<p>We now live in an era of experts on virtually everything, among which we have professional medical ethicists, who gained prominence in the late 60s due to dramatic advances in medical technology. Before then, medical ethics issues were not thought as separable from the warp and woof of the everyday life. Medical technology’s advancement cascades legions of moral problems in medicine and biomedical research. Series of innovative interventions in medicine raise throngs of ethical questions. In most cases that have to do with issues of life and death, there are perceived moral conflicts. Due to this swath of problematic issues that need solutions, some apologists favour medical ethics experts as fit for the job, while critics argue that no one has the knowledge or skill for dealing with moral quandaries because objective truth is not feasible in ethics and moral judgment is relative to cultures, beliefs and values