The neuroscience of ethics is allegedly having a double impact. First, it is transforming the view of human morality through the discovery of the neurobiological underpinnings that influence moral behavior. Second, some neuroscientific findings are radically challenging traditional views on normative ethics. Both claims have some truth but are also overstated. In this article, the author shows that they can be understood together, although with different caveats, under the label of “neurofoundationalism.” Whereas the neuroscientific picture of human morality is undoubtedly valuable if we avoid neuroessentialistic portraits, the empirical disruption of normative ethics seems less plausible. The neuroscience of morality, however, is providing relevant evidence that any empirically informed ethical theory needs to critically consider. Although neuroethics is not going to bridge the is–ought divide, it may establish certain facts that require us to rethink the way we achieve our ethical aspirations.

Governmental reactions to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as ethics communication. Governments can contain the disease and thereby mitigate the detrimental public health impact; allow the virus to spread to reach herd immunity; test, track, isolate, and treat; and suppress the disease regionally. An observation of Sweden and Finland showed a difference in feasible ways to communicate the chosen policy to the citizenry. Sweden assumed the herd immunity strategy and backed it up with health utilitarian arguments. This was easy to communicate to the Swedish people, who appreciated the voluntary restrictions approach and trusted their decision makers. Finland chose the contain and mitigate strategy and was towards the end of the observation period apparently hesitating between suppression and the test, track, isolate, and treat approach. Both are difficult to communicate to the general public accurately, truthfully, and acceptably. Apart from health utilitarian argumentation, something like the republican political philosophy or selective truth telling are needed. The application of republicanism to the issue, however, is problematic, and hiding the truth seems to go against the basic tenets of liberal democracy.

This paper focuses on an emergency basic income (EBI) as a tool for avoiding financial insecurity during the time of pandemic. The authors argue that paying each resident a monthly cash amount for the duration of the crisis would serve to protect them from the economic fallout.They suggest three reasons why the EBI proposal is particularly well-suited to play an important role in a comprehensive public health response to COVID-19: it offers an immediate and agile response; it prioritizes the most vulnerable in the affected population; and it promotes a solidaristic response to the pandemic crisis. To go beyond the need to shut down and restart an EBI assistance scheme each time a pandemic hits, the authors propose considering turning the program into a permanent feature.

While the world rushed to develop treatments for COVID-19, some turned hopefully to drug repurposing (drug repositioning). However, little study has addressed issues of drug repurposing in emergency situations from a broader perspective, taking into account the social and ethical ramifications. When drug repurposing is employed in emergency situations, the fairness of resource distribution becomes an issue that requires careful ethical consideration.This paper examines the drug repurposing in emergency situations focusing on the fairness using Japanese cases. Ethical issues under these circumstances addressed by the authors include: maintaining the evidence level, integrity of clinical research ethics, and voluntary consent by original indication patients. In order to address these issues, they argue that rapid accumulation of ethically and scientifically valid evidence is required, as is obtaining information on resource quantity.

Disorders of consciousness (DOC) continue to profoundly challenge both families and medical professionals. Once a brain-injured patient has been stabilized, questions turn to the prospect of recovery. However, what “recovery” means in the context of patients with prolonged DOC is not always clear. Failure to recognize potential differences of interpretation—and the assumptions about the relationship between health and well-being that underlie these differences—can inhibit communication between surrogate decisionmakers and a patient’s clinical team, and make it difficult to establish the goals of care. The authors examine the relationship between health and well-being as it pertains to patients with prolonged DOC. They argue that changes in awareness or other function should not be equated to changes in well-being, in the absence of a clear understanding of the constituents of well-being for that particular patient. The authors further maintain that a comprehensive conception of recovery for patients with prolonged DOC should incorporate aspects of both experienced well-being and evaluative well-being.

