Andreas Bruns

In recent years, the principle of informed consent has come under significant pressure with the rise of biobanks and data infrastructures for medical research. Study-specific consent is unfeasible in the context of biobank and data infrastructure research; and while broad consent facilitates research, it has been criticised as being insufficient to secure a truly informed consent. Dynamic consent has been promoted as a promising alternative approach that could help patients and research participants regain control over the use of their biospecimen and health data in medical research. Critical voices have focused mainly on concerns around its implementation; but little has been said about the argument that dynamic consent is morally superior to broad consent as a way to respect people’s individual autonomy. In this paper, we identify two versions of this argument—an information-focused version and a control-focused version—and then argue that both fail to establish the moral superiority of dynamic over broad consent. In particular, we argue that since autonomous choices are a certain species of choices, it is neither obvious that dynamic consent would meaningfully enhance people’s autonomy, nor that it is morally justifiable to act on every kind of consent choice enabled by dynamic consent.

In this article, I defend Frances Kamm’s inviolability account against a powerful objection referred to as the saveability objection. The inviolability account aims to justify deontological constraints (that prohibit us from harming innocent people even to minimise instances of the same type of harm overall) by referring to the idea that constraints hold us to be more inviolable and hence more important beings than we would otherwise be. The saveability objection says that we would seem to be at least equally important if it was permissible to harm innocent people to save us in greater numbers. We would be less inviolable but more saveable. I argue that, despite looking initially forceful, the saveability objection fails to establish that we would have greater saveability without constraints because there is a sense in which the absence of constraints would not only make us less inviolable but also less saveable.

This paper offers an account of Susan Haack’s philosophy of law and points out several aspects within the legal pragmatist tradition that deserve further discussion. Firstly, a systematic presentation of legal pragmatism as it is defended by Haack, who follows Justice Oliver W. Holmes here, is given. Secondly, the limits of an evolutionary perspective of law recommended by legal pragmatism are considered. Finally, the paper discusses whether legal pragmatism is able to handle different legal traditions, thereby focusing on Anglo-American common law and European civil law.

Cultural appropriation is a central concept today in the struggle against systems of oppression and marginalisation of cultural minorities in postcolonial societies. Cultural appropriation means the use or imitation of cultural symbols, broadly understood, outside of their original cultural context, especially the use of symbols of cultural minorities by members of dominant cultural groups. However, the concept of cultural appropriation is also increasingly used to condemn individual actions (such as wearing certain hair styles outside of their original context) on the basis that they would constitute an act of wrongful cultural appropriation. This article provides a critical examination of the current debate around cultural appropriation and outlines two fundamental problems with using the concept to scandalise individual actions. It then argues that the value of the concept seems to be in exposing systemic relations of power and oppression by making them recognisable and criticisable in different social and political contexts.

This thesis develops a deeper understanding of and provides an answer to the paradox of deontology. Traditional deontological views include deontic constraints that prohibit us from harming innocent people even to prevent greater harms of the same type. Although constraints correspond to widely shared moral intuitions, they seem to make traditional deontology unavoidably paradoxical: for how can it ever be morally wrong to minimise morally objectionable harm? The thesis argues that previous attempts to solve this paradox have been insufficient because they have failed to distinguish clearly between two distinct puzzles that together constitute the paradox. The first puzzle—the rationality paradox—says that if we think that we should not harm others in a certain way, it is rational by default to think that we should minimise the occurrences of that kind of harm overall. Thus, to answer the rationality paradox the deontologist must justify constraints by reference to some value that cannot be furthered by minimising the occurrences of harm. However, this will make her vulnerable to a second puzzle—the value paradox—which says that in the face of the severe harm that awaits the greater number of individuals, it seems morally inappropriate to be concerned with anything other than the minimisation of the occurrences of that kind of harm overall. The thesis develops a comprehensive approach that can address both these paradoxes. The hyperinviolability account developed in this thesis shows that traditional deontology ceases to appear paradoxical once we understand it as an agent-neutral moral theory that gives priority to our moral standing over the moral significance of what might happen to us.

Introduced by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, the trolley problem asks us to imagine a runaway trolley heading toward five unfortunate workmen. They can only be saved from being crushed and killed if the trolley is diverted to a side track, occupied by a sixth unfortunate workman who would meet the same fate. For the early Michael, a demon torturer and architect of the human afterlife, the 'problem' here is how we could manage to kill all six workmen. But, in line with what may be The Good Place's most dominant moral theme, even an immortal demon torturer can learn human ethics. After he has learned what it means to face a moral dilemma, Michael claims to have solved the (real) trolley problem: you should sacrifice yourself. Although self-sacrifice is not an available option in the set up of the original trolley problem, this article argues that self-sacrifice might still have normative implications for our judgements about different kinds of trolley cases.