Browsing by Subject "Morals"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Distressed Work: Chronic Imperatives and Distress in Covid-19 Critical Care.
    (The Hastings Center report, 2023-01) Navuluri, Neelima; Solomon, Harris S; Hargett, Charles W; Kussin, Peter S
    This ethnographic study introduces the term "distressed work" to describe the emergence of chronic frictions between moral imperatives for health care workers to keep working and the dramatic increase in distress during the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviews and observant participation conducted in a hospital intensive care unit during the Covid-19 pandemic reveal how health care workers connected job duties with extraordinary emotional, physical, and moral burdens. We explore tensions between perceived obligations of health care professionals and the structural contexts of work. Key findings cluster around the moral imperatives of health care work and the distress that work engendered as work spaces, senses of vocation, patient and family interactions, and end-of-life care shifted. While the danger of working beyond limits has long been an ordinary feature of health care work, it has now become a chronic crisis. Assessing this problem in terms of distressed work and its structural contexts can better address effective, worker-informed responses to current health care labor dilemmas.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemRestricted
    Medical education as moral formation: an Aristotelian account of medical professionalsim.
    (Perspect Biol Med, 2010) Kinghorn, Warren A
    The medical professionalism movement, bolstered by many influential medical organizations and institutions, has in the last decade produced a number of conceptual definitions of professionalism and a number of concrete proposals for its measurement and teaching. These projects, however laudable, are misguided when they treat professionalism as a unitary descriptive concept rather than as a contested and therefore primarily evaluative one; when they conceive professionalism as a domain of medical practice separable in principle from other domains; and when they treat professionalism as, in principle, a specifiable goal or product of sufficiently well designed educational curricula. The logic of professionalism-as-product corresponds to the logic of techne (art or practical skill) in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle provides a cogent argument, however, that the moral excellences denoted by "professionalism" cannot be "produced" or even prespecified in the concrete; rather, they must be acquired through long practice under the careful concrete guidance of teachers who themselves embody these moral excellences. Phronesis (practical wisdom) rather than techne must therefore be the guiding logic of educational initiatives in medical professional formation, with particular emphasis on close mentorship and on the moral character both of students and of those who teach them.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment.
    (Emotion, 2013-02) Inbar, Yoel; Pizarro, David A; Gilovich, Thomas; Ariely, Dan
    Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality.
    (Sci Rep, 2015-12-04) Ngo, L; Kelly, M; Coutlee, CG; Carter, RM; Sinnott-Armstrong, W; Huettel, SA
    Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Values and moral experience in global health: bridging the local and the global.
    (Global public health, 2010-01) Stewart, KA; Keusch, GT; Kleinman, A