This article seeks to illustrate the relevance of social theory for the study and practice of law. As social theory reports on changes that influence societal structures, the question for lawyers is how these changes affect law and what this means for its role and function. To this end, the article draws on Ulrich Beck's theory of the risk society and reflexive modernization to provide the relevant perspective. This theory reports upon and explains the so-called side effects of modernization that (...) take the shape of environmental, industrial and political risks. It is these side effects that constitute the problem in risk society and dealing with them demands a reflexive approach towards modernization. The article seeks to highlight the relevance of this theory for law by placing it in the tradition of social contacts theory. It does so by reformulating the central problem of the risk society and by identifying the main social actors who would be party to a "new" social contract. The article then identifies and formulates the instruments of negotiation, at which point it becomes clear what the role of law may be. It concludes with a tentative indication of what the main terms of the social contract could look like. (shrink)

In a bid to boost fertility levels, Iran and Japan have recently launched their own dating apps, with more countries likely to follow. The aim of this article is to consider whether state-run dating apps are morally desirable, which is a question that has not received any scholarly attention. It finds that such apps have at least two benefits that collectively, if not individually, render their introduction to be welcomed provided certain conditions are met. These benefits are that they are (...) better placed than commercial dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Badoo to (i) help people find lasting love and to (ii) protect individuals from spending too much money and/or time on online dating. Several objections are discussed and shown to be unconvincing as arguments against state-run dating apps tout court, including the objection that for states to offer their own dating apps is unduly expensive; the objection that it gives them too much power; and the objection that they should invest in creating offline opportunities for meeting potential partners instead. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ethics, the use of empirical data has become more and more popular, leading to a distinct form of applied ethics, namely empirical ethics. This ‘empirical turn’ is especially visible in bioethics. There are various ways of combining empirical research and ethical reflection. In this paper we discuss the use of empirical data in a special form of Reflective Equilibrium (RE), namely the Network Model with Third Person Moral Experiences. In this model, the empirical data consist of the moral (...) experiences of people in a practice. Although inclusion of these moral experiences in this specific model of RE can be well defended, their use in the application of the model still raises important questions. What precisely are moral experiences? How to determine relevance of experiences, in other words: should there be a selection of the moral experiences that are eventually used in the RE? How much weight should the empirical data have in the RE? And the key question: can the use of RE by empirical ethicists really produce answers to practical moral questions? In this paper we start to answer the above questions by giving examples taken from our research project on understanding the norm of informed consent in the field of pediatric oncology. We especially emphasize that incorporation of empirical data in a network model can reduce the risk of self‐justification and bias and can increase the credibility of the RE reached. (shrink)

Many individuals on the autism spectrum are hypersensitive to certain sensory stimuli. For this group, as well as for non-autistic individuals with sensory processing disorders, being exposed to e.g. fluorescent lights, perfume odours, and various sounds and noises can be real torment. In this article, I consider the normative implications of such offence for the design of office spaces, which is a topic that has not received any attention from philosophers. After identifying different ways in which the senses of hypersensitive (...) workers might be protected within these spaces, I show that many of such accommodations can be made at reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be a legal requirement. (shrink)

Being the victim of a microaggression, that is, a relatively minor act of hostility that targets someone's (marginalized) social identity, can be distressing, but so can merely being in doubt over whether one has been the victim of such aggression. To address this last problem, Regina Rini has proposed a novel understanding of microaggressions that is meant to eliminate such doubts. On her “Ambiguous Experience Account,” whenever members of marginalized groups believe they might have been subjected to a microaggression, a (...) microaggression will have been committed even if the would‐be perpetrator was not motivated by prejudiced aggression. This article challenges this account on grounds of being incompatible with people's lived experiences, including those of the would‐be victims, and argues that we should instead accept the conventional account on which microaggressive acts must be consciously or unconsciously motivated by prejudiced aggression. At the same time, it shows that those falsely suspected of having committed microaggressions will still merit blame sometimes for having failed to signal that their behavior was respectful of others, which lessens the concerns that Rini's conceptual engineering seeks to address. I conclude by drawing out some implications for the debate on microaggressions and attributional ambiguity. (shrink)

