Matching Items (9)
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- All Subjects: Medical Ethics
- Creators: Hurlbut, Ben
- Creators: Robert, Jason
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
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
Noninvasive prenatal testing using cell-free fetal DNA (CffDNA) testing is a rapidly developing area in prenatal diagnosis. Fetal genetic testing can occur with a simple maternal blood sample, since CffDNA can be found in maternal plasma. Thus, no harm is caused to mother or fetus to obtain this genetic information, providing significant benefits for those users. How the test should be integrated in existing prenatal programs has yet to be seen. CffDNA testing is an exciting technology and has attracted attention from many stakeholders, yet the lack of regulation and guidance has left legal, ethical, and social questions unanswered. This paper outlines a number of those issues expressed in the present literature on the matter.
ContributorsVeeder, Shaylynn Lee (Author) / Marchant, Gary (Thesis director) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Milleson, Valerye (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
According to my 2016 survey of ASU undergraduate students, 33% have used stimulant medications (e.g. Adderall or Ritalin) without a prescription to study. I view this practice as a step towards cognitive enhancement, which is the deliberate application of biotechnology to radically alter the human condition. From a foresight perspective, the ability to actively improve human beings, to take our evolutionary destiny into our own hands, may be a turning point on par with agriculture or the use of fossil fuels. The existential risks, however, may be greater than the benefits—and many of the most radical technologies have made little documented progress.
I turn to an actual example where people are trying to make themselves marginally better at academic tasks, as a guide to how future transformative development in human enhancement may be incorporated into everyday practice. This project examines the history and context that led to the widespread use of stimulant medication on college campuses. I describe how Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for which stimulant medication is prescribed and diverted, governs students, negotiates relationships between parents and school authorities, and manages anxieties resulting from a competitive neoliberal educational system. I extend this archeology of ADHD through the actions and ethical beliefs of college students, and the bioethical arguments for and against human enhancement. Through this work, I open a new space for an expanded role for universities as institutions capable of creating experimental communities supporting ethical cognitive enhancement.
I turn to an actual example where people are trying to make themselves marginally better at academic tasks, as a guide to how future transformative development in human enhancement may be incorporated into everyday practice. This project examines the history and context that led to the widespread use of stimulant medication on college campuses. I describe how Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for which stimulant medication is prescribed and diverted, governs students, negotiates relationships between parents and school authorities, and manages anxieties resulting from a competitive neoliberal educational system. I extend this archeology of ADHD through the actions and ethical beliefs of college students, and the bioethical arguments for and against human enhancement. Through this work, I open a new space for an expanded role for universities as institutions capable of creating experimental communities supporting ethical cognitive enhancement.
ContributorsBurnam-Fink, Michael (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Wetmore, Jameson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Vaccinations are important for preventing influenza infection. Maximizing vaccination uptake rates (80-90%) is crucial in generating herd immunity and preventing infection incidence. Vaccination of healthcare professionals (HCP) against influenza is vital to infection control in healthcare settings, given their consistent exposure to high-risk patients like: those with compromised immune systems, children, and the elderly (Johnson & Talbot, 2011). Though vaccination is vital in disease prevention, influenza vaccination uptake among HCP is low overall (50% on average) (Pearson et al., 2006). Mandatory vaccination policies result in HCP influenza vaccination uptake rates substantially higher than opt-in influenza vaccination campaigns (90% vs. 60%). Therefore, influenza vaccination should be mandatory for HCP in order to best prevent influenza infection in healthcare settings. Many HCP cite individual objections to influenza vaccination rooted in personal doubts and ethical concerns, not best available scientific evidence. Nevertheless, HCP ethical responsibility to their patients and work environments to prevent and lower influenza infection incidence overrules such individual objections. Additionally, mandatory HCP influenza vaccination policies respect HCP autonomy via including medical and religious exemption clauses. While vaccination as a prevention method for influenza is logically sound, individuals’ actions are not always rooted in logic. Therefore, I analyze HCP perceptions and actions toward influenza vaccination in an effort to better explain low HCP uptake rates of the influenza vaccine and individual objections to influenza vaccination. Such analysis can aid in gaining HCP trust when implementing mandatory HCP influenza vaccination policies. In summary, mandatory HCP influenza vaccination policies are ethically justified, effective, scientifically-supported method of maximizing HCP influenza vaccine uptake and minimizing the spread of the influenza virus within healthcare settlings.
ContributorsGur-Arie, Rachel (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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 development of computational systems known as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offers the possibility of allowing individuals disabled by neurological disorders such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and ischemic stroke the ability to perform relatively complex tasks such as communicating with others and walking. BCIs are closed-loop systems that record physiological signals from the brain and translate those signals into commands that control an external device such as a wheelchair or a robotic exoskeleton. Despite the potential for BCIs to vastly improve the lives of almost one billion people, one question arises: Just because we can use brain-computer interfaces, should we? The human brain is an embodiment of the mind, which is largely seen to determine a person's identity, so a number of ethical and philosophical concerns emerge over current and future uses of BCIs. These concerns include privacy, informed consent, autonomy, identity, enhancement, and justice. In this thesis, I focus on three of these issues: privacy, informed consent, and autonomy. The ultimate purpose of brain-computer interfaces is to provide patients with a greater degree of autonomy; thus, many of the ethical issues associated with BCIs are intertwined with autonomy. Currently, brain-computer interfaces exist mainly in the domain of medicine and medical research, but recently companies have started commercializing BCIs and providing them at affordable prices. These consumer-grade BCIs are primarily for non-medical purposes, and so they are beyond the scope of medicine. As BCIs become more widespread in the near future, it is crucial for interdisciplinary teams of ethicists, philosophers, engineers, and physicians to collaborate to address these ethical concerns now before BCIs become more commonplace.
