The science of “smell” and the noble for “hugs:” making “sense?”

David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were jointly awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch. It was a phenomenal moment for the scientific community, more for the discovery that forms the basic fabric of our everyday life—ever imagined how life would have been without feeling the aroma around? Or even the dangers of accidentally touching a heated object. Dr Julius and Dr Patapoutian, independently discovered key mechanisms of how living organisms sense heat, cold, and touch. The journey started when Dr Julius, at the University of California, San Francisco, used a key ingredient in hot chili peppers to identify a protein in nerve cells that respond to these stimuli. Using capsaicin, the pungent component of chili peppers, he provided fundamental insights into mechanisms of pain. Then using a meticulous cDNA library-based functional screening from sensory neurons to search for the gene(s) that could confer capsaicin sensitivity, Dr Julius identified for the first time a novel ion channel (now called transient receptor potential [TRP] vanilloid 1) belonging to the family of TRP ion channels associated with the pain sensitivity. A painful exercise indeed! While Prof Julius was exploring the oceans and skies to hunt for sensory pain pathways, quite independently, Dr Patapoutian of Scripps Research Institute La Jolla, California, was searching for a similar thing that seemed to bother him equally. How do we sense touches? After all, there are so many emotions packaged in this small five-letter word, touch. The mother’s touch is the first sensation that every single of us always cherishes. Dr Patapoutian research is centered around finding candidate genes in a mechanosensitive cell line that could respond to mechanical stimuli. After a thorough search, the team identified two mechanically-activated ion channels, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, representing an entirely novel class of mechanical sensors-based ion channels. What is fascinating is the idea that discovery of the smell and touch receptor stretches far beyond just touch and temperature sensations only. Mutations in other TRP channels are involved in neurodegenerative disorders and skeletal dysplasia, while mutations in PIEZO channels help control critical functions such as respiration and blood pressure regulation. So now, the mysterious world surrounding us looks more transparent and clearer. The molecular landscape is defined with precision. We now have a chemical entity behind all these emotions and intuition. The warm hug that makes our day is now millions of ions crisscrossing the ion channels. There is a different side to this too. How will the world look if everything is defined as a chemical entity? Won’t we lose the charm? After all, so much within the subtleness remains charmful when wrapped within the veil of ignorance. Knowing too much about something steals the show.

The Irreconcilable Conflict between Islam and Liberalism

John Rawls used an apparently neutral apparatus to derive the principles of justice that all “rational” people ought to agree with because they provide the basis of coexistence in a pluralistic society. He believes that religious faith is consistent with the commitment to liberalism. The paper shows that the Rawlsian liberal “self” modelled in the original position is not consistent with the original position recognized by religion in general and Islam in particular. According to Islam, the human self is mukallaf (subject of God) while Rawls treats it non-mukallaf. This is so because Rawlsian original position presumes an atheist self behind the veil of ignorance. This conceptualization of self is not only inconsistent with but also hostile to religion. The claims about liberalism’s tolerance towards religion are superficial. The liberal self can express itself in various religious forms provided these are aligned with the system of rights acknowledged by the liberal atheist self.

1597 Navigating the Morality of Postponing Urgent Cancer Surgery in The Covid-19 Pandemic

Introduction The Covid-19 pandemic presents challenges of unparalleled magnitude to healthcare resource allocation. Many cancer operations have been postponed due to reduced staff, bed and ICU availability, potentially allowing incurable disease progression. The five-year survival rate for stage 1 bowel cancer is 91%; stage 2, 84%1, yet some studies suggest the mortality rate of ventilated Covid-19 patients is 50-88%2,3,4,5. Many ethical documents attempt to guide just resource allocation for ICU, however, Covid-19 presents a greater conundrum. If resource allocation occurs on the basis of acute medical need it is preferential to Covid-19 care, and at what cost is this to those with potentially curable cancer? How can we navigate pandemic pressures to be as just as we can? Method Literature review and application of ethical theories including utilitarianism, deontology and a Rawlsian approach. Results Utilitarianism argues that allocating scarce resources to those likely to gain minimal benefit, whilst removing benefit from those with a higher likelihood of survival would not be for the greater good. Doctors, however, tend to practise in a more deontological way; that is in the best interests of the patient in front of them. Rawl’s thought experiment allows us to wear a ‘veil of ignorance’ to consider the fairest decision for any undefined individual. Conclusions Covid-19 has forced unprecedented moral dilemmas; these do not just extend to patients requiring ventilators, but those in need of curative surgery. An understanding of ethical principles and a multidisciplinary approach to decision-making should encompass the consideration of outcomes of oncological surgical intervention.

Abortion and the veil of ignorance: a response to Minehan

In a recent JME paper, Matthew John Minehan applies John Rawls’ veil of ignorance against Judith Thomson’s famous violinist argument for the permissibility of abortion. Minehan asks readers to ‘imagine that one morning you are back to back in bed with another person. One of you is conscious and the other unconscious. You do not know which one you are’. Since from this position of ignorance, you have an equal chance of being the unconscious violinist and the conscious person attached to him, it would be rational to oppose a right for detachment. Likewise, behind the veil of ignorance, it is rational to oppose abortions since you could be the fetus, Minehan claims. This paper provides a plausible reply to this argument.

Uncertainty, equality, fraternity

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is “completely ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting?

What is Arbitrary about Moral Arbitrariness?

John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ is often cited as a central source of inspiration for luck egalitarianism, which is, correlatively, often characterized as a more refined version of justice as fairness. Rawls’s distributive hostility to morally arbitrary endowments is standardly interpreted as betraying hostility to distributions that are skewed by brute luck. This chapter argues otherwise. It has two main aims. First, it replaces the standard ‘Neutralization Interpretation’ of Rawls’s main arguments with the ‘Irrelevance Interpretation’. According to the Irrelevance Interpretation, morally arbitrary person endowments ought to play no role in the selection of principles of justice in the original position. According to the Neutralization Interpretation, by contrast, principles of justice ought to expunge the influence of any inequalities that are due to luck. The Irrelevance Interpretation is more permissive of inequalities, just as long as they serve some other purpose, such as improving the position of the worst-off. The Irrelevance Interpretation is also more congenial to Rawls’s investment in the contractarian machinery of the original position and the veil of ignorance.