The major normative recommendations in the literature on food risk communication can be summarized in the form of seven practical principles for such communication: (1) Be honest and open. (2) Disclose incentives and conflicts of interest. (3) Take all available relevant knowledge into consideration. (4) When possible, quantify risks. (5) Describe and explain uncertainties. (6) Take all the public's concerns into account. (7) Take the rights of individuals and groups seriously. We show that each of these proposed principles can be (...) justified both in terms of more fundamental ethical principles and instrumentally in terms of the communicating agent's selfinterest. The mechanisms of this concordance of justifications are discussed. It is argued that the concordance is specific for areas such as food risks in which agents such as companies and public authorities are highly dependent on the public's trust and confidence. The implications of these findings both for moral philosophy and for practical food risk communication are discussed. (shrink)

Universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the economic and social relevance of the research they produce. In the UK, for example, recent developments in the UK under the Research Excellence Framework (REF) suggest that future funding schemes will grant “significant additional recognition…where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life” (HEFCE 2009 ). Having conceded that this and similar developments are likely to continue into the future, this (...) paper explores the problematic ethical terrain facing philosophers of education under increasing pressure to produce work that has unambiguous, demonstrable practical value on terms offered by various funding regimes. A preliminary ethics of relevance is developed through an examination of the debate between John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on the relationship between philosophy, public policy and public reason. The paper then articulates and defends a principle of legitimate relevance . This principle is then applied to the case of directing disciplinary competence in philosophy of education for the educational policy process as a means to producing social and economic benefits. (shrink)

Introduction Hundreds of thousands of premature neonates born in low-income countries are implicitly denied treatment each year. Studies from India show that treatment is rationed even for neonates born at 32 gestational age weeks (GAW), and multiple external factors influence treatment decisions. Is withholding of life-saving treatment for children born between 28 and 32 GAW acceptable from an ethical perspective? Method A seven-step impartial ethical analysis, including outcome analysis of four accepted priority criteria: severity of disease, treatment effect, cost effectiveness (...) and evidence for neonates born at 28 and 32 GAW. Results The ethical analysis sketches out two possibilities: (a) It is not ethically permissible to limit treatment to neonates below 32 GAW when assigning high weight to health maximisation and overall health equality. Neonates below 32 GAW score high on severity of disease and efficiency and cost-effectiveness of treatment if one gives full weight to early years of a newborn life. It is in the child's best interest to be treated. (b) It can be considered ethically permissible if high weight is assigned to reducing inequality of welfare and maximising overall welfare and/or not granting full weight to early years of newborns is considered acceptable. From an equity-motivated health and welfare perspective, we would not accept (b), as it relies on accepting the lack of proper welfare policies for the poor and disabled in India. Conclusion Explicit priority processes in India for financing neonatal care are needed. If premature neonates are perceived as worth less than other patient groups, the reasons should be explored among a broad range of stakeholders. (shrink)

Abstract: This article offers a perspective on the role of philosophy in relation to other academic disciplines and to society in general. Among the issues treated are the delimitation of philosophy, whether it is a science, its role in the community of knowledge disciplines, its losses of subject matter to other disciplines, how it is influenced by social changes and by progress in other disciplines, and its role in interdisciplinary work. It is concluded that philosophy has an important mission in (...) promoting clarity, precision, and open-mindedness in academic research and in society at large. (shrink)

Early intervention aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a corpus of (...) EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development. (shrink)

Contemporary liberal democracies contain multiple cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. Within these societies, different interpretive communities provide divergent models for understanding health, illness, and moral obligations. Bioethicists commonly draw upon models of moral reasoning that presume the existence of shared moral intuitions. Principlist bioethics, case-based models of moral deliberation, intuitionist frameworks, and cost-benefit analyses all emphasise the uniformity of moral reasoning. However, religious and cultural differences challenge assumptions about common modes of moral deliberation. Too often, bioethicists minimize or ignore the (...) existence of multiple traditions of moral inquiry. Careful consideration of the presence of multiple horizons for moral deliberation generates challenging questions about the capacity of bioethicists to effectively resolve complex cases and social policy disputes. (shrink)

Beyond the well‐known ethical issues involved in medical experimentation on human subjects, experimenting with embryos raises unique and particularly hard problems. Beside the psychological obstacles connected with the fear of ‘‘playing God" and the awe with which we hold the process of the creation of human beings, there are three philosophical problems which are the main subject of the article:1. The logical problem of circularity: the morality of experimenting on embryos is dependent on the status of the embryo, which in (...) turn is partly decided by experimentation.2. The metaphysical problem: experiments are justified by the benefits they bring to human subjects; but it is doubtful whether an early embryo is a ‘‘subject" and whether coming into being is a ‘‘benefit".3. The moral problem: the standard constraint on medical experiments is that they benefit either the individual subject or at least members of a relevantly defined group of patients suffering from the same syndrome. But embryo experimentation is often associated with potential cure to people of a completely different category .Finally, the article discusses the limits of the force of philosophical arguments in the formation of actual policies for regulating such practices as experimenting with embryos. The widely‐shared fourteen‐day limit is shown to be a sound practical compromise despite the difficulties in justifying it philosophically. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to articulate and critically discuss different answers to the following question: How should decision-makers deal with conflicts that arise when the values usually entailed in ethical guidelines – such as accuracy, privacy, non-discrimination and transparency – for the use of Artificial Intelligence clash with one another? To begin with, I focus on clarifying some of the general advantages of using such guidelines in an ethical analysis of the use of AI. Some disadvantages will also (...) be presented and critically discussed. Second, I will show that we need to distinguish between three kinds of conflict that can exist for ethical guidelines used in the moral assessment of AI. This section will be followed by a critical discussion of different answers to the question of how to handle what we shall call internal and external values conflicts. Finally, I will wrap up with a critical discussion of three different strategies to resolve what is called a ‘genuine value conflict’. These strategies are: the ‘accepting the existence of irresolvable conflict’ view, the ranking view, and value monism. This article defends the ‘accepting the existence of irresolvable conflict’ view. It also argues that even though the ranking view and value monism, from a merely theoretical point of view, are better equipped to solve genuine value conflicts among values in ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence, this is not the case in real-life decision-making. Keywords: AI; ethical guidelines; algorithm-based sentencing; value conflicts. (shrink)

This article offers a perspective on the role of philosophy in relation to other academic disciplines and to society in general. Among the issues treated are the delimitation of philosophy, whether it is a science, its role in the community of knowledge disciplines, its losses of subject matter to other disciplines, how it is influenced by social changes and by progress in other disciplines, and its role in interdisciplinary work. It is concluded that philosophy has an important mission in promoting (...) clarity, precision, and open‐mindedness in academic research and in society at large. (shrink)