ContributorsChu, Kevin Michael (Author) / Ankeny, Casey (Thesis director) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Frow, Emma (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School for the Future of Innovation in Society (Contributor) / Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In 1996, President Clinton ordered the formation of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which undertook to evaluate the morality of a myriad of secret and publicized radiation experiments ranging from 1944 to 1974. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the ways in which that committee formed moral evaluations and the extent to which its strategies related to a broader historical and philosophical discourse. Here I attempt to describe two specific techniques of simplification the committee deploys in order to make a retrospective moral analysis possible. Although the techniques comprise specific problems, frameworks, subjective perspectives, and conceptual links, their unifying principle is the field of choices the techniques produce. In the first technique I outline, I argue that by focusing on the problem of historical relativism, the committee gains a platform through which it would be granted flexibility in making a distinction between moral wrongdoing and blameworthiness. In the second technique of simplification I outline, I argue that the committee's incorporation of a principle to reduce uncertainty as an ethical aim allow it to establish new ways to reconcile scientific aims with moral responsibility. In addition to describing the structure of these techniques, I also demonstrate how they relate to the specific experiments the analysts aim to evaluate, using both the ACHRE experiments as well as the Nuremberg Trial experiments as my examples. My hope is not to show why a given committee made a particular moral evaluation, or to say whether a decision was right or wrong, but rather to illustrate how certain techniques open up a field of choices that allow moral analysts to form retrospective moral judgments.
ContributorsCirjan, Cristian (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis director) / Humphrey, Ted (Committee member) / Zachary, Gregg (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Informed Consent is a ubiquitous way of enshrining choice in the United States which regulates social relations in domains as varied as health, research, access to institutions, and prisons. Informed consent describes an imagined epistemic relationship between right knowledge and legitimate choice, where judgements of capacitation determine whether a person is the right sort of person to take up knowledge which will render them agential under conditions of asymmetrical power. It has been developed over and over to solve problems of injustice, where the injustice in question is understood in terms of undue infringement on individual autonomy, and the logic of informed consent is re-invented to reframe the problem at hand as a rightful matter of individual choice. It is imagined to respect autonomy, and to perform a transformative "moral magic" that makes the forbidden quotidian. This dissertation develops this account of informed consent through a series of cases, each of which explicates different aspects of the technopolitics of informed consent. It begins with genetic counseling as a paradigm case in the logic of informed consent: a well-developed field that emerged to inform people about genetics and genomics in the interest not only of individual reproductive choice, but in opposition to eugenic shaping of populations through genetic knowledge. Next, pro- and anti- abortion deployments of informed consent illustrate an epistemology of information itself, which is understood to agentialize as well as to serve as a site for refusing choice to those deemed incapacitated. Third, liability waivers and requests for student informed consent on university campuses during the pandemic show informed consent to be a tool for the exercise of biopolitics and, in particular, for making responsible subjects. Finally, civil libertarian opposition to migrant genetic testing on the grounds that migrants weren’t asked for consent demonstrates a tight coupling between consent, imaginations of just state-subject relations, and what it means to be recognized as a person. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for a practice of attention that sees informed consent as an important site for the exercise of power and offers frameworks for analyzing it as such.
ContributorsDietz, Elizabeth A (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Joel M (Committee member) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
In the last 200 years, advancements in science and technology have made understanding female sexual function and the female body more feasible; however, many women throughout the US still lack fundamental understanding of the reproductive system in the twenty-first century. Many factors contribute to the lack of knowledge and misconceptions that women still have. Discussing sexual health tends to make some people uncomfortable and this study aims to investigate what aspects of somewhat recent US history in women’s health care may have led to that discomfort. This thesis examines the question: what are some of the factors that shaped women’s reproductive medicine in the US from the mid 1800s and throughout the 1900s and what influence could the past have had on how women and their physicians understand female sexuality in medicine and how physicians diagnose their female patients in the twenty-first century. A literature review of primary source medical texts written at the end of the 1800s provides insight about patterns among physicians at the time and their medical practice with female patients. Factors like gendered expectations in medical practice, misconceptions about the female body and behaviors, and issues of morality in sex medicine all contributed to women lacking understanding of sex female reproductive functions. Other factors like a physician’s role throughout history and non-medical reproductive health providers and solutions likely also influenced the reproductive medicine women received. Examining the patterns of the past provides some insight into some of the outdated and gendered practices still exhibited in healthcare. Expanding sexual education programs, encouraging discussion about sex and reproductive health, and checking gendered implicit bias in reproductive healthcare could help eliminate echoes of hysteria ideology in the twenty-first century medicine.
ContributorsHorwitz, Rainey (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, Ben (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019