Emerging Infectious Diseases: Coping with Uncertainty

The world’s scientific community must be in a state of constant readiness to address the threat posed by newly emerging infectious diseases. Whether the disease in question is SARS in humans or BSE in animals, scientists must be able to put into action various disease containment measures when everything from the causative pathogen to route(s) of transmission is essentially uncertain. A robust epistemic framework, which will inform decision-making, is required under such conditions of uncertainty. I will argue that this framework should have reasoning at its center and, specifically, that forms of reasoning beyond deduction and induction should be countenanced by scientists who are confronted with emerging infectious diseases. In previous articles, I have presented a case for treating certain so-called traditional informal fallacies as rationally acceptable forms of argument that can facilitate scientific inquiry when little is known about an emerging disease. In this article, I want to extend that analysis by highlighting the unique features of these arguments that makes them specially adapted to cope with conditions of uncertainty. Of course, such a view of the informal fallacies must at least be consistent with the reasoning practices of scientists, and particularly those scientists (viz. epidemiologists) whose task it is to track and respond to newly emerging infectious diseases. To this end, I draw upon examples of scientific reasoning from the UK’s BSE crisis, a crisis that posed a significant threat to both human and animal health.

Moral Knowledge and Moral Uncertainty1

Applying a broadly Wittgensteinian view of knowledge and its relation to the conditions in which the word “know” is ordinarily used, the paper defends the claim that there can be knowledge (and thus also truth) in moral matters and rejects the idea that a cross‐culturally homogeneous moral language is a necessary condition for this. However, the fact that moral knowledge is available sometimes does not imply that it is available always. Taking issue in particular with Ronald Dworkin, the paper also argues that where moral questions are a matter of judgement, there may well be no right answer to them and, further, that this is a feature by no means unique to moral discourse.     

彰显道德韧性：应对疫情中的道德创伤

道德韧性是成功应对道德逆境的高尚道德操守。面对新型冠状病毒感染的肺炎疫情,中华民族的道德韧性得以彰显,有效地遏制了道德创伤的发生;但社会个体道德韧性的缺失,也使得部分道德创伤不容忽视,如果任其恣意蔓延必将消解和冲击人们抗击疫情的道德情感和道德意志。抵御疫情中的道德创伤,必须在坚定文化自信中传承道德韧性,在应对道德逆境中塑造道德韧性,在探寻生命意义中升华道德韧性,在领导和权威人士履职尽责中激发道德韧性。     

Moral Uncertainty for Deontologists

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? One common response to this challenge proposes a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent’s credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: where does the threshold come from, and why should it take any one value rather than another? Threshold views also seem to violate “ought” agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). The stochastic dominance approach also allows a principled, albeit intuitively imperfect, response to the agglomeration problem. Thus, I argue, deontologists are better equipped than many critics have supposed to address the problems of decision-making under uncertainty.     

Moral Uncertainty and Distributive Sufficiency

According to the sufficiency principle, distributive justice requires that everyone have some sufficient level of resources or well-being, but inequalities above this threshold have no moral significance. This paper defends a version of the sufficiency principle as the appropriate response to moral uncertainty about distributive justice. Assuming that the appropriate response to moral uncertainty is to maximize expected choiceworthiness, and given a reasonable distribution of credence in some familiar views about distributive justice (including libertarianism, sufficientarianism, and egalitarianism), a version of the sufficiency principle strikes the optimal balance between the competing moral risks posed by implementing these views. In particular, it avoids the moral risk posed by views like Nozick’s libertarianism, which forbid redistributive taxation even for the sake of helping to provide for people’s basic needs: failing to do the latter, if it turns out that justice does require it, would be very morally wrong. This “uncertainty argument” has the advantage of minimizing reliance on controversial intuitions about distributive justice, helps to specifying a non-arbitrary threshold for sufficiency, and shows that the substantive moral implications of moral uncertainty are not limited to high-stakes applied ethics issues such as abortion and vegetarianism but instead extend to an issue at the heart of political philosophy.

     

Coping with Disillusionment,Abstract Images,and Uncertainty in Career Decision Making

The author examines sources of disillusionment and uncertainty in college students' career thinking.     

Coping With Uncertainty: Superstitious Strategies and Secondary Control1

The aim of the present studies was to investigate the relationship between primary and secondary control and the use of superstitious strategies under conditions of uncertainty and stress. In the first study, 78 participants completed a chance‐determined card‐guessing task in which they were permitted to use a psychic's card selections instead of making their own card selections. Participants' use of a superstitious strategy (a psychic's selections) increased significantly with the perceived likelihood of failure, regardless of belief in psychic ability. A second study (N= 102) replicated these findings using a skill task. Overall, these data suggest that as the need to control outcomes becomes increasingly salient, the use of superstitious strategies may represent attempts at secondary control.     

中学生道德问题应对策略研究

按Carolyn Saarni对儿童在社会交往和情绪问题上应对策略的研究,在小样本初测基础上,以124名我国中学生为被试、以道德问题情境故事作为刺激材料、对他们的道德问题应对策略之选择及其相应的内心体验作了调查。结果表明,我国中学生道德问题应对策略有五类,他们大多能选择具有积极社会意义的策略,不同年级和面对不同道德问题时他们的选择会有差异,选择不同的应对策略时他们会有不同的内心体验,在“角色投射”时他们的内心体验更为强烈。     

The General Confidence Scale: Coping With Environmental Uncertainty and Threat

We investigated general confidence as a psychological buffer for coping with environmental uncertainty and threat. In Study 1, a new scale to measure general confidence was developed and cross‐validated with different samples. Study 2 examined general confidence as a moderator of the influence of environmental stress on individual strains. Two groups of participants were presented with photographs either of terrorist attacks or of neutral scenes. We found a significant interaction between presented scenes and general confidence. Study 3 examined the effect of general confidence on acceptance of mobile phone stations while controlling for relevant variables. The results showed good incremental validity for the General Confidence Scale over related personality and social psychological constructs.     

Coping with disturbances

Motion systems must cope with internal and external disturbances affecting the envisioned movement program. In science responses to disturbances are used to characterize system properties. Recently, evidence has been collected that self-stability due to the mechanical response of a system can greatly contribute to safe guarding proper operation of the system and to follow up an envisioned task. Here we review research in our laboratory on the kinematic response of standing subjects to sudden pulls inflicted by a motor, and the kinetics of runners crossing a track with a bump. We find that in both cases the first responses are dominated by system compliance. Thereby damage is avoided and the tasks are secured. Preparation to the observed disturbance does not seem to have the goal to compensate quickly but to enhance the scope of the reaction and its economy.     

William MacAskill,Krister Bykvist,and Toby Ord: Moral Uncertainty

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -     

Coping with Work:

African-American women, who have faced the "double jeopardy" (Beale, 1970) of racism and sexism in the workforce, have had to develop coping strategies to enable their survival. African-Americans appear to use more diverse coping strategies than Caucasians (Barbarin, 1983; Gibson, 1982; Ramseur, 1989), as well as a more varied pool of informal helpers in their social networks and more flexible responses to stress (Gibson, 1982). Career counselors working with African-American women should be aware of decision-making factors other than individual preference, such as cultural norms and coping strategies necessary to survive in a discriminatory work environment. This paper examines the relationship between coping strategies used by African-American women and workplace realities, and makes recommendations for culturally sensitive career interventions with African-American women clients.     

Coping with condom embarrassment

This study assesses the embarrassment associated with purchasing, carrying, storing, using and disposing of condoms. It incorporates coping theory into the investigation of embarrassment by analysing the strategies individuals use to cope with embarrassment during condom purchase. The results of a survey show that individuals are embarrassed at various stages related to condom use. Purchasing condoms elicits the most embarrassment, followed by carrying and disposing, while using and storing are the least embarrassing. To cope with their embarrassment while purchasing condoms, people use multiple cognitive and behavioural coping strategies, with embarrassed people using more strategies. Both embarrassment and the number of strategies used decrease with age and experience. It appears that embarrassment associated with condoms remains a barrier to condom acquisition and consistent condom use, particularly among young adult populations. Coping strategies help individuals to bridge the gap between embarrassment and use.