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51Part I: Introduction to the Philosophy of Hate CrimeIn David Brax & Christian Munthe (eds.), The Philosophy of Hate Crime Anthology, University of Gothenburg. 2013.
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77Moral relativism comes in many forms. Most discussed of these are metaethical ideas that make claim to some form of relativity regarding the truth, meaning and/or knowledge of moral judgements. Notwithstanding the vast differences that exist between more precise versions of metaethical relativism (MR), they all have one basic feature in common: A moral judgement can only be true (or have a certain meaning, or be known) relative to a person or some group of persons. However, a moral judgement to …Read more
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24The IOC and WADA have announced their ambition to develop control program in order to detect athletes' illegitimate use of genetic technology for enhancing performance. Although it is far from clear what such uses should be counted as illegitimate, as well as to what extent the idea of control programs for such things is a feasible idea, I will assume that such programs will concern so-called somatic genetic modifications that aims at altering the athlete's initial bodily biochemistry in a way t…Read more
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50The precautionary principle (PP) has been criticised for almost every intellectual sin one may imagine: unclarity, impracticability, rigidity, implausibility etc. Recognising the rather obvious fact that there is no such thing as one PP, this paper attempts to address this criticism on a more constructive note than merely view it as forcing us to be "for or against" precaution. This is done by connecting an underlying ethical ideal regarding the imposition of risks present in most formulations o…Read more
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36A new landscape of prenatal testing is presently developing, including new techniques for risk-reducing, non-invasive sampling of foetal DNA and drastically enhanced possibilities of what may be rapidly and precisely analysed, surrounded by a growing commercial genetic testing industry and a general trend of individualization in healthcare policies. This article applies a set of established ethical notions from past debates on PNT for analysing PNT screening-programmes in this new situation. Whi…Read more
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25Public health is often distinguished from heaslth care in that it is said to serve more 'collective' goals, such as 'the common good' rather than the good of individual people. However, it is not clear what this good is supposed to be (although it is supposed to be 'common'). In regular health care we see in the West a gradual expansion of traditional goals exclusively in terms of length and quality of life to goals having to do more with autonomy - the ability of people to control and direct th…Read more
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Recension av Thomas Anderberg och Ingmar Persson: "Abortetik"Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 10 (3): 32. 1989.
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11Conscientious refusal in healthcare: the Swedish solutionJournal of Medical Ethics 43 (4): 257-259. 2017.The Swedish solution to the legal handling of professional conscientious refusal in healthcare is described. No legal right to conscientious refusal for any profession or class of professional tasks exists in Sweden, regardless of the religious or moral background of the objection. The background of this can be found in strong convictions about the importance of public service provision and related civic duties, and ideals about rule of law, equality and non-discrimination. Employee's requests t…Read more
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46The morality of scientific opennessScience and Engineering Ethics 2 (4): 411-428. 1996.The ideal of scientific openness — i.e. the idea that scientific information should be freely accessible to interested parties — is strongly supported throughout the scientific community. At the same time, however, this ideal does not appear to be absolute in the everyday practice of science. In order to get the credit for new scientific advances, scientists often keep information to themselves. Also, it is common practice to withhold information obtained in commissioned research when the scient…Read more
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The Philosophy of Hate Crime AnthologyUniversity of Gothenburg. 2013.Introductory anthology to the philosophy of hate crime, written in the EU project "When Law and Hate Collide".
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32While health care goals are usually formulated in terms of the securing of good health for the population, the goal of public health is to an increasing extent, at least in Western countries, being formulated in terms of the provision of societal preconditions for securing of good health. This goal may be attained although no one enjoys good health as a result, namely if people choose not to make use of the preconditions provided. However, reaching this goal may still seem desirable in that it p…Read more
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29Permissibility or Priority? Testing or Screening? Essential Distinctions in the Ethics of Prenatal TestingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 17 (1): 30-32. 2017.
