The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged both medicine and governments as they have strived to confront the pandemic and its consequences. One major challenge is that evidence-based medicine has struggled to provide timely and necessary evidence to guide medical practice and public policy formulation. We propose an extension of evidence-based corona medicine to an organismic systems corona medicine as a multilevel conceptual framework to develop a robust concept-oriented medical system. The proposed organismic systems corona medicine could help to prevent or mitigate (...) future pandemics by transitioning to a bifocal medicine that extends an empirical evidence-based medicine to a theory-oriented organismic systems medicine. (shrink)

It is common nowadays for laypeople to take public stances on complex issues, such as the effectiveness of a vaccine or the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, without any kind of disciplinary expertise. Yet those who do so act as if they were experts in the field, disseminating their thoughts and sometimes also spreading their advice. Scholars have ascribed this phenomenon to various kinds of individuals, such as conspiracy or contrarian thinkers, science denialists, know-it-all experts and celebrities. This paper aims (...) to argue that behind such different manifestations lies a common, independently identifiable epistemic disposition that will be called epistemic hubris that will be fully explained in relation to other epistemic vices already discussed in the literature. Epistemic hubris includes, but is not limited to, overconfidence; it may or not entail arrogance; it is similar to yet distinct from hyper-autonomy and conspiracy thinking. Its peculiarity is that individuals who develop it seem to believe that they can easily become experts, even without special training. This disposition negatively affects individuals’ epistemic conduct, hindering knowledge and true belief formation, and can generate morally relevant consequences when people who falsely consider themselves experts begin to share their mistaken beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to provide an adequate normative analysis of the phenomenon of Covid-19 vaccine refusal. We argue that all vaccine-refusers make a moral mistake on the double grounds that the act of refusing to get vaccinated is a free-riding action and a negligent one. We then introduce four archetypes of vaccine refusers in order to further explore under what conditions this moral mistake makes one blameworthy. We maintain that there are both epistemic and motivational considerations that make (...) a difference to one’s blameworthiness for their vaccine refusal and offer some preliminary claims about which epistemic errors and which motivational errors can, in fact, ground blameworthiness. We conclude the paper with some remarks on the complicated connection between blameworthiness and blame, and on why we think the aim of normative analysis should not be to dole out blame. (shrink)