In the readings, both Flanigan and Hidalgo are essentially arguing for citizens to go against a higher power of which they normally are supposed to follow. In the case of Flanigan and the argument regarding a patient’s right to self-medicate, the higher power is a doctor who has gone through years of medical school and residency in order to have the power they do. Hidalgo’s argument suggests that citizens disobey the request by laws set by the government that they violate immigrants right to freedom. Both authors propose interesting choices for the individual that go against what we are often taught growing up.

A healthy doctor-patient relationship includes trust that the provider will include all relevant and necessary information regarding treatment options and prescriptions. I had personally never thought of it in the light that people should be authorized to make those decisions themselves. While it clearly is anyone’s choice to refuse medication, the idea that it would be their choice to seek out a prescription medication provides both benefits and costs. Flanigan did clearly address the concern that it would lead to higher level of addiction to now prescription medications. However, I do not think she adequately assessed the severity of the prescription medication addiction problem in our country. I do not believe it is the inaccessibility to these drugs that cause people to become addicted, but rather the substance in themselves. As Flanigan said, there are “black market painkillers” that would no longer be black market, but would still be just as addictive in a world of self-medication. And though she does address in saying addicts could enroll in a “voluntary prohibition program”, why should they have to be given the freedom to become addicts all on their own in the first place? From my point of view, the pushing of painkiller drugs by insurance companies and therefore by health care providers has created things like the opioid epidemic and that allowing people to have access to them on their own would in no way solve the problem.

Returning to Hidalgo’s paper, I found his argument that citizens have a duty to disobey immigration laws that “regulate how citizens and migrants interact with each other” to make a lot of sense.  I think most people can see that the government should not be roping citizens into law enforcement positions, unless of course they are police officers, and they also should not be controlling how any two people interact. Personally, I was not aware of the way that some immigration laws rope citizens into this duty and dislike the limit to interact with specific people. I know that if I were in the position where I felt the need to immigrate to another country for work, I would wish those people to be accepting and helpful in my struggles. Personally, I believe that the citizens of our country have the right to do the same on an individual basis regardless of the laws that are meant to be enforced by immigration officers or police officers.

I was not largely surprised by my results from the IAT test that I took. This was not the first time that I had taken one of these tests so I tried to take a different one. The test that I took was the skin color test and my results did not surprise me much. I showed a slight preference for light skin which I think especially considered the recent events of the past year is something that I have given much more thought to recently. Obviously I would prefer if I showed no preference and had no implicit bias but that is simply not the reality of the world we live in. I acknowledge that I grew up in a very white area with little diversity and was exposed to diversity but never in my day to day life. I think that this made a bit naive in the way that I viewed issues of skin color and I think that implicit bias tests like this help to recognize and work to override these mind bugs that have developed. Ultimately, while I am not surprised by my results, I hope that I can continue to work to counter act my implicit biases and remove them from my decision making.

The conceptualization of stereotypes and implicit bias as “mindbugs”  creates an interesting description of how bias impacts everyday life both on an individual and cultural level. First off, the idea retroactive inference and memory mindbugs are largely ignored when eyewitness accounts are considered for legal purposes is concerning. The trust that we have in others to be completely focused and able to remember at any given moment shows a flaw in relying on memory. It is not necessarily any individual’s fault that their mind has deceived them, but it still should be considered by the larger culture especially during trials. Furthermore, the distinction between white lies, colorless lies, and blue lies exposes how much of life is fabricated from lies. Of course each of these lies are told to make oneself or those around them feel better. But regardless of whether or not lying will protect someone, it is concerning how easily we let these little things slip out. Colorless lies that involved impression management intrigued me and made me evaluate both my own and those around me in how we manage our self image in different social or professional settings. These small mindbugs that are within ourselves are clearly linked to the larger development of societal stereotypes.

Stereotype threat and colorless lies seem to propose an interesting link. Hiding things from ourselves and managing who we appear to be leads to falling into the stereotypes of one’s given group. Whether it is gender stereotypes for a woman who is a stay at home mother or stereotypes of a different group, there is a great deal of intersectionality between the different mindbugs that we come across. How we counter these mindbugs is an ever present question for a society that is working to improve. I believe the method of just exterminating them oversimplifies how deeply rooted stereotypes are in individuals and in society. Of course removing the problem is the easiest answer, but it fails to consider all of the challenges that come with trying to demolish such a large and ubiquitous road block. I find the same issues with simply attempting to bypass mindbugs because again this is clearly a seemingly simple way to removed stereotypes from our thinking. However, it again is not that simple to just “outwit” the minbugs that have become so pervasive. I see the proposed numerical approach as the most realistic in solving the problem of mindbugs. This may simply be because I am a numbers person who likes to deal with facts and statistics, but ultimately I find it more challenging (though no impossible) for humans to ignore numbers as it is much harder to try and infiltrate them with outliers that justify stereotypes.

The idea of noncognitivism was not one that had crossed my mind before. When one is thinking about morality or ethics there has always been the premise that there are things that are wrong or right. The belief that “there are no moral statements that are true or false” challenges the often taught mentality that there are always right and wrong actions. Children are taught early on through either punishment or reward that there are morally right and wrong ways to treat people and objects. However, the removal of true and false from the evaluation of a moral statement is a curious proposal. Surely, as the chapter points out, it would take away much of the heat and emotion found in debate and politics. Perhaps this would even allow for less extreme partisanship and more true progress towards a greater good. However, would a debate over something with no truth or falsehood lead to any progress? How can one make a decision if there is no true and false to morality? For better or worse, we as a society largely agree that there are true and false moral values and statements. Unfortunately though, which solution is true is often where the debate begins.

Taking more of a cognitivist view point and believing that there is a true and false statement to a moral question leads more to how one does decide what is true and what is false. Personally, I thinking that in holding all people equally morally important, universalism looks like the best way to make a decision regarding morality. The idea that the benefit or harm to the larger population or culture looks the best, yet the egoism of the consequentialist approach is almost always bound to creep in. Personal interest is natural for humans and in some ways goes back to survival instincts of our ancestors. However, in order to make the largest moral impact on the most amount of people, the universalist mindset must be embodied. This is highly linked the concept of effective altruism when considering where and how much money to donate. Both universalism and effective altruism rely on the premise that the largest impact should be made on the most amount of people possible. Though challenging to fully embrace, the universalist approach to morality likely has the potential to do the most good in a society.