15th Annual PhilFEST
15th PhilFEST on May 1st, 2024
PhilFEST is the highlight of our undergraduate community’s life in which honors students present their research in 15-20 minute presentations followed by a public Q&A. This year, an audience of almost 50 persons –faculty from inside and outside the department, students, and interested listeners at large—engaged with and vibrantly discussed our students’ fascinating series of presentations about their research results. The research projects presented were, in the order of appearance:
Christopher Yee: Can We Wrong Others With Our Beliefs About Them? (Supervisor: Prof Sandy Goldberg)
Basu and Schroeder (2018) argue that beliefs about others can constitute moral wrongs. So-called "doxastic wrongs" are directed, committed by belief, and wrong in virtue of what is believed. While paradigmatic examples of doxastic wronging seem intuitive, I present counterexamples that demand explanation. I argue that any explanation holds the locus of the wrong upstream from - and thus not in virtue of - belief. If this is true, the third condition for doxastic wronging is not satisfied. In Section III, I argue that control is required for beliefs to count as wrongs and that their response to the "extended problem of control" is insufficient. I am critical of Basu and Schroeder but I remain neutral vis a vis other versions of wronging belief. The upshot is that if we think beliefs can wrong, we should turn away from Basu and Schroeder's conception.
Camila Vicens: A Philosophical Critique of the US Malpractice Regime (Supervisor: Prof Chad Horne)
Medical malpractice law attempts to police physician conduct to the benefit of public and private spheres. It is grounded in concepts of professionalism, deterrence, corrective justice, care quality improvements, and cost reduction. The American malpractice system has been heavily addressed in economic, healthcare, policy, and legal literature, but the operation of the tort system in the United States has rarely been addressed philosophically. In response to this lack of scholarship, this paper will assess the efficacy of the malpractice system by adopting a consequentialist ethical approach. The paper ultimately finds that although well-intentioned, the system fails substantially in its ability to effectively achieve its theoretical underpinnings as it causes a series of external consequences that deter its performance. On the private physician-patient side, it fails as a method of corrective justice due to the mistreatment-malpractice gap and reduces care quality and professionalism through defensive medicine. Publicly, it poses massive costs to the healthcare “Intolerable Suffering and Physician-Assisted Death" The Canadian government recently delayed the rollout of a law allowing physician-assisted death in cases of psychiatric illness. Given a history of questionable cases of physician-assisted death, the proposed law has drawn criticism and concern. Many scholars have expressed worries that the new law will lead to patients acquiring physician-assisted death who should not be approved. Ultimately, these concerns boil down to one question: how should a physician ethically evaluate an application for physician-assisted death? The standard approach focuses primarily on ensuring that the patient’s autonomy is respected, with only a cursory mention of whether or not the patient’s suffering is intolerable. Bioethicists do not have a standard definition of intolerable suffering, and many leading theorists glaze over a definition of intolerability to focus primarily on respect for autonomy or questions of application. This is a critical error that prevents physicians from evaluating fringe cases such as psychiatric illness. After surveying the existing literature on physician-assisted death to identify this error, this thesis presents a theory of intolerable suffering derived from paradigmatic cases of physician-assisted death and Frederik Svenaeus’ theory of suffering. argue that intolerable suffering is present if and only if the patient’s autonomous decision-making is respected and three criteria are present: self-reflection, coherent narrative, and direness. When all three are present, the patient’s suffering can reasonably be understood to be intolerable, fulfilling that part of the physician-assisted death approval process. This thesis will further elucidate these criteria and apply them to cases of psychiatric illness. sector by way of defensive medicine and the encouragement of high insurance premiums, failing to deter and improve care quality as it places blame on individual physicians rather than institutions. Through a detailed analysis of these private and public externalities caused by the current iteration of the tort system in the United States, this paper aims to reveal the failures of the status quo and serve as a framework under which to assess future modifications or constructions of medical malpractice systems.
Sam Keimweiss: Intolerable Suffering and Physician Assisted Death (Supervisor: Prof Chad Horne)
The Canadian government recently delayed the rollout of a law allowing physician-assisted death in cases of psychiatric illness. Given a history of questionable cases of physician-assisted death, the proposed law has drawn criticism and concern. Many scholars have expressed worries that the new law will lead to patients acquiring physician-assisted death who should not be approved. Ultimately, these concerns boil down to one question: how should a physician ethically evaluate an application for physician-assisted death? The standard approach focuses primarily on ensuring that the patient’s autonomy is respected, with only a cursory mention of whether or not the patient’s suffering is intolerable. Bioethicists do not have a standard definition of intolerable suffering, and many leading theorists glaze over a definition of intolerability to focus primarily on respect for autonomy or questions of application. This is a critical error that prevents physicians from evaluating fringe cases such as psychiatric illness. After surveying the existing literature on physician-assisted death to identify this error, this thesis presents a theory of intolerable suffering derived from paradigmatic cases of physician-assisted death and Frederik Svenaeus’ theory of suffering. argue that intolerable suffering is present if and only if the patient’s autonomous decision-making is respected and three criteria are present: self-reflection, coherent narrative, and direness. When all three are present, the patient’s suffering can reasonably be understood to be intolerable, fulfilling that part of the physician-assisted death approval process. This thesis will further elucidate these criteria and apply them to cases of psychiatric illness.
Silas Staten-Lusty: Delirium and Defending Patients’ First-Person Perspectives (Supervisor: Prof Peter Van Elswyk)
Diagnoses are core to both medical practice and research. As a result, it is essential that the criteria we use for any particular diagnosis are precise and unambiguous. Currently, that is not the case for the ways in which we diagnose the condition known as Delirium. The consensus definition of Delirium, as published in the DSM-5, does not get at the core issues of the condition, and has far too much slack within its criteria. As result, there is a significant amount of harmful disagreement between medical professionals as to what exactly constitutes delirium. Given that the ambiguity of the DSM-5 definition is downstream of an incomplete scientific understanding of what it means to be human essentially, I propose that a new definition should be made from the ground up by using a theoretical framework from the field of human ontology. Specifically, I will use Lynne Rudder Baker’s human constitution to construct a more essential view of delirium, which will be able to give crucial direction to future delirium research and treatment.