Ethically Speaking

In various parts of the world, hospitals are legally bound to follow a patient’s advance directive. The two most common directives are treatment and proxy directives. The former specifies what treatment, if any, the patient would desire in the future, and the latter who is empowered to make decisions on a patient’s behalf. Despite the legal push to implement advance directives, clinicians remain reluctant to do so, particularly in conditions where an individual has undergone some kind of personal transformation (i.e. they’ve changed religion since writing their directive). I propose that dementia is a distinctive kind of cognitive transformation which results in patients expressing different preferences than they did at the onset of their condition. I argue that the received philosophical view, which mirrors the law and argues that advance directives which prioritize the patient’s preferences at onset should be given decisive moral weight, is out of touch with clinical practice and that clinicians are right to be reluctant to administer advance directives after a significant transformation. This argument ought to encourage us to reduce our confidence in the moral weight of advance directives for dementia patients.

Dr. Em Walsh is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on exploring the ways in which marginalization and mental health affect one’s ability to remember. Her research combines insights from philosophy, medicine, transcultural psychiatry, and urban planning, to show the ways in which memory can be influenced by society.

What is structural injustice, and who ultimately bears responsibility for it? In answering these questions Maeve McKeown goes beyond the widely accepted narrative of unintended consequences and blameless participation to explain how power and responsibility truly function in today’s world. Drawing on case studies from sweatshops to climate change, McKeown identifies three types of structural injustice: the pure and unintended accumulation of disparate activities; the avoidable injustice that could be ameliorated by the powerful but nevertheless continues; the deliberate perpetuation of structural processes that benefit powerful political and economic agents. In each of these, the role of power is different which changes the allocation of responsibility. From this understanding, we can shape a deeper, more sophisticated idea of how structural injustice operates and what we as individuals can do about it. What is the political responsibility of ordinary individuals? How can ordinary individuals with very little power pressure morally responsible, powerful agents to address structural injustice? Do we have the same responsibility for historical injustice as we do for that which we see in today’s world? This is fundamental reassessment of the relationship between power, ordinary people and responsibility for structural injustice.

Dr Maeve McKeown is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Campus Fryslân, an interdisciplinary faculty at the University of Groningen. In 2024, she published her first monograph With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice (Bloomsbury Academic) and a volume co-edited with Prof Jude Browne, What is Structural Injustice? (Oxford University Press, Open Access). Her research interests include structural injustice, historical injustice, reparations and feminism.

Public and popular views of digital privacy concerns often trade on a particular intuition about creepiness: that we can (and should!) use our feelings of whether something is creepy as a proxy for whether or not something is a breach of privacy. Yet this emphasis on creepiness is a problem: not only do feelings of creepiness sometimes misfire, it has also meant that technologists have focused on altering user perceptions of ‘creepiness’ rather than interrogating whether the technology preserves privacy. Some scholars (such as Richards 2022) have concluded, thus, that ‘creepiness’ is a mere distraction. I argue that’s not the case, either. In this talk, we’ll (1) consider what creepiness is and what it does for us, and (2) look at how ‘creepiness’ can rightly serve as a guide when thinking about digital privacy.