Asian Bioethics Review最新文献

This paper employs a critical lens rooted in neoliberalism to scrutinize the stark dichotomy surrounding the female reproductive organ, ‘womb’. On the one hand, it is commodified for commercial purposes through surrogacy, while on the other hand, procedures like ‘hysterectomy’ are promoted as solutions to complications arising from menstruation or unwanted pregnancies, often interfering with women’s demanding lives as labourers to enhance productivity. Utilizing a case study approach, this research delves into the experiences of migrant workers hailing from Beed district in Maharashtra and the underlying cases leading to surrogacy reforms aiming to protect the vulnerable groups highlighting the gaps in the present Surrogacy Regulation Act 2021 (SRA), Surrogacy (Regulation) Rules, 2022 and recent amendments which have failed to do justice to all stakeholders. Further, the study aims to uncover the challenges, gender dynamics, and socio-economic disparities that contribute to the marginalization and segregation faced by women from underprivileged background. Residing amidst economic deprivation, the lives of poor working women are characterized by precariousness and exploitative circumstances often silencing or misleading them into oppressive systems jeopardising their mental, physical, and reproductive health. These harsh realities prompt crucial inquiries into reproductive justice, shedding light on how feminist perspectives in neoliberal states have failed to address reproductive injustices. In particular, the study advocates the need for a more nuanced understanding of the intersectionality of gender, economic disparity, and education in shaping the lived experiences of these vulnerable populations.

In the era of rapid information exchange, engineers and computer scientists are not merely creators of technology but vital players in the shaping of public discourse, including in the context of serious health threats like the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the dis/misinformation surrounding public health risks, this work will dissect the mechanisms that enable disinformation and explore how design decisions, algorithmic biases, and lack of regulation contribute to the spread of false information. Design decisions that include simplified sharing mechanisms, limited word counts, and basing the platforms in the sharing of emotional stories drive confirmation biases and discourage fact-checking. Users are further trapped by their past behaviors in algorithm-based echo chambers that repeat false information. These effects are solidified by failed regulation attempts and backfire effects, as well as barriers to regulation from organizations. Thus, the built infrastructure and embedded algorithms of these digital platforms create breeding grounds for disinformation. By indirectly governing social listening, engineers and computer scientists can actively influence the distribution and credibility of information, thus impacting public trust and health decisions. This work will further analyze the professional, ethical, and human rights responsibilities of the engineering profession as architects of social media and other digital platforms. In Ontario, Canada, the engineering profession’s specific responsibilities include statutory duties to serve the public interest, ethical obligations that are both statutory and normative, and compliance with laws related to privacy, human rights, and communication. This work contends that as a player in infodemics, engineering ethics education must shift away from a rules-based approach to instead prioritize social responsibility and foster engagement with societal and political dimensions of technology and its consequences.

Infodemics have emerged as a serious contemporary challenge to public health, especially in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This paper conducts a narrative thematic analysis exploring the South Korean response to the public health risks caused by misinformation, critically examining the legal, social, and ethical dimensions of dealing with the difficulties posed by health misinformation, identifying the following key themes: limitations posed by existing law in South Korea, government policies as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, self-regulation in the private sector and mitigation of the social impacts of COVID-19 misinformation. The paper offers a thematic exploration of South Korea’s integrated policy response to health misinformation within the context of the global COVID-19 infodemic and highlights the South Korean effort to balance the protection of public health and welfare with citizen’s individual rights to freedom of expression and the necessity of flexibility and adaptive policies to effectively counter COVID-19 misinformation. It observes the importance of effective public health communication and provides insight useful for dealing with potential future challenges arising from the proliferation of health misinformation and mitigating the adverse impacts of infodemics on public health initiatives, using the example of South Korea.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently initiated “social listening”. The first section of this paper investigates conceptual aspects of social listening. It demonstrates that the WHO’s descriptions of social listening are vague and inconsistent. Notwithstanding this, possibly, the WHO-envisaged social listening is constituted by three core components: (i) listening and monitoring, (ii) understanding, and (iii) engaging and nudging. It follows that there is an inherent relatedness between WHO-envisaged social listening and other “social-listening” activities. It follows that to investigate issues of or related to social listening, the inquiry should be broadened to general practices of “social listening”, and experiences related to these must be considered. In the second section, this paper finds several issues with or related to social listening, including bad faith uses, the difficulty of identifying misinformation and punishing it, the echo chambers problem, issues concerning nudging, concerns about policy preset position, concerns for the management and prioritization of resources, and concerns about overlapping between social listening activities. Thus, social listening should be subject to certain rules. In the third section, this paper argues that social listening should be subject to the precautionary principle. Doan, Nie, and Fenton projected that the central teleology, the purpose, and the modus operandi of the precautionary principle could be identified in various policy and legal instruments and propositions, accordingly, the precautionary principle entails, inter alia, proactive preparation for public health matters, specifically emergencies, and assessment, e.g. risk–benefit analysis, taking into account uncertainty and past experiences. They showed the normative validity and necessity of applying the precautionary principle in its “moderate versions” to public health matters. It follows from this and the rationale underlying and the range of rules of the precautionary principle that the precautionary principle can offer some insights, solutions, and mechanisms to remedy issues posed by or related to social listening.

