Aims In the recent neuroscientific research addiction has been defined as a brain disease in which the addict's brain is “hijacked”. The research indicates how the addictive cravings function in the brain's reward system. At the same time growing support has emerged to a view of addiction as a matter of choice. This viewpoint claims that those with addiction lack either willpower or the moral capacity to make the right decisions. In this article, we problematise these two models and argue that neither of them succeeds in providing successful and adequate means of tackling personal problems associated with agency and responsibility in relation to addiction. Methods The article uses means of social ethics and empirically informed analytical philosophy. Results After showing that the two prominent models are not sufficient in capturing the problematique of addictive behaviour, we propose a new approach called the affective choice model. Conclusions As the disease model and the choice model fall short, we illustrate why the affective choice model is more capable of capturing the problematique of addicts' agency than the existing models are.
The European Union's policies regarding genetically modified food (GMF hereafter) are based on the precautionary principle and the requirement of respecting consumers' autonomy. We ask whether the requirement of respecting consumers' autonomy regarding GMF implies that both GMF and non-GMF
How to classify the human condition? This is one of the main problems psychiatry has struggled with since the first diagnostic systems. The furore over the recent editions of the diagnostic systems DSM-5 and ICD-11 has evidenced it to still pose a wicked problem. Recent advances in techniques and methods of artificial intelligence and computing power which allows for the analysis of large data sets have been proposed as a possible solution for this and other problems in classification, diagnosing, and treating mental disorders. However, mental disorders contain some specific inherent features, which require critical consideration and analysis. The promises of AI for mental disorders are threatened by the unmeasurable aspects of mental disorders, and for this reason the use of AI may lead to ethically and practically undesirable consequences in its effective processing. We consider such novel and unique questions AI presents for mental health disorders in detail and evaluate potential novel, AI-specific, ethical implications.
Medical scientists have expressed scepticism about whether philosophy is relevant to medicine. We challenged this in a conference on the topic of "too much medicine" (TMM) held in Oxford in April 2017. The topic of TMM provided an opportunity to bring the two disciplines together because of its history both in philosophy and in medicine. We found that the collaboration between the two disciplines was fruitful when two conditions were met. First, both disciplines had to avoid discipline-specific jargon. Second, each discipline had to engage with the other. Specifically, medical scientists had to engage with some philosophical literature, and philosophers had to "get their hands dirty with data." In this conference report, we provide an overview of our discussions and summarize the other papers in the series.
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