All of our lives come to an end. For most people in Western societies, this is not until they reach a relatively advanced age, often 80 years and above. For others, death comes earlier, whether unexpectedly as when someone dies in car crash, or after a short or long period of physical decline as when a middle-aged person develops terminal cancer. To the extent that people experience such a stage of decline, usually with the prior knowledge that it will result (...) in their death, we tend to speak of their ‘end-of-life-stage’. In this chapter, my aim is to analyze one of the main ways in which our personal autonomy might be, and often is, undermined during this stage, namely that we come to suffer from severe cognitive impairments. To be more precise, I seek to show how two different philosophical views on personal autonomy can lead to very different verdicts on how severely cognitively impaired individuals may or ought to be treated in various contexts, whereby I will be mostly critical on one of the views discussed. On the first view, we cease to have autonomy-interests once we become severely cognitively impaired as we will no longer be capable of reflecting upon what makes our life worth living. On the second view, we continue to have such interests provided that we independently endorsed a conception of the good life before we became severely cognitively impaired. (shrink)

Unemployment rates among autistic people are high even among those with low-support needs. While a variety of measures is needed to address this problem, this article defends one that has not been defended in detail and that has profound implications for contemporary hiring practices. Building on empirical research showing that job interviews are a major contributor to autistic unemployment, it argues that such interviews should be abolished in many cases for autistic and non-autistic people alike.

Okay, Professor Turner is not Rodney King. He is not responding to bioethicists and social scientists running amuck, setting automobiles aflame, and pelting each other with rocks and broken bottles. He does not come right out and ask, “Why can't we all just get along?” But in its academic way, Turner's essay is an effort to negotiate a truce in the interdisciplinary squabbles that plague bioethics, a plea to move bioethics beyond the “misleading” and “unhelpful” “demarcation of disciplinary goals” that (...) leads to “dichotomous thinking” and “polemical accusations.”. (shrink)

The silencing of the epistemologies, theories, principles, values, concepts and experiences of the global South constitutes a particularly egregious epistemic injustice in bioethics. Our shared responsibility to rectify that injustice should be at the top of the ethics agenda. That it is not, or only is in part, is deeply problematic and endangers the credibility of the entire field. As a first step towards reorienting the field, this paper offers a comprehensive account of epistemic justice for global health ethics. We (...) first introduce several different conceptions of justice and decolonisation in relation to knowledge, purposefully drawing on work emanating from the global South as well as the global North. We then apply those conceptions to the global health ethics context to generate a tripartite account of the layers of epistemic justice in the field: who is producing ethics knowledge; what theories and concepts are being applied to produce ethics knowledge; and whose voices are sought, recorded and used to generate ethics knowledge. These layers reflect that the field spans conceptual and empirical research. We conclude by proposing that, going forward, three avenues are key to achieve greater epistemic justice at each layer and to help decolonise global health ethics: namely, understanding the problem, dialogue and structural change. (shrink)

Unearthing the radical potential at the heart of canonical political thought, this book uses the work of Foucault and Deleuze to re-imagine theory in a way that embraces difference and resistance.

Many higher-income countries have shortages of care-workers, which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future as virtually all of these societies are ageing. The philosophical literature on this problem has concentrated mostly on the merits and demerits of different policy solutions, especially on the recruitment of foreign care-workers and on investments in care robots and other relevant technologies. However, the question of what moral duties, if any, private individuals have to help address care-worker shortages has been entirely neglected. In (...) this article, I help to fill this lacuna by arguing that some inhabitants of higher-income countries have moral duties to age abroad in order to reduce the pressure on the aged care-systems of their current societies, whereby ‘ageing abroad’ is defined narrowly as moving to a foreign country to receive residential or non-residential aged care. As I show, these duties are dependent on a number of conditions being met, including the requirement that the host populations not be made worse off. (shrink)

