Per Sandin

Many thinkers endorse an idea that we humans should leave nature alone or somehow exercise restraint in our relations to nature. Among those thinkers, we find several who take a critical or pessimistic attitude to modernity and modern life in general and to technology, or some specific technologies like genetic engineering in particular. In this chapter, I take a constructive approach starting with an exploration of Albert Borgmann’s idea of focal practices. I side with Paul B. Thompson in suggesting that agricultural systems offer some potential areas for such focal practices. I argue that even highly engineered environments should contain ‘pockets of focality’ and that those may provide ‘stepping stones’ from which a system can be changed. Finally, I argue that there is room for implementing some of these elements within a context of responsible research and innovation, for instance in the form of ethics committees for food and agricultural issues.

This chapter provides an overview of how disasters have been conceived of in philosophy, starting with Plato, with focus on the analytic tradition. Philosophers have been surprisingly little concerned with disasters. Some works where philosophers, and some non-philosophers, explicitly define disasters are surveyed and discussed. Works by philosophers who have discussed philosophical issues pertaining to disasters and disaster-like situations without offering much discussion of the definition of the term are also treated. Those have mainly been ethicists, normative as well as applied, and political philosophers dealing with the Hobbesian tradition’s problems of state authority and exceptions. The use of imagined disasters in philosophical thought experiments, typically in ethics, is also discussed. The chapter concludes by offering tentative suggestions of some possible future developments in disaster philosophizing. Among them are that we might expect philosophers to devote increased attention to empirical work, for instance from behavioural science, and increased exploration of the intersection between disaster philosophizing and environmental ethics.

Citizen science (CS) has been presented as a novel form of research relevant for social concerns and global challenges. CS transforms the roles of participants to being actively involved at various stages of research processes, CS projects are dynamic, and pluralism arises when many non-professional researchers take an active involvement in research. Some argue that these elements all make existing research ethical principles and regulations ill-suited for guiding responsible CS conduct. However, while many have sought to highlight such challenges from CS, few have discussed principles per se providing the foundation for regulations. In this article we will investigate the possibilities of midlevel principlism in guiding responsible CS conduct. Principlism has the potential of accommodating many of the concerns taken to reduce the relevance of existing principles.

Citizen science (CS) is an umbrella term for research with a significant amount of contributions from volunteers. Those volunteers can occupy a hybrid role, being both ‘researcher’ and ‘subject’ at the same time. This has repercussions for questions about responsibility and credit, e.g. pertaining to the issue of authorship. In this paper, we first review some existing guidelines for authorship and their applicability to CS. Second, we assess the claim that the guidelines from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), known as ‘the Vancouver guidelines’, may lead to exclusion of deserving citizen scientists as authors. We maintain that the idea of including citizen scientists as authors is supported by at least two arguments: transparency and fairness. Third, we argue that it might be plausible to include groups as authors in CS. Fourth and finally, we offer a heuristic list of seven recommendations to be considered when deciding about whom to include as an author of a CS publication.

Science is supposedly meritocratic, and this means that it is important for scientists to be familiar with the mechanisms of how credit, for instance, in the form of authorship, acknowledgments, or awards, is bestowed. In citizen science – research activities in which volunteers are actively involved and where the research project and its success rely on those volunteer contributions – there are less clear guidelines and practices for awarding and valuing credit. This chapter introduces different forms of citizen science, disentangles concepts of credit, fairness, and incentives and considers their relevance in citizen science. Then some specific forms of expressing credit are discussed: prizes and awards, authorship, acknowledgments, and naming, including eponyms. Finally, some considerations to be taken into account when thinking of how to give credit in citizen science are proposed: To apply a wide conception of credit, to apply a wide conception of contributions and contributors, and to err on the side of generosity.

In this article, we defend two claims about the precautionary principle. The first is that there is no ‘core’ precautionary principle that unifies all its different versions. It is more plausible to think of the different versions as being related to each other by way of family resemblances. So although precautionary principle x may have much in common with precautionary principle y, and y with z, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that unify all versions of the principle. Our second claim is that it is sometimes appropriate to think of the precautionary principle as a midlevel principle in the sense proposed by Beauchamp and Childress in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, i.e. as a non-rigid moral principle. We argue that if the precautionary principle is conceived as a non-rigid principle that needs to be balanced against other principles before a moral verdict can be reached, then this enables us to address some standard objections to the principle.

