Matching Items (9)
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- All Subjects: ethics
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Brian, Jennifer
- Creators: Robert, Jason
- Creators: Creath, Richard
Description
The academic literature on science communication widely acknowledges a problem: science communication between experts and lay audiences is important, but it is not done well. General audience popular science books, however, carry a reputation for clear science communication and are understudied in the academic literature. For this doctoral dissertation, I utilize Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape, a general audience science book on the particularly thorny topic of neuroscientific approaches to morality, as a case-study to explore the possibility of using general audience science books as models for science communication more broadly. I conduct a literary analysis of the text that delimits the scope of its project, its intended audience, and the domains of science to be communicated. I also identify seven literary aspects of the text: three positive aspects that facilitate clarity and four negative aspects that interfere with lay public engagement. I conclude that The Moral Landscape relies on an assumed knowledge base and intuitions of its audience that cannot reasonably be expected of lay audiences; therefore, it cannot properly be construed as popular science communication. It nevertheless contains normative lessons for the broader science project, both in literary aspects to be salvaged and literary aspects and concepts to consciously be avoided and combated. I note that The Moral Landscape's failings can also be taken as an indication that typical descriptions of science communication offer under-detailed taxonomies of both audiences for science communication and the varieties of science communication aimed at those audiences. Future directions of study include rethinking appropriate target audiences for science literacy projects and developing a more discriminating taxonomy of both science communication and lay publics.
ContributorsJohnson, Nathan W (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Martinez, Jacqueline (Committee member) / Sylvester, Edward (Committee member) / Lynch, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
At present, the ideological bias in the human enhancement debate holds that opponents to human enhancement are primarily techno-conservatives who, lacking any reasonable, systematic account of why we ought to be so opposed, simply resort to a sort of fear-mongering and anti-meliorism. This dissertation means to counteract said bias by offering just such an account. Offered herein is a heuristic explanation of how, given a thorough understanding of enhancement both as a technology and as an attitude, we can predict a likely future of rampant commodification and dehumanization of man, and a veritable assault on human flourishing.
ContributorsMilleson, Valerye Michelle (Author) / McGregor, Joan (Thesis advisor) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / French, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Corporations in biomedicine hold significant power and influence, in both political and personal spheres. The decisions these companies make about ethics are critically important, as they help determine what products are developed, how they are developed, how they are promoted, and potentially even how they are regulated. In the last fifteen years, for-profit private companies have been assembling bioethics committees to help resolve dilemmas that require informed deliberation about ethical, legal, scientific, and economic considerations. Private sector bioethics committees represent an important innovation in the governance of emerging technologies, with corporations taking a lead role in deciding what is ethically appropriate or problematic. And yet, we know very little about these committees, including their structures, memberships, mandates, authority, and impact. Drawing on an extensive literature review and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with executives, scientists and board members, this dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of the Ethics and Public Policy Board at SmithKline Beecham, the Ethics Advisory Board at Advanced Cell Technology, and the Bioethics Committee at Eli Lilly and offers insights about how ideas of bioethics and governance are currently imagined and enacted within corporations. The SmithKline Beecham board was the first private sector bioethics committee; its mandate was to explore, in a comprehensive and balanced analysis, the ethics of macro trends in science and technology. The Advanced Cell Technology board was created to be like a watchdog for the company, to prevent them from making major errors. The Eli Lilly board is different than the others in that it is made up mostly of internal employees and does research ethics consultations within the company. These private sector bioethics committees evaluate and construct new boundaries between their private interests and the public values they claim to promote. Findings from this dissertation show that criticisms of private sector bioethics that focus narrowly on financial conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency obscure analysis of the ideas about governance (about expertise, credibility and authority) that emerge from these structures and hamper serious debate about the possible impacts of moving ethical deliberation from the public to the private sector.
