Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the mechanism for emotion induction, a (...) cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction. (shrink)

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

A successor to the acclaimed 'Music and Emotion', The Handbook of Music and Emotion provides comprehensive coverage of the field, in all its breadth and depth. As well as summarizing what is currently known about music and emotion, it will also stimulate further research in promising directions that have been little studied.

Culinary products have culinary value. That is, they have value qua culinary products. However, what is the nature of culinary value and what elements determine it? In the light of the central and universal role that culinary products play in our lives, offering a philosophical analysis of culinary value is a matter of interest. This paper attempts to do just this. It develops three different possible models of culinary value, two rather restricted ones and a third more encompassing one, rejects (...) the first two, and defends the third one. (shrink)

Instrumental values are often considered to be inferior to intrinsic values. One reason for this is that instrumental values are extrinsic and rely on two factors: (a) a means–end relationship that is (b) conducive to something of final or intrinsic value. In this paper, I will investigate the conditions under which bearers of instrumental value are given different value or owed different levels of respect. Such conditions include the number of means that are conducive to something of final or intrinsic (...) value as well as the form of causality that is implied. It will be suggested that different numbers and causal relations will imply different degrees of reverence or respect to the bearers of instrumental value. I will also critically investigate recent proposals such as relational values that allegedly go beyond the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value. Drawing from this critical analysis, a nuanced picture of instrumental value will be provided. (shrink)

This book examines the role of ethics and philosophy in biodiversity conservation. The objective of this book is two-fold: on the one hand it offers a detailed and systematic account of central normative concepts often used, but rarely explicated nor justified, within conservation biology. Such concepts include 'values', 'rights', and 'duties'. The second objective is to emphasize to environmental philosophers and applied ethicists the many interesting decision-making challenges of biodiversity conservation. The book argues that a nuanced account of instrumental values (...) provides a powerful tool for reasoning about the values of biodiversity. It also scrutinizes relational values, the concept of rights of nature, and risk, and show how moral philosophy proves indispensable for these concepts. Consequently, it engages with recent suggestions on normative aspects of biodiversity conservation, and show the need for moral philosophy in biodiversity conservation. The overriding aim of this book is to provide conservation biologists and policy-makers with a systematic overview of concepts and assessments of the reasons for reaching prescriptive conclusions about biodiversity conservation. This will prove instrumental in clarifying the role of applied ethics and a refined understanding of the tools it can provide. This title will be of interest to students and scholars of conservation biology, conservation policy, environmental ethics and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Do recipes and their instances, i.e. dishes, have any representational power? This is vexed question in the philosophy of food. In this paper, I take a fresh look on the issue by means of a theory of recipes. I argue that once a certain conception of recipes is in place, complemented by a certain conception of traditions, it becomes plausible that certain recipes, traditional ones, and their instances, traditional dishes, can be said to represent past living conditions. Hence, at some (...) some food items experiences could be said to genuinely possess a representational dimension. (shrink)

That nature, including insentient entities such as trees, rivers, or ecosystems, should be recognized as right-holders is an enticing thought that would have substantial practical repercussions. But the position finds little support from moral conceptions of rights and moral distinctions that have judicial relevance in the sense of providing normative reasons for legislation and assessing existing laws. An alternative to viewing rights of nature as proper rights resting on valid moral claims that ought to be legally recognized is to regard (...) them as ‘manifesto’ rights. Such rights are based on political demands and hold even if there is no one with a corresponding duty to fulfill them. I investigate whether rights of nature can be considered manifesto rights. Some objections to regarding rights of nature as manifesto rights will be considered, such as difficulties of delimiting the borders of an environmental entity and making successful analogies with existing (human) rights based on interests and needs. It will be suggested that while some of those challenges can be mitigated by custodianship, it is not clear what needs of insentient entities in nature would justify such claims. It is found that rights of nature depend substantially on legitimate custodians both for delineation of the entity in question and for establishing interest-like characteristics. But rights of nature are not manifesto rights when there is a legitimate custodian having the possibility of evoking duties in others. However, the need for a legitimate custodian in delimitation and establishing normatively relevant characteristics of specific environmental entities defeats universal appeals to rights of nature. (shrink)

