Gamification is the use of elements and techniques from video game design in non-game contexts. Amid the rapid growth of this practice, normative questions have been under-explored. The primary goal of this article is to develop a normatively sophisticated and descriptively rich account for appropriately addressing major ethical considerations associated with gamification. The framework suggests that practitioners and designers should be precautious about, primarily, but not limited to, whether or not their use of gamification practices: takes unfair advantage of workers (...) ; infringes any involved workers’ or customers’ autonomy ; intentionally or unintentionally harms workers and other involved parties; or has a negative effect on the moral character of involved parties. (shrink)

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem (...) to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribution of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction. (shrink)

This dissertation is a collection of four studies which collectively explore a hypothesized construct of ‘moral evaluation of patient behaviors’ (MEPB) as a driver of health professionals’ readiness to interact humanistically with their patients. In these studies, ‘humanistic interactions’ refer to the non-technical, intangible skills and factors of clinical competence; the factors specifically explored in these studies were compassion toward patients, self-efficacy for treating patients, and optimism toward patient treatment. For the purpose of specificity, all factors were examined as they (...) pertained to patients with substance use disorders. Survey data from a convenience sample of 524 health professionals (i.e. physicians, nurses, and other health professionals) from three culturally distinct areas of the world (i.e. California (n = 173), urban France (n = 102), and urban China (n = 249)) were analyzed using analyses of variance, Welch’s t-tests, confirmatory factor analyses, and structural equation models. Results indicate: 1.) Psychometric support for the survey tool that was created for the assessment of the hypothesized construct of MEPB among health professionals, and information on differences on this hypothesized construct by age group, occupation, and country of residence; 2.) Indication that this survey tool operates differently among health professionals in different countries, which supports the notion that people from differing cultures have differing notions about morality. 3.) In the California sample, results indicate that while moral judgements of patients’ behavior carries mixed associations with factors of health professionals’ readiness to interact humanistically with these patients, moral judgements of the self (or, moral self-image) have only positive associations with factors of this readiness for humanistic interaction. This finding supports the notion that having a healthy self-concept strengthens one’s ability to support others. 4.) In all three countries, moral evaluations were positively associated with optimism toward treating patients, and in urban China, they were additionally positively associated with compassion and with self-efficacy. Given weak measurement invariance (i.e. differences in the operation of the measurement of moral evaluations by country), more research is needed in this area. The current research provides a tool for examining research of just this nature, and most importantly suggests that morality does not need to be eliminated from perspectives of mental illness or addiction, but rather that more nuanced moral perspectives are needed. Future research may explore distinctions between moral appraisals and stigma, and associations between moral evaluations (both among health professionals and among patients) and clinical/health outcomes such as rates of relapse and recovery. (shrink)

This chapter aims to distinguish between pathologies of agency in the strict sense and mere sources of impediments or distortion. Expanding on a recent notion of necessarily less-than-successful agency, it complements a mainstream approach to mental disorders and anomalous psychological conditions in the philosophy of mind and action. According this approach, the interest of such clinical case studies is heuristic, to differentiate between facets of agency that are functionally and conceptually separate even though they typically come together. Yet, in the (...) absence of independent criterion for a pathology of as opposed to inner obstacle to agency, this heuristic is at risk of becoming circular or uninformative, falling back on a clinical diagnosis it is meant to take as a starting point only. The chapter develops such a criterion and shows how it could work tracking agential achievement across two core dimensions of agency: planning and responsiveness to reasons. The discussion concludes with some implications on assessing decisional capacity and safeguarding agent autonomy in psychiatric settings. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophical concept of akrasia, also known as weakness of will, and demonstrates its relevance to clinical practice. In particular, it challenges an implicit notion of control over one’s actions that might impede recovery from substance misuse. Reflecting on three fictional case vignettes, we show how philosophical work on akrasia helps avoid this potentially harmful notion of control by supporting a holistic engagement with people for whom substance misuse is a problem. We argue that such engagement enhances (...) their prospects of recovery by focusing on agency over time, as opposed to individual lapses. (shrink)