm and based on the theory's principles of the Technologies of the self (Foucault). Photovoice and bodymapping were used for the reflection process. The participants were 267 first-year nursing students from two Spanish universities. A content analysis was conducted. Ethical considerationsThe Research Ethics Committee of both universities approved this study. FindingsThe body transformations most photographed by the students were piercing, tattoos and surgical interventions. Two main categories emerged: 1. Body modifications as constructions of the self with two subcategories, the pursuit of bodily aesthetics and the pursuit of spiritual aesthetics. 2. Health consequences.The need to build an identity of their own, as well as to be integrated into their environment by helping to improve not only their external appearance but also their inner side were the main inputs. The major ethical dilemmas are evident when body modifications are influenced by social and cultural values. The debate and reflection of the students through photovoice and its symbolic representation in bodymapping highlighted its health consequences. For the students, nursing should accompany them throughout the entire process, highlighting the importance of ethical values. ConclusionThe ethical value attributed to the different body modifications has been shown, revealing how they have a common origin, the improvement of their corporal and spiritual aesthetics. Nursing has a role as an active carer of the health of these people and must act in accordance with the ethical principles of this profession.

On the atout ticket learning problem for neural networks and its application in securing federated learning exchanges

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have become the backbone of many real-world applications, including distributed applications relying on Federated Learning (FL). However, several vulnerabilities/attacks have emerged in recent years, affecting the benefits of using ANNs in FL, such as reconstruction attacks and membership inference attacks. These attacks can have severe impacts on both the societal and professional levels. For instance, inferring the presence of a patient’s private health record in a medical study or a clinic database violates the patient’s privacy and can have legal or ethical consequences. Therefore, protecting the data and model from malicious attacks in FL systems is important. This paper introduces the Atout Ticket Learning (ATL) problem. This new problem consists of identifying sensitive parameters (atout tickets) of a neural network model, which, if modified, will increase the model’s loss by at least a given threshold ϵ. First, we formulate ATL as an ℓ0-norm minimization problem, and we derive a lower bound on the number of atout tickets needed to achieve a model degradation of ϵ. Second, we design the Atout Ticket Protocol (ATP) as an effective solution for privacy-preserving in FL systems using atout tickets, along with the benefit of noise perturbations and secure aggregation techniques. Finally, we experiment ATP against FL reconstruction attacks using new selection strategies, namely Inverting Gradients, Deep Leakage, and Improved Deep Leakage. The results show that ATP is highly robust against these attacks.

Psychological aspects of aggression among police personnel

The article presents psychological aspects of aggression in the context of professional activity of police personnel. The nature and manifestations of aggression in the working environment of police officers are investigated, the factors that cause aggressive behaviour are considered, and its impact on the efficiency and safety of performance of official duties is analysed. The theoretical analysis has shown that everyday stress and dangerous situations in wartime create a favourable environment for the development of aggressive tendencies, which can negatively affect the quality of official duties performance. It has been found that aggression among police personnel can take various forms such as verbal conflict and physical force, which calls into question the credibility of law enforcement agencies and can have serious legal and ethical consequences. The purpose of the study is to examine and analyse various manifestations of aggression among police personnel in order to identify possible differences in their characteristics and ability to display such behaviour. The sample consisted of 200 police officers, divided into two groups by gender, 100 in each group. The first group was represented by men, the second by women. The study used the “Aggression Level Questionnaire” by A. Bass and A. Darky. Mathematical and statistical processing of the results was carried out using Student’s t-test for independent samples and Fisher's angular transformation criterion (φ). An empirical study of aggression among police officers of different gender groups has revealed significant differences in the manifestation of aggressive behaviour. Male police officers are more likely to use physical force and verbal aggression compared to female police officers. At the same time, both groups have a similar tendency to indirect aggression and negativism, which indicates a general tendency towards indirect forms of aggression and oppositional behaviour among police personnel. Female police officers show a higher level of irritability, suspicion and resentment, which may affect their interaction with others and their overall psychological state.

The medical anthropology of Viktor v. Weizsacker: ethical consequences

The medical anthropology of Viktor v. Weizsacker: ethical consequences

Changing climate, changing geographies?

AbstractEver since climate change came to occupy a place on the research and policy landscape in the 1980s, geography and geographers have been at the forefront of understanding its dynamics and social, economic, ethical, and political consequences. In this collection, we explore how the geographical understanding of climate change has evolved over time. We reflect on what we consider to be the most significant contributions that geography has made to our understanding of climate change, how the discipline's approach to this issue has changed over time, the gaps and limits in our understanding, and what the future of climate‐changed geographies might be.