This article argues that holistic ecocentrism unnecessarily introduces elements to explain why we ought to halt biodiversity loss. I suggest that atomistic accounts can justify the same conclusion by utilising fewer elements. Hence, why we ought to preserve biodiversity can be made reasonable without adding elements such as intrinsic values of ecosystems or moral obligations to conserve collectives of organisms. Between two equally good explanations of the same phenomenon, the explanation utilising fewer elements, which speaks in favour of atomistic accounts, (...) will be the better one. (shrink)

In the past years, food has found itself a central focus of creativity in contemporary culture and a pinnacle of this trend has been the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma in Copenhagen. But what is culinary creativity? And what is distinctive about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at places like Noma? In this paper, I attempt to answer these two questions. Building up on pioneering work on creativity by Margaret Boden, I argue that creativity is a matter (...) of adding new valuable things to the world. I then distinguish three different ways a recipe can be creative, building up on different culinary trends. I then focus on the specific case of Noma and argue that what is specific about the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma is that it emphasizes the role that recipes can play in mediating our relation to the environment. (shrink)

Can culinary items bear heritage value? That is, can culinary items bear the kind of universal value shared by, say, a paleolithic site and the Hiroshima P.

This paper introduces the philosophical foundation and practical application of empirical phenomenology in social research. The approach of empirical phenomenology builds upon the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the sociologist Alfred Schütz, but considers how their more philosophical and theoretical insights can be used in empirical research. It aims at being practically useful for anyone doing qualitative studies and concerned about safeguarding the perspective of those studied. The main idea of empirical phenomenology is that scientific (...) explanation must be grounded in the first-order construction of the actors; that is, in their own meanings. These constructions are then related to the second-order constructions of the scientist. In this paper, empirical phenomenology is considered in the light of phenomenological philosophy. The paper includes an explication of the approach, which is summarized in seven steps through which the researcher is guided, and considers its implications for qualitative methods such as interviewing and participant observation. (shrink)

In recent years many actors have investigated the possibilities of strengthening legal environmental protection by making appeals to the rights of nature. Such rights have also been legally encoded in some countries. This paper will critically investigate whether it is reasonable to ascribe moral or legal rights to nature. With support from moral and legal philosophy, different propositions in support of rights of nature will be tested to see if reasonable responses can be formulated against objections. If not, the position (...) that nature has rights may ultimately have to be rejected, or at the very least become questionable. It will be suggested that all the investigated propositions require committing to one or several of the following shortcomings: rejecting conventional properties of rights-holders; accepting conventional properties but suggesting that natural objects and processes have those properties; accepting conflicting claims between rights of natural entities and human rights; trivializing the notion of rights. Committing to any of these have significant intellectual and practical costs, and ultimately it will be proposed that the view that nature has rights ought to be rejected. (shrink)

‘Relational value’ (RV) has intuitive credibility due to the shortcomings of existing axiological categories regarding recognizing the ethical relevance of people’s relations to nature. But RV is justified by arguments and analogies that do not hold up to closer scrutiny, which strengthens the assumption that RV is redundant. While RV may provide reasons for ethically considering some relations, much work remains to show that RV is a concept that does something existing axiological concepts cannot, beyond empirically describing relations people have (...) to environmental areas and places. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that there are differences in physicians’ and caregivers’ ethical attitudes towards clinical situations. The assumption is that the difference is driven by different values, views and judgements in specific situations. At Aalborg University Hospital, Denmark, we aimed to investigate these assumptions by conducting a large quantitative study. The study design, based on the Factorial Survey Method, was a carefully constructed survey with 50 questions designed to test which factors influenced the respondents’ ethical reasoning. The factors were (...) clustered into three categories of ethical reasoning and values. The categories were formulated in terms of easily recognizable ethical positions: consequential ethics, deontological ethics and relational ethics. Based on 2129 respondents, we found significant support for the assumption of differences between physicians and caregivers. The group of caregivers favoured the relational ethics view in clinical ethical situations, and the group of ph... (shrink)

