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647This text is a non-technical overview of modern decision theory. It is intended for university students with no previous acquaintance with the subject, and was primarily written for the participants of a course on risk analysis at Uppsala University in 1994.
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70The Ethics of Enabling TechnologyCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 16 (3): 257-267. 2007.Healthcare depends increasingly on advanced medical technology. In addition, other forms of technology contribute to determine how our lives are influenced by disease and disability. The extent to which persons with impaired bodily functions are forced to live their lives differently than other people depends to a large part on a variety of technologies, from wheelchairs to computer interfaces, from hearing aids to garage doors. This wide-ranging influence of technology has important ethical asp…Read more
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20Back to Basics: Belief Revision Through Direct SelectionStudia Logica 107 (5): 887-915. 2019.Traditionally, belief change is modelled as the construction of a belief set that satisfies a success condition. The success condition is usually that a specified sentence should be believed or not believed. Furthermore, most models of belief change employ a select-and-intersect strategy. This means that a selection is made among primary objects that satisfy the success condition, and the intersection of the selected objects is taken as outcome of the operation. However, the select-and-intersect…Read more
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59The false promises of risk analysisRatio 6 (1): 16-26. 1993.The relatively new discipline of risk analysis promises to provide objective guidance in some of the most controversial issues in modern high‐technology societies. Four conditions are discussed that must be satisfied for this promise to be fulfilled. Since none of these conditions is satisfied, risk analysis does not keep its promise. In its attempts to reduce genuinely political issues to technocratic calculations, it neglects many of the factors that should influence decisions on risk acceptan…Read more
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37Defining "good" and "bad" in terms of "better"Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 31 (1): 136-149. 1989.
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36The Ethics of BiobanksCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 13 (4): 319-326. 2004.Due to modern biochemistry and, in particular, recent developments in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, human samples have become the most important raw materials for advancement in the health sciences. Such material has been at the center of fundamental biomedical research for a long time. What is new is its increased usefulness in research with direct clinical relevance, such as the development of drugs. Because of the larger commercial involvement in such research, this has also led t…Read more
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104Values in pure and applied scienceFoundations of Science 12 (3): 257-268. 2007.In pure science, the standard approach to non-epistemic values is to exclude them as far as possible from scientific deliberations. When science is applied to practical decisions, non-epistemic values cannot be excluded. Instead, they have to be combined with scientific information in a way that leads to practically optimal decisions. A normative model is proposed for the processing of information in both pure and applied science. A general-purpose corpus of scientific knowledge, with high entry…Read more
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35Protecting people in research: A comparison between biomedical and traffic research (review)Science and Engineering Ethics 13 (1): 99-115. 2007.Traffic research shares a fundamental dilemma with other areas of empirical research in which humans are potentially put at risk. Research is justified because it can improve safety in the long run. Nevertheless, people can be harmed in the research situation. Hence, we need to balance short-term risks against long-term safety improvements, much as in other areas of research with human subjects. In this paper we focus on ethical issues that arise when human beings are directly affected in the pe…Read more
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75Safe Contraction RevisitedIn Sven Ove Hansson (ed.), David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems (Outstanding Contributions to Logic, Vol. 3), Springer. 2014.Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on s…Read more
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58What is technological science?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (3): 523-527. 2007.The technological sciences have at least six defining characteristics that distinguish them from the other sciences. They have human-made rather than natural objects as their study objects, include the practice of engineering design, define their study objects in functional terms, evaluate these study objects with category-specified value statements, employ less far-reaching idealizations than the natural sciences, and do not need an exact mathematical solution when a sufficiently close approxim…Read more
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9Understanding Technological Function Introduction to the special issue on the Dual Nature programmeTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 6 (2): 87-92. 2002.
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46Bioethics in SwedenCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 15 (3): 285-293. 2006.Sweden is probably one of the most secularized nations in the world. Therefore religious arguments tend to play a smaller role in the public bioethical debate than in most other countries. Issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and therapeutic cloning have been far less controversial in Sweden than elsewhere. Instead, other issues have dominated recent bioethical debates in Sweden, in particular those concerning privacy and the control over biological information about individuals
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160Equality and priorityUtilitas 17 (3): 299-309. 2005.This article argues that, contrary to the received view, prioritarianism and egalitarianism are not jointly incompatible theories in normative ethics. By introducing a distinction between weighing and aggregating, the authors show that the seemingly conflicting intuitions underlying prioritarianism and egalitarianism are consistent. The upshot is a combined position, equality-prioritarianism, which takes both prioritarian and egalitarian considerations into account in a technically precise manne…Read more
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61Uncertainty and ControlDiametros 53 50-59. 2017.In a decision making context, an agent’s uncertainty can be either epistemic, i.e. due to her lack of knowledge, or agentive, i.e. due to her not having made use of her decision-making power. In cases when it is unclear whether or not a decision maker presently has control over her own future actions, it is difficult to determine whether her uncertainty is epistemic or agentive. Such situations are often difficult for the agent to deal with, but from an outsider’s perspective, they can have sens…Read more
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20Three Bioethical Debates in SwedenCambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 17 (3): 261-269. 2008.Three of the bioethical issues recently discussed in Sweden appear to be particularly interesting also to an international audience. A new law allowing restrictive use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis /human leukocyte antigen () has been implemented, a new recommendation for the cessation of life-sustaining treatment has been issued, and the scope of individual responsibility for medical mistakes has been rather thoroughly discussed
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65Implant ethicsJournal of Medical Ethics 31 (9): 519-525. 2005.Implant ethics is defined here as the study of ethical aspects of the lasting introduction of technological devices into the human body. Whereas technological implants relieve us of some of the ethical problems connected with transplantation, other difficulties arise that are in need of careful analysis. A systematic approach to implant ethics is proposed. The major specific problems are identified as those concerning end of life issues (turning off devices), enhancement of human capabilities be…Read more
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20Moral and Instrumental Norms in Food Risk CommunicationJournal of Business Ethics 101 (2). 2011.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…Read more
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89Welfare, Justice, and Pareto EfficiencyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (4): 361-380. 2004.In economic analysis, it is usually assumed that each individuals well-being (mental welfare) depends on her or his own resources (material welfare). A typology is provided of the ways in which one persons well-being may depend on the material resources of other persons. When such dependencies are taken into account, standard Paretian analysis of welfare needs to be modified. Pareto efficiency on the level of material resources need not coincide with Pareto efficiency on the level of well-being.…Read more
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20Levi Contractions and AGM Contractions: A ComparisonNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 36 (1): 103-119. 1995.A representation theorem is obtained for contraction operators that are based on Levi's recent proposal that selection functions should be applied to the set of saturatable contractions, rather than to maximal subsets as in the AGM framework. Furthermore, it is shown that Levi's proposal to base the selection on a weakly monotonic measure of informational value guarantees the satisfaction of both of Gärdenfors' supplementary postulates for contraction. These results indicate that Levi has succee…Read more
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51Order-Independent Transformative Decision RulesSynthese 147 (2): 323-342. 2005.A transformative decision rule alters the representation of a decision problem, either by changing the set of alternative acts or the set of states of the world taken into consideration, or by modifying the probability or value assignments. A set of transformative decision rules is order-independent in case the order in which the rules are applied is irrelevant. The main result of this paper is an axiomatic characterization of order-independent transformative decision rules, based on a single ax…Read more
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