Kierkegaard's view of time and eternity.

An analysis of the value systems of critical social issues is difficult to carry out in any qualified sense from an unstructured basis and that attempts to do so easily result in relatively superficial discussions of particular issues. Instead, we suggest how this might be viewed from a more holistic ethical and systems theological perspective. In doing so, we review a new framework that aims to distil relevant issues regarding necessary trade-offs and how this can be done. Broadly speaking, this (...) consists of a kind of Socratic dialogue that systematically examines the value basis of the decisions that need to be made, as well as whether the effects of the decisions become unacceptable and thus need to be modified vis-à-vis the normative system embraced by the decision-maker. We discuss the role of theologians in this and emphasise that they should take a larger place in discussions on how to deal with complex societal crises. (shrink)

Many scientific models in biology are how-possibly models. These models depict things as they could be, but do not necessarily capture actual states of affairs in the biological world. In contemporary philosophy of science, it is customary to treat how-possibly models as second-rate theoretical tools. Although possibly important in the early stages of theorizing, they do not constitute the main aim of modelling, namely, to discover the actual mechanism responsible for the phenomenon under study. In the paper it is argued (...) that this prevailing picture does not do justice to the synthetic strategy that is commonly used in biological engineering. In synthetic biology, how-possibly models are not simply speculations or eliminable scaffolds towards a single how-actually model, but indispensable design hypotheses for a field whose ultimate goal is to build novel biological systems. The paper explicates this by providing an example from the study of alternative genetic systems by synthetic biologist Steven Benner and his group. The case will also highlight how the method of synthesis, even when it fails, provides an effective way to limit the space of possible models for biological systems. (shrink)

This chapter explores arguments, ideas, and practices related to relativism in social and cultural anthropology. It covers discussions about cultural relativism, methodological relativism, conceptual relativism, relativism about rationality, moral relativism, epistemic relativism, and ontological relativism.

Background:Moral courage is defined as courage to act according to one’s own ethical values and principles even at the risk of negative consequences for the individual. In a complex nursing practice, ethical considerations are integral. Moral courage is needed throughout nurses’ career.Aim:To analyse graduating nursing students’ moral courage and the factors associated with it in six European countries.Research design:A cross-sectional design, using a structured questionnaire, as part of a larger international ProCompNurse study. In the questionnaire, moral courage was assessed with (...) a single question (visual analogue scale 0–100), the questionnaire also covered several background variables.Participants and research context:The sample comprised graduating nursing students (n = 1796) from all participating countries. To get a comprehensive view about graduating nursing students’ moral courage, the views of nurse managers (n = 538) and patients (n = 1327) from the same units in which the graduating nursing students practised were also explored, with parallel questionnaires.Ethical considerations:Ethical approvals and research permissions were obtained according to national standards in every country and all participants gave their informed consent.Results:The mean of graduating nursing students’ self-assessed moral courage was 77.8 (standard deviation 17.0; on a 0–100 scale), with statistically significant differences between countries. Higher moral courage was associated with many factors, especially the level of professional competence. The managers assessed the graduating nursing students’ moral courage lower (66.5; standard deviation 18.4) and the patients slightly higher (80.6; standard deviation 19.4) than the graduating nursing students themselves.Discussion and conclusions:In all countries, the graduating nursing students’ moral courage was assessed as rather high, with differences between countries and populations. These differences and associations between moral courage and ethics education require further research. (shrink)

This book contains scholarly contributions to several current debates in the philosophy of medicine and health care regarding the nature of health and health promotion, concepts and measurements of mental illness, phenomenological conceptions of health and illness, allocation of health care resources, criteria for proper medical science, the clinical meeting, and ethical constraints in such a meeting. With one exception, the authors in this book are or have been teachers or graduate students at the interdisciplinary Department of Health and Society (...) (Tema H) at Linköping University, Sweden. While all the texts have a philosophical focus, many other disciplines have influenced the choice of specific perspectives. The university backgrounds of the authors range from medicine, psychology, sociology, and religion to philosophy. What binds the authors together is their deep interest in the theory of medicine and in the pursuit of a philosophy of humanistic medicine and health care. (shrink)

We consider an infinite hierarchy of systems of Alethic Modal Logic with so-called Levels of Perfection, and add to them suitable definitions of such interesting deontic categories as those of supererogation, offence, conditional obligation and conditional permission. We then state three problems concerning the proper characterization of the resulting logic(s) for our defined notions, and discuss two of these problems in some detail.