ContributorsBrian, Jennifer (Author) / Robert, Jason S (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James B (Committee member) / Sarewitz, Daniel (Committee member) / Brown, Mark B. (Committee member) / Moreno, Jonathan D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Birth control promised to curb growing human populations while liberating women individually and socially. Instead, these technologies reinforce a feedback loop associating only women’s bodies with family-planning responsibilities. As a result, many diverse female contraceptives have reached markets while few male contraceptives have. Cis-men’s attitudes are commonly offered as explanation for why novel male contraceptives have not reached markets at the same pace, but little research has investigated this. I address this gap through thematic analysis of focus group interviews exploring cis-men’s attitudes on existing and novel male contraceptives. Focus group findings suggest cis-men experience less urgency to contracept due to differences in physiological burdens of pregnancy and childbirth. Decreased urgency does not mean that cis-men are uninterested in contracepting or in novel contraception options, but that cis-men express boundaries to what they will endure when contracepting. Knowing men’s articulated boundaries can help male contraceptive research and development (R&D) efforts moving forward. Additionally, these findings call into question current clinical risk assessment systems wherein risk of the medication is compared to how the individual experiences (unintended) pregnancy in a purely physical sense. Lastly, these data crucially demonstrate cis-men’s interest in contracepting and having a complete clinical risk assessment system for developing, novel male contraceptives is still not enough. Systemic changes must occur for male contraceptive technologies to be accessible and utilized by cis-male populations. Because interviews were conducted before the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision that overturned federal abortion protections, I expanded my research to include a follow-up survey gauging how participants’ attitudes from the focus groups were impacted, if at all. The follow-up survey demonstrated increased urgency for novel male contraceptives as a result of the Dobbs decision, for example, can increase cis-men’s urgency/interest in trying the interventions regardless of their lack of familiarity with the method or its potential side effects. Follow-up survey findings also demonstrate how cis-men’s urgency/interest for novel male contraceptives is highly influenced by the current socio-political context surrounding reproductive justice issues. This finding affirms that the focus group data finding that the current FDA (Food and Drug Administration) clinical risk assessment is incomplete.
ContributorsGardner, Kara Diane (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Gur-Arie, Rachel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Moral status questions, (who and what counts morally) are of central concern to moral philosophers. There is also a rich history of psychological work exploring the topic. The received view in psychology of moral status accounts for it as a function of other mind perception. On this view, entities are morally considerable because they are perceived to have the right sort of minds. This dissertation analyzes and tests this theory, pointing out both empirical and conceptual issues with the received view. The results presented show that important moral intuitions (for example about unjustifiable interpersonal killing) cannot be explained by appealing to other mind perception. Some alternative views of the psychology of moral status are presented, as well as avenues for further research.
ContributorsLaTourelle, Jonathan Jacob (Author) / Creath, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Van Gelderen, Elly (Thesis advisor) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Becker, D. Vaughn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Writing speculative fiction is a valuable method for exploring the potential societal transformations elicited by advances in science and technology. The aim of this project is to use speculative fiction to explore the potential consequences of precision medicine for individuals’ daily lives. Precision medicine is a vision of the future in which medicine is about predicting, and ultimately preventing disease before symptoms arise. The idea is that identification of all the factors that influence health and contribute to disease development will translate to better and less expensive healthcare and empower individuals to take responsibility for maintaining their own health and wellness. That future, as envisioned by the leaders of the Human Genome Project, the Institute for Systems Biology, and the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative, is assumed to be a shared future, one that everyone desires and that is self-evidently “better” than the present. The aim of writing speculative fiction about a “precision medicine” future is to challenge that assumption, to make clear the values underpinning that vision of precision medicine, and to leave open the question of what other possible futures could be imagined instead.
ContributorsVenkatraman, Richa (Author) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
2023 has been a record-breaking year for legislation aimed at restricting and even criminalizing access to gender affirming care for minors. In response to these legislative efforts, many advocates rely on invocations of medical authority to defend the right of individuals to access gender affirming care. However, this reliance on the pathologization of transgender identity both reaffirms stigmatization of transgender identity as mental illness as well as forecloses on opportunities to affirm access to gender affirming care otherwise. The purpose of this research is to use disability justice scholarship, predominantly crip theory, to analyze these legislative efforts in-depth beyond the predominant critique offered by the medical-model. I demonstrate that these legislative moves to ban access to gender affirming care are part of a larger effort to prevent a trans future more broadly. Trans childhood has become a particularly fruitful site for this political action due to the ways in which normativities relating to time, biological plasticity, and capacity shape the way that their bodies are understood. I term those individual bodies which have such characteristics of non-normative temporalities, plasticity, and capacity/incapacity grafted onto them become “bodies of normative intervention” and explore how they become the laboratory sites for producing population-wide normative interventions. This legislative effort to restrict access to gender affirming care for minors represents a broader effort to legislate a trans future out of existence through the strategic targeting of trans children. This robs society of valuable trans knowledge and experience.