What exactly is it that makes one morally responsible? Is it a set of facts which can be objectively discerned, or is it something more subjective, a reaction to the agent or context-sensitive interaction? This debate gets raised anew when we encounter newfound examples of potentially marginal agency. Accordingly, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the idea of “novel beings” represent exciting opportunities to revisit inquiries into the nature of moral responsibility. This paper expands upon my article “Artificial Moral Responsibility: How We Can and Cannot Hold Machines Responsible” and clarifies my reliance upon two competing views of responsibility. Although AI and novel beings are not close enough to us in kind to be considered candidates for the same sorts of responsibility we ascribe to our fellow human beings, contemporary theories show us the priority and adaptability of our moral attitudes and practices. This allows us to take seriously the social ontology of relationships that tie us together. In other words, moral responsibility is to be found primarily in the natural moral community, even if we admit that those communities now contain artificial agents.

We all now know that the novel coronavirus is anything but a common cold. The pandemic has created many new obligations for all of us, several of which come with serious costs to our quality of life. But in some cases, the guidance and the law are open to a degree of interpretation, leaving us to decide what is the ethical (or unethical but desired) course of action. Because of the high cost of some of the obligations, a conflict of interest can arise between what we want to do and what it is right to do. And so, some people choose to respect only the letter of the law, but not the spirit, or not to respect even the spirit of the guidelines. This paper identifies and describes the new obligations imposed on us all by the pandemic, considers their costs in terms of the good life, and provides an ethical analysis of two personal and two public cases in terms of the letter and spirit of the guidance and legislation.

Several digital contact tracing smartphone applications have been developed worldwide in the effort to combat COVID-19 that warn users of potential exposure to infectious patients and generate big data that helps in early identification of hotspots, complementing the manual tracing operations. In most democracies, concerns over a breach in data privacy have resulted in severe opposition toward their mandatory adoption. This paper examines India as a noticeable exception, where the compulsory installation of such a government-backed application, the “Aarogya Setu” has been deemed mandatory in certain situations. We argue that the mandatory app requirement constitutes a legitimate public health intervention during a public health emergency.

The world awaits a SARS-CoV-2 virus (i.e., COVID-19 disease) vaccine to keep the populace healthy, fully reopen their economies, and return their social and healthcare systems to “normal.” Vaccine safety and efficacy requires meticulous testing and oversight; this paper describes how despite grandiose public statements, the current vaccine development, testing, and production methods may prove to be ethically dubious, medically dangerous, and socially volatile. The basic moral concern is the potential danger to the health of human test subjects and, eventually, many vaccine recipients. This is further complicated by economic and political pressures to reduce government oversight on rushed vaccine testing and production, nationalistic distribution goals, and failure to plan for the widespread immunization needed to produce global herd immunity. As this paper asserts, the public must be better informed to assess promises about the novel vaccines being produced and to tolerate delays and uncertainty.

There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings such as nonhuman animals whom we also consider to be psychological moral patients.

Implanted medical devices—for example, cardiac defibrillators, deep brain stimulators, and insulin pumps—offer users the possibility of regaining some control over an increasingly unruly body, the opportunity to become part “cyborg” in service of addressing pressing health needs. We recognize the value and effectiveness of such devices, but call attention to what may be less clear to potential users—that their vulnerabilities may not entirely disappear but instead shift. We explore the kinds of shifting vulnerabilities experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) who receive therapeutic deep brain stimulators to help control their tremors and other symptoms of PD.

Ethical issues raised by the outbreak of COVID-19 have predominantly been addressed through a public health ethics lens. This article proposes that the rising COVID-19 fatalities and the World Health Organization’s failure to include palliative care as part of its guidance on how to maintain essential health services during the pandemic have exposed palliative care as an underlying global crisis. It therefore calls for a different ethical framework that includes a care ethics perspective and thereby addresses the ways in which the pandemic has triggered new difficulties in ensuring the delivery of appropriate end-of-life care for the dying. The article analyses the structural weaknesses of palliative care accentuated by the pandemic and proposes solutions that could set in motion lasting changes in the way it is delivered beyond COVID-19.