O „deonotologicznych” i „utylitarnych” decyzjach w dylematach etycznych opartych na „dylemacie wagonika” (the Trolley Problem)

Ethical dilemmas facing respondents with a choice between sacrificing the lives of a smaller number of people to save a larger number, formulated in correspondence to the famous Trolley Problem, have been of enduring interest almost since the Philippa Foot’s presentation of the canonical version of this problem. In more recent literature, and especially in publications reporting the results of empirical research, decisions of answerers declaring abstention from taking action that would result in saving a larger group of potential victims at the cost of sacrificing the lives of fewer people have come to be referred to as “deontological” choices. On the other hand, declarations of readiness to take such actions are referred to as “utilitarian” or (less frequently) “consequentialist” choices. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the shortcomings of using the aforementioned labels. The argumentation is supported by empirical material collected in the years 2020–2022 among students of the University of Łódź (N = 302). The analysis of justifications explaining the motives behind both types of decisions left by the respondents shows that in numerous cases, “deontological” decisions, that is, passive decisions, actually stemmed from premises much closer to consequentialist ethics than deontological attitudes. Similarly, active behaviour was not always the outcome of utilitarian motives. The results of our research clearly indicate that the dominant, simplified perception of these choices in the literature leads to a distorted picture of the moral attitudes of respondents, thus posing the danger of drawing false conclusions. We claim that distinguishing between attitudes adopted by respondents in dilemmas based on the Trolley Problem should not refer to ethical doctrines. Instead, judging the moral attitudes of respondents requires an analysis of the motives behind the decisions they make at the very least.

From Embodied Abuse to Mass Disruption : Generative, Inter-Reality Threats in Social, Mixed-Reality Platforms

Extended Reality (XR) platforms can expose users to novel attacks including embodied abuse and/or AI attacks-at-scale. The expanded attack surfaces of XR technologies may expose users of shared online platforms to psychological/social and physiological harms via embodied interactions with potentially millions of other humans or artificial humans, causing what we define as an inter-reality attack. The past twenty years have demonstrated how social and other harms (e.g. bullying, assault and stalking) can and do shift to digital social media and gaming platforms. XR technologies becoming more mainstream has led to investigations of ethical and technical consequences of these expanded input surfaces. However, there is limited literature that investigates social attacks, particularly toward vulnerable communities, and how AI technologies may accelerate generative attacks-at-scale. This paper employs human-centred research methods and a harms-centred Cybersecurity framework to co-design a testbed of socio-technical attack scenarios in XR social gaming platforms. It uses speculative fiction to further extrapolate how these could reach attacks-at-scale by applying generative AI techniques. It develops an Inter-Reality Threat Model to outline how actions in virtual environments can impact on the real-world. As AI capability continues to rapidly develop, this paper articulates the urgent need to consider a future where XR-AI attacks-at-scale could become commonplace.

Research Into Digital Health Intervention for Mental Health: 25-Year Retrospective on the Ethical and Legal Challenges.

Digital mental health interventions are routinely integrated into mental health services internationally and can contribute to reducing the global mental health treatment gap identified by the World Health Organization. Research teams designing and delivering evaluations frequently invest substantial effort in deliberating on ethical and legal challenges around digital mental health interventions. In this article, we reflect on our own research experience with digital mental health intervention design and evaluation to identify 8 of the most critical challenges that we or others have faced, and that have ethical or legal consequences. These include: (1) harm caused by online recruitment work; (2) monitoring of intervention safety; (3) exclusion of specific demographic or clinical groups; (4) inadequate robustness of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness findings; (5) adequately conceptualizing and supporting engagement and adherence; (6) structural barriers to implementation; (7) data protection and intellectual property; and (8) regulatory ambiguity relating to digital mental health interventions that are medical devices. As we describe these challenges, we have highlighted serious consequences that can or have occurred, such as substantial delays to studies if regulations around Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) are not fully understood, or if regulations change substantially during the study lifecycle. Collectively, the challenges we have identified highlight a substantial body of required knowledge and expertise, either within the team or through access to external experts. Ensuring access to knowledge requires careful planning and adequate financial resources (for example, paying public contributors to engage in debate on critical ethical issues or paying for legal opinions on regulatory issues). Access to such resources can be planned for on a per-study basis and enabled through funding proposals. However, organizations regularly engaged in the development and evaluation of digital mental health interventions should consider creating or supporting structures such as advisory groups that can retain necessary competencies, such as in medical device regulation.

Teaching Nursing Students the Ethical and Legal Consequences of Medical Errors: Insights from the RaDonda Vaught Case Using the Jigsaw Technique

PurposeThis article examines teaching the consequences of harm and error to multisite prelicensure baccalaureate, second-degree baccalaureate, and graduate nursing students utilizing the RaDonda Vaught Trial as an exemplar. The Jigsaw Technique (JT) was the chosen learning strategy to empower students with knowledge and understanding through the lens of terms acquired throughout existing concept-based nursing curriculum. ResultsNursing students evaluated the approach to this activity using both quantitative and qualitative feedback. A total of 188 nursing students completed the survey, including undergraduate and graduate nursing students. Qualitative data obtained from students through open comments revealed common perceptions about such focal areas as advocacy, license protection, system failures, medication errors, and legal documentation. Quantitative outcomes related to the utilization of the JT approach were overwhelmingly positive. ConclusionResults indicate that our approach, combining the RaDonda Vaught case with the JT, was an effective strategy for teaching the consequences of medical errors in nursing practice.