The purpose of this theoretical article is to contribute to the analysis of knowledge and valuation in markets. In every market actors must know how to value its products. The analytical point of departure is the distinction between two ideal types of markets that are mutually exclusive, status and standard. In a status market, valuation is a function of the status rank orders or identities of the actors on both sides of the market, which is more entrenched than the value (...) of what is traded in the market. In a market characterized by a standard, the situation is reversed; the scale of value is more entrenched than the rankings of actors in the market. In a status market actors need to know about the other actors involved as there is no scale of value for evaluating the items traded in the market independently of its buyers and sellers. In a standard market it is more important to know how to meet the standard in relation to which all items traded are valued. The article includes empirical examples and four testable hypotheses. (shrink)

For any market to work properly, certain key elements are necessary: competition, pricing, rules, clearly defined offers, and easy access to information. Without these components, there would be chaos. Orderly Fashion examines how order is maintained in the different interconnected consumer, producer, and credit markets of the global fashion industry. From retailers in Sweden and the United Kingdom to producers in India and Turkey, Patrik Aspers focuses on branded garment retailers--chains such as Gap, H&M, Old Navy, Topshop, and Zara. (...) Aspers investigates these retailers' interactions and competition in the consumer market for fashion garments, traces connections between producer and consumer markets, and demonstrates why market order is best understood through an analysis of its different forms of social construction. Emphasizing consumption rather than production, Aspers considers the larger retailers' roles as buyers in the production market of garments, and as potential objects of investment in financial markets. He shows how markets overlap and intertwine and he defines two types of markets--status markets and standard markets. In status markets, market order is related to the identities of the participating actors more than the quality of the goods, whereas in standard markets the opposite holds true. Looking at how identities, products, and values create the ordered economic markets of the global fashion business, Orderly Fashion has wide implications for all modern markets, regardless of industry. (shrink)

I will outline four justifications of regional ecological obligations calling for different political authorities to collaborate for ecological reasons: through voluntary agreement between political entities united by an ecological region; by a shared regional history or cultural relations to an ecological region; with reference to ‘place-based’ duties with an ecological basis; or by obligations to an extended set of individual right-holders. None are conclusive reasons but show that there are normative grounds for regional collaboration of separate political authorities. The article (...) contributes to discussion on, despite its practical relevance, a much neglected concept in political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines three proposals on the difference between the complex and the simple view about personal identity: Parfit’s original introduction of the distinction, Gasser and Stefan’s definition, and Noonan’s recent proposal. I argue that the first two classify the paradigm cases of simplicity as complex, while Noonan’s proposal makes simplicity and complexity turn on features whose relevance for the distinction is questionable. Given these difficulties, I examine why we should be interested in whether a position is complex or simple. (...) I describe two purposes of having a distinction, and show that extant accounts of the complex versus simple distinction fail to serve these. I argue that unless we find a satisfying account of the difference between complex and simple positions, we should not frame discourses on personal identity in these terms. (shrink)

Uncertainty is an intriguing aspect of social life. Uncertainty is epistemic, future-oriented, and implies that we can neither predict nor foresee what will happen when acting. In cases in which no institutionalized certainty about future states exists, or can be generated, judgment is needed. This article presents the forms by which uncertainty is reduced as a result of judgments made about different alternatives in a process involving several actors. This type of uncertainty may exist, for example, about which artist is (...) the best, which offer in the market is more valuable, which football team is better than all the rest, or which research proposal will get a grant. The result of different forms of uncertainty reduction is increased certainty concerning alternatives in relation to one another, such as good and bad, rank lists, scores, quality assessment, and “winner and losers.” Based on the result, uncertainty is reduced and action is facilitated. The forms are structural and comprise roles; may be legitimate in a smaller or larger domain; and may exist in all spheres of life, as exemplified in sports competitions, in labor markets, and in the ranking of universities. Three forms of uncertainty reduction based on judgment are identified in this article: (1) decision, made by an authority; (2) valuation, by means of which order arises as a result of actors ascribing values; and (3) contest, by which an order is the result of direct struggle. (shrink)

