Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable results in recent decades, especially thanks to the refinement of an old and for a long time neglected technology called Deep Learning (DL), a class of machine learning algorithms. Some achievements of DL had a significant impact on public opinion thanks to important media coverage, like the cases of […]
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The Ethics Blog
A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
What should the healthcare team do when established treatments do not help the patient? Should one be allowed to test a so-called non-validated treatment on the patient, where efficacy and side effects have not yet been determined scientifically? Gert Helgesson comments on this problem in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. His comment concerns suggestions from authors […]
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Sometimes the intellectual claims on science are so big that they risk obscuring the actual research. This seems to happen not least when the claims are associated with some great prestigious question, such as the origin of life or the nature of consciousness. By emphasizing the big question, one often wants to show that modern […]
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What exactly is fact resistance? It is often defined as a tendency not to be influenced by facts that contradict our own beliefs. Or as a tendency to hold beliefs even though there is no evidence for them. To make fact resistance more humanly comprehensible, I would like to draw attention to a common way […]
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When we talk about patient integrity, we often talk about the patients’ medical records and the handling of their personal data. But patient integrity is not just about how information about patients is handled, but also about how the patients themselves are treated. For example, can they tell about their problems without everyone in the […]
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Two of our doctoral students at CRB recently successfully defended their dissertations. Both dissertations reflect a trend in bioethics from purely theoretical studies to also include empirical studies of people’s perceptions of bioethical issues. Åsa Grauman’s dissertation explores the public’s view of risk information about cardiovascular disease. The risk of cardiovascular disease depends on many […]
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How do we take responsibility for a technology that is used almost everywhere? As we develop more and more uses of artificial intelligence (AI), the challenges grow to get an overview of how this technology can affect people and human rights. Although AI legislation is already being developed in several areas, Rowena Rodrigues argues that […]
Continue readingSo-called psychosurgery, in which psychiatric disorders are treated by neurosurgery, for example, by cutting connections in the brain, may have a somewhat tarnished reputation after the insensitive use of lobotomy in the 20th century to treat anxiety and depression. Nevertheless, neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders can help some patients and the area develops rapidly. The field […]
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When the coronavirus began to spread outside China a year ago, the Director General of the World Health Organization said that we are not only fighting an epidemic, but also an infodemic. The term refers to the rapid spread of often false or questionable information. While governments fight the pandemic through lockdowns, social media platforms […]
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We are more often than we think governed by old patterns of thought. As a philosopher, I find it fascinating to see how mental patterns capture us, how we get imprisoned in them, and how we can get out of them. With that in mind, I recently read a book chapter on something that is […]
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Welcome to the Ethics Blog!
This blog is published by the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University.
Supported by the Human Brain Project, Neuroethics and Philosophy.
Meet the editor
Pär Segerdahl is the editor of the Ethics Blog and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
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