Reframing 'dehumanisation': AI and the reality of clinical communication.

Warnings that large language models (LLMs) could 'dehumanise' medical decision-making often rest on an asymmetrical comparison: the idealised, attentive healthcare provider versus a clumsy, early-stage artificial intelligence (AI). This framing ignores a more urgent reality: many patients face rushed, jargon-heavy, inconsistent communication, even from skilled professionals. This response to Hildebrand's critique argues that: (1) while he worries patients lose a safeguard against family pressure, in practice, time pressure, uncertainty and fragile dynamics often prevent clinician intervention.

Which AI doctor would you like to see? Emulating healthcare provider-patient communication models with GPT-4: proof-of-concept and ethical exploration.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in enhancing various aspects of healthcare, including health provider-patient communication. However, some have raised the concern that such communication may adopt implicit communication norms that deviate from what patients want or need from talking with their healthcare provider. This paper explores the possibility of using LLMs to enable patients to choose their preferred communication style when discussing their medical cases.

Decentralising the Self - Ethical Considerations in Utilizing Decentralised Web Technology for Direct Brain Interfaces.

The rapidly advancing field of brain-computer (BCI) and brain-to-brain interfaces (BBI) is stimulating interest across various sectors including medicine, entertainment, research, and military. The developers of large-scale brain-computer networks, sometimes dubbed 'Mindplexes' or 'Cloudminds', aim to enhance cognitive functions by distributing them across expansive networks. A key technical challenge is the efficient transmission and storage of information.

When Two Become One: Singular Duos and the Neuroethical Frontiers of Brain-to-Brain Interfaces.

Advances in brain-brain interface technologies raise the possibility that two or more individuals could directly link their minds, sharing thoughts, emotions, and sensory experiences. This paper explores conceptual and ethical issues posed by such mind-merging technologies in the context of clinical neuroethics. Using hypothetical examples along a spectrum from loosely connected pairs to fully merged minds, the authors sketch out a range of factors relevant to identifying the degree of a merger.

Does attitude importance moderate the effects of person-first language? A registered report.

Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to outgroup descriptions that use person-first, as compared to identity-first, language can attenuate negative stereotypes or prejudice and enhance support for policies that seek to advance outgroup rights. However, those benefits of person-first language may not apply to all social groups equally. The present study examines a boundary condition of the effects of person-first language.

Flourishing, Mental Health Professionals and the Role of Normative Dialogue.

This paper explores the dilemma faced by mental healthcare professionals in balancing treatment of mental disorders with promoting patient well-being and flourishing. With growing calls for a more explicit focus on patient flourishing in mental healthcare, we address two inter-related challenges: the lack of consensus on defining positive mental health and flourishing, and how professionals should respond to patients with controversial views on what is good for them. We discuss the relationship dynamics between healthcare providers and patients, proposing that 'liberal' approaches can provide a pragmatic framework to address disagreements about well-being in the context of flourishing-oriented mental healthcare.

The Mystery of Mental Integrity: Clarifying Its Relevance to Neurotechnologies.

The concept of mental integrity is currently a significant topic in discussions concerning the regulation of neurotechnologies. Technologies such as deep brain stimulation and brain-computer interfaces are believed to pose a unique threat to mental integrity, and some authors have advocated for a legal right to protect it. Despite this, there remains uncertainty about what mental integrity entails and why it is important.

Merging Minds: The Conceptual and Ethical Impacts of Emerging Technologies for Collective Minds.

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing and swarming technologies promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks across domains, ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications. As these tools continue to improve, we are prompted to monitor how they may affect our society on a broader level, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other key concepts of our moral landscape.

Race and resource allocation: an online survey of US and UK adults' attitudes toward COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine distribution.

Objective: This study aimed to assess US/UK adults' attitudes towards COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine allocation.

Design: Online survey including US and UK adults, sampled to be representative for sex, age, race, household income and employment. A total of 2580 participated (women=1289, age range=18 to 85 years, Black American=114, BAME=138).

Affirmative action in healthcare resource allocation: Vaccines, ventilators and race.

This article is about the potential justification for deploying some form of affirmative action (AA) in the context of healthcare, and in particular in relation to the pandemic. We call this Affirmative Action in healthcare Resource Allocation (AARA). Specifically, we aim to investigate whether the rationale and justifications for using prioritization policies based on race in education and employment apply in a healthcare setting, and in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Which features of patients are morally relevant in ventilator triage? A survey of the UK public.

Background: In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health systems, including those in the UK, developed triage guidelines to manage severe shortages of ventilators. At present, there is an insufficient understanding of how the public views these guidelines, and little evidence on which features of a patient the public believe should and should not be considered in ventilator triage.

Methods: Two surveys were conducted with representative UK samples.

Enhancing Gender.

Transgender healthcare faces a dilemma. On the one hand, access to certain medical interventions, including hormone treatments or surgeries, where desired, may be beneficial or even vital for some gender dysphoric trans people. But on the other hand, access to medical interventions typically requires a diagnosis, which, in turn, seems to imply the existence of a pathological state-something that many transgender people reject as a false and stigmatizing characterization of their experience or identity.

Animal researchers shoulder a psychological burden that animal ethics committees ought to address.

Animal ethics committees (AECs) typically focus on the welfare of animals used in experiments, neglecting the potential welfare impact of that animal use on the animal laboratory personnel. Some of this work, particularly the killing of animals, can impose significant psychological burdens that can diminish the well-being of laboratory animal personnel, as well as their capacity to care for animals. We propose that AECs, which regulate animal research in part on the basis of reducing harm, can and ought to require that these harms to researchers are reduced as well.

Which factors should be included in triage? An online survey of the attitudes of the UK general public to pandemic triage dilemmas.

Objective: As cases of COVID-19 infections surge, concerns have renewed about intensive care units (ICUs) being overwhelmed and the need for specific triage protocols over winter. This study aimed to help inform triage guidance by exploring the views of lay people about factors to include in triage decisions.

Design, Setting And Participants: Online survey between 29th of May and 22nd of June 2020 based on hypothetical triage dilemmas.

Biomarkers for the Rich and Dangerous: Why We Ought to Extend Bioprediction and Bioprevention to White-Collar Crime.

There is a burgeoning scientific and ethical literature on the use of biomarkers-such as genes or brain scan results-and biological interventions to predict and prevent crime. This literature on biopredicting and biopreventing crime focuses almost exclusively on crimes that are physical, violent, and/or sexual in nature-often called blue-collar crimes-while giving little attention to less conventional crimes such as economic and environmental offences, also known as white-collar crimes. We argue here that this skewed focus is unjustified: white-collar crime is likely far costlier than blue-collar crime in money, health, and lives lost.

Moral enhancement and the good life.

One approach to defining enhancement is in the form of bodily or mental changes that tend to improve a person's well-being. Such a "welfarist account", however, seems to conflict with moral enhancement: consider an intervention that improves someone's moral motives but which ultimately diminishes their well-being. According to the welfarist account, this would not be an instance of enhancement-in fact, as I argue, it would count as a disability.

Enhancement, disability and the riddle of the relevant circumstances.

The welfarist account of enhancement and disability holds enhanced and disabled states on a spectrum: the former are biological or psychological states that increase the chances of a person leading a good life in the relevant set of circumstances, while the latter decrease those chances. Here, I focus on a particular issue raised by this account: what should we count as part of an individual's relevant set of circumstances when thinking about enhanced and disabled states? Specifically, is social prejudice relevant to an individual's circumstances in regards to how disabled or enhanced they are? For instance, if an individual is discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour, and this leads to a reduction in their well-being, the welfarist account suggests that their skin colour is a disability. To avoid such a seeming mislabel, Savulescu and Kahane have argued for excluding social prejudice from counting as a relevant circumstance to their welfarist definition of disability.