More benefit or harm? Moral contextualism shapes public attitudes towards social egg freezing

Moral Contextualism and Moral Relativism

Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. Howeve...

Public Attitudes Towards Moral Enhancement. Evidence that Means Matter Morally

To gain insight into the reasons that the public may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological moral enhancement for themselves or for others, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards these issues. Participants (N = 293) from the United States were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one of several contrastive vignettes in which a 1...

Social egg freezing: a reproductive chance or smoke and mirrors?

Autologous human oocyte cryopreservation allows storing woman’s eggs to be used later by the same donor when therapeutic or elective reasons induce women to postpone motherhood. In the case of non-medical motivation, this practice is termed social freezing. By shifting the awareness from a medical procedure to social relations, frozen oocytes are becoming polemic bio-objects, which pose new que...

Attitudes Towards Harm Reduction Programs

The current study aimed to investigate reasons for supporting harm reduction approaches to treating drug addiction. The study used Brickman et al.'s (1982) models of helping as a framework to determine the relationship between where a participant attributed the responsibility for the problem and solution to drug addiction and support for particular approaches to treating drug addiction. It was ...

The Liverpool Care Pathway: benefit or harm?