Den form for anvendt etik, som denne antologi repræsenterer, sigter mod at anvise løsninger på de etiske problemer, som samfunds- og teknologi-udviklingen fører med sig. De helt konkrete aktuelle etiske udfordringer, som tages op i denne bog er: Virksomheders adgang til jobansøgeres straffeattester, det fælles medicinkort, fordelingsretfærdighed i forhold til miljøudfordringer, Al Qaedas brug af de elektroniske medier, Irak-krigens legitimitet, evidensbaseret pædagogik samt personers ansvar for egen sundhed. Bogens syv bidrag er skrevet af forskere ved universiteterne i Aalborg, Roskilde, Aarhus (...) og Syddanske Universitet og forsynet med en indledning ved de to redaktører Patrik Kjærsdam Telléus og Mogens Pahuus. (shrink)

Xenotransplantation is any transplantation, implantation, or infusion of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human bodily fluids, cells, tissues, or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs into a human recipient. Most scientists agree that clinical xenotransplantation should not be performed in the absence of accompanying public health safeguards The science upon which that consensus is based has been extensively described in the literature. By and large (...) the most compelling reason for public health safeguards is the possible introduction of new infectious agents into the human life cycle as a result of xenotransplantation.The most frequent source of new infectious diseases in human populations is the transfer of agents, such as viruses, bacteria, or prions, from animals to man. Human diseases and infectious agents that are thought to have originated from animals include influenza, rabies, malaria, lassa fever, lyme disease, AIDS, yellow fever, tuberculosis, the human t-cell lymphotropic virus, the herpes B virus, the hantavirus, and even the bubonic and pneumonic plagues. (shrink)

I support the music and social bonding framework, but submit that the authors' predictions lack discriminative power, and that they do not engage sufficiently with the emotion mechanisms that mediate between musical features and social bonding. I elaborate on how various mechanisms may contribute, in unique ways, to social bonding at various levels to help account for the socio-emotional effects of music.

Attention serves to represent selectively relevant information at the expense of competing and irrelevant information, but the mechanisms and effects of attention are not unitary. The great variety of methods and techniques used to study automaticity and attention for facial expressions suggests that the time should now be ready for a better breaking down of the concepts of automaticity and attention into elementary constituents that are more tractable to investigations in cognitive neuroscience. This article reviews both the behavioral and neuroimaging (...) literature on the automatic perception of facial expressions of emotion in healthy volunteers and patients with brain damage. It focuses on aspects of automaticity in face perception that relate to task goals, attentional control, and conscious awareness. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings converge to support some degree of automaticity in processing facial expressions and is likely to reflect distinct components that should be better disentangled at both the behavioral and neural level. (shrink)

Despite the awareness that climate change is an increasingly urgent issue to manage, little is being done to adequately achieve mitigation targets and ambitions. It has been suggested that this is due to ill-equipped normative frameworks and that common concepts, such as responsibility, harm, and justice, collapse when applied to climate change. One perspective has however been missing from this debate – the deep ecological perspective. The paper will investigate the deep ecological view and will argue that it can provide (...) a valuable contribution to normative issues pertaining to climate change. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate whether algorithmic fairness is an inconsistent concept (the inconsistency thesis). Drawing on the work of Kevin Scharp, inconsistent concepts can apply and disapply at the same time (2.). It is shown that paradigmatic issues of algorithmic fairness fit this description (3.). Similarities and differences to received views (4.) and alternatives to the inconsistency thesis are considered (5.). Suggestions are articulated on how the inconsistency thesis might hold ground nevertheless, or at the very least denotes a (...) distinctive option in argumentative space whose status and implications merit further evaluation. (shrink)

Empathic perspective taking involves a phenomenally rich reaction to another’s mental state, in an attempt to understand the other by feeling with them. But can we take just any perspective, even if the person we aim to understand seems fundamentally different from us? In this paper, we will explore the possibility of empathically understanding others that are different from us with respect to one aspect of their mental life: their sensibility.

