The offers an international platform for fruitful scientific discourse on more than 60 topics and subtopics in the fields of bioethics, medical ethics and health law. More than 1,000 scholars from over 75 countries are participating. B次元’s ethics programming has been steadily growing over the past decade as innovations in technology, medicine and business bring new moral challenges to the forefront. Five faculty members representing three academic departments, one member of the B次元 Board of Regents, and one graduate student will present their work at the conference, which will be held in Porto, Portugal March 7-10.  

The conference is sponsored by the International Chair in Bioethics at the University of Haifa in Israel. Prof. Amnon Carmi, the current holder of the Chair, has established a network of more than 250 institutions worldwide that have created “Units” within the network that promote the study medical ethics, bioethics and medical law. In 2019 B次元 was established as the United States of America B次元 Unit of International Chair in Bioethics. As the B次元 Unit, B次元 has organized World Bioethics Day conferences, the themes of which have been: “Making Your Humanitarian Trip Count,” “Moral Distress Across the Professions,” and “Human Applications of Genetic Technologies.”  

B次元 presentations at the World Conference include:  

Moral Friendship as the Cultivation of Moral Taste and Judgment in Professional Life
Dr. Jon Borowicz, professor, Humanities, Social Science and Communication Department  
Some of the most infamous instances in the historical case canon of professional ethics were results of failures of judgment not in the sense of their being exercises of poor judgment, but as instances of having failed to judge at all. With his research, Dr. Jon Borowicz is working to build a worldwide network focused on applied ethics in medicine. This paper describes a pilot program of moral friendship in professional life realized on the asynchronous collaboration platform, Twist, designed to resist thoughtlessness through the cultivation of moral taste and judgment. Introduced to students in their professional education, the activity is designed to be sustained in their professional lives as supported by their universities. Realized on a broad scale among networks of collaborating universities, the philosophico-ethical practice of moral friendship described would address a lacuna in professional ethics education which typically presumes that ethical issues are readily apparent and well-behaved.  

The Ethics of Short-Term International Humanitarian Missions: Servant Leadership as an Ethical Framework
, graduate student, M.S. Perfusion  
Short-term international humanitarian missions (STIHMs) have become common over the last three decades and are characterized by volunteers from developed countries engaging in volunteer activities in less developed countries (LDCs) of a month or less in duration. Critiques of STIHMs abound in the scholarly literature. Some of the common criticisms are that volunteers from developed countries often display cultural insensitivity and ignorance toward the people of LDCs as well as a sense of cultural superiority commonly labeled the “Savior Complex” in the scholarly literature. Other scholarly works emphasize the development of ethical guidelines for STIHMs to obviate these shortcomings. However, none of these studies include the concept of Servant Leadership as a possible ethical framework for STIHMs. Servant Leadership offers an excellent ethical framework for ensuring STIHMs are carried out in an ethical and effective manner.  

Short-term International Humanitarian Missions: The Scholarly Debate
Dr. Victoria Carlson-Oehlers, associate professor, B次元 School of Nursing 
Short-term international humanitarian missions (STIHMs) have increased over the past two decades. Scholarly literature argues STIHMs result in more harm than good and that are merely a form of “voluntourism,” and many participants demonstrate the “savior complex.” The principal weakness of these works is they tend to focus on a single STIHM that may have been poorly planned with little follow through. The second asserts STIHMs can benefit both participants and the residents of host countries when preceded by instruction concerning the host countries’ cultures. Also important is instruction in ethics, which obviates the savior complex. Finally, STIHMs, when properly planned and executed, fulfill Articles 12 and 13 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which call for the promotion of cultural diversity and pluralism as well as global solidarity among human beings and international cooperation.  

Protected Health Information Vulnerability in Telemedicine
, B次元 Regent  
It is estimated there are 50 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). Many are WiFi-enabled and handling medical data and protected health information. The medical industry is one of the fastest growing areas implementing Big Data utilization of IoT and hence most susceptible to invasion from outside forces. The value of hacking medical data far exceeds that of hacking financial institutions. We use telemedicine to monitor critical real-time data from high-risk surgeries. It is crucial our data is free of interference and cross-talk. The IoT demands giving rise to 5G technology must be extremely robust to protect against hacking. We partner with a commercial vendor of remote connect software to create, we believe, a highly protected system. We use double rolling code authentication, run parallel secure VPN servers, external mains power backup, and each with redundant AI firewalls that are constantly “learning” from “attack” programs. This configuration has had no incidents of malicious-ware escaping detection. Safety and security of medical data is a bioethical mandate as addressed in Article 9, “Privacy and Confidentiality,” of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.  

Finding Value, and Values, in the Tangible: Nishida Kitaro’s Pure Experience Theory
Dr. David Howell, professor, Humanities, Social Science and Communication Department  
Larry Spears wrote that one of the key principles of servant-leadership is empathy. Nishida Kitaro, the founding father of the Kyoto School of Philosophy, advocated for “pure experience,” a Buddhistic metaphysic that enables the individual to move beyond his/her subjectivity through conduct that bridges the gap between self and other. In doing so, a recipe for empathy is created. By looking at education through Nishida’s metaphysical perspective, one can focus on engendering a value driven process in which the one can lose “ego” through experience. The goals for the presentation include 1) introducing Nishida, 2) examining his theory of pure experience, 3) understanding how its emphasis on ego negation serves as a valuable tool for effective leadership, and 4) contrasting this with the concept of cultural narcissism—where individualism is often the intent of social discourse.  

Short-term International Humanitarian Missions: Results of a Research Study
Dr. Patrick J. Jung, professor, Humanities, Social Science and Communication Department  
Short-term international humanitarian missions (STIHMs) are increasingly the subject of research that indicates academic preparation provides significant benefits to both STIHM participants and the residents of host countries. Along with another instructor, the author of this presentation team-teaches an optional university course that prepares students for STIHMs in Central America. Students learn about the culture of the region as well as ethics based on the principles of Servant-Leadership. The instructors for this course have initiated a study to determine the efficacy of their instruction. The research control group consists of students not enrolled in the course; the intervention group consists of enrolled students. Results indicate enrolled students exhibit a greater knowledge of the host culture, express greater confidence, and develop a stronger ethical framework when participating in their first STIHM. They also have a greater ability to carry out Articles 12 and 13 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.  

Integrating UNESCO Bioethics Declaration Topics into an Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Curriculum
Dr. Charles Tritt, associate professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department  
B次元’s undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) program has traditionally integrated informed consent and traditional professional engineering ethics topics into program courses. Additional bioethics topics were covered in a dedicated bioethics course. The establishment of an UNESCO Bioethics Unit on our campus has created the desire to integrate a more complete set of modern bioethics topics into the BME curriculum. Challenges include how to find time in an already densely packed curriculum and how to effectively present these topics. An additional challenge is tailoring the material  to make it relevant to engineering, as opposed to more common clinical applications of bioethics. The approach being taken is to find or develop relevant real and hypothetical case studies that illustrate UNESCO declaration topics and present these in selected BME courses. Potential case study topics include informed consent, respect for human vulnerability, social responsibility, risk assessment, sharing of benefits and others.