Innovation is necessary to deal with challenges that climate change brings for agriculture, such as droughts, floods, pests and pathogens that enter new climatic regions, and challenges relating to the labour force. There is a dominant narrative that science and technology are the locus of innovation, and that the solutions developed can change systems. Indeed, history shows how the Green Revolution started a massive change in practices worldwide and gave science and technology the main role. Innovation, however, also happens outside universities or industry research. Particularly in agriculture, it happens in the field through farmers’ experimentation. This opens up the idea of who is an innovator, and it is crucial to tackling climate challenges to agriculture. In this paper, we investigate the role of curiosity as a virtue of innovators. Instead of looking at systems of innovation, or at innovations themselves, we add to the growing scholarship on virtues of innovators. Among those virtues, curiosity is prominent. We argue that different contexts require different forms of the innovator virtues, and we conceptually investigate how such virtues ought to be cultivated in order to contribute to solving 21st century challenges for agriculture.

The purpose of the present thesis is to apply philosophical methods to the ongoing debate of the precautionary principle, in order to illuminate this debate. The thesis consists of an Introduction and five papers. Paper I con-cerns an objection to the method of conceptual analysis, the Charge from Psychology. After a brief characterisation of conceptual analysis, I argue that the Charge from Psychology is misdirected. In Paper II, the method of conceptual analysis is applied to the concept of precaution which is ana-lysed in terms of precautionary actions. The purpose is explicatory. A definition involving three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is proposed, and the implications of this analysis for the debate on the pre-cautionary principle are discussed. Paper III attempts to provide an ana-lytical apparatus which may be used for finding improved formulations of the precautionary principle. The approach is lexicographical. Several exist-ing and possible formulations of the precautionary principle are examined, and four common elements and a common structure of the precautionary principle are identified. It is suggested that the analytical apparatus pre-sented can be used in negotiations of the precautionary principle. Paper IV questions the soundness of some arguments against the precautionary prin-ciple. Five common arguments are discussed and rejected. In Paper V, two of these arguments are further discussed. I argue that an attempt at rejec-tion of the precautionary principle delivered by John Harris and Søren Holm is unwarranted, because their arguments against it are based on in-terpretations of the precautionary principle that ignore context. Paper VI deals with the idea of de minimis risk. After a discussion of the distinction between disregarding a risk and accepting it, I examine one way of deter-mining how small a risk ought to be in order to be disregarded, namely the use of natural risk levels as benchmarks. I argue that this approach fails, even if the distinction between what is natural and what is not natural can be upheld.

Opposition against greenhouse gas emissions reductions is strong among some conservative Christian groups, especially in the United States. In this paper, we identify five scripture-based arguments against greenhouse gas mitigation put forward by a core group of Christian conservatives (‘the Cornwallists'): the anti-paganism argument, the enrichment argument, the omnipotence argument, the lack of moral relevance argument and the cost-benefit argument. We evaluate to what extent the arguments express positions that can be characterised as climate science denialist and to what degree they are consistent with support for climate adaptation. Using Stefan Rahmstorf's (2004) taxonomy of climate science denial, we conclude that the Cornwallists could be labelled climate change deniers. However, their opposition is not only based on denial of climate science but often rests on premises that render the science irrelevant, a position we term ‘relevance denialism’.

Anthropocentrism—the idea that humans are the most important beings there are—comes in many guises. One version of anthropocentrism states that only humans have full moral status. Those who argue for such a position (beyond merely assuming it) usually refer to some trait that confers moral status and that only humans have. Suggestions include linguistic ability, self-awareness or rationality. However, regardless of what trait one picks it will not track the line between Homo sapiens and other species. You will always be able to find some non-human animal that possesses the trait to a greater degree than some human does— even potentially. Koplin and Wilkinson1 adopt a broadly sentientist position: moral status is conferred by some mental or cognitive function. They discuss two sources of moral uncertainty related to this. In cases of moral uncertainty of the first type, it is uncertain whether Property X confers (full) moral status. In cases of uncertainty of the second type, we assume it to be true that moral status is conferred by X, but it is uncertain whether a particular entity (such as a pig) possesses the property. There are reasons to believe …

Food is sometimes labeled as ‘100% natural’ or as containing ‘all natural ingredients’. There is however controversy on how to justify, design and implement such labelling. This paper argues that since naturalness is not one single concept, but several ones, and those concepts typically allow degrees, so that things can be more or less natural, thus, this complexity should be reflected in labelling of foods. There is no obvious way of presenting an aggregate measure of a particular food item’s naturalness, and therefore a graphical representation that contains several axes, with the degree of naturalness represented on each axis, is considered. Such a mode of representation might however be too complex to be practical, and a possible compromise would be to settle for a small number of labels that represent some common combinations of degrees of naturalness along the axes.