How do markets come about? This article offers a first systematic analysis of three different ideal types of market fashioning: mutual adjustment, organization, and fields. Although aspects of these are identifiable in most empirical markets, these three ideal types provide analytic tools for students of real markets and marketplaces. After going through this comprehensive literature, it is argued that mutual adjustment, which refers to non-planned processes, is affinity with markets in which products are differentiated, for example, producer markets. Organization refers (...) to process driven by attempts to decide for others and shows affinity with markets for standardized and homogenous products, for example, stock exchanges. Organization also accounts for the making of marketplaces. The broader notion of fields does not refer to any specific process, but accounts for the context of market fashioning and its respective power struggles. (shrink)

In a series of publications, Derek Matravers has challenged what he calls the “consensus view” of the nature of fiction. According to this consensus view, there is a conceptual route that starts with the notion of a prescription to imagine and that ends up with a systematic distinction between fiction and non-fictional representations. This paper engages in a systematic reconstruction of Matravers’ argument against the consensus view as well as a rebuttal of recent rejoinders offered by Gregory Currie and Kathleen (...) Stock. It concludes that the challenge against the consensus view, once properly understood, still stands. (shrink)

The shortcomings of existing legal tools to abate species extinctions and habitat losses raise the attractiveness of recognizing rights of nature (RoN), in effect granting legal standing directly to non-human entities and collectives. RoN have been recognized in several domestic legislations and attract increasing popularity and enthusiasm. Yet, from an analytical and general perspective RoN rely on a contentious relation between concepts such as intrinsic value and interests, respectively, as justifying RoN. Consequently, a general analytical defense of RoN has not (...) been provided and recognition hitherto has been constrained to the contingent factors of domestic legislations. Here, I will provide an examination of RoN by way of expressive theories of law where law expresses (some) ethical values. Expressive theories of law have not previously been related to RoN. I will examine whether such theories have the potential of defending RoN as rights that legislatures have strong general reasons to recognize. The examination of RoN through the lens of expressivist legal theories provide a better understanding of RoN, and the analytical and conceptual commitments they presuppose, including the relation between ethics and law and the values underpinning RoN to be expressed by law. (shrink)

Background Big data and AI applications now play a major role in many health contexts. Much research has already been conducted on ethical and social challenges associated with these technologies. Likewise, there are already some studies that investigate empirically which values and attitudes play a role in connection with their design and implementation. What is still in its infancy, however, is the comparative investigation of the perspectives of different stakeholders. Methods To explore this issue in a multi-faceted manner, we conducted (...) semi-structured interviews as well as focus group discussions with patients and clinicians. These empirical methods were used to gather interviewee’s views on the opportunities and challenges of medical AI and other data-intensive applications. Results Different clinician and patient groups are exposed to medical AI to differing degrees. Interviewees expect and demand that the purposes of data processing accord with patient preferences, and that data are put to effective use to generate social value. One central result is the shared tendency of clinicians and patients to maintain individualistic ascriptions of responsibility for clinical outcomes. Conclusions Medical AI and the proliferation of data with import for health-related inferences shape and partially reconfigure stakeholder expectations of how these technologies relate to the decision-making of human agents. Intuitions about individual responsibility for clinical outcomes could eventually be disrupted by the increasing sophistication of data-intensive and AI-driven clinical tools. Besides individual responsibility, systemic governance will be key to promote alignment with stakeholder expectations in AI-driven and data-intensive health settings. (shrink)

