•  13
    The Child as Co-researcher—Moral and Epistemological Issues in Childhood Research
    with Elisabeth Willumsen and Ingunn Studsrød
    Ethics and Social Welfare 8 (4): 332-349. 2014.
    This article discusses whether a child can and should be engaged as a co-researcher on moral and epistemological grounds. Selected research literature has been used to illustrate various approaches to the issue of children's participating as co-researchers in social research. By exploring the predicament of childhood and the meaning of the concept ‘research’, we attempt to clarify the necessary conditions for a person to qualify as a researcher and for an activity to qualify as research. We then…Read more
  •  36
    Evil's Place in the Ethics of Social Work
    Ethics and Social Welfare 4 (3): 254-279. 2010.
    This article argues that the concept of evil is needed in normative ethics in general as well as in the professional ethics of social work. Attention is drawn to certain shortcomings in the classical theories of normative ethics when it comes to recognizing the profound destructiveness of certain types of acts that exceed the mere ?bad? or ?wrong? applied in the most common theories of moral philosophy. Having established the category of morally evil acts in general, the author turns to the fiel…Read more
  •  2
    The Relation between Normative and Descriptive Ethics – A Consideration of Empirical Bioethics
    Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 19 (1): 21-26. 2009.
    This article offers a discussion of the relevance of empirical studies to normative ethics focusing on the new trend in bioethics called empirical bioethics. The author sees this trend as an answer to a call made by anthropologists decades ago that ethicists should be more aware of the situatedness of the moral institution of life. Through a discussion of two opposing views expressed in the final publications of the EU-funded EMPIRE-project, the middle way is sought between the misconception of …Read more