Sven Ove Hansson

New technologies and practices, such as drug testing, genetic testing, and electronic surveillance infringe upon the privacy of workers on workplaces. We argue that employees have a prima facie right to privacy, but this right can be overridden by competing moral principles that follow, explicitly or implicitly, from the contract of employment. We propose a set of criteria for when intrusions into an employee''s privacy are justified. Three types of justification are specified, namely those that refer to the employer''s interests, to the interests of the employee her- or himself, and to the interests of third parties such as customers and fellow workers. For each of these three types, sub-criteria are proposed that can be used to determine whether a particular infringement into an employee''s privacy is morally justified or not.

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 requirements, has a central role in this model. Due to its high entry requirements, the information that it contains is sufficiently reliable for the vast majority of practical purposes. However, for some purposes, the corpus needs to be supplemented with additional information, such as scientific indications of danger that do not satisfy the entry requirements for the corpus. The role of non-epistemic values in the evaluation of scientific information should, as far as possible, be limited to determining the level of evidence required for various types of practical decisions

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 performance of research by examining how the ethical requirements in biomedical research can inform traffic research. After introducing the basic ethical requirements on biomedical research, each of the major requirements is discussed in relation to traffic research. We identify the main areas where biomedical research and traffic research differ, and where the ethical requirements from the former cannot easily be transferred to the latter. Finally, we argue that there is a need for systematic studies of the ethics of traffic research and point to some of the issues that need to be addressed.

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 safe contraction, provides some new results and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation.

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 approximation is available. In combination, the six characteristics are sufficient to show that the technological sciences are neither branches nor applications of the natural sciences, but form a different group of sciences with specific characteristics of their own.Keywords: Technological sciences; Technology; Functional concepts; Idealization; Design.

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 manner. On this view, the moral value of a distribution of well-being is a product of two factors: the sum of all individuals' priority-adjusted well-being, and a measure of the equality of the distribution in question. Some implications of equality-prioritarianism are considered.

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 sensible pragmatic solutions.

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 beyond normal levels, mental changes and personal identity, and cultural effects

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

The maximin rule can be used as a formal version of the precautionary principle. This paper evaluates the feasibility and the intuitive plausibility of this decision rule. The major conclusions are: (1) Precaution has to be applied symmetrically. (2) Precaution is only possible when outcomes are comparable in terms of value, so that it can be determined which outcome is worst. (3) Precaution is sensitive to standards of possibility. Far-away scenarios have to be excluded, and it is difficult to find a principled way to draw the line. (4) Precaution is sensitive to the framing of decision problems. Local cautiousness may add up to global incautiousness.

Value statements can be divided into three major groups according to how their criteria of evaluation are specified. The first of these groups consists of those value statements that are unspecified with respect to the criteria of evaluation. Here is one example: Her decision was very good. The second group consists of the viewpoint-specified value statements. In these value statements, an explicit point of view is given, from which the evaluation is made. We often use adverbs such as “morally”, “aesthetically” etc. to express this type of specification.

Analytical tools that give precision to the concept of "independence of syntax" are developed in the form of a series of substitutivity principles. These principles are applied in a study of the rôle of language in belief revision theory. It is shown that sets of sentences can be used in models of belief revision to convey more information than what is conveyed by the combined propositional contents of the respective sets. It is argued that it would be unwise to programmatically restrain the use of sets of sentences to that of representing propositional contents. Instead, the expressive power of language should be used as fully as possible. Therefore, syntax-independence should not be seen as a criterion of adequacy for language-based models of information-processing, but rather as a property that emerges from some but not all the idealization processes through which such models are constructed.

In the last half century, decision theory has had a deep influence on moral theory. Its impact has largely been beneficial. However, it has also given rise to some problems, two of which are discussed here. First, issues such as risk-taking and risk imposition have been left out of ethics since they are believed to belong to decision theory, and consequently the ethical aspects of these issues have not been treated in either discipline. Secondly, ethics has adopted the decision-theoretical idea that action-guidance has to be based on cause–effect or means–ends relationships between an individual action and its possible outcomes. This is problematic since the morally relevant connections between an action and future events are not fully covered by such relationships. In response to the first problem it is proposed that moral theory should deal directly and extensively with issues such as risk-taking and risk imposition, thereby intruding unabashedly into the traditional territory of decision theory. As a partial response to the second problem it is proposed that moral theorizing should release itself from the decision-theoretical requirement that the moral status of an action has to be derivable from the consequences (or other properties) that are assignable to that action alone. In particular, the effects that an action can have in combination with other actions by the same or other agents are valid arguments in an action-guiding moral discourse, even if its contribution to these combined consequences cannot be isolated and evaluated separately.