Results of studies that cast doubt on the safety of genetically modified crops have been published since the first GM crop approval for commercial release. These ‘alarming studies’ challenge the dominant view about the adequacy of current risk assessment practice for genetically modified organisms. Subsequent debates follow a similar and recurring pattern, in which those involved cannot agree on the significance of the results and the attached consequences. The standard response from the government—a reassessment by scientific advisory bodies—seems insufficient to bring the debate to a satisfactory closure. The recurrence of the same debate every time an alarming study is published shows that science alone cannot solve the problem. We believe that further analysis is needed to investigate if and how we can prevent this repetitive cycle that creates frustration amongst all stakeholders. In this paper, we analyse the dynamics behind discussions which occur following alarming studies. We will use a selection of representative alarming GMO case studies to underpin our claim that it is likely that there will be a permanent difference in view of opinion that cannot be solved with more data or new facts. The current strategy of more research is a pitfall that is unlikely to solve this issue. Instead, the focus of the GM crop discussion should shift towards managing permanent different viewpoints and providing a platform for a broader conversation on agriculture and food production

The most common argument against child pornography is that children are harmed in the process of producing it. This is the argument from abusive production. However, it does not apply to ‘virtual’ child pornography, i.e. child pornography produced using computer technology without involving real children. Autilitarian who wishes to condemn virtual child pornography cannot appeal to the argument from abusive production. I discuss three possible ways out of this: (1) abandoning the intuition that virtual child pornography is wrong, (2) abandoning utilitarianism, or (3)circumventing the problem. I propose a version of the third way out.

The ethics of corporate crisis management is a seriously underdeveloped field. Among recent proposals in the area, two contributions stand out: Seeger and Ulmer’s (2001) virtue ethics approach to crisis management ethics and Simola’s (2003) ethics of care. In the first part of the paper, I argue that both contributions are problematic: Seeger and Ulmer focus on top management and propose virtues that lack substance and are in need of further development. Simola’s proposal is also fraught with difficulty, since it seems to conceive of ethics of care as a course of action that can be chosen in a crisis, something which runs contrary to the idea of caring. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Simola and Seeger and Ulmer are nevertheless on the right track, and I propose some directions for further development of the ethics of corporate crisis management. I argue that the value of codes of conduct is limited. Furthermore, I propose a way of identifying relevant virtues for corporate crisis management and discuss a problem that is prevalent in crisis management ethics (the temptation of ad hoc utilitarianism).

For several years, the official European method for deciding whether or not shellfish were fit for human consumption was the mouse bioassay, which was eventually replaced by chemical testing. In this paper, we examine the process of this change, looking at how devices of social, technical, and organisational risk management were re-negotiated locally, nationally, and across the continent. We also show how the political decision to replace a precautionary standard with a management-vigilance device was the result of various dynamics. These included unpredictable events, enhanced scientific knowledge, collective mobilisations, and multi-level statutory, commercial, and ethical orders

The public can influence animal welfare law and regulation. However what constitutes ‘the public’ is not a straightforward matter. A variety of different publics have an interest in animal use and this has implications for the governance of animal welfare. This article presents an ethnographic content analysis of how the concept of a public is mobilized in animal welfare journals from 2003 to 2012. The study was undertaken to explore how experts in the discipline define and regard the role of the public in determining animal welfare standards. Analysis indicates that experts in animal welfare constitute different types of citizen and consumer publics around specific types of animal use, framed by different theories of value. These results suggest a need for greater clarity about the roles and responsibilities of experts and publics in animal welfare reform processes. Clearly citizens and consumers can both contribute to promoting higher welfare standards, but an over-reliance on market mechanisms and consumer behaviour to assign value is beset by moral hazards, foremost being the risk of disarticulating the concept of animal welfare from the public good

It is commonly believed that people become selfish and turn to looting, price gouging, and other immoral behaviour in emergencies. This has been the basis for an argument justifying extraordinary measures in emergencies. It states that if emergencies are not curtailed, breakdown of moral norms threaten (‘the moral black hole’). Using the example of natural disasters, we argue that the validity of this argument in non-antagonistic situations, i.e. situations other than war and armed conflict, is highly questionable. Available evidence suggests that people in such emergencies typically do not display panic reactions or exaggerated selfishness, and that phenomena such as looting and price gouging are rare. Furthermore, a version of the moral-black-hole argument based on the mere possibility of a moral black hole occurring runs into problems similar to those of Pascal’s Wager. We conclude that we should be wary against applying the moral-black-hole argument to non-antagonistic cases.

Bioethics and Armed Conflict: Moral Dilemmas of Medicine and War, by Michael Gross. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. 384 pp. $26.00. To the uninitiated, the phrase “military medical ethics” probably signals triage (methods for sorting casualties) and the neutrality of medical personnel in battle zones. There is, however, a lot more to it than that, as this excellent book by Michael L. Gross shows. Gross is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Haifa and has published extensively in bioethics and the ethics of war.