Ludovica Lorusso | Università di Sassari (original) (raw)
Papers by Ludovica Lorusso
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Apr 11, 2023
In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race conc... more In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race concepts in the genomics of sport performance and sport-related concussion (SRC). In the first part of the article, we show how the concept of race is ubiquitous in scientific literature, besides the fact that 'race' as other analogous population descriptors like 'ancestry' and 'continent'
Journal of Medical Ethics
The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injurie... more The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injuries to the global medical and sport research communities, and has significantly impacted brain injury-related practices and rules of international sport. Despite being the global repository of state-of-the-art science, diagnostic tools and guides to clinical practice, the ensuing consensus statements remain the object of ethical and sociocultural criticism. The purpose of this paper is to bring to bear a broad range of multidisciplinary challenges to the processes and products of sport-related concussion movement. We identify lacunae in scientific research and clinical guidance in relation to age, disability, gender and race. We also identify, through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis, a range of ethical problems resulting from conflicts of interest, processes of attributing expertise in sport-related concussion, unjustifiably narrow methodological control and insufficient a...
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2022
Bioetica. Rivista Interdisciplinare, 2020
Negli USA sta prendendo piede un movimento di pensiero che si batte affinché sparisca dall’educaz... more Negli USA sta prendendo piede un movimento di pensiero che si batte affinché sparisca dall’educazione, dalla scienza e dalla pratica medica ogni riferimento alla razza, sulla base del fatto che è falso che i gruppi razziali socialmente riconosciuti abbiano una realtà biologica, e allo scopo di cessare di favorire la reificazione del concetto di razza. In questo paper mostriamo che è giusto opporsi a un certo tipo di correzione su base razziale implementata negli algoritmi diagnostico-terapeutici più utilizzati, ma anche che per combattere le disparità di salute prodotte dal razzismo abbiamo bisogno di una epidemiologia, di una ricerca biomedica e di conseguenza anche di una clinica medica che utilizzino in maniera consapevole il concetto di razza.
A growing number of medical professionals in the US are saying that race should not be used in patient care, biomedical research, and medical education, and are advocating for their institutions to ban race from medical thinking, starting with automatic race correction in guidelines and algorithms. While we agree that most automatic race correction is grounded on conceptions of race tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience and should therefore be eliminated, we also argue that we need to employ the concept of race critically and intensely in biomedical research, epidemiology, and even clinical medicine if we want to actively fight racism, address health inequalities, and avoid penalising disadvantaged groups.
in Remapping Race in a Global Context, eds. L. Lorusso and R. G. Winther, Routledge, 2022
In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical elim... more In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical eliminativism about race and erase any reference to human race from scientific and medical discourse. Our answer is that total and indiscriminate eliminativism would be a mistake. Our position, however, is not based on the thesis that there are such things as human races. Quite the contrary, we show that the response coming from the sole field of study entitled to determine the ontological status of human races, i.e. population genetics, is that, loosely speaking, there are not such things as races. Still this conclusion should not put an end to the story. Also if race is on a par with witchcraft, we show not only that there are some phenomena that we cannot adequately explain without resorting to a nonreferring concept, but also that some of these phenomena are biological phenomena. In particular, race is a biologically significant and ineliminable variable from social epidemiology; the mere fact that races "do not exist" is simply not relevant enough to decree that the concept of race should be eliminated from epidemiology in the face of its epistemological indispensability as a variable tracking the effects of all of the causal pathways going from racism to disease.
Paradigmi, 2021
In recent years there has been considerable debate over the metaphysics of human race, but little... more In recent years there has been considerable debate over the metaphysics of human race, but little attention has been given to its implications on the question of the causal relevance of race, arguably because such implications are considered self-evident. This paper shows that, on the contrary, they are far from being transparent. First, it argues that embracing biological realism about race is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for maintaining that race is causally relevant to the instantiation of some biological properties in an individual or in a group, and to consequent emergence of some biological differences between individuals or groups. Second, it argues that social realism alone – at least in societies which are not fully racism-free – can account for race to be causally relevant to the instantiation of biological traits that can even be biologically transmitted to offspring.
