CIENCIASMEDICASNEWS: Enhancing the disadvantaged - new edition of the American Journal of Bioethics

domingo, 5 de junio de 2016

Enhancing the disadvantaged - new edition of the American Journal of Bioethics

Enhancing the disadvantaged

by Xavier Symons | 4 Jun 2016 |

A new edition of the American Journal of Bioethics explores a unique aspect of enhancement technologies – the possibility of remedying social disadvantage through cognitive enhancement.

Social disadvantage is taken by many to be structural and very difficult to remedy. The AJOB edition takes this as a given, and considers enhancement as an alternative strategy.

In a target article for the edition, University of Texas at Houston bioethicist Keisha Shantel Ray argues that the use of cognitive stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin is a morally acceptable way to improve the academic performance of disadvantaged children and, indirectly, remedy social inequality.

“What morally matters when we are disadvantaged through luck, or through no choice of our own, is how disadvantages affect access to resources and how we address these disadvantages. Stimulants could be one way to address these disadvantages by giving students the tools to function within their disadvantaged setting. Some may be unwilling to use stimulants for these purposes…however, I argue that we have to be willing to consider stimulants as an option because we are not correcting students’ disadvantages in other, more traditional ways.”

Ray acknowledges the common argument that enhancements are a kind of superficial solution for a deeper problem; but she believes a pragmatic approach may be necessary.

“Stimulants may be a better practical and just solution in our current unjust situation”.

Sebastian Sattler (a sociologist from the University of Cologne) and Ilina Singh (a neuroscientist from Oxford) are sceptical of Ray’s proposal, and note that there have been no clinical trials to test the enhancement potentials of prescription stimulants in healthy children. (Sattler also expressed his concerns in an AJOB blog post).

Anthropologists Fred B. Ketchum (University of Chicago) and Psychiatrist Dimitris Repantis (Charite – University Hospital Berlin) argue that Ray’s approach is a subtle way of medicalizing social disadvantage:

“We contend that Ray’s argument relies on an untenable distinction between “social” and “biological” pathologies. Social scientists and philosopher of medicine have long demonstrated that biological norms are not independent of social norms, but always intertwined with them.”

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/enhancing-the-disadvantaged/11900#sthash.DOIT3ubH.dpuf

Ali defeated Sonny Liston in 1964

The death of Muhammed Ali at the age of 74 is reminder of the uneasy ethical status of boxing. Only in boxing is the brain the target. Ali’s Parkinson’s disease was probably a result of punishing blows to the head over the course of his career. Gloves probably make the problem worse, as they increase the weight and the force of impact. Headgear may not protect boxers from rotational acceleration.

John Hardy, a neuroscientist at University College London, wrote a couple years ago: “nothing can be more killing of joy than personality changes, violence, substance abuse and dementia. I also think it is demeaning as a society for people to get pleasure out of watching others fight and that we should consign this public spectacle, as we have done public executions, to the dustbin of history.”

What do you think? Should professional boxing be banned? It seems hard to justify a sport which, in the words of Joe Frazier, who beat Ali in the brutal “fight of the century” in 1971, “boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.”