Your Health vs. My Liberty: From Precautionary Principles to Duties to Be Watched and Randomized?
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Description
Nick Byrd, Dept. of Bioethics and Decision Sciences, Geisinger College of Health Sciences — Public health controversies are often oversimplified. A technocrat may treat resistance to expert recommendations as a communication problem. A psychologist may expect identifiable victims to motivate compliance. A philosopher may expect reflection to resolve disagreement. Our empirical research has complicated all three narratives. In pandemic experiments, philosophical disagreement predicted intended compliance more reliably than reflective reasoning or identifiable victims. In moral dilemma studies, reflective reasoning did not support one pattern of ethical decisions over others, but multiple non-overlapping patterns. So strategic communication and reflection may be necessary, but insufficient.
These findings also motivate a more pragmatic, systems-level approach: mitigating major health risks requires that we investigate how consequential health decisions are produced, identify the most promising opportunities to prevent avoidable harms, and run experiments at those decision points. The resulting harm-prevention opportunities (and perhaps the corresponding duties) may be distributed across a surprisingly broad range of people, practices, and institutions.
And frontier technologies are enabling unprecedented scale in experimentation and observation, making systemic pragmatism about health increasingly feasible. Of course, new forms of surveillance and artificial intelligence resurface familiar concerns about seeming tensions between health and liberty. In an age of rapid therapeutic development and ambient intelligence systems, we may not have to sacrifice as much convenience. But do we have to subject ourselves to even more pervasive randomization and observation?
Price
Free
Admission Information
Open to the public
External Sponsor
UNLV Dept. of Philosophy