A major goal of improving public health is to identify when status quo social interactions seriously undermine physical and mental health. For example, in the past forty years, major progress was achieved by identifying family interactions that seriously harmed children, which are now considered child abuse and neglect. We believe that the time has come to spotlight extra-familial forms of socio-emotional interaction that may cause even more widespread harm to children: the influence of relative social disadvantage on early neurodevelopment. While our work thus far has focused particularly on the harms school-age children experience in hierarchical relationships with other children, this R24 will permit us to look more broadly at the transmission of social ordering and the complex causal nexus of SES, biology, and early familial and community environments. This ethics component will consist in philosophical scholarship seeking to address the fundamental question: What new ethical obligations arise when social disadvantages can be shown to impact early neurodevelopment, and thus the very formation of a person's lifelong biological and psychological capacities? 1. Is such early embodiment of social ordering not only unfortunate and unfair, but morally wrong in the strongest sense of violating a basic right? 2. Can we defend a concept of the transmission of social inequalities via epigenetic and basic psychological formation as a direct harm (rather than simply a disadvantage with associated health sequelae) to children? If so, this violation of the most basic right to be free from harm to one's person can be the foundation of a model showing that society has direct responsibility to mitigate this harm. 3. If not direct harm, what ethical obligations can be articulated based on each child's """"""""right to an open future""""""""(Feinberg, 1986)? What constitutes sufficient impingement on a child's future to obligate society to address such disparities? 4. If we can make one of the two above arguments for the strongest kind of ethical obligations, what is the target of intervention? What are the processes for such intervention? Who is responsible for them? How can such processes respect families and groups as well as children? How can they be guided by the values of the community itself?
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