As a part of a research project on Dignity and Older Europeans Programme) I explore in this paper a set of notions of human dignity. The general concept of dignity is introduced and characterized as a position on a value scale and it is further specified through its relations to the notions of right, respect and self-respect. I present four kinds of dignity and spell out their differences: the dignity of merit, the dignity of moral or existential stature, the dignity (...) of identity and the universal human dignity. Menschenwürde pertains to all human beings to the same extent and cannot be lost as long as the persons exist. The dignity of merit depends on social rank and position. There are many species of this kind of dignity and it is very unevenly distributed among human beings. The dignity of merit exists in degrees and it can come and go. The dignity of moral stature is the result of the moral deeds of the subject; likewise it can be reduced or lost through his or her immoral deeds. This kind of dignity is tied to the idea of a dignified character and of dignity as a virtue. The dignity of moral stature is a dignity of degree and it is also unevenly distributed. The dignity of identity is tied to the integrity of the subject's body and mind, and in many instances, although not always, also dependent on the subject's self-image. This dignity can come and go as a result of the deeds of fellow human beings and also as a result of changes in the subject's body and mind. (shrink)

Experts have been claimed to perceive risks in a different way than the general public. It is likely that experts often see risks in their own field of expertise as smaller than the public does, but that does not imply that their risk perception is also driven by other factors. Topical experts and general risk assessors are two quite different types of experts. Still, common assertions as to the simple structure of expert risk perception, said to be related only to (...) technical or statistical risk estimates, builds on a meager database consisting of 15 general risk assessors. Results from a study reported here show that the factors explaining experts’ risk perception are similar to those of a comparable group of nontopical experts with a similar level of technological literacy and to the general public, and that the level of explained variance is quite comparable for experts and the general public. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the ethical foundations for a caring conversation. The analysis is based on the ethics of Paul Ricoeur and deals with questions such as what kind of person the nurse ought to be and how she or he engages in caring conversations with suffering others. According to Ricoeur, ethics (the aim of an accomplished life) has primacy over morality (the articulation of aims in norms). At the ethical level, self-esteem and autonomy were shown (...) to be essential for a person (nurse) to act with respect and responsibility. The ethical relationship of a caring conversation was found to be asymmetrical, because of the passivity inflicted by suffering. This asymmetry was found to be potentially unethical if not balanced with reciprocity. In the ethical context, the caring conversation is one in which the nurse makes room through the ethos of caritas for a suffering person to regain his or her self-esteem, and thus makes a good life possible. (shrink)

Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences. Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry (...) in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research. (shrink)

In policy-making the consumption of specially labelled products, and its role in improving the welfare of livestock, has attracted considerable attention. There is in many countries a diverse market for animal welfare-friendly products which is potentially confusing and may lack transparency. We ask whether special quality labels that involve medium levels of animal welfare, as compared with labels promoting premium levels of animal welfare, have a role to play in promoting improvements in animal welfare. The Danish pork market is our (...) reference case, but we also widen the context by comparing the markets for pork in three other European countries. Our findings suggest that in order to improve animal welfare through demand for welfare-friendly products it is important to maintain separate the market for products with strong animal welfare profiles from markets for products with medium levels of animal welfare where, often, animal welfare is bundled together with other food quality attributes. We conclude that such quality labels may indeed play an important role in promoting higher animal welfare standards provided that they offer real improvements in animal welfare as compared with standard products. They will be attractive to consumers with a positive, but not especially strong interest in animal welfare as an individual food attribute who would otherwise be inclined to purchase standard products. (shrink)

Emotions are an important clue for the characterisation of individuals in Xenophon’s “Hellenica”. Especially joy and schadenfreude have an important narrative function. Malicious joy and spite point at the flaws of the Spartan hegemony after the Peloponnesian War. However, pleasure at the misfortune of others is not negative in itself. Defeating hubristic enemies is a proper reason to rejoice for Xenophon. Emotions can be vices or virtues, it is the circumstances that define their moral value.

