What Is Paradoxical Lucidity?

In this presentation, I provide a conceptual background from which the other symposium speakers can describe detailed methods for investigating paradoxical lucidity (PL) in dementia. First, I outline the clinical and ethical significance of studying PL. Second, I describes how PL is understudied and so difficult to measure. A working definition of PL has been formulated from case reports, but aspects of this definition remain vague. I argue that this vagueness challenges the measurement of PL and the generalizability of study results. I conclude by proposing ways to address these problems.

George Steiner’s Hermeneutic Motion and the Ontology, Ethics, and Epistemology of Translation

This chapter is organized around three phrases from Phil Goodwin’s ide­alizing reading of George Steiner’s hermeneutic motion: (1) “there is a certain vi­olence involved,” (2) “This imagery offended some readers,” and (3) “this second stage of translation will always feel like a violation.” In response to those remarks, my research questions are (Q1) What is the ontology of that “certain violence,” and why did it “offend some readers”? (Q2) What is the ethical significance of Steiner’s pas­sage through violence in the hermeneutic motion? (Q3) What is the epistemological sig­nificance of “feeling” in the recognition that “this second stage of translation will always feel like a violation”? The trajectory of my argument, in other words, is from ontologization (Q1) through ethical regimes (Q2) to the epistemology of feeling (Q3).

‘Can you hear me?’: communication, relationship and ethics in video-based telepsychiatric consultations

Telepsychiatry has long been discussed as a supplement to or substitute for face-to-face therapeutic consultations. The current pandemic crisis has fueled the development in an unprecedented way. More and more psychiatric consultations are now carried out online as video-based consultations. Treatment results appear to be comparable with those of face-to-face care in terms of clinical outcome, acceptance, adherence and patient satisfaction. However, evidence on videoconferencing in a variety of different fields indicates that there are extensive changes in the communication behaviour in online conversations. We hypothesise that this might impact ethically relevant aspects of the therapeutic relationship, which plays a prominent role in psychiatry. In this paper, we review effects of video-based consultations on communication between therapists and patients in psychiatry. Based on a common understanding of video-based consultations as changing the lived experience of communication, we categorise these effects according to sensory, spatial and technical aspects. Departing from a power-based model of therapeutic relationships, we then discuss the ethical significance of this changed communication situation, based on dimensions of respect for autonomy, lucidity, fidelity, justice and humanity. We conclude that there is evidence for ethically relevant changes of the therapeutic relationship in video-based telepsychiatric consultations. These changes need to be more carefully considered in psychiatric practice and future studies.

Consciousness

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define. Several things are meant by consciousness: sentience, self-awareness, wakefulness, phenomenal consciousness, and more. There are also several consciousness-related ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions, including questions about what consciousness is, what creatures are conscious, how we can know who is conscious, and, importantly, questions about the ethical significance of consciousness. This chapter provides a sketch of several philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness as an introduction to medical, scientific, and philosophical inquiries into consciousness and unconsciousness.

“These and Those Are the Words of the Living God, but …”: Meaning, Background, and Reception of an Early Rabbinic Teaching

This is the first article-length treatment of the famous rabbinic dictum “These and those are the words of the living God, but the Law always follows Beit Hillel.” The statement's significance lies in the innovative manner in which it negotiates the monistic and pluralistic tendencies within the rabbinic tradition. “These and those …” first emerged in the late tannaitic or early amoraic period as a reworking of an earlier Tosefta text. The Yerushalmi, consistent with its overall monistic tendencies, cited this text only for its ruling in favor of Beit Hillel, marginalizing its affirmation that the teachings of Beit Shammai represent “the words of the living God.” The Bavli embraced both the pluralistic and monistic stances of “These and those …” and further placed the declaration in a wider narrative context, imbuing it with social and ethical significance.

“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID-19

During the COVID-19 emergency, people around the world are debating concepts like physical distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. The ethical significance of proximity—that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (Strathern 2020)—is thus being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships. Through five case studies from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, contributors to this Colloquy shed light on what the hype of the pandemic often conceals: the forms of ethical reflection, reasoning, and conduct fashioned during the pandemic.

The Ethics of Disruptive Technologies: Towards a General Framework

Disruptive technologies can be conceptualized in different ways. Depending on how they are conceptualized, different ethical issues come into play. This article contributes to a general framework to navigate the ethics of disruptive technologies. It proposes three basic distinctions to be included in such a framework. First, emerging technologies may instigate localized “first-order” disruptions, or systemic “second-order” disruptions. The ethical significance of these disruptions differs: first-order disruptions tend to be of modest ethical significance, whereas second-order disruptions are highly significant. Secondly, technologies may be classified as disruptive based on their technological features or based on their societal impact. Depending on which of these classifications one adopts and takes as the starting point of ethical inquiry, different ethical questions are foregrounded. Thirdly, the ethics of disruptive technology raises concerns at four different levels of technology assessment: the technology level, the artifact level, the application level, and the society level. The respective suitability of approaches in technology ethics to address concerns about disruptive technologies co-varies with the respective level of analysis. The article clarifies these distinctions, thereby laying some of the groundwork for an ethical framework tailored for assessing disruptive technologies.

Understanding the Ethics of Risk as Used in Epidemiology

This chapter analyzes the concept of risk that is central to epidemiology, since the study of disease or health of populations necessarily requires assessing and determining the probability of the factors that may increase or decrease the likelihood of disease or health. It argues that the purportedly non-normative understanding of risk in epidemiology fails to capture separate but interrelated points, such as the description of risk assessments. It also discusses the importance of risk to a population for disease p to understand the political or economic values that help create the context that led to the increased risk. The chapter delves into the ethical significance for epidemiologists to help analyze and explain who imposed risk onto whom and in what ways this risk imposition occurred. It cites a normative sense of risk in epidemiology, which appeals to most theories of justice and makes sense of the ethics of causation in either more modest or stronger terms.

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics

How do Aristotle’s empiricist views bear on the role perception plays for the virtuous? Do they point towards a certain kind of ethical particularism, according to which universal rules could never adequately codify virtuous behavior? I argue they do not. Virtuous agents always need perception to determine what to do, and it is inexpedient for them to articulate general rules of conduct, but this is not because it is in principle impossible to do so, or because virtuous conduct does not admit of theoretical treatment. Still, perception and experience do play an indispensable role in the development and deployment of practical wisdom. For our learning to be virtuous depends on first-hand, personal experience that theoretical modes of thought could not provide. I end by considering what a practically-oriented treatment of virtuous conduct would look like, and how we might conceive of its ethical significance.