Современные биоэтические проблемы в контексте основных принципов буддийской этики

The relevance of this research consists in reconsideration of the main approaches to solving bioethical problems based on the religious and ethical principles of Buddhism. The purpose of this research is to analyze Buddhist principles that can be consistently applied to a range of biomedical problems (euthanasia, biomedical experiments with animals, etc.). The subject of our research is ethics in the context of medicine, namely the relationship between Buddhism and medical practice. The research materials are based on many years of teaching the bioethics course at St. Petersburg State University of Chemistry and Pharmacy and Tyumen State Medical University, as well as on the results of research related to the development of scientific research of bioethical issues. The central question of modern bioethics about the nature and status of the moral subject in Buddhism is based on the principle of the moral dignity of all living beings: from human life to the life of animals and, perhaps, even plants. Belief in interspecific rebirth and respect for animal life are typical of Buddhist ethics. In modern ethics, Buddhism is a teleological ethics of virtue, which postulates a certain end result of life as the implementation of human potential and asserts that this goal should be realized through cultivation of certain spiritual practices, which implies the rejection of euthanasia, abortion, artificial insemination and other dvanced medical technologies.

The promise and challenges of generative AI in education

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as large language models (LLMs), generate natural language and other types of content to perform a wide range of tasks. This represents a significant technological advancement that poses opportunities and challenges to educational research and practice. This commentary brings together contributions from nine experts working in the intersection of learning and technology and presents critical reflections on the opportunities, challenges, and implications related to GenAI technologies in the context of education. In the commentary, it is acknowledged that GenAI’s capabilities can enhance some teaching and learning practices, such as learning design, regulation of learning, automated content, feedback, and assessment. Nevertheless, we also highlight its limitations, potential disruptions, ethical consequences, and potential misuses. The identified avenues for further research include the development of new insights into the roles human experts can play, strong and continuous evidence, human-centric design of technology, necessary policy, and support and competence mechanisms. Overall, we concur with the general skeptical optimism about the use of GenAI tools such as LLMs in education. Moreover, we highlight the danger of hastily adopting GenAI tools in education without deep consideration of the efficacy, ecosystem-level implications, ethics, and pedagogical soundness of such practices.

Advancing Humanity: Sharīʻah-Compliant Innovations in Contemporary Technology

The ethical need for the development of science and technology to prioritise human benefit is analyzed in this paper. With a focus on Shari'ah's five basic aims namely preserving faith, life, intellect, lineage and property, the ethical consequences of scientific progress are explored through the prism of Islamic law. If ethical considerations are not incorporated in the field of science and technology, we will observe further chaos in the society. This paper concludes the fact that the human beings will get maximum benefits and the impending damages to the society will be minimized if adherence to the five main aims of Shari’ah is made.

“What could go wrong?”: An evaluation of ethical foresight analysis as a tool to identify problems of AI in libraries

Artificial intelligence (AI) has entered libraries in various ways and raised concern about its potential ethical consequences therein. A number of approaches have been developed to encourage ethical AI and audit the ethics of specific AI applications, but very few approaches have been applied or tested, especially in a library setting, and so it remains unclear which, if any approaches are suitable or useful for encouraging ethical AI in libraries. We applied Ethical Foresight Analysis as an approach to identify possible ethical risks of an AI project for (semi-)automated subject indexing in a large research library. Specifically, to identify risks we conducted a two-round ethical Delphi study wherein experts on AI development, library practices, and AI ethics sought consensus on potential risks and their relative importance. The experts' post-test reflections on the procedure were then collected to inform an evaluation of the approach's feasibility. A variety of ethical risks of the specific project and of general AI indexing were indeed identified, most notably discrimination and under-representation stemming from attributes of the bibliographic training data provided by the library (e.g. varied historical contexts and gaps left by unindexed items). However, we identified some drawbacks of the approach tested: (1) it is time-consuming, which is likely prohibitive for many libraries, and (2) the identified risks were mainly well-known issues of AI and its training data rather than the subtle, application-specific, and human-centred issues that ethical foresight analysis might be employed to identify. Thus, although libraries should continue to model ethical AI through careful planning and auditing, alternative development and auditing approaches may be more practical to undertake and more effective at identifying novel or application-specific issues.

Making warming worlds: Future making between climate politics and science – The case of the Structured Expert Dialogue

The Long-Term Global Goal (LTGG) is the focal point for addressing future climate change. This paper explores a specific institutional context: the Structured Expert Dialogue (SED) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Set up as a platform for interaction between experts and UN negotiators, the SED is a site where scientific information about the LTGG and net-zero was translated into actionable targets for policymaking. We identify different modes of anticipation in the SED - as scientific, lived future, and ethical/political - and explore how they emerged and played out. We ask how these different modes of anticipation produce a particular vision of a desirable future and legitimise ways of governing future climate change. We observe that the scientific and technical mode of anticipation is dominant and has shaped the definition of the LTGG, focussing on numerical targets and side-lining geopolitical and distributive consequences. We also see the science-based framing being re-politicised and challenged, and discuss how capacities to get a voice in the SED were unequally distributed. Based on our findings, we suggest that care is needed to design spaces in order to consider ethical and political consequences of the LTGG and rethink modes of participation and representation.