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85Brain imaging and privacyNeuroethics 3 (1): 5-12. 2010.I will argue that the fairly common assumption that brain imaging may compromise people’s privacy in an undesirable way only if moral crimes are committed is false. Sometimes persons’ privacy is compromised because of failures of privacy. A normal emotional reaction to failures of privacy is embarrassment and shame, not moral resentment like in the cases of violations of right to privacy. I will claim that if (1) neuroimaging will provide all kinds of information about persons’ inner life and no…Read more
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46Global justice and the logic of the burden of proofMetaphilosophy 36 (1-2): 228-239. 2005.The question of who has the burden of proof is often important in practice. We must frequently make decisions and act on the basis not of conclusive evidence but of what is reasonable to presume true. Consequently, it happens that a given practical question must be solved by referring to principles that explicitly or implicitly determine, at least partly, where the burden of proof should rest. In this essay, I consider the role of the logic of the burden of proof in a debate on global justice. I…Read more
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28The ethical and political evaluation of biotechnology strategiesMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 12 (3): 273-280. 2009.In this paper I will briefly discuss the role and function of the ethical advisory committees and other ethics bodies that are supposed to take care of the ethical dimension of the biotechnology strategies. The expert ethical advice has created colourful discussion in many contexts, but here I aim to analyze the role and relevance of ethical expertise in the context of national and regional biotechnology strategies. I will argue that it may be quite unproblematic that the work of the ethics comm…Read more
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13The Place of Religious Arguments in Civic DiscussionRatio Juris 13 (2): 162-176. 2000.I shall consider whether morality requires citizens of democratic societies to advance secular reasons in public debates on political questions. Is it wrong to give purely religious reasons in political discussion? I shall argue that the moral acceptability of public religious arguments that are not supported with secular reasons depends on the political context we are discussing, and that often there is nothing wrong with using religious considerations. I shall also discuss the so‐called shared…Read more
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390Environmental Security and Just Causes for WarAlmanac: Discourses of Ethics 10 (1): 47-54. 2015.This article asks whether a country that suffers from serious environmental problems caused by another country could have a just cause for a defensive war? Danish philosopher Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen has argued that under certain conditions extreme poverty may give a just cause for a country to defensive war, if that poverty is caused by other countries. This raises the question whether the victims of environmental damages could also have a similar right to self-defense. Although the article con…Read more
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49The Repugnant Conclusion and the Welfare of Actual PeopleTheoria 68 (2): 162-169. 2002.According to Derek Parfit's well‐known argument, a version of utilitarian moral theory implies the so‐called Repugnant Conclusion. This version of utilitarianism states that other things being equal, it is better if there is a greater total sum of whatever makes life worth living. This view appears to implicate that a world where there is an immense total sum of whatever makes life worth living but where individual people have an exceedingly low quality of life is better than a world where there…Read more
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89On Disassociating Oneself from Collective ResponsiblitySocial Theory and Practice 23 (1): 93-108. 1997.
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52Burden of Proof Rules in Social CriticismArgumentation 11 (4): 463-477. 1997.The article discusses burden of proof rules in social criticism. By social criticism I mean an argumentative situation in which an opponent publicly argues against certain social practices; the examples I consider are discrimination on the basis of species and discrimination on the basis of one's nationality. I argue that burden of proof rules assumed by those who defend discrimination are somewhat dubious. In social criticism, there are no shared values which would uncontroversially determine w…Read more
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41James Stacey Taylor : The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death: Oxford University Press, New York, 2013, 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-975113-6 $74.00 hbk (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (3): 497-502. 2015.This is the first collection of essays of philosophical thanatology that explicitly connects the metaphysical and the ethical questions of death, including some bioethical questions. The volume has four sections, and the discussion moves from historical and theoretical problems to practical issues of bioethics. However, as the editor of the book, James Stacey Taylor, has surely intended, the practical questions discussed are closely related to traditional metaphysical problems, most notably to t…Read more
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53Are there Alternative Methods in Ethics?Grazer Philosophische Studien 52 (1): 173-189. 1996.Do all methods of moral justification resemble the method of reflective equilibrium in presupposing that moral judgment's being justified depends at least in part on its being appropriately related to our actual substantial moral views? Can a moral judgment be justified without such a presupposition? I shall distinguish three versions of the no-option argument According to any version of the no-option argument, there is certain fact which characterizes moral theories, and that fact implies that …Read more
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18In this book the practical dimension of social justice is explained using the analysis and discussion of a variety of well-known topics. These include: the relation between theory and practice in normative political philosophy; the issue of justice under uncertainty; the question of whether we can and should unmask social injustices by means of conspiracy theories; the issues of privacy and the right to privacy; the issue of how certain psychological states may affect our moral obligations, in p…Read more
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53The social concept of diseaseTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 17 (4). 1996.In the discussion of such social questions as how should alcoholics be treated by society? and what kind of people are responsible in the face of the law?, is disease a value-free or value-laden notion, a natural or a normative one? It seems, for example, that by the utterance alcoholism should be classified as a disease we mean something like the following: the condition called alcoholism is similar in morally relevant respects to conditions that we uncontroversially label diseases, and therefo…Read more
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29Redistributive Wars and Just War PrinciplesRatio.Ru 12 4-26. 2014.The topic of the paper is the justness of the so-called global redistributive wars — wars whose prime purpose would be the correction of global economic and power structures that are said to cause suffering in poor countries. My aim is to comment on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s argument concerning the implications of Thomas Pogge’s theory of global poverty. Pogge has argued that affluent coun-tries uphold global institutional structures that have a significant causal role in leading to the poverty…Read more
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16On Disassociating Oneself from Collective ResponsiblitySocial Theory and Practice 23 (1): 93-108. 1997.
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |