Faculty Bibliography

Obviously, health-care workers have the duty, proclaimed in their own professional associations' ethical codes, to put patient interest and safety first and get vaccinated. There is also, clearly, an unarguable foundation for insisting that all health-care workers who have regular patient contact get vaccinated as a job requirement. However, when hospitals and health departments have proposed vaccination mandates for health-care workers, they have almost invariably been met with lawsuits demanding the right to choose. Here, Caplan discusses why legal actions against mandates should be stopped

Others want to cite natural law or religious tradition to support claims of human dignity, yet the invocation of a long intellectual tradition is not an argument but only a sociological case study. Even the Christian notion of dignity that invokes both humanity's likeness to God in the grand scheme of things or praising human creations such as art, medicine, science, and philosophy can be secularised a bit so that it is simply the products of a conscious and socially cooperative, reflective creature that are infused with dignity due to their purposefulness and utility

There is increasing pressure for neuroscientists to communicate their research and the societal implications of their findings to the public. Communicating science is challenging, and the transformation of communication by digital and interactive media increases the complexity of the challenge. To facilitate dialogue with the public in this new media landscape, we suggest three courses of action for the neuroscience community: a cultural shift that explicitly recognizes and rewards public outreach, the identification and development of neuroscience communication experts, and ongoing empirical research on the public communication of neuroscience.