Sometimes the simplest forms are the most difficult to explain. Perhaps the reason for this is that one estimates the problems involved as being too simple, too obvious, and does not seek, therefore, to penetrate to their core. Besides, there is an aura of the primitive and underivative about a literary form we are used to considering as popular; we hardly dare profane it by dry, objective analysis. As the tradition of a community, it shares the anonymity of the latter. (...) Seeking the traces of creative and tradition-conscious personages, we find only an amorphous mass of the unknown. No wonder that the riddle has been relegated back to prehistoric times, permitting us to conceal its problems behind a veil of mystery. (shrink)

Providing equitable food security for a growing population while minimizing environmental impacts and enhancing resilience to climate shocks is an ongoing challenge. Here, we quantify the resource intensity, environmental impacts and nutritional output of a small (0.075 ha) low-input subsistence Mediterranean agroecological farm in a developed nation that is based on intercropping and annual crop rotation. The farm provides one individual, the proprietor, with nutritional self-sufficiency (adequate intake of an array of macro- and micro-nutrients) with limited labor, no synthetic fertilizers (...) or herbicides, and zero waste, effectively closing a full farm-table-farm cycle. We find that the agroecological farm outperforms conventional farming as practiced in the same country in terms of both lower environmental burdens, across all examined environmental metrics (63% lower on average) per kg produce, and higher nutritional score (66% higher on average). Per equal farmland, the environmental lopsidedness was even higher (79% lower than conventional farming on average), with nearly the same nutritional score (3% lower on average). Moreover, when considering total land area, which includes farmland and supporting non-agricultural lands, as well as postgate impacts and food losses, the advantage of the agroecological system over conventional farming is even more pronounced. Situated within a Mediterranean region that is undergoing rapid climate change, this food system is a unique case study of nutrition- and environment-oriented food production system. While its deployment potential is limited by lack of supportive policies, it nonetheless represents one of the most starkly bold alternatives to current food systems. (shrink)

Modern Proposals for Regulating Ecocide: pragmatic, ideological or diplomatic. Towards a legal concept befitting the ecological challenges of our time. This article argues that the current debate on ecocide law is gridlocked due to an overlooked incongruency within the 2021 Independent Expert Panel’s ecocide proposal. To reinvigorate the discussion, the Panel’s proposal is compared with earlier proposals by Polly Higgins and Richard Falk. Analysis of the challenges, objectives, and legal solutions in each proposal reveals a respectively ideological, diplomatic or pragmatic (...) approach. Incongruencies are found in Higgins’ and the Panel’s proposals, while Falk’s proposal shows consistency. The incongruence between the challenges, objectives and legal solutions arguably has its roots in fundamental methodological discrepancies between ideal and non-ideal theory. For a juridically viable solution a congruent non-ideal approach should be adopted, resulting in a multitude of laws and regulations addressing various objectives that are often incompatible in one singular article to effectively tackle environmental challenges. (shrink)

An account of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and in particular their call for a general reformation, in relation to medieval and early modern traditions and reform programs.

The field of bioethics continues to struggle with the problem of cultural diversity: can universal principles guide ethical decision making, regardless of the culture in which those decisions take place? Or should bioethical principles be derived from the moral traditions of local cultures? Ten Have and Gordijn and Bracanovic defend the universalist position, arguing that respect for cultural diversity in matters ethical will lead to a dangerous cultural relativity where vulnerable patients and research subjects will be harmed. We challenge the (...) premises of moral universalism, showing how this approach imports and imposes moral notions of Western society and leads to harm in non-western cultures. (shrink)