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23Editorial: New Media and Risky Behavior of Children and Young People: Ethics and Policy Implications. Introducing the Themes and Pushing for MorePublic Health Ethics 7 (1): 1-4. 2014.Guest editorial to a special symposium on New Media and Risky Behavior of Children and Young People: Ethics and Policy Implications
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103Adherence, shared decision-making and patient autonomyMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 15 (2): 115-127. 2012.In recent years the formerly quite strong interest in patient compliance has been questioned for being too paternalistic and oriented towards overly narrow biomedical goals as the basis for treatment recommendations. In line with this there has been a shift towards using the notion of adherence to signal an increased weight for patients’ preferences and autonomy in decision making around treatments. This ‘adherence-paradigm’ thus encompasses shared decision-making as an ideal and patient perspec…Read more
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17Societal decisions regarding the possible granting of permission for industrial and power plants, waste disposals, traffic routes and other facilities implementing modern science and technology (here simply called technology-decisions) often provoke debates regarding the risks involved. A main theme in these debates concerns the magnitudes of these risks and whether or not they are worth taking to reach some aim. This is also a main theme in traditional risk-analysis and critical discussions of …Read more
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39While other parts of medicine and health care seems traditionally to be primarily directed at preventing losses of bodily functions, repairing said functions in the case of such losses, or at least to provide ailment for unpleasant symptoms, sports medicine has allready from the beginning been involved with the project of enhancing bodily functions with regard to sports performance. First, when sports medicine involve itself in the traditional health care activity of prevention, therapy and ailm…Read more
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27Standard versions of the requirement of informed consent state that patients who are offered to enter a clinical trial of a medical procedure should be informed about risks and possible benefits of this procedure (compared to available alternatives) in order to facilitate a rational decision whether or not to participate. However, in many real cases where new medical procedures are to be clinically tested for the first time the information available for such communication to prospective patients…Read more
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55Divisibility and the Moral Status of EmbryosBioethics 15 (5-6): 382-397. 2001.The phenomenon of twinning in early fetal development has become a popular source for doubt regarding the ascription of moral status to early embryos. In this paper, the possible moral basis for such a line of reasoning is critically analysed with sceptical results. Three different versions of the argument from twinning are considered, all of which are found to rest on confusions between the actual division of embryos involed in twinning and the property of early embryos to be divisible, be base…Read more
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121The Morality of InterferenceTheoria 65 (1): 55-69. 1999.This paper is about the idea of a moral distinction between doing harm and allowing harm to occurr. It discusses, and developes a general argument against, the version of the distinction often described as counterfactual, which I characterize in terms of making a moral difference between different ways of causing harm (in contrast to, e.g., the version famously discussed by Jonathan Bennett). The gist of the argument is that all variants of this version of the doing-allowing idea would have to m…Read more
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45The Ethics of Screening in Health Care and Medicine: Serving Society Or Serving the Patient?Springer Verlag. 2011.This book involves an in-depth analysis of the ethical, political and philosophical issues related to health-oriented screening programs.
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23The argument from transferBioethics 10 (1). 1996.Utilitarian arguments on bioethical issues regarding human reproduction typically start with the view that it is wrong, other things being equal, not to procreate when this would have resulted in an additional being with a life worth living. The paper takes this view for granted and examines the common utilitarian claim that overpopulation and destitution in the world mean that, in practice, this obligation to procreate, other things being equal, often turns into a (categorical) obligation not t…Read more
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Recension av Jörgen Hermansson: Spelteorins nytta – Om rationalitet i vetenskap och politik (review)Filosofisk Tidskrift 12 (4): 43-51. 1992.
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21In recent years a principle for responsible risk-taking called "The Precautionarity Principle" (PP) has been put forward in several policy documents regarding risk-management of technological and environmental issues. PP involves two claims: 1. An ethical claim according to which it is irresponsible to, for example, use new technologies, regdless of how large benefits these are known to bring, unless it has been proven that they will not give rise to unacceptable long term risks. 2. An administr…Read more
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261Shared decision-making and patient autonomyTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 30 (4): 289-310. 2009.In patient-centred care, shared decision-making is advocated as the preferred form of medical decision-making. Shared decision-making is supported with reference to patient autonomy without abandoning the patient or giving up the possibility of influencing how the patient is benefited. It is, however, not transparent how shared decision-making is related to autonomy and, in effect, what support autonomy can give shared decision-making. In the article, different forms of shared decision-making ar…Read more
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1Challenges for Empirical Study of Patient Autonomy, Self-determination and Co-Decision MakingThinking Ahead: Bioethics for the Future, the Future of Bioethics–Challenges, Changes, Concepts. 11th World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics. Rotterdam, June 26-29, 2012. forthcoming.
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74The goals of public health: An integrated, multidimensional modelPublic Health Ethics 1 (1): 39-52. 2008.While promoting population health has been the classic goal of public health practice and policy, in recent decades, new objectives in terms of autonomy and equality have been introduced. These different goals are analysed, and it is demonstrated how they may conflict severly in several ways, leaving serious unclarities both regarding the normative issue of what goal should be pursued by public health, what that implies in practical terms, and the descriptive issue of what goal that actually is …Read more
Göteborg, Vastra Gotaland, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Social and Political Philosophy |