Personal Transformation and Advance Directives: An Experimental Bioethics Approach

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This article refers to:

Cognitive Transformation, Dementia, and the Moral Weight of Advance Directives

Notes

1 This approach may also help us understand why certain examples used to support a philosophical account such as Walsh’s feel “intuitive” (or otherwise).

2 There are important theoretical questions about the meaning and philosophical significance of ordinary people’s judgments about the “different person” relation—for example, do they concern a break in numerical identity or qualitative similarity (see, e.g., Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018)? Plausibly, same/different person judgments are context-sensitive and depend, among other things, on the purpose(s) for which they are being elicited.

3 Participants for all studies were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Sample sizes reported in this paper are the final n after excluding participants who failed one or more of three embedded attention checks.

4 How might this finding be explained? We know that participants prefer “treat” over “withhold” ADs. Perhaps in their reluctance to see treatment withheld from a patient who could easily be cured—especially if the patient has undergone a positive transformation—they find themselves inclined to judge that the patient and the person who signed the “withhold” AD are, after all, different people.