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28Three sources of social indeterminacyPhilosophical Studies 181 (1): 65-82. 2024.Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued that this neglect can be traced to how a particula…Read more
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53Like the Bloom on Youths: How pleasure completes our livesIn Timothy Chappell (ed.), Values and virtues: Aristotelianism in contemporary ethics, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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53From Virtue to DecencyMetaphilosophy 37 (5): 589-604. 2006.In her work on virtue ethics Rosalind Hursthouse has formulated an Aristotelian criterion of rightness that understands rightness in terms of what the virtuous person would do. It is argued here that this kind of criterion does not allow enough room for the category of the supererogatory and that right and wrong should rather be understood in terms of the characteristic behavior of decent persons. Furthermore, it is suggested that this kind of approach has the added advantage of allowing one to …Read more
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25Normative ethics usually presupposes background accounts of human agency, and although different ethical theorists might have different pictures of human agency in mind, there is still something like a standard account that most of mainstream normative ethics can be understood to rest on. Ethical theorists tend to have Rational Man, or at least some close relative to him, in mind when constructing normative theories. It will be argued here that empirical findings raise doubts about the accuracy …Read more
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97Particularism in Question: an Interview with Jonathan DancyTheoria 74 (1): 3-17. 2008.Jonathan Dancy works within almost all fields of philosophy but is best known as the leading proponent of moral particularism. Particularism challenges “traditional” moral theories, such as Contractualism, Kantianism and Utilitarianism, in that it denies that moral thought and judgement relies upon, or is made possible by, a set of more or less well-defined, hierarchical principles. During the summer of 2006, the Philosophy Departments of Lund University (Sweden) and the University of Reading (E…Read more
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59A distinction in value: Intrinsic and for its own sake1In Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen & Michael J. Zimmerman (eds.), Recent work on intrinsic value, Springer. pp. 115. 2005.
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47The independence of medical ethicsMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (1): 5-15. 2019.This paper discusses the relation between medical ethics and general moral theory, the argument being that medical ethics is best seen as independent from general moral theory. According to this independence thesis, here explicated in terms of what is called a disunitarian stance, the very idea of applied ethics, which is often seen as underlying medical ethics, is misguided. We should instead think of medical ethics as a domain-specific ethical inquiry among other domain-specific ethical inquir…Read more
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47Social positions and institutional privilege as matters of justiceEuropean Journal of Political Theory 20 (3): 510-528. 2018.Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injust...
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20Three Kinds of Organic UnityPatterns of Value : Essays on Formal Axiology and Value Analysis 2004. 2004.Abstraact is not available.
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94Rawlsian Constructivism and the Assumption of DisunityJournal of Political Philosophy 27 (1): 48-66. 2018.
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102The constitution of agency: Essays on practical reason and moral psychology – by Christine M. Korsgaard (review)Theoria 75 (4): 358-361. 2009.
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5Passing the Buck: On Reasons and ValuesIn Wlodek Rabinowicz & Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen (eds.), Patterns of Value - Essays on Formal Axiology and Value Analysis, Lund University Department of Philosophy. 2003.is not available.
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19Regulating Compensatory PaternalismRes Publica 25 (2): 167-185. 2019.Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human beings are far removed from the ideals of rationality presupposed by much of philosophical and economic theory. In this paper it is argued that we need to move to a different conception of human decision-making competence than the one that lies behind that common line of philosophical and economic thinking, and which a…Read more
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55Normative ethics: 5 questions – edited by Thomas S. Petersen and Jesper RybergTheoria 74 (4): 363-366. 2008.No Abstract
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51Respect for Persons in Bioethics: Towards a Human Rights-Based AccountHuman Rights Review 18 (2): 171-187. 2017.Human rights have increasingly been put forward as an important framework for bioethics. In this paper, it is argued that human rights offer a potentially fruitful approach to understanding the notion of Respect for Persons in bioethics. The idea that we are owed a certain kind of respect as persons is relatively common, but also quite often understood in terms of respecting people’s autonomous choices. Such accounts do however risk being too narrow, reducing some human beings to a second-class …Read more
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7Pleasure, Preference, and Happiness: Variations on Themes from MillIdeas in History. The Journal of the Nordic Society of the History of Ideas 1 (1-2): 205-228. 2006.
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29Principles of justice and the idea of practice-dependenceEthics and Global Politics 12 (3): 1-16. 2019.In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that characterizes interpretivism disables this approa…Read more
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17Patients as Rights HoldersHastings Center Report 47 (4): 32-39. 2017.Autonomy and consent have been central values in Western moral and political thought for centuries. One way of understanding the bioethical models that started to develop, especially in the 1970s, is that they were about the fusion of a long-standing professional ethics with the core values underpinning modern political institutions. That there was a need for this kind of fusion is difficult to dispute, especially since the provision of health care has in most developed countries become an ever …Read more
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38On the Epistemic Legitimacy of Government PaternalismPublic Health Ethics 11 (1): 27-34. 2018.Some contemporary paternalists argue in favor of government interventions based on how experimental psychologists and behavioral economists have found that our behavior often diverges from what would be predicted by rational-choice models. In this article it is argued that these findings can, more specifically, be used to identify decisional trouble spots where paternalist interventions may be legitimate. It is further argued that since the epistemic legitimacy of government paternalism ultimate…Read more
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48Patriarchy as InstitutionalJournal of Social Ontology 7 (2): 233-254. 2021.In considering patriarchy as potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an explication of informal institutions. When applie…Read more
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33Means Paternalism and the Problem of IndeterminacyMoral Philosophy and Politics 10 (1): 47-67. 2023.Many contemporary defenders of paternalist interventions favor a version of paternalism focused on how people often choose the wrong means given their own ends. This idea is typically justified by empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics. To the extent that paternalist interventions can then target the promotion of goals that can be said to be our own, such interventions are prima facie less problematic. One version of this argument starts from the idea that it is meaningful to a…Read more
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121Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative MeaningPhilosophical Papers 32 (3): 321-343. 2003.Abstract In contemporary moral philosophy, the standard way of understanding the constituents of the human good is in terms of a fairly limited number of features that contribute to our happiness independently of how they are situated in our lives. Even when this approach is supplemented by Moorean ideas about organic wholes, it still cannot do justice to the deep importance of how things are situated and even when meaning is seen as an important factor, it still tends to be treated as simply an…Read more
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73Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing – by Margaret urban WalkerTheoria 74 (2): 169-172. 2008.No Abstract
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114Institutions, Ideology, and Nonideal Social OntologyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 49 (2): 137-159. 2019.Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that instituti…Read more
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129Morality and the Pursuit of Happiness : A Study in Kantian EthicsDissertation, Lund University. 2002.This work seeks to develop a Kantian ethical theory in terms of a general ontology of values and norms together with a metaphysics of the person that makes sense of this ontology. It takes as its starting point Kant’s assertion that a good will is the only thing that has an unconditioned value and his accompanying view that the highest good consists in virtue and happiness in proportion to virtue. The soundness of Kant’s position on the value of the good will is defended against criticisms direc…Read more
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Stockholm UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Social Ontology, Misc |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Normative Ethics, Miscellaneous |