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone’s personal ventilator is a direct assault on their bodily and social integrity. They conclude that personal ventilators should not be part of reallocation pools and that triage protocols should be immediately clarified to explicitly state that personal ventilators will be protected in all cases.

Responses to brain injury sit in the intersection between neuroscience and an ethic of care, and require sensitive and dynamic indicators of how an individual with brain injury can learn how to live in the context of a changing environment and multiple timescales. Therapeutic relationships and rhythms underpinning such a dynamic approach are currently obscured by existing models of brain function. Something older is required and we put forward narrative types articulating outcomes of brain injury over various periods and starting points in time. Such storytelling challenges a static neuropsychological paradigm and moves from an ethics that focuses on patient autonomy into one that is reflective of the cognitive supports and therapeutic relationships that underpin ways that the patient can re-find the beat that proves the music is not over.

This paper addresses a dichotomy in the attitudes of some clinicians and bioethicists regarding whether there is a moral difference between deactivating a cardiac pacemaker in a highly dependent patient at the end of life, as opposed to standard cases of withdrawal of treatment. Although many clinicians hold that there is a difference, some bioethicists maintain that the two sorts of cases are morally equivalent. The author explores one potential morally significant point of difference between pacemakers and certain other life-sustaining treatments: specifically, that the former are biofixtures, which become part of the patient in a way that the latter do not. The concept of the pacemaker as biofixture grants pacemakers a unique moral status that gives reason to treat a pacemaker the same as other parts of the patient that are necessary to sustain life. The author employs this biofixture analysis to affirm the intuition that deactivating a pacemaker in a highly dependent patient at the end of life is, in moral terms, more analogous to active euthanasia than it is to standard cases of withdrawal of treatment. The paper concludes with consideration of potential implications for further implantable medical technologies, such as ventricular assist devices and total artificial hearts.

Embodiment is typically given insufficient weight in debates concerning the moral status of Novel Synthetic Beings (NSBs) such as sentient or sapient Artificial Intelligences (AIs). Discussion usually turns on whether AIs are conscious or self-aware, but this does not exhaust what is morally relevant. Since moral agency encompasses what a being wants to do, the means by which it enacts choices in the world is a feature of such agency. In determining the moral status of NSBs and our obligations to them, therefore, we must consider how their corporeality shapes their options, preferences, values, and is constitutive of their moral universe. Analysing AI embodiment and the coupling between cognition and world, the paper shows why determination of moral status is only sensible in terms of the whole being, rather than mental sophistication alone, and why failure to do this leads to an impoverished account of our obligations to such NSBs.

This article explores how the law of England and Wales1 has responded thus far to medical and clinical advances that have enabled patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness to survive. The authors argue that, although the courts have taken account of much of the science, they are now lagging behind, with the result that some patients are being denied their legal rights under the Mental Capacity Act 2005. The article further argues that English law does not comply with the United Kingdom’s commitments under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Stressing the need for the law to keep in step with advances in science, the article concludes with robust recommendations for improvements, based on the latest research in neuroscience, to the way in which life-sustaining treatment decisions are made. This would mean that the wishes of patients, including those with covert awareness, can be better reflected in best interests assessments.

Naloxone, which reverses the effects of opioids, was synthesized in 1960, though the hunt for opioid antagonists began a half-century earlier. The history of this quest reveals how cultural and medical attitudes toward opioids have been marked by a polarization of discourse that belies a keen ambivalence. From 1915 to 1960, researchers were stymied in seeking a “pure” antidote to opioids, discovering instead numerous opioid molecules of mixed or paradoxical properties. At the same time, the quest for a dominant explanatory and therapeutic model for addiction was likewise unsettled. After naloxone’s discovery, new dichotomizing language arose in the “War on Drugs,” in increasingly divergent views between addiction medicine and palliative care, and in public debates about layperson naloxone access. Naloxone, one of the emblematic drugs of our time, highlights the ambivalence latent in public and biomedical discussions of opioids as agents of risk and relief.