New Zealand’s curriculum, in terms of its approach to technological literacy, attempts to deliver a sound, philosophy-­based understanding of the nature of technology. The curriculum’s main authors claim that it conforms well to Mitcham’s (2014) categorization of different aspects of technology’s nature. Nevertheless, taking advantage of the existing literature of the philosophy of technology, this paper will reveal that the intended urriculum, though an admirable approach, still has a number of points needing improvement, and there are also certain gaps to (...) be bridged in the claimed conformity. This analysis primarily makes use of the method initiated by Nia and De Vries (2016a), based upon Mitcham’s suggested framework and other philosophers’ opinions as to the nature and various features of technology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the present study, we refer to Carr's theory on the nature of educational practice for evaluating teaching as a praxis in relation to two major changes, i.e. ubiquitous learning and massive communication caused by MOOCs. With regard to the first change, we argue that the teacher is faced with the problem of encouraging the learners to get involved in the educational activities. The second change has resulted in a reduction of teacher’s agency and loss of teaching legitimacy and hence (...) its natural feature as a morally committed action. In addition, massive communication has affected the potential encounters between teacher and student considered as the ‘Other’ and has replaced conversation with texting. We highlight the significance of teacher-student conversation as an essential element for developing reflection and self-reflection capacities. Finally, we discuss that the responsibility of teaching is beyond designing and implementing education technically through MOOCs. (shrink)

This article discusses the relation between empirical and normative approaches in bioethics. The issue of dwarf tossing, while admittedly unusual, is chosen as a point of departure because it challenges the reader to look with fresh eyes upon several central bioethical themes, including human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people. After an overview of current approaches to the integration of empirical and normative ethics, we consider five ways that the empirical and normative can be brought together to speak (...) to the problem of dwarf tossing: prescriptive applied ethics, theoretical ethics, critical applied ethics, particularist ethics and integrated empirical ethics. We defend a position of critical applied ethics that allows for a two-way relation between empirical and normative theories. Against efforts fully to integrate the normative and the empirical into one synthesis, we propose that the two should stand in tension and relation to one another. The approach we endorse acknowledges that a social practice can and should be judged both by the gathering of empirical data and by normative ethics. Critical applied ethics uses a five stage process that includes: (a) determination of the problem, (b) description of the problem, (c) empirical study of effects and alternatives, (d) normative weighing and (e) evaluation of the effects of a decision. In each stage, we explore the perspective from both the empirical (sociological) and the normative ethical point of view. We conclude by applying our five-stage critical applied ethics to the example of dwarf tossing. (shrink)

BackgroundFor many decades, the debate on children’s competence to give informed consent in medical settings concentrated on ethical and legal aspects, with little empirical underpinnings. Recently, data from empirical research became available to advance the discussion. It was shown that children’s competence to consent to clinical research could be accurately assessed by the modified MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Clinical Research. Age limits for children to be deemed competent to decide on research participation have been studied: generally children of 11.2 (...) years and above were decision-making competent, while children of 9.6 years and younger were not. Age was pointed out to be the key determining factor in children’s competence. In this article we reflect on policy implications of these findings, considering legal, ethical, developmental and clinical perspectives.DiscussionAlthough assessment of children’s competence has a normative character, ethics, law and clinical practice can benefit from research data. The findings may help to do justice to the capacities children possess and challenges they may face when deciding about treatment and research options. We discuss advantages and drawbacks of standardized competence assessment in children on a case-by-case basis compared to application of a fixed age limit, and conclude that a selective implementation of case-by-case competence assessment in specific populations is preferable. We recommend the implementation of age limits based on empirical evidence. Furthermore, we elaborate on a suitable model for informed consent involving children and parents that would do justice to developmental aspects of children and the specific characteristics of the parent-child dyad.SummaryPrevious research outcomes showed that children’s medical decision-making capacities could be operationalized into a standardized assessment instrument. Recommendations for policies include a dual consent procedure, including both child as well as parents, for children from the age of 12 until they reach majority. For children between 10 and 12 years of age, and in case of children older than 12 years in special research populations of mentally compromised patients, we suggest a case-by-case assessment of children’s competence to consent. Since such a dual consent procedure is fundamentally different from a procedure of parental permission and child assent, and would imply a considerable shift regarding some current legislations, practical implications are elaborated. (shrink)

Modern bioethics was born in the West and thus reflects, not surprisingly, the traditions of Western moral philosophy and political and social theory. When the work of bioethics was confined to the West, this background of socio-political theory and moral tradition posed few problems, but as bioethics has moved into other cultures – inside and outside of the Western world – it has become an agent of moral imperialism. We describe the moral imperialism of bioethics, discuss its dangers, and suggest (...) that global bioethics will succeed only to the extent that it is local. (shrink)