Ethically Speaking

Dr. Blake Hereth is the Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics, Humanities, & Law, Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. Blake is “proudly nonbinary, bisexual, and disabled.” Their work covers neuroethics, bioethics, applied ethics more broadly, and the philosophy of religion. They were the winner of the 2023 Alvin Plantinga Prize ($10,000) for their essay “Self‐Defense for Theists”.

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.

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.