Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine usage in America has experienced extreme peaks as a method of maintaining social distancing for medical staff and patients. While there have been numerous significant positive effects from increasing this practice, there are also significant risks to be explored. Patients and physicians have been navigating new technology, new protocols, and new dynamics at a high rate. Doctors using telemedicine are required to rely more heavily on their judgment with less data than usual to support their hypotheses. This results in a wide variety of potential complications that can be detrimental to patients and physicians alike. Though negative outcomes are not nearly the majority, it is clear that for telemedicine to function at its fullest capacity, the limitations of its technology must be defined and communicated. A survey was distributed to physicians currently practicing telemedicine to understand more about the usage increase in telemedicine and the incidence rates of telemedicine-related complications. The results showed that although the impact of telemedicine has been largely positive, there certainly are risks that must be considered and prepared for. Thus, it is the responsibility of healthcare systems to ensure that their policies are current and appropriate in proportion to their usage of telemedicine to better protect and prepare patients and doctors for this new frontier of medicine.

This project focuses on the effects of partisanship and electoral contestation on the likelihood of state legislators to adopt an independent ethics commission. Existing literature suggests that ethics reform is a function of public perception and the need to assuage public outrage in the face of scandal. Additionally, many legislators view ethics laws as suggestions of their own ineptitude and thus resist reform. However, this existing view fails to consider the unique nature of the enabling legislation of ethics commissions and often conflates external, public drivers of reform with internal drivers personal to the individual legislators. Using logistic regression and time series analysis, this project finds that increased durations of single-party control in state legislatures decreases the chances of that legislature having an independent commission, suggesting that legislators use the partisan ethics committees as political weapons when they are in power. When the dominant party does not face the risk of becoming the minority, there is little in place to motivate ethics reform, thus the lack of commissions. This research identifies the need to develop more focused measures of inter-legislator partisanship and suggests that the effects of different types of ethics laws, specifically those pertaining to ethics commissions, should more often be studied in isolation, rather than as one single category.

Four-dimensionalism is a popular philosophical view of how we persist through time. However, some philosophers, such as Mark Johnston and Eric Olson, argue that four-dimensionalism has perverse implications on our practical ethics. This is because, if four-dimensionalism is true, then there exist entities called personites. And if personites exist, then many of the ordinary prudential, social, and moral habits we engage in, like present self-sacrifice for future benefit, promising to do something painful in the future, or being held responsible for something the we did in the past, subjects personites to suffering without sufficient compensation, consent, or desert. And this would be immoral according to our common-sense morality. In this paper, I argue that if four-dimensionalism is true, and personites exist, then we are still morally permitted to engage in the above practices. If four-dimensionalism turns out to be true, it has no perverse implications on how we ought to live.