Killing, letting die and moral perception: a reply to Grant Gillett

A number of philosophers in recent times have employed arguments to show that there is no morally relevant difference between killing a patient and allowing that patient to die in those circumstances where the outcome is virtually identical and where death is preventable, at least for a significant time. From his perspective as both a philosopher and a clinician, Grant Gillett has rejected such general and abstract arguments in the light of the intuitions and moral perceptions available to clinicians and those who care for the terminally ill. I argue that his strategy fails, is massively question-begging, and that his appeal to the notion of 'moral particularism', far from being an alternative to cogent philosophical argument, actually supports the very position he has attempted to discredit.     

Killing, letting die and the bare difference argument

I believe that there is no intrinsic moral difference between killing and letting die. That is, there is no difference that depends solely on the distinction between an act and an omission. I also believe that we can reasonably establish this thesis by appeal to the Bare Difference Argument. The form of this argument involves considering two imaginary cases in which there are no morally relevant differences present, save the bare difference that one is a case of killing and one a case of letting die. But in the pair of cases under consideration this bare difference makes no moral difference. Hence it cannot be that the bare difference between killing and letting die is in itself a morally important difference.
Winston Nesbitt has recently argued that the Bare Difference Argument fails because "the examples produced typically possess a feature which makes their use in this context illegitimate, and that when modified to remove this feature, they provide support for the view which they were designed to undermine". I argue that Nesbitt misunderstands the logic of the Bare Difference Argument and that accordingly his objections are mistaken.     

Killing for the greater good: Action aversion and the emotional inhibition of harm in moral dilemmas

Moral judgment is influenced by both automatic and deliberative processing systems, and moral conflict arises when these systems produce competing intuitions. We investigated the role of emotional arousal in inhibiting harmful action in a behavioral study of utilitarian tradeoffs in a 3D digital simulation of two classic “trolley” scenarios in which participants decided whether to harm one person in order to avert harm to five others. Physiological arousal was measured via skin conductance response in real time. Results showed that physiological arousal is increased in situations in which using personal harm is necessary to achieve a utilitarian outcome relative to when the same outcome can be achieved with impersonal harm, and is linked to a decreased likelihood of engaging in harmful action, though a test of mediation was not statistically significant. In addition, when the use of personal harm was required to save lives, arousal was higher pre-action relative to post-action. Overall, our findings suggest that physiological arousal may be part of an affective system that functions to inhibit harmful action against others.     

Intelligence, Coalitional Killing, and the Antecedents of War

Advances in primatological research have recently led to a hypothesis that lethal coalitionary raiding in chimpanzees is the product of an evolutionarily adaptive dominance drive that disposes adult males to seek out low-cost opportunities for conspecific killing. This conclusion has been extended into a claim that human warfare and other forms of coalitional killing are outcomes of a hardwired, demonic male complex. Reversing this evidential approach, I argue from data on conspecific killing in humans that humans and chimpanzees have an aversion to killing conspecifics. Their lethal violence, I propose, is more parsimoniously explained as the result of a developed intelligence capable of envisioning the future and, when necessary, of disabling this aversion to achieve desired goals.     

Thrombopoietin, HSCs, and the osteoblast niche: holding on loosely, but not letting G0

New findings in this issue of Cell Stem Cell by Qian et al. (2007) and Yoshihara et al. (2007) reveal that thrombopoietin modulates hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) cell-cycle progression at the osteoblast surface, linking a single cytokine with a specific postnatal niche cell. These observations indicate that simultaneous stimulation and suspension in a G(0) state are critical for maintenance of the HSC pool.     

Infant Killing, Wounding and Predation in Eulemur and Lemur

Infant killing by primates is highly controversial. Sexual selection of infanticidal males has been disputed, especially for seasonally breeding species, in which death of an infant does not advance conception of the next infant. We report attacks, infants found wounded, and predation in seasonally breeding Eulemur and Lemur at Berenty, Beza Mahafaly and Duke University Primate Center, and review cases seen elsewhere. Observed attacks leading to wounds or death conservatively total twelve by extratroop males, two by troop males, and seven by troop females. Eulemur are occasional vertebrate predators, whose prey includes infant Lemur catta. Wounds inflicted by lemurs are usually abdominal canine slashes or bites to the head, with rare eating, a pattern distinct from carnivore and raptor kills. Infant killing as inferred from corpses is more frequent than previously thought, but still rare. Adaptive advantages of killing plausibly include eliminating resource competitors of females, and sexual selection on males.     