In this introduction to the Topical Collection on Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science, we map the questions that have guided social epistemological approaches to diversity in science. Both social and cognitive diversity of different types is claimed to be epistemically beneficial. The challenge is to understand how an increase in a group’s diversity can bring about epistemic benefits and whether there are limits beyond which diversity can no longer improve a group’s epistemic performance. The contributions to the Topical Collection (...) discuss various proposals to maintain an appropriate amount of cognitive diversity in science, for instance, by recruiting and retaining practitioners from underrepresented social groups, providing incentives for explorative and risky research, encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations and stakeholder participation in research, requiring industry scientists to share their evidence, and developing strategies to encounter politically motivated attempts to manufacture doubt. To be successful, efforts to promote diversity in science should anticipate risks related to institutional interventions, navigate trade-offs between different types of epistemically good outcomes, and identify hidden costs that such policies may cause for various actors. Such efforts need to be assessed not only from an epistemic perspective but also from the point of view of fairness and the political legitimacy of scientific institutions. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to clarify some senses of dignity that are particularly relevant for the treatment and care of the elderly. I make a distinction between two quite different ideas of dignity, on the one hand the basic kind of dignity possessed by every human being, and on the other hand the dignity which is the result of a person's merits, whether these be inherited or achieved. Common to both these ideas is that having a dignity (...) entails having a set of rights, in the case of basic dignity the set of rights which we call human rights, the rights which the United Nations, among others, has tried to determine. The dignities of merit also provide some rights, although normally rights with limited scope covering, for instance, a professional area. This observation gives my preliminary answer to the fundamental question of what distinguishes dignity from other high values that could be attached to humans. I discuss further a kind of value that might be mistaken for a kind of dignity, viz. what I call public status. This status is to be distinguished from social status (the status of e.g. kings, governors, and officials) that I take to be a proper dignity of merit. The public status is the status gained solely via public perception and not directly via any merits on the part of the dignified. Finally, I turn to the topic of the dignity of the elderly and try to determine whether there is some dignity peculiar to the elderly, and which is over and above the basicMenschenwrde. My two preliminary proposals are the following: the elderly have a dignity of wisdom and they have a highly general dignity of merit, which results from their life-long efforts and achievements, and for this they deserve our gratitude. (shrink)

In recent decades, economists have developed methods for measuring the country-wide level of inequality of opportunity. The most popular method, called the ex-ante method, uses data on the distribution of outcomes stratified by groups of individuals with the same circumstances, in order to estimate the part of outcome inequality that is due to these circumstances. I argue that these methods are potentially biased, both upwards and downwards, and that the unknown size of this bias could be large. To argue that (...) the methods are biased, I show that they ought to measure causal or counterfactual quantities, while the methods are only capable of identifying correlational information. To argue that the bias is potentially large, I illustrate how the causal complexity of the real world leads to numerous non-causal correlations between circumstances and outcomes and respond to objections claiming that such correlations are nonetheless indicators of unfair disadvantage, that is, inequality of opportunity. (shrink)

According to an infinite frequency principle, it is rational, under certain conditions, to set your credence in an outcome to the limiting frequency of that outcome if the experiment were repeated indefinitely. I argue that most infinite frequency principles are undesirable in at least one of the following ways: accepting the principle would lead you to accept bets with sure losses, the principle gives no guidance in the case of deterministic experiments like coin tosses and the principle relies on a (...) metaphysical property, ‘chanciness’, whose necessary and sufficient conditions are unknown. I show that a frequency principle that is based on the principal principle suffers from problems related to the definition of ‘chance’ or ‘chanciness’, which could lead to all three of the above problems. I introduce a version of the infinite frequency principle that does not rely on a notion of chance or chanciness and does not suffer from any of these problems. (shrink)

The traditional Lockean justification of property rights has been argued to be no longer valid in a world in which much wealth does not derive from acquisitions of natural resources, and in which much property, such as money, is intangible. This means that libertarians need to reconsider whether and why property rights are justified for objects that fall outside of the scope of the Lockean justification. This paper gives a justification of property rights in relation to modern money, which uses (...) the self-ownership principle as its central premise. Since modern money is a form of credit, I start with a justification of credit property rights. I then consider both money under gold convertibility and present-day fiat systems, showing that the justification of credit property rights remains valid under these conditions. (shrink)

Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality and relative modality. In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for (...) practically all empirical inquiry. In RM, modal inferences are evaluated relative to what is kept fixed in a system, like a theory or a model. RM-based inferences are more certain but framework-dependent. While elements from both AM and RM can be found in some existing accounts of modality, it is worth highlighting them in their own right and isolating their features for closer scrutiny. This helps to establish their relevant epistemologies that are free from some strong philosophical assumptions often attached to them in the literature. We close by showing how combining these two routes amounts to a view that accounts for a rich variety of modal inferences in science. (shrink)

When discussing scientific objectivity, many philosophers of science have recently focused on accounts that can be applied in practice when assessing the objectivity of something. It has become clear that in different contexts, objectivity is realized in different ways, and the many senses of objectivity recognized in the recent literature seem to be conceptually distinct. I argue that these diverse ‘applicable’ senses of scientific objectivity have more in common than has thus far been recognized. I combine arguments from philosophical discussions (...) of trust, from negative accounts of objectivity, and from the recent literature on epistemic risks. When we call X objective, we endorse it: we say that we rely on X, and that others should do so too. But the word ‘objective’ is reserved for a specific type of reliance: it is based on the belief that important epistemic risks arising from our imperfections as epistemic agents have been effectively averted. All the positive senses of objectivity identify either some risk of this type, or some efficient strategy for averting one or more such risks. (shrink)