During recent years the relevance of environmental ethics to nature conservation has been increasingly questioned. This doubt mainly takes two forms: (1) Conservation biology is regarded as solely a scientific endeavor, and therefore ethics is redundant; (2) It is acknowledged that values are part and parcel of conservation science, practice and policy, but environmental ethics is considered to have little positive contribution to make. We focus on the latter form and argue that it enables only suppressed normative premises omitted from (...) critical scrutiny, and that relying on suppressed premises for making prescriptive conclusions is normatively unreasonable. Furthermore, even if the normative premises were well-founded, the stance has unwelcome implications. We show ways in which environmental ethics provides critical and structured manners of reasoning on normative premises. This invites more collaboration between nature conservation and environmental ethics in the future. (shrink)

Cross-cultural studies of music and emotion are needed to assess the generalizability of results and also have important implications for theory development. However, progress requires that the domain is broken down into smaller constituents based on key distinctions. For example, a multilevel theory of emotion-causation implies that the relative contributions made by culture and biology differ depending on the underlying mechanism involved, which precludes general conclusions. Such an account of emotions to music might be cross-culturally valid at the level of (...) mechanisms even if there is cross-cultural diversity in musical surface features and aroused emotions. An analysis in terms of psychological mechanisms can provide the necessary bridge between biological and social-constructionist perspectives on musical emotions. (shrink)

A somewhat prominent view in the literature is that language provides opportunity to program the brain with ‘cognitive gadgets’, or ‘virtual machines’. Here, I explore the possibility that thinking itself – internal symbolic responses to stimuli that are either intrinsic or extrinsic, and computational procedures that operate on these internal symbolic representations – is such a software product rather than just an emergent phenomenon of the brain’s hardware being ‘complex enough’, or the brain processing information in a manner that is (...) ‘integrated enough’. I also present a testable hypothesis that would indicate the presence of such a thought-gadget, and briefly overview some evolutionary pre-requisites for its existence. Further, I explore some consequences the existence of such a gadget would entail for our understanding of consciousness. The nature of the gadget is left unspecified as the article is not a blueprint for the thinking gadget, but an argument in favor of its existence. (shrink)

I argue that Paul Ricœur displaces and decentres established theodicies; the issue of evil is perceived as a practical rather than a speculative matter. It is the view of evil as a productive aporia, which suggests that evil provokes action and obliges human beings to take a stand ethically and politically. Hence, the topic of evil is not necessarily about putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The central problem of evil has less to do with logic than with resignation, inertia, despair (...) and meaninglessness. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate three arguments for Rights of Antarctica (RoA), understood as recognising the whole continent as a rights-holder with legal standing. For this, we draw inspiration from the Antarctica Declaration, a text developed by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars and activists. We scrutinise three justifications that could potentially be used in support of RoA. First, we investigate whether arguments for Rights of Nature (RoN) elsewhere can support RoA. RoN has been accepted in several domestic legislations. (...) Unfortunately, we discover important disanalogies between RoA and RoN, defeating the purpose of justifying RoA with reference to RoN. Second, we scrutinise potential arguments that focus on giving rights to specific Antarctic ecoregions or places. However, such arguments would only cover parts of the continent, thus going against the holistic approach of RoA, and they would require using a broader understanding of ‘attachments’ as grounds for justifying rights for parts of Antarctica. In contrast, we construct an argument for accepting RoA based on four components: (1) Antarctica’s intrinsic value, (2) wider forms of human attachments, (3) Antarctica’s substantial role as a global systemic resource, and (4) the fact that Antarctica is under recurrent and substantial threats. While none of these are individually sufficient for recognising RoA, they can jointly make RoA appropriate. We conclude that it remains an open question whether international law or, more specifically, the Antarctic Treaty, would be open to such conceptual and normative innovation, adopting a new paradigm in our treatment of the nonhuman natural world. At the same time, we hope to kickstart a discussion of what RoA would require and how it should relate more generally to RoN discourses. (shrink)

This article investigates whether geoengineering can be justified as a residual obligation given that demands related to mitigating emissions of greenhouse gases are left unfulfilled due to conflicting with other demands. Ultimately, it is found that geoengineering cannot be justified due to, amongst other reasons, risks.