This article introduces digital influence literacy, arguing for its inclusion in programs devoted to lessening the spread of health misinformation online. Influence literacy can be roughly understood as the capacity to recognise, analyse, navigate, and emotionally regulate feeling as it is generated, circulated and monetized over digital platforms, alternately experienced by social media users as mood, movement, sentiment, or environmental vibe. Combining insights from communications, social and behavioural psychology, digital design, and trauma studies, influence literacy can be used to better understand events like #FilmYourHospital, where a single rumour on Twitter wound up feeding into a global conspiracy. It can also be used to better appreciate how trends, memes, challenges, and calls for justice move from online spaces to offline ones. After arguing that traditional media literacy’s assumptions about the value of emotional communication require substantial re-thinking in the age of platforms, this article lays the groundwork for topics that might be included in discussions on influence, moving from psycho-social theories of feeling to techno-social operations like emotion recognition, sentiment mining, persuasive computing and emotion optimization on platforms. To assist those looking to add influence literacy to classrooms, a teaching framework called the Influence Ecosphere is offered, with discussion topics suggested to help supplement media literacy’s traditional focus on rights with a feeling-based ethics of care.

The COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most critical health crises in recent history, resulted in nearly 7 million deaths worldwide. The ensuing infodemic, characterized by the proliferation of information about the virus and vaccines, persisted beyond the cessation of the international public health emergency. In Brazil, this infodemic had collateral effects, including increase and structuring of anti-vaccine groups, reduced overall vaccine coverage, and a crisis of public trust, exacerbated by government dissemination of disinformation through official channels. This paper examines the interplay between government authorities and disinformation in Brazil, identifying key pitfalls and actors instrumental in maintaining public trust. Given that trustworthy sources of information are foundational to effective infodemic management, the collaboration of medical scientific societies, government entities, and national and international agencies is essential for a robust response. Necessary investments include (1) implementing epidemiological surveillance through social listening; (2) establishing a transparent, efficient, and agile communication strategy from public health authorities; and (3) enforcing stringent regulations and accountability measures for online disinformation.

Singapore is conducting its first controlled human infection (CHI) study, and is administering SARS-CoV-2 as the challenge agent. Ahead of this study, we conducted a survey to assess public perceptions in Singapore of CHI studies in general and with SARS-CoV-2, and the ethical issues they raise, including those around payments to research participants. Overall, there was large support for challenge studies in Singapore, suggesting they could obtain a social license. However, a minority strongly disagreed, and most respondents reported limited pre-survey knowledge about CHI studies. Importantly, Singaporeans support a higher incentive model of payment than is usually employed in challenge study research. They support either a Market Model or a Payment for Risk Model. There was most support for paying participants the highest rate offered—in our study, it was $SGD30 per hour. These results were broadly in line with a similar study in the UK, despite the latter having notably lower reported levels of public trust and, most recently, a highly criticized response to COVID-19. As such, general support for CHI studies may not be a direct function of background confidence in public or biomedical institutions but reflect other factors such as their intrinsic value and importance. More direct cross-cultural research in different contexts concerning attitudes towards CHI studies could help shed light on the extent that localized factors such as culture, history, and infrastructure affect both their acceptability and attitudes towards participant payment.

The WHO has recently been advocating for a more inclusive approach within healthcare systems, urging the integration of traditional medicines with biomedicine. Which traditions are perceived as authentic, authoritative or legitimate is as much a political question as it is a conceptual or scientific one. This paper will pose the question: is integration in fact desirable? Proponents may argue that integration will produce a number of benefits: more efficient use of healthcare resources, greater range of patient choice, and respect for the intellectual contributions of traditional medicines. Yet, I will argue that given the deep ontological divides across traditions, traditional medical practices are often incommensurable with biomedical paradigms, meaning integration is ultimately infeasible. Furthermore, to the extent that integration is pursued, it is likely to replicate colonial attitudes toward indigenous practices and repeat rather than remedy the very forms of epistemic injustice it would claim to avoid.

I offer a positive argument in defense of the moral permissibility of abortion that relies on the moral concept of self-defense. I argue that given the lack of proportional self-defense options in pregnancy, a pregnant woman is morally permitted to procure a self-defensive abortion so long as the risks/burdens of her pregnancy and childbirth reach a sufficiently high threshold of seriousness. I then argue that even standard pregnancies reach this threshold, because of the expected physical and nonphysical risks/burdens imposed. Finally, I consider three objections—an objection based on the risks/burdens of abortion, an objection based on the fetus’s status as an innocent aggressor, and an objection based on the pregnant woman’s moral responsibility for the creation of the fetus.