A large proportion of tumour‐associated antigens seem to be determined by carbohydrate structures. Advances in the study of the antigenicity of cell‐surface carbohydrates have been hampered by the absence of advanced monoclonal hybridoma technology comparable to that available for the study of protein antigens. Monoclonal antibodies have been raised against a carbohydrate epitope (43–9F) that is associated with the proliferative features of squamous lung carcinomas. These were used in turn to generate anti‐idiotype antibodies with homology to 43–9F. The method and (...) its possible applications are described, together with a procedure to detect rare cell membrane variants within large populations. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of health has been quite focused on the problem of determining the nature of the concepts of health, illness and disease from a scientific point of view. Some theorists claim and argue that these concepts are value-free and descriptive in the same sense as the concepts of atom, metal and rain are value-free and descriptive. To say that a person has a certain disease or that he or she is unhealthy is thus to objectively describe this person. On (...) the other hand it certainly does not preclude an additional evaluation of the state of affairs as undesirable or bad. The basic scientific description and the evaluation are, however, two independent matters, according to this kind of theory. Other philosophers claim that the concept of health, together with the other medical concepts, is essentially value-laden. To establish that a person is healthy does not just entail some objective inspection and measurement. It presupposes also an evaluation of the general state of the person. A statement that he or she is healthy does not merely imply certain scientific facts regarding the person’s body or mind but implies also a (positive) evaluation of the person’s bodily and mental state. My task in this paper will be, first, to present the two principal rival types of theories and present what I take to be the main kind of reasoning by which we could assess these theories, and second, to present a deeper characterization of the principal rival theories of health and illness. (shrink)

One INTRODUCTION 1. Background The theory of the nature of health and disease, or of the concepts of health and disease, has been central in modem ...

Whereas much of the literature in the social epistemology of scientific knowledge has focused either on scientific communities or research groups, we examine the epistemic significance of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). We argue that certain types of SIMs can play an important epistemic role in science: they can remedy epistemic injus- tices in scientific practices. SIMs can counteract epistemic injustices effectively because many forms of epistemic injustice require structural and not merely individual remedies. To illustrate our argument, we discuss the case (...) of indigenous studies. (shrink)

This edited volume is a comprehensive presentation of views on the relations between metaphysics and logic from Aristotle through twentieth century philosophers who contributed to the return of metaphysics in the analytic tradition.

This paper analyzes the notion of possibility in biology and demonstrates how synthetic biology can provide understanding on the modal dimension of biological systems. Among modal concepts, biological possibility has received surprisingly little explicit treatment in the philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of the notion of biological possibility by showing how it provides both a philosophically and biologically fruitful category as well as introducing a new practically grounded way for its assessment. (...) More precisely, we argue that synthetic biology can provide tools to scientifically anchor reasoning about biological possibilities. Two prominent strategies for this are identified and analyzed: the design of functionally new-to-nature systems and the redesign of naturally occurring systems and their parts. These approaches allow synthetic biologists to explore systems that are not normally evolutionarily accessible and draw modal inferences that extend in scope beyond their token realizations. Subsequently, these results in synthetic biology can also be relevant for discussions on evolutionary contingency, providing new methods and insight to the study of various sources of unactualized possibilities in biology. (shrink)

Job characteristics play an essential role for the well-being of employees. When job characteristics are unfavorable, the experienced exchange relationship with one’s supervisor may become relevant to weaken negative consequences. We conducted a diary study over ten consecutive working days with 112 academics. Based on conservation of resources theory, we assumed that daily LMX constitutes a resource for employees that moderates the link between job characteristics and job satisfaction as well as emotional exhaustion. Additionally, we proposed lagged-effects of morning job (...) characteristics and LMX on next-day morning job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Findings from hierarchical linear modeling demonstrated that on the day-level higher perceived levels of job control in the morning were associated with higher perceived job satisfaction and lower perceived emotional exhaustion in the afternoon. The experience of increased time pressure in the morning was negatively related to perceived day-level afternoon job satisfaction and positively to perceived day-level afternoon emotional exhaustion. Within one day, perceived LMX moderated the relationship between perceived job control and perceived job satisfaction in the afternoon. We only found lagged effects of the interaction between afternoon job control and afternoon LMX on next-day morning job satisfaction. We discuss daily LMX as a resource for employees both within one day and from day-to day, along with future research directions on the buffering role of LMX. (shrink)

In the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, it is largely accepted that relationships of trust, not just reliance, are necessary in contemporary collaborative science characterised by relationships of opaque epistemic dependence. Such relationships of trust are taken to be possible only between agents who can be held accountable for their actions. But today, knowledge production in many fields makes use of AI applications that are epistemically opaque in an essential manner. This creates a problem for the social epistemology of scientific (...) knowledge, as scientists are now epistemically dependent on AI applications that are not agents, and therefore not appropriate candidates for trust. (shrink)