Social decision-making involving risks ideally results in obligations to avoid expected harms or keep them within acceptable limits. Ambitious goals aimed at avoiding or greatly reducing risks might not be feasible, forcing the acceptance of higher degrees of risk (i.e. unrealistic levels of risk reduction are revised to comport with beliefs regarding abilities). In this paper, the philosophical princi- ple ‘ought implies can’ is applied to the management of complex risks, exempli- fied by the risks associated with climate change. In (...) its common interpretation, the principle states that we cannot expect an agent to perform something that lies beyond his or her abilities. However, it is here argued that this principle requires setting thresholds for legitimate claims of inabilities that justify the waiving of normative demands. This paper discuss three claims: (1) that caution is required before revising a risk-reducing goal that is perhaps exceedingly ambitious; (2) that claims on abilities are not only descriptive, but also value-laden; and (3) that the function of a goal has to be clarified before risk-reducing goals are revised. Risk-reducing goals that initially seem unrealistic arguably serve performance- enhancing purposes in risk management. Neglecting such goals could lead to choosing less desirable, but certainly feasible, risk-reducing goals. (shrink)

_In this article we justify why justice ought to be considered in scenarios of energy transitions, stipulate what dimensions should reasonably be considered, and investigate whether such considerations are taken in Swedish parliamentary debates on energy policies. Through interviews we investigated how Swedish parliamentary politicians think through justice in energy transitions, providing a practical perspective. We conclude that while there is some overlap between minimal conditions for energy justice and the issues brought forward by Swedish politicians, several issues are omitted. (...) Examples include procedural justice and recognizing Sámi interests. On the other hand, principles of energy justice omit economic issues, which are however often brought up by respondents. It can be argued that justice issues, and not only the technical and economic issues that currently dominate the political debate, should be considered in energy transitions. It is therefore unfortunate that questions about justice are not adequately recognized by Swedish members of parliament, as outlined here by interview results. Stronger conclusions would require more empirical work, but the article points out several discrepancies between the topics discussed in the research literature on energy policies, and the topics discussed by elected parliamentarians having a specific focus on energy policies. _ _Keywords_: energy justice; energy transitions; Swedish energy policies; climate justice. (shrink)

Democratic school systems are expected to equip students with the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes needed for life as citizens, particularly through social science education. Disciplinary knowledge, derived from the academic counterparts to school subjects, is essential in developing these skills. However, research has also emphasized the importance of life-world perspectives, where students’ experiences are included and taken seriously in teaching. This study suggests that the theory of (civic) narrative competence can function as a bridge between the disciplinary domain and the (...) life-world domain in its focus on how students’ civic reasoning can be developed through teaching. The article uses narrative theory to explore how the students’ civic narratives changed and became more nuanced after a teaching segment focusing on social and political trust. In the article, we demonstrate how the students’ personal experiences colored their interpretations and orientations before the teaching segment and how their civic narratives were developed through the implemented teaching, which provided them with concepts, a theoretical model, and empirical examples. We found that the students did not discard previous perceptions after the teaching segment, but integrated them into their new knowledge and orientations, thus integrating the life-world and disciplinary domains. (shrink)

There is a growing need to implement anticipatory climate change adaptation measures, particularly in vulnerable sectors, such as in agriculture. However, setting goals to adapt is wrought with several challenges. This paper discusses two sets of challenges to goals of anticipatory adaptation, of empirical and normative character. The first set of challenges concern issues such as the extent to which the climate will change, the local impacts of such changes, and available adaptive responses. In the second set of uncertainties are (...) issues such as the distribution of burdens to enhance adaptive capacities in vulnerable agents with a legitimate claim to such resources, and what anticipatory adaptation ideally should result in. While previous discussions have been limited to either discuss the first or second set of uncertainties, this paper suggests that both dimensions should be considered when setting goals in social planning with long time frames. A taxonomy will be suggested that combines both dimensions. Furthermore, strategies for managing situations in which there are either empirical, or normative, uncertainties will be proposed which could be used in social decision-making with long planning time-frames in which goals must be set. (shrink)