Should a school honor a student's DNR order?

Physicians first present the case of a sixteen-year-old cardiac patient who has refused a heart transplant and cardiac resuscitation. Her family and physicians accept the decision. The family has asked the school system to honor her do not resuscitate order if she goes into cardiac arrest in school The school system has refused to do so. Following the case presentation, a lawyer, a physician/ethicist, and an educator consider the important issues raised by this ongoing case.     

Should a school honor a student's DNR order? A lawyer responds: a student's right to forgo CPR.

...Instead of and certainly before advising the school or S.A. to go into court, I would urge them to try to resolve the question where it arises -- in the classroom, not the courtroom. And I would ask school officials to try to place themselves in S.A.'s shoes, and to imagine how she feels about her situation; and to ask themselves how they will feel if they administer CPR against her and her parents' wishes. Is there no way that they can do more than nothing, but less than CPR? Which image would we prefer to attach to S.A.'s case, that of some lawyers giving a press conference on the courthouse steps or of a story about a school that made it possible for one of its students to spend her precious time with her friends, classmates, and teachers, as they learn together that death does not need to separate the living from the dying?     

Should a school honor a student's DNR order? An educator responds: a school's interest in denying the request.

My goal in this commentary is to try to construct a picture of the interests of school officials in considering the request of S.A. and her family. It is not clear from the case presentation whether one or more administrators were responsible for the decision not to honor S.A.'s request; I will call the decision maker "ADMIN," who may be regarded as an individual or a corporate body. I will try to make sense of ADMIN's decision by exploring some plausible lines of argument for it that seem worthy of consideration, even though I may not accept any or all of them....     

Why cannot reasons change your moral decisions? Because they are not persuasive enough: A comment on Stanley et al. (2018)

Stanley et al. (2018) found that the consideration of reasons rarely induced people to change their moral decisions. We challenged this article by assuming what caused such a null or weak effect was that the persuasiveness of reasons provided to oppose the initial decisions was not strong enough. To verify our assumption, this study used Stanley et al.’s (2018) experimental paradigm and manipulated the levels of persuasiveness of reasons. The results revealed (1) that not only strong opposing reasons but also weak affirming reasons could induce changes in moral decision-making and increase decision confidence after altering the decisions; (2) that people with a weak decision confidence tended to change their initial decisions after evaluation of reasons; and (3) that people who maintained their decisions after considering weak opposing reasons enhanced rather than reduced their decision confidence. Overall, these findings demonstrated that moral decision change was a composite outcome of the interaction among reason type, reason persuasiveness and initial decision confidence and that low-quality argumentation had a boomerang effect on moral persuasion. This study re-lifted the role of rational reasoning in moral decision-making and revising, thus posing important amendments to Stanley et al.’s (2018) findings.     

Methods in the study of motor programming: is it just a matter of simple vs. choice reaction time? A comment on Klapp et al. (1979)

A recent article (Klapp, Abbott, Coffman, Greim, Snider, and Young, 1979) has concluded that central time demands of motor programming can only be determined by choice reaction time methodology. A critique of the theoretical position and results of this study is made showing that this conclusion is unwarranted. We go on to suggest that the simple vs. choice reaction time controversy might only be clouding a more basic issue in motor programming research; viz., identification of relevant internal response variables. Finally, a case is made for the notion that the choice reaction time paradigm may produce response competition (interference) effects and as a result confound measures presumed to reflect only the processes involved in the organization of movement.