In the CAVE: An Ethics Podcast

Imagine that you are a doctor with deeply held moral or religious beliefs that conflict with providing certain medical treatments. For example, perhaps you oppose physician-assisted dying, or you have religious objections to performing certain reproductive healthcare procedures. How should healthcare systems handle these situations where healthcare professionals want to conscientiously refuse to provide treatments that patients are legally entitled to receive? Should doctors be required to justify their refusals? Or should they be forced to perform procedures they may genuinely object to?   Join host Professor Paul Formosa and guest Dr Doug McConnell as they investigate the ethical issues that arise when we think about conscientious objection in a healthcare context. The podcast features the following paper: McConnell, D. (2024). Assessing Public Reason Approaches to Conscientious Objection in Healthcare. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180124000112

We've all seen the headlines: "20% of Americans believe the government is using COVID vaccines to microchip the population"; "12 million Americans think lizard people control their country."; or “9% of Australians believe that the government is covering up the fact that 5G mobile networks spread coronavirus”. These kinds of survey results about conspiracy theory beliefs often go viral on social media, painting a concerning picture about how many people believe in bizarre, unfounded and sometimes contradictory claims. But here's a crucial question we rarely ask: do all these people sincerely believe these conspiracy theories? Or might some of them be trolling, joking around, or just clicking buttons without much thought? While this is partly a methodological question about survey data, given the central role such results can play politically, it is important that we interrogate this issue here. Join host Professor Paul Formosa and guest Dr Robert Ross as they investigate whether people sincerely believe in conspiracy theories. Correction:  At about 12:18, Dr Ross says that 20% of participants selected “yes" when asked if they responded randomly or insincerely during the survey. This was a mistake. Dr Ross meant to say that 20% of participants selected “yes” or endorsed the warrior racoon conspiracy theory (or both). The podcast features a preprint paper written by Robert M. Ross, Kate Gleeson, Shaun Wilson, Luke Ashton, and Neil Levy, titled: “Do people sincerely believe conspiracy theories that they endorse? The paper is available here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/zsncr_v1

We often imaging novelists as solitary creatures, shut away in a room, labouring over their keyboards and relying on their imaginations for the words that fill the page. But even before the advent of AI, this image did not ring true for all novelists. Many had assistants to do research and check facts, and editors to massage the raw prose into the finished product. Usually these people would be acknowledged and their contributions made clear. The advent of large language models like Chat GTP complicates this understanding of the creative process. Does the use of AI undermine the creativity of the writer, and if so, how? Should an AI assistant be acknowledged in the same way as a human one?  Join host Distinguished Professor Wendy Rogers and guest Professor Paul Formosa as they investigate tricky questions about authorship and responsibility that arise when creative writers have assistance - human or AI - in their work. This podcast features a recently published paper by Paul, with Sarah Bankins, Rita Matulionyte and Omid Ghasemi: Can ChatGPT be an author? Generative AI creative writing assistance and perceptions of authorship, creatorship, responsibility, and disclosure, published open access in AI & Society https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02081-0

From the ventilator to the pulse oximeter to the surgical robot, medical care is mediated by sophisticated devices. It takes time to learn to use these devices safely. They require upkeep from skilled technicians. If something goes wrong, the consequences may be devastating for the patient. So how do Australian hospitals ensure that clinicians know how to use devices safely, when to update them, how they should be serviced and so on? Unbeknownst to many patients and the public, these services, and more, are performed by medical device representatives or MDRs. MDRs are employed by the companies that make equipment and devices to ensure that their products are used as safely and effectively as possible. But this is not the only role that MDRs have. They are also sales people, tasked by the companies they work for to sell products directly to the clinicians who use them. This dual role of support and sales raises many ethical questions about the range of activities of MDRs and their impact on patient care. Join host Distinguished Professor Wendy Rogers and guest Dr Brette Blakely as they investigate the ethical complexities that arise from the multiple roles played by medical device representatives in Australian Hospitals. This podcast features a paper in progress. The paper is one of the research outputs of the ARC Discovery project (DP200100883): Support or sales? Medical device representatives in Australian hospitals, led by Dr Jane Johnson at Macquarie University, and on which Wendy Rogers is also a CI.

Australia prides itself on being a secular, multi-cultural state. Section 116 of the Australian Constitution declares that:  The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth. In theory, the law protects all religions equally. But in a new book, Mareike Reidel argues that, despite the state’s supposed religious neutrality and the separation of state and church, the law fails to deliver equality for all religions. She traces the origins of this “Christian normativity” to the historical relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and the long-held ambivalence about the place and belonging of Jews and Judaism in Western societies. This work raises questions of identity, difference, and the law, and explores how religious difference is racialized.  Join host Distinguished Professor Wendy Rogers and guest Dr Mareike Riedel as they discuss the relationship between law, secularism, religion, and racialisation through the lens of the legal encounter with Jewish identity.    This podcast features Mareike’s forthcoming book, 'Law and Jewish Difference: Ambivalent Encounters', published with Cambridge University Press. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/law-and-jewish-difference/D8A29D2D741715B8EB4E5D77B77644D3)