Virtue,foible, and practice--medicine's arduous moral triad

Moral distress is often discussed as a response to the moral dilemmas that professional and other caregivers encounter in their effort to balance competing moral principles, or to provide care in difficult cases, to difficult patients, in spite of difficult institutional requirements or policy. In this essay, a reforming ER clinician and teaching physician, offers a personal approach to moral distress. Assuming that a clinician's own foibles may sometimes contribute to another's distress, and that attempting to rationalize or subvert these foibles causes moral fatigue, he offers personal guidelines for healthcare providers--four strategies that less-than-perfect practitioners may use while striving to attain the ideal of the competent, compassionate, altruistic, calm, and wise clinician.     

Time perception,depression and sadness

This study examined changes in time perception as a function of depressive symptoms, assessed for each participant with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). The participants performed a temporal bisection task in which they had to categorize a signal duration of between 400 and 1600 ms as either as short or long. The data showed that the bisection function was shifted toward the right, and that the point of subjective equality was higher in the depressive than in the non-depressive participants. Furthermore, the higher the depression score was, the shorter the signal duration was judged to be. In contrast, the sensitivity to time was similar in these two groups of participants. These results thus indicate that the probe durations were underestimated by the depressive participants. The sadness scores assessed by the Brief Mood Inventory Scale (BMIS) also suggest that the emotional state of sadness in the depressive participants goes some way to explaining their temporal performance. Statistical analyses and modeling of data support the idea according to which these results may be explained by a slowing down of the internal clock in the depressive participants.     

Interneurons, spike timing, and perception.

Rhythmic gamma oscillations at 30-70 Hz in cortical and hippocampal slices depend on a maintained excitation and on interactions between interneurons and pyramidal cells. These interactions include gap-junctional connections between inhibitory cells and fast excitatory and inhibitory chemical synapses. Spike timing with precision in the range of several ms may be assured by biphasic signaling mechanisms operating at these different connections. Such temporal precision may be important in cognitive processing.     

End-of-Life Decisions and Moral Psychology: Killing, Letting Die, Intention and Foresight

In contemplating any life and death moral dilemma, one is often struck by the possible importance of two distinctions; the distinction between killing and “letting die”, and the distinction between an intentional killing and an action aimed at some other outcome that causes death as a foreseen but unintended “side-effect”. Many feel intuitively that these distinctions are morally significant, but attempts to explain why this might be so have been unconvincing. In this paper, I explore the problem from an explicitly consequentialist point of view. I first review and endorse the arguments that the distinctions cannot be drawn with perfect clarity, and that they do not have the kind of fundamental significance required to defend an absolute prohibition on killing. I go on to argue that the distinctions are nonetheless important. A complete consequentialist account of morality must include a consideration of our need and ability to construct and follow rules; our instincts about these rules; and the consequences (to the agent and to others) that might follow if the agent breaks a good general rule, particularly if this involves acting contrary to moral instinct. With this perspective, I suggest that the distinctions between killing and letting die and between intending and foreseeing do have moral relevance, especially for those involved in the care of the sick and dying.     

Faktoren,die die Samenbildung der Luzerne beeinflussen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Orchids,bilateral symmetry and insect perception

The basic characteristics of orchids, possessing the greatest number of complex floral images of any Angiosperm family, are reviewed. Bilateral symmetry (zygomorphy) is shown by use of information theory techniques to give much greater possibilities for the transmission of visually mediated information than radial symmetry. The difference in information content is further enhanced by motion. The analysis is offered as evidence that the evolution of diversity in complex images, if effected by the unique behavioral specificity of pollinators known as “flower constancy”, is most economically explained by hypothesizing recognition and storage of the total image (“gestalt”) in the agents of natural selection.     

On the perception of probable things: neural substrates of associative memory, imagery, and perception

Perception is influenced both by the immediate pattern of sensory inputs and by memories acquired through prior experiences with the world. Throughout much of its illustrious history, however, study of the cellular basis of perception has focused on neuronal structures and events that underlie the detection and discrimination of sensory stimuli. Relatively little attention has been paid to the means by which memories interact with incoming sensory signals. Building upon recent neurophysiological/behavioral studies of the cortical substrates of visual associative memory, I propose a specific functional process by which stored information about the world supplements sensory inputs to yield neuronal signals that can account for visual perceptual experience. This perspective represents a significant shift in the way we think about the cellular bases of perception.     

Music perception, pitch, and the auditory system

The perception of music depends on many culture-specific factors, but is also constrained by properties of the auditory system. This has been best characterized for those aspects of music that involve pitch. Pitch sequences are heard in terms of relative as well as absolute pitch. Pitch combinations give rise to emergent properties not present in the component notes. In this review we discuss the basic auditory mechanisms contributing to these and other perceptual effects in music.