Sven Ove Hansson

As part of the conference commemorating Theoria's 75th anniversary, a round table discussion on philosophy publishing was held in Bergendal, Sollentuna, Sweden, on 1 October 2010. Bengt Hansson was the chair, and the other participants were eight editors-in-chief of philosophy journals: Hans van Ditmarsch (Journal of Philosophical Logic), Pascal Engel (Dialectica), Sven Ove Hansson (Theoria), Vincent Hendricks (Synthese), Søren Holm (Journal of Medical Ethics), Pauline Jacobson (Linguistics and Philosophy), Anthonie Meijers (Philosophical Explorations), Henry S. Richardson (Ethics) and Hans Rott (Erkenntnis)

As part of the conference commemorating Theoria's 75th anniversary, a round table discussion on philosophy publishing was held in Bergendal, Sollentuna, Sweden, on 1 October 2010. Bengt Hansson was the chair, and the other participants were eight editors‐in‐chief of philosophy journals: Hans van Ditmarsch (Journal of Philosophical Logic), Pascal Engel (Dialectica), Sven Ove Hansson (Theoria), Vincent Hendricks (Synthese), Søren Holm (Journal of Medical Ethics), Pauline Jacobson (Linguistics and Philosophy), Anthonie Meijers (Philosophical Explorations), Henry S. Richardson (Ethics) and Hans Rott (Erkenntnis).

The AGM theory of belief contraction is extended tomultiple contraction, i.e. to contraction by a set of sentences rather than by a single sentence. There are two major variants: Inpackage contraction all the sentences must be removed from the belief set, whereas inchoice contraction it is sufficient that at least one of them is removed. Constructions of both types of multiple contraction are offered and axiomatically characterized. Neither package nor choice contraction can in general be reduced to contractions by single sentences; in the finite case choice contraction allows for reduction.

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 acceptance. A list of tentative guidelines is given for numerical decision support that encourages democratic decision‐making instead of trying to evade it.

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 to greater economic interests in human biological material and in the information that can be extracted from it

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 method is difficult to justify, in particular since the primary objects are not themselves plausible outcome candidates. Some of the most controversial features of belief change theory, such as recovery and the impossibility of Ramsey test conditionals, are closely connected with the select-and-intersect method. It is proposed that a selection mechanism should instead operate directly on the potential outcomes, and select only one of them. In this way many of the problems that are associated with the select-and-intersect method can be avoided. This model is simpler than previous models in the important Ockhamist sense of doing away with intermediate, cognitively inaccessible objects. However, the role of simplicity as a choice criterion in the direct selection among potential outcomes is left as an open issue.

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 aspects, but has seldom been discussed in bioethics, the ethics of technology, or other branches of applied ethics

abstract Even though much research has been devoted to studies of safety, the concept of safety is in itself under‐theorised, especially concerning its relation to epistemic uncertainty. In this paper we propose a conceptual analysis of safety. The paper explores the distinc‐tion between absolute and relative safety, as well as that between objective and subjective safety. Four potential dimensions of safety are discussed, viz. harm, probability, epistemic uncertainty, and control. The first three of these are used in the proposed definition of safety, whereas it is argued that control should not be included in a reasonable definition of safety. It is shown that strictly speaking, an objective safety concept is not attainable. Instead, an intersubjective concept is proposed that brings us as close as possible to an objective concept.

In the first part of this paper, I clear the ground from frequent misconceptions of the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origins of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the most important of which is evolutionistic: if any behaviour that favours our equilibrium with the environment is potentially adaptive, nothing can be more effective for this goal than developing an attitude toward the natural world that considers it as a dispenser of sacred norms that must be invariably respected. By referring to the Aristotelian notion of human flourishing illustrated in the first part of the paper, in the second I discuss as a case study some ethical problems raised by mini-chips implantable in our bodies. I conclude by defending their potential beneficial effects of such new technological instruments

Although stability is a central notion in several academic disciplines, the parallelsremain unexplored since previous discussions of the concept have been almostexclusively subject-specific. In the literature we have found three basic conceptsof stability, that we call constancy, robustness, and resilience. They are all foundin both the natural and the social sciences. To analyze the three concepts we introducea general formal framework in which stability relates to transitions between states. Itcan then be shown that robustness is a limiting case of resilience, whereas neitherconstancy nor resilience can be defined in terms of the other. Hence, there are twobasic concepts of stability, both of which are used in both the social and the naturalsciences. This congruence in the concepts of stability is of particular interest forendeavours to construct models that represent both natural and social phenomena.

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.