Remapping Race in a Global Context, 2021
In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical elim... more In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical eliminativism about race and erase any reference to human race from scientific and medical discourse. Our answer is that total and indiscriminate eliminativism would be a mistake. Our position, however, is not based on the thesis that there are such things as human races. Quite the contrary, we show that the response coming from the sole field of study entitled to determine the ontological status of human races, i.e. population genetics, is that, loosely speaking, there are not such things as races. Still this conclusion should not put an end to the story. Also if race is on a par with witchcraft, we show not only that there are some phenomena that we cannot adequately explain without resorting to a non-referring concept, but also that some of these phenomena are biological phenomena. In particular, race is a biologically significant and ineliminable variable from social epidemiology; the mere fact that races "do not exist" is simply not relevant enough to decree that the concept of race should be eliminated from epidemiology in the face of its epistemological indispensability as a variable tracking the effects of all of the causal pathways going from racism to disease.
Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2017
Purpose This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology... more Purpose This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology (TRT) and tattoo similarity detection technology (TSDT), which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies. Design/methodology/approach The paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics. Findings TRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many more personal features that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought. Practical implications The findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biome...
Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2019
Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used ... more Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies – is racism free or, on the contrary, is affected by racial biases and/or racist prejudices, thus reinforcing overall racial discrimination. Design/methodology/approach The study investigates the causal pathways through which face recognition technology may reinforce the racial disproportion in enforcement; it also inquires whether it further discriminates black people by making them experience more racial discrimination and self-identify more decisively as black – two conditions that are shown to be harmful in various respects. Findings This study shows that face recognition technology, as it is produced, implemented and used in Western societies, reinforces existing racial disparities in stop, investigation, arrest and incarceration rates because of racist prejudices and even contributes to strengthen the unhealthy effe...
Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, Jan 16, 2015
A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of comp... more A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of complex diseases by considering (self-identified) race as a relevant variable and focusing on the differences in risk among racial groups in the United States; they extensively draw on a genetic hypothesis-viz. the hypothesis that differences in the risk of complex diseases among racial groups are largely due to genetic differences covarying with genetic ancestry-that appears highly problematic in the light of both current biological evidence and the theory of human genome evolution. Is this reason for dismissing self-identified races? No. An alternative promising use of self-identified races exists, and ironically is suggested by those studies that investigate the etiology of complex diseases without focusing on racial differences. These studies provide a large amount of empirical evidence supporting the primacy of the contribution of non-genetic as opposed to genetic factors to the risk of...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015
ABSTRACT Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, sinc... more ABSTRACT Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces.
Perception, 2011
Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be... more Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be modelled as a signal-detection task, strictly related to similar facial features. We measured subjects' response times to face-pair stimuli while they performed visual judgments of kinship, similarity, or dissimilarity, and examined some priming effects involved. Our results show that kinship judgment takes longer on average than either similarity or dissimilarity judgment—which is compatible with existing models, yet might also suggest that kinship judgments are of a more complex character. In our priming study we observed selective suppression/enhancement of the efficacy of dissimilarity judgments whenever they followed similarity and kinship judgments. This finding confounds the notion, inherent in previous models, of resemblance cues signalling for kinship, since similarity and dissimilarity cannot be considered just as opposite concepts, and observed priming effects need to be ...
Consciousness and Cognition, 2013
Remapping Race in a Global Context
In biomedicine self-identified racial classifications of humans are used to infer genetic differe... more In biomedicine self-identified racial classifications of humans are used to infer genetic differences causally responsible for different susceptibilities to complex diseases between racial categories. In this paper I analyze the epistemological status of these classifications within the three main types of hypotheses that explain the epidemiological differences between racial categories: the genetic, the epigenetic, and the environmental hypothesis. These hypotheses differ in the use of self-identified racial classifications as proxies respectively for genetic, epigenetic, and environmental differences causally responsible for differences in the risk of complex diseases between racial categories. I show that the use of self-identified racial classifications under the genetic hypothesis is not justifiable from an epistemological point of view, and recent biological evidence rather highlights the relevance of different kinds of nongenetic factors in the causation of specific susceptib...