ContributorsMills, Raegan Lenore (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Hlava, Terri (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
American Indian literature is replete with language that refers to broken or hollow promises the US government has made to American Indians, one of the most prominent being that the US government has not kept its promises regarding health services for American Indians/Alaska Natives (AI/AN). Some commenters refer to treaties between tribes and the US government as the origin of the promise for health services to AI/AN. Others point to the trust relationship between the sovereign nations of American Indian tribes and the US government, while still others assert that the Snyder Act of 1921 or the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (IHCIA) contained the promise for health care. While the US has provided some form of health care for AI/AN since the country was in its infancy, and continues to do so through the Indian Health Service, the promise of health services for AI/AN is not explicit.
Philosophers have articulated that a promise contains a moral obligation to fulfill it because of others’ expectations created by that promise. As the US government made its first promises in early treaties with AI/AN tribes and subsequently made promises in the years since, it is morally obligated to fulfill those promises, be they lying promises or not, because of resulting expectations. Yet, the US government has historically acted to restrict the rights of AI/AN—rights that include access to health services—through assimilation, separation, or termination policies. Further, the policies of the US government have kept the AI/AN populations socioeconomically impoverished, dependent on the US government for basic needs, and susceptible to health-compromising conditions.
Using case studies, this dissertation looks not only at the policies and events that directly affected health services and health status, but also at how those policies and events contributed to health outcomes and the expectations of AI/AN. Given the history of the US government in fulfilling (or not fulfilling) its promises, this dissertation examines the expectations of AI/AN for their own future health outcomes under the policy of self-governance.
Philosophers have articulated that a promise contains a moral obligation to fulfill it because of others’ expectations created by that promise. As the US government made its first promises in early treaties with AI/AN tribes and subsequently made promises in the years since, it is morally obligated to fulfill those promises, be they lying promises or not, because of resulting expectations. Yet, the US government has historically acted to restrict the rights of AI/AN—rights that include access to health services—through assimilation, separation, or termination policies. Further, the policies of the US government have kept the AI/AN populations socioeconomically impoverished, dependent on the US government for basic needs, and susceptible to health-compromising conditions.
Using case studies, this dissertation looks not only at the policies and events that directly affected health services and health status, but also at how those policies and events contributed to health outcomes and the expectations of AI/AN. Given the history of the US government in fulfilling (or not fulfilling) its promises, this dissertation examines the expectations of AI/AN for their own future health outcomes under the policy of self-governance.
ContributorsDrago, Mary (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Herkert, Joseph (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Trujillo, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The landscape of science education is changing. Scientific research and the academy are both becoming increasingly complex, competitive, interdisciplinary, and international. Many federal research agencies, scientific professional societies, and science educators seem to agree on the importance of strong ethics education to help young scientists navigate this increasingly craggy terrain. But, what actually should be done? When it comes to teaching ethics to future scientists, is the apparent current emphasis on basic responsible conduct of research (RCR) sufficient, or should moral theory also be taught in science ethics education? In this thesis I try engage this question by focusing on an existing, related debate on whether moral theory should be part of teaching professional ethics more generally. After delving into the respective approaches promoted by the three primary participants in this debate (C. E. Harris, Bernard Gert, and Michael Davis) I unpack their views in order to ascertain their practical application potential and relative benefits. I then take these findings and apply them to ethics education in science, paying particular attention to its purported learning objectives. In the end I conclude that the presentation of these objectives suggests that moral theory may well be required in order for these objectives of ethics education in science to be fully achieved.
ContributorsMilleson, Valerye Michelle (Author) / Robert, Jason (Thesis advisor) / Herkert, Joseph (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014