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Professor Blumenthal-Barby will present in a public lecture at the NYU Center for Bioethics. She is the Cullen Associate Professor and Associate Director for Medical Ethics in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, and has an adjunct appointment in Philosophy at Rice University.  More information on Professor Blumenthal-Barby can be found here.

Prof. Vardit Ravitsky, Ph.D.

Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) is a new technology that allows genetic testing of a fetus with a simple maternal blood test, by isolating cell-free fetal DNA in the mother’s plasma. Introduced in 2011, it is now available globally, its cost is declining, and the number of conditions it can test for is increasing. Technically, this technology can be used to sequence the entire genome of a fetus early in the first trimester of pregnancy. Should this use of prenatal testing be banned? Limited? Offered? Encouraged? Covered by insurance? This talk will explore some ethical implications of this possibility. It will focus on reproductive autonomy and the transition from ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘knowledge is vulnerability’ in the context of informed choice.

Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Bioethics Programs within the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal. She is also Director of the Ethics and Health Branch of the CRE, an interuniversity research center in ethics. Prof. Ravitsky’s research focuses on reproductive ethics and the ethical aspects of genetic and genomics. Her research interests in bioethics also include health policy and cultural perspectives. She is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural frameworks shape public debate and public policy in the area of bioethics. Her research projects are funded by CIHR, FRQSC, SSHRC, and Genome Canada. She published over 100 articles, book chapters and commentaries on bioethical issues, and is lead-editor of “The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics”.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Ravitsky brings international perspectives to her research and teaching. She holds a BA in philosophy from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Bioethics of the NIH and at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

Ravitsky is an elected Board member and Treasurer of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB). She is a member of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (the ‘Canadian NIH’) Standing Committee on Ethics. She is also member of the University of Montreal’s Public Health Research Institute (IRSPUM), the Quebec Reproduction Network (RQR), and of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at CIHR’s Ethics Office and a GE3LS consultant to Genome Canada.

This talk describes and criticizes traditional approaches to moral psychology, which try to understand moral judgments through questionnaires. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that it is more accurate and illuminating to use tests of implicit attitudes modeled on tests of implicit racial attitudes. Sinnott-Armstrong explains one such test that we have used with great success in predicting not only personality variables but also behavior (charity donations and voting). Finally, he draws out potential lessons for traditional issues in moral philosophy and legal responsibility.

Walter Sinnott–Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics at Duke University in the Philosophy Department, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Law School. He publishes widely in ethics, moral psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of law, epistemology, informal logic, and philosophy of religion.

Philosophers have employed two different varieties of felt necessity to explain central aspects of agency in addiction and love, respectively. In the case of addiction, the relevant felt need is often described in terms of an appetite, whereas love is characterized by necessities arising from a particular kind of caring. On Dr. Wonderly’s view, the extant literature offers an instructive, but incomplete picture of the roles of felt necessity in addiction and love. Dr. Wonderly argues that a third form of felt necessity – attachment necessity – often better captures central aspects of agency in love and addiction. Recognizing the role of attachment necessity will not only illuminate how felt necessity can impact the value of certain relationships, but it will also allow us to discern important features of addiction and love that remain obscured on extant approaches.

Monique Wonderly is the Harold T. Shapiro Postdoctoral Research Associate in Bioethics. She is primarily interested in puzzles at the intersection of ethics and the nature of emotions. She has published in the areas of applied ethics, philosophy of emotion, and history of philosophy. Her current research focuses on emotional attachment – and in particular, on questions concerning moral agency and ethical treatment that arise when considering certain attachment-related pathologies, including psychopathy and (some forms of) addiction. For more, visit here.

Reception to follow.

The metaphysics of implicit bias has been an area of heated debates involving philosophers and psychologists. Most theorists of implicit bias posit that associations underwrite implicit bias. Recent dissenters have argued that propositional attitudes undergird this pernicious attitude. However, the propositional attitude view of implicit bias does not satisfyingly explain its various manifestations that are underwritten by its diverse contents. In this paper my criticism targets: (1) legitimacy of ascriptions of unconscious mental content, and (2) the phenomenology of implicit bias. The first criticism focuses on a common assumption in philosophy of mind—the equivalence of content in the conscious and unconscious domain—and raises problems regarding the propositional attitude theorist’s strategy to ascribe propositional attitudes to explain implicit biases which they locate in the unconscious mind of the subject. Second, I argue that the similarities between a more familiar mental phenomenon—the phenomenon of moods—and the conscious manifestations of implicit bias have been ignored. I identify several parallels between moods and implicit bias: their context-dependence, the subject’s lack of awareness of their source, their effects on the salience and valence of their targets, and their simultaneous responsiveness and recalcitrance to reasons. I argue that an explanatorily robust view of implicit bias must be commensurate with this analogy. I end with a proposal that I dub the indeterminate content view, which avoids these problems and promises explanatory power.

We will also be giving an award to 2nd-place essay prize winner Elis Miller (Harvard) for her paper “Whether to Suspend Judgment”.

Gottlob Frege famously argued that we should always ‘always separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective’. While analytic philosophers have generally followed this advice when discussing logic and mathematics (in their rejection of ‘psychologism’ about these things), they have not followed it when discussing the psychological itself. It might be thought that if psychologism was true of anything, it is true of the psychological. But much 20th and 21st century analytic philosophy of mind has thought otherwise, approaching the study of the mind using ideas from logic, semantics and the theory of meaning (e.g. the proposition, truth, reference etc.). In this lecture I make two claims: (i) that its rejection of psychologism is one of the things that has made it difficult for philosophy of mind to gain a proper understanding of consciousness, and (ii) that despite the widespread rejection of behaviourism in philosophy and psychology, contemporary philosophy of mind still works with a conception of consciousness that derives from mid-20th century behaviourism. The relationship between psychologism and behaviourism explored here is different, though complementary to, Ned Block’s discussion In his classic 1981 paper, ‘Psychologism and Behaviourism’.

The orthodox conception of drug addiction is a neurobiological disease characterised by compulsive drug use despite negative consequences. But this conception depends on three core ideas that are rarely clarified: disease, compulsion, and negative consequences. Pickard argues that it is only when the significance of negative consequences is appreciated that the puzzle of addiction comes clearly into view; and she discusses some conceptual and empirical grounds supporting scepticism about the claim that addiction can be accurately characterised as a form of compulsion, and agnosticism about the claim that addiction is a neurobiological disease. Addiction is better characterized as involving drug choices that, while on the surface puzzling, can be explained by recognizing the multiple functions that drugs serve, and by contextualizing drug choices in relation to a host of interacting and individualized factors. Alongside craving or strength of motivation to use, these factors include (1) psychiatric co-morbidity, (2) limited socio-economic opportunities, (3) temporally myopic decision-making, (4) denial and motivated irrationality, and, lastly, (5) a sense of self and social identity. She shall briefly explain the relevance of all five factors, but conclude by focussing on (5) in more detail, exploring the distinctive way that the human drive not only for social reward and belonging but also to know who one is can serve to cement addiction and impede recovery.

Hanna Pickard is Professor in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a 3-year Visiting Research Scholar in the Program of Cognitive Science at Princeton University. In addition to her academic work, from 2007-17 she worked in a NHS specialist service for people with personality disorders and complex needs. Website: www.hannapickard.com.

Friday, February 8th, 2019
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Reception to follow
Location TBD; RSVPs will be notified via email

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