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Apr 11, 2023
In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race conc... more In this article, we tackle the epistemological and ethical issues related to the use of race concepts in the genomics of sport performance and sport-related concussion (SRC). In the first part of the article, we show how the concept of race is ubiquitous in scientific literature, besides the fact that 'race' as other analogous population descriptors like 'ancestry' and 'continent'
Journal of Medical Ethics
The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injurie... more The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injuries to the global medical and sport research communities, and has significantly impacted brain injury-related practices and rules of international sport. Despite being the global repository of state-of-the-art science, diagnostic tools and guides to clinical practice, the ensuing consensus statements remain the object of ethical and sociocultural criticism. The purpose of this paper is to bring to bear a broad range of multidisciplinary challenges to the processes and products of sport-related concussion movement. We identify lacunae in scientific research and clinical guidance in relation to age, disability, gender and race. We also identify, through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis, a range of ethical problems resulting from conflicts of interest, processes of attributing expertise in sport-related concussion, unjustifiably narrow methodological control and insufficient a...
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2022
Bioetica. Rivista Interdisciplinare, 2020
Negli USA sta prendendo piede un movimento di pensiero che si batte affinché sparisca dall’educaz... more Negli USA sta prendendo piede un movimento di pensiero che si batte affinché sparisca dall’educazione, dalla scienza e dalla pratica medica ogni riferimento alla razza, sulla base del fatto che è falso che i gruppi razziali socialmente riconosciuti abbiano una realtà biologica, e allo scopo di cessare di favorire la reificazione del concetto di razza. In questo paper mostriamo che è giusto opporsi a un certo tipo di correzione su base razziale implementata negli algoritmi diagnostico-terapeutici più utilizzati, ma anche che per combattere le disparità di salute prodotte dal razzismo abbiamo bisogno di una epidemiologia, di una ricerca biomedica e di conseguenza anche di una clinica medica che utilizzino in maniera consapevole il concetto di razza.
A growing number of medical professionals in the US are saying that race should not be used in patient care, biomedical research, and medical education, and are advocating for their institutions to ban race from medical thinking, starting with automatic race correction in guidelines and algorithms. While we agree that most automatic race correction is grounded on conceptions of race tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience and should therefore be eliminated, we also argue that we need to employ the concept of race critically and intensely in biomedical research, epidemiology, and even clinical medicine if we want to actively fight racism, address health inequalities, and avoid penalising disadvantaged groups.
in Remapping Race in a Global Context, eds. L. Lorusso and R. G. Winther, Routledge, 2022
In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical elim... more In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical eliminativism about race and erase any reference to human race from scientific and medical discourse. Our answer is that total and indiscriminate eliminativism would be a mistake. Our position, however, is not based on the thesis that there are such things as human races. Quite the contrary, we show that the response coming from the sole field of study entitled to determine the ontological status of human races, i.e. population genetics, is that, loosely speaking, there are not such things as races. Still this conclusion should not put an end to the story. Also if race is on a par with witchcraft, we show not only that there are some phenomena that we cannot adequately explain without resorting to a nonreferring concept, but also that some of these phenomena are biological phenomena. In particular, race is a biologically significant and ineliminable variable from social epidemiology; the mere fact that races "do not exist" is simply not relevant enough to decree that the concept of race should be eliminated from epidemiology in the face of its epistemological indispensability as a variable tracking the effects of all of the causal pathways going from racism to disease.
Paradigmi, 2021
In recent years there has been considerable debate over the metaphysics of human race, but little... more In recent years there has been considerable debate over the metaphysics of human race, but little attention has been given to its implications on the question of the causal relevance of race, arguably because such implications are considered self-evident. This paper shows that, on the contrary, they are far from being transparent. First, it argues that embracing biological realism about race is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for maintaining that race is causally relevant to the instantiation of some biological properties in an individual or in a group, and to consequent emergence of some biological differences between individuals or groups. Second, it argues that social realism alone – at least in societies which are not fully racism-free – can account for race to be causally relevant to the instantiation of biological traits that can even be biologically transmitted to offspring.
Remapping Race in a Global Context, 2021
In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical elim... more In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical eliminativism about race and erase any reference to human race from scientific and medical discourse. Our answer is that total and indiscriminate eliminativism would be a mistake. Our position, however, is not based on the thesis that there are such things as human races. Quite the contrary, we show that the response coming from the sole field of study entitled to determine the ontological status of human races, i.e. population genetics, is that, loosely speaking, there are not such things as races. Still this conclusion should not put an end to the story. Also if race is on a par with witchcraft, we show not only that there are some phenomena that we cannot adequately explain without resorting to a non-referring concept, but also that some of these phenomena are biological phenomena. In particular, race is a biologically significant and ineliminable variable from social epidemiology; the mere fact that races "do not exist" is simply not relevant enough to decree that the concept of race should be eliminated from epidemiology in the face of its epistemological indispensability as a variable tracking the effects of all of the causal pathways going from racism to disease.
Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2017
Purpose This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology... more Purpose This study aims to explore the ethical and social issues of tattoo recognition technology (TRT) and tattoo similarity detection technology (TSDT), which are expected to be increasingly used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies. Design/methodology/approach The paper investigates the new ethical concerns raised by tattoo-based biometrics on a comparative basis with face-recognition biometrics. Findings TRT raises much more ethically sensitive issues than face recognition, because tattoos are meaningful biometric traits, and tattoo identification is tantamount to the identification of many more personal features that normally would have remained invisible. TSDT’s assumption that classifying people in virtue of their visible features is useful to foretell their attitudes and behaviours is dangerously similar to racist thought. Practical implications The findings hope to promote an active debate on the ethical and social aspects of tattoo-based biome...
Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 2019
Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used ... more Purpose This study aims to explore whether face recognition technology – as it is intensely used by state and local police departments and law enforcement agencies – is racism free or, on the contrary, is affected by racial biases and/or racist prejudices, thus reinforcing overall racial discrimination. Design/methodology/approach The study investigates the causal pathways through which face recognition technology may reinforce the racial disproportion in enforcement; it also inquires whether it further discriminates black people by making them experience more racial discrimination and self-identify more decisively as black – two conditions that are shown to be harmful in various respects. Findings This study shows that face recognition technology, as it is produced, implemented and used in Western societies, reinforces existing racial disparities in stop, investigation, arrest and incarceration rates because of racist prejudices and even contributes to strengthen the unhealthy effe...
Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, Jan 16, 2015
A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of comp... more A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of complex diseases by considering (self-identified) race as a relevant variable and focusing on the differences in risk among racial groups in the United States; they extensively draw on a genetic hypothesis-viz. the hypothesis that differences in the risk of complex diseases among racial groups are largely due to genetic differences covarying with genetic ancestry-that appears highly problematic in the light of both current biological evidence and the theory of human genome evolution. Is this reason for dismissing self-identified races? No. An alternative promising use of self-identified races exists, and ironically is suggested by those studies that investigate the etiology of complex diseases without focusing on racial differences. These studies provide a large amount of empirical evidence supporting the primacy of the contribution of non-genetic as opposed to genetic factors to the risk of...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015
ABSTRACT Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, sinc... more ABSTRACT Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces.
Perception, 2011
Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be... more Following other researchers, we investigated the premise that visual judgment of kinship might be modelled as a signal-detection task, strictly related to similar facial features. We measured subjects' response times to face-pair stimuli while they performed visual judgments of kinship, similarity, or dissimilarity, and examined some priming effects involved. Our results show that kinship judgment takes longer on average than either similarity or dissimilarity judgment—which is compatible with existing models, yet might also suggest that kinship judgments are of a more complex character. In our priming study we observed selective suppression/enhancement of the efficacy of dissimilarity judgments whenever they followed similarity and kinship judgments. This finding confounds the notion, inherent in previous models, of resemblance cues signalling for kinship, since similarity and dissimilarity cannot be considered just as opposite concepts, and observed priming effects need to be ...
Consciousness and Cognition, 2013
Remapping Race in a Global Context
In biomedicine self-identified racial classifications of humans are used to infer genetic differe... more In biomedicine self-identified racial classifications of humans are used to infer genetic differences causally responsible for different susceptibilities to complex diseases between racial categories. In this paper I analyze the epistemological status of these classifications within the three main types of hypotheses that explain the epidemiological differences between racial categories: the genetic, the epigenetic, and the environmental hypothesis. These hypotheses differ in the use of self-identified racial classifications as proxies respectively for genetic, epigenetic, and environmental differences causally responsible for differences in the risk of complex diseases between racial categories. I show that the use of self-identified racial classifications under the genetic hypothesis is not justifiable from an epistemological point of view, and recent biological evidence rather highlights the relevance of different kinds of nongenetic factors in the causation of specific susceptib...