Social media concept: students sit at a table with social media notification bubbles floating above them.

Is Your Cellphone Destroying Your Morals? Devices, Distraction and the Impossible Ethics of Modern Life

It isn’t that texting and driving is dangerous per se. If we were perfectly capable of doing both flawlessly, this danger would instantly disappear. Yet, we know that the danger of texting and driving exists precisely because of the fragility of our attention. The consequences of distracted driving loom large: According to one source, “Text messaging creates a crash risk 23 times worse than driving while not distracted.”

The reasons for this lay in the recesses of a brain stunningly ill-suited to multitasking. Yet, what is useful about this example is that it highlights with searing severity the moral risks and costs of an increasingly distracted mind.

As multitasking now defines modern life, a hugely important question emerges: What will an increasingly distracted brain mean for ethics? Read More

Reality star Kim Kardashian at the CFDA Awards at the Brooklyn Museum on June 4, 2018.

Can Kim Kardashian Help Bioethics? Celebrity Data Breaches and Software for Moral Reflection

In 2013, Kim Kardashian entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

During her hospitalization, unauthorized hospital personnel accessed Kardashian’s medical record more than fourteen times. Secret “leaks” of celebrities’ medical information had, unfortunately, become de rigueur. Similar problems befell Prince, Farah Fawcett, and perhaps most notably, Michael Jackson, whose death stoked a swelling media frenzy around his health. While these breaches may seem minor, patient privacy is ethically important, even for the likes of the Kardashians.

Since 2013, however, a strange thing has happened.

Across hospitals both in the U.S. and beyond, snooping staff now encounter something curious. Through software, staff must now “Break the Glass” (BTG) to access the records of patients that are outside their circle of care, and so physicians unassociated with Kim Kardashian’s care of must BTG to access her files.

As part of the BTG process, users are prompted to provide a reason why they want to access a file. Read More

woman holding an ipad, looking concerned

What are the Ethics of Electronic Consent Forms?

While bioethics has generally understood technologies to be a source of ethical problems, there is relatively little reflection about issues associated with technology’s role in bioethics itself. The move towards electronic consent is one area in technology. While there is substantial research on consent and the consent process the gradual shift towards digital consent forms appears to have arrived without necessary bioethical reflection. What are the ethical implications of this shift?

Yet, there are other more compelling questions that this brings about: Could the digitization of consent forms support even more robust kinds of consent on the part of patients and research subjects? Given what we know about the gaps between the ideals of consent and the reality of consent in clinical and research settings, could electronic supports be used precisely in areas where consent “breaks down?” How might ethical aims be sustained or emboldened via systems?

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