Madness, Moral Agency, and Recovery

This chapter elaborates on the connections between oneness, moral agency, and spontaneity by distinguishing between two general kinds of spontaneity: untutored spontaneity, which is characteristic of traditions such as Daoism, and cultivated spontaneity, representative of traditions such as Confucianism. This discussion intersects with oneness on the matter of “metaphysical comfort,” the sense of oneness, harmony, and happiness that one experiences when acting or reacting spontaneously, on either the untutored or cultivated model. Daoists argued quite plausibly that this experience goes hand in hand with certain kinds of untutored spontaneity, but an important objective of the chapter is to show that even cultivated spontaneity can provide the same comfort. The chapter makes the case that both forms of spontaneity are familiar, though largely unrecognized, in all forms of human life and that the descriptions provided, inspired by early Chinese philosophy, offer important theoretical resources for philosophy today.

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What do new neuroscience discoveries in children mean for their open future?

10.1093/oso/9780198786832.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Cheryl D. Lew

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Structural Changes ◽

Fetal Life ◽

Open Future ◽

Ethical Concerns ◽

Pediatric Ethics ◽

Pediatric Decision Making ◽

New Research ◽

Pediatric Healthcare

Over the last decade, the number of neuroimaging and other neuroscience studies on the developing brain from fetal life through adolescence has increased exponentially. Children are viewed as particularly vulnerable members of our society and observations of significant neural structural changes associated with behavioral anomalies raise numerous ethical concerns around personal identity, free will, and the possibility of an open future. This chapter provides a review of recent research in the pediatric neuroscience literature, common pediatric decision-making, and social justice models, and discusses the implications of this research for the future of pediatric ethics thinking and policy. New research presents challenges to professional and pediatric bioethicist views of the moral future of children in pediatric healthcare and opportunities to examine anew notions of how to consider the developing moral agency of children.

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Moral Responsibility, Socially Embedded

10.1093/oso/9780198830405.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lisa Herzog

Keyword(s):

Social Psychology ◽

Moral Responsibility ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Human Behaviour ◽

Shared Responsibility ◽

The Face ◽

Moral Theorizing ◽

The Impact

This chapter asks whether we can hold on to the picture of the morally responsible subject as we knew it in the face of evidence from social psychology about the impact of contexts on human behaviour. Some theorists have taken this to present a major challenge to moral theorizing. However, the chapter argues that, while we should acknowledge the malleability of human behaviour, we should not give up the notion of responsible agency. Rather, we need to broaden our theoretical horizon in order to include individuals’ co-responsibility for the contexts in which they act. This argument is a general one, but it is of particular relevance for organizations: it is our shared responsibility to turn them into contexts in which moral agency is supported rather than undermined.

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Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

10.1093/oso/9780198845539.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Moral Responsibility ◽

New Orleans ◽

Moral Philosophy ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Self Control ◽

Moral Testimony ◽

Quality Of Will ◽

Wide Range ◽

Standing To Blame

This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. The papers were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of resentment and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; the role and conditions of shame in theories of attributability; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; how to build a theory of attributabiity that captures all the relevant cases; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

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Practicing Narrative Inquiry II

The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190847388.013.19 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 283-328

Author(s):

Arthur P. Bochner ◽

Andrew F. Herrmann

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Narrative Inquiry ◽

Narrative Analysis ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Human Sciences ◽

Pragmatic Development ◽

The Social ◽

Crisis Of Representation ◽

Small Story ◽

The Life Course

Narrative inquiry provides an opportunity to humanize the human sciences, placing people, meaning, and personal identity at the center of research, inviting the development of reflexive, relational, dialogic, and interpretive methodologies, and drawing attention to the need to focus not only on the actual but also on the possible and the good. In this chapter, we focus on the intellectual, existential, empirical, and pragmatic development of the turn toward narrative. We trace the rise of narrative inquiry as it evolved in the aftermath of the crisis of representation in the social sciences. The chapter synthesizes the changing methodological orientations of qualitative researchers associated with narrative inquiry as well as their ethical commitments. In the second half of the chapter, our focus shifts to the divergent standpoints of small-story and big-story researchers; the differences between narrative analysis and narratives under analysis; and narrative practices that seek to help people form better relationships, overcome oppressive canonical identities, amplify or reclaim moral agency, and cope better with contingencies and difficulties experienced over the life course. We anticipate that narrative inquiry will continue to situate itself within an intermediate zone between art and science, healing and research, self and others, subjectivity and objectivity, and theories and stories.

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A moral analysis of intelligent decision-support systems in diagnostics through the lens of Luciano Floridi’s information ethics

Human Affairs ◽

10.1515/humaff-2021-0013 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 149-164

Author(s):

Dmytro Mykhailov

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Decision Support ◽

Medical Diagnosis ◽

Moral Agency ◽

Moral Agent ◽

Well Being ◽

Medical Diagnostics ◽

Intelligent Decision ◽

Luciano Floridi ◽

Intelligent Decision Support

Abstract Contemporary medical diagnostics has a dynamic moral landscape, which includes a variety of agents, factors, and components. A significant part of this landscape is composed of information technologies that play a vital role in doctors’ decision-making. This paper focuses on the so-called Intelligent Decision-Support System that is widely implemented in the domain of contemporary medical diagnosis. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I will show that the IDSS may be considered a moral agent in the practice of medicine today. To develop this idea I will introduce the approach to artificial agency provided by Luciano Floridi. Simultaneously, I will situate this approach in the context of contemporary discussions regarding the nature of artificial agency. It is argued here that the IDSS possesses a specific sort of agency, includes several agent features (e.g. autonomy, interactivity, adaptability), and hence, performs an autonomous behavior, which may have a substantial moral impact on the patient’s well-being. It follows that, through the technology of artificial neural networks combined with ‘deep learning’ mechanisms, the IDSS tool achieves a specific sort of independence (autonomy) and may possess a certain type of moral agency. Second, I will provide a conceptual framework for the ethical evaluation of the moral impact that the IDSS may have on the doctor’s decision-making and, consequently, on the patient’s wellbeing. This framework is the Object-Oriented Model of Moral Action developed by Luciano Floridi. Although this model appears in many contemporary discussions in the field of information and computer ethics, it has not yet been applied to the medical domain. This paper addresses this gap and seeks to reveal the hidden potentialities of the OOP model for the field of medical diagnosis.

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