The conjunction fallacy: A test of averaging hypotheses

The conjunction fallacy, in which individuals report that the conjunction of two events is more rather than less likely to occur than one of the events alone, is a robust phenomenon. We assessed the possibility that an analysis in terms of functional measurement methodology might be consistent with occurrence of the fallacy. A 3 × 3 design in which we varied the judged likelihood of the two components constituting the conjunction permitted us to assess the possibility that subjects judge the likelihood of conjunctions by averaging the likelihood of their component parts. The results were consistent with this possibility, and this interpretation was supported by analysis of the results in terms of functional measurement methodology.     

Managed care at the bedside: how do we look in the moral mirror?

Managed care per se is a morally neutral concept; however, as practiced today, it raises serious ethical issues at the clinical, managerial, and social levels. This essay focuses on the ethical issues that arise at the bedside, looking first at the ethical conflicts faced by the physician who is charged with responsibility for care of the patient and then turning to the way in which managed care exacts costs that are measured not in dollars but in compromises in the caring dimensions of the patient-physician relationship.     

THE INADEQUACY OF ROLE MODELS FOR EDUCATING MEDICAL STUDENTS IN ETHICS WITH SOME REFLECTIONS ON VIRTUE THEORY

Persons concerned with medical education sometimes argued that medical students need no formal education in ethics. They contended that if admissions were restricted to persons of good character and those students were exposed to good role models, the ethics of medicine would take care of itself. However, no one seems to give much philosophic attention to the ideas of model or role model. In this essay, I undertake such an analysis and add an analysis of role. I show the weakness in relying on role models exclusively and draw implications from these for appeals to virtue theory. Furthermore, I indicate some of the problems about how virtue theory is invoked as the ethical theory that would most closely be associated to the role model rhetoric and consider some of the problems with virtue theory. Although Socrates was interested in the character of the (young) persons with whom he spoke, Socratic education is much more than what role modeling and virtue theory endorse. It -- that is, philosophy -- is invaluable for ethics education.     

The moral significance of the genetic relation

Our ordinary moral attitudes give a prominent place to the principle that each person ought specially to care for any child who is his or her genetic offspring. From this principle of genetic-parental responsibility and other plausible premises, we can derive the principle that each person has the right to control the genetic use of his or her own genes. But there are competing principles of parental responsibility that require consideration. Principles of nurture are among the important competitors. Also, the view that a woman has the right to control her own body for reproductive purposes may be based on a principle that denies the genetic-parental principle. An analysis is developed of the relations that constitute the criteria for the various possible principles of parental responsibility. Causality, temporality, spatiality, and resemblance are considered. The genetic relation is not any one of these relations, but it includes some of them. The justification of any principle of parental responsibility requires a detailed consideration of the principle from the viewpoint of a deontological or consequentialist moral theory. This examination is beyond the scope of this paper, but consideration is given to some issues and problems of justification, and difficult or unusual cases are discussed. There remain, then, complexities that require further study.     

Multidimensional rotation and scaling of configurations to optimal agreement

An integrated method for rotating and rescaling a set of configurations to optimal agreement in subspaces of varying dimensionalities is developed. The approach relates existing orthogonal rotation techniques as special cases within a general framework based on a partition of variation which provides convenient measures of agreement. In addition to the well-known Procrustes and inner product optimality criteria, a criterion which maximizes the consensus among subspaces of the configurations is suggested. Since agreement of subspaces of the configurations can be examined and compared, rotation and rescaling is extended from a data transformation technique to an analytical method.     

The Hippocratic Oath and clinical ethics

Its obvious shortcomings aside, this study by H. Steven Moffic, John Coverdale, and Timothy Bayer is disquieting. It comes as no surprise that residents have lapses of cognitive recall. Every medical teacher knows this very well. What is worrisome is that their amnesia concerns the oldest, most revered, and most influential moral statement in the history of the profession...Purely apart from its content, the oath continues to have power as the solemnification of a physician's entry into the profession. It signifies a willingness to submit to a way of life that demands some suppression of self-interest. If studying the oath more explicitly reenforces this solemnification or strengthens the physician's dedication to the welfare of the patient, the effort will be worthwhile.     

Value, pleasure and choice in the ventral prefrontal cortex

Rapid advances have recently been made in understanding how value-based decision-making processes are implemented in the brain. We integrate neuroeconomic and computational approaches with evidence on the neural correlates of value and experienced pleasure to describe how systems for valuation and decision-making are organized in the prefrontal cortex of humans and other primates. We show that the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal (VMPFC) cortices compute expected value, reward outcome and experienced pleasure for different stimuli on a common value scale. Attractor networks in VMPFC area 10 then implement categorical decision processes that transform value signals into a choice between the values, thereby guiding action. This synthesis of findings across fields provides a unifying perspective for the study of decision-making processes in the brain.