Sean Aas

Brain–computer interfaces and disability: extending embodiment, reducing stigma?

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) now enable an individual without limb function to “move” a detached mechanical arm to perform simple actions, such as feeding herself. This technology may eventually offer almost everyone a way to move objects at a distance, by exercising cognitive control of a mechanical device. At that point, BCIs may be seen less as an assistive technology for disabled people, and more as a tool, like the internet, which can benefit all users. We will argue that BCIs will have a significant but uncertain impact on attitudes toward disabilities and on norms of bodily form and function. It may be liberating, oppressive, or both. Its impact, we argue, will depend – though not in any simple way – on whether BCIs come to be seen as parts of the body itself or as external tools.

BCIs and disability: enhancement, environmental modification, and embodiment

Abstract:This paper explores the ways that BCIs can modify the environment as well as the individual, blur the boundaries between them, and thereby affect the physical functioning and social inclusion of people with disabilities. We begin by outlining the traditional distinction between two kinds of technology that serve people with disabilities: assistive devices and universal design. We then examine a spectrum of BCI applications, from prosthetic attachments to public infrastructure, with the potential to vastly improve the functioning of both disabled and nondisabled people, and to diminish the importance and salience of physical impairments. We suggest that these applications will erode the distinction between assistive devices and universal design as they blur the lines between individual and environmental modifications. Our optimism is tempered by concern for the impact that BCI technology may have on our embodied connection to the physical world and on people with intellectual disabilities. We find...

Natural and Social Inequality

This paper examines the moral import of a distinction between natural and social inequalities. Following Thomas Nagel, it argues for a “denatured” distinction that relies less on the biological vs. social causation of inequalities than on the idea that society is morally responsible for some inequalities but not others. It maintains that securing fair equality of opportunity by eliminating such social inequalities has particularly high priority in distributive justice. Departing from Nagel, it argues that society can be responsible for inequalities not only when they are the unintended result of justifiable projects, but even when their alleviation would be very costly. Sharing Nagel’s general concept of ‘social inequality’, then, this paper proposes a far more expansive conception. We argue that many disadvantages due to disability fall under this conception. Eliminating or alleviating those disadvantages should be regarded as securing fair equality of opportunity, not improving the condition of the worst-off.

The ethics of sexual reorientation: what should clinicians and researchers do?

Technological measures meant to change sexual orientation are, we have argued elsewhere, deeply alarming, even and indeed especially if they are safe and effective. Here we point out that this in part because they produce a distinctive kind of ‘clinical collective action problem’, a sort of dilemma for individual clinicians and researchers: a treatment which evidently relieves the suffering of particular patients, but in the process contributes to a practice that substantially worsens the conditions that produce this suffering in the first place. We argue that the role obligations of clinicians to relieve the suffering of their patients put them in a poor position to solve this problem, though they can take measures to avoid complicity in the harms that would result from widespread use of individually safe and effective reorientation biotechnology. But in the end the medical community as a whole still seems obligated to provide these measures, if they become technologically feasible. Medical researchers are in a better position to prevent the harms that would result if reorientation techniques were safe, effective and widely available. We argue that the harms attendant on the development of safe and effective re-orientation techniques give researchers reason to avoid ‘applied‘ research aimed at developing these techniques, and to be careful in the conduct of basic orientation research which might be applied in this way.

Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights, edited by Diana Meyers Tietjens

conflict between rational egoism and universal benevolence, one’s own good versus the good of others). None of the other figures in this school worried about this conflict in anything like the way that Sidgwick did, in his famous lines about practical reason being reduced to a chaos. As Hurka shows at length, they were for the most part concerned, in one way or another, to deny the ground of any such dualism by dismissing the rational egoist alternative, a gambit that strikes many as very far from both consensus and common sense. Still, one can seek to undercut the dualism on more Sidgwickian or utilitarian terms. Indeed, that the more Sidgwickian approach to moral theory—with its hedonism, consequentialism, determinateness, and anxiety about the dualism—is as alive as ever is evident from Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s ambitious book, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics, a work marked by sharp critiques of Ross, Moore, et al. And yet such difficulties with Hurka’s larger theses do not much detract from the value of this book, which is immense. The penetrating discussions of such matters as Ross’s different formulations of his position on prima facie duties, of the Broad-Ewing defence of ‘fittingness’ as the fundamental thin moral concept, of the various arguments floated against hedonism, of the back-and-forth on what the fundamental notion or notions might be (‘ought’ or ‘good’ or both or something else), and so on and on are deft, scholarly, and wonderfully informative. Despite the concerns expressed above, Hurka is surely correct in thinking that there are vital moral philosophical issues at stake here, and that the works of these philosophers merit the attention even of those who lean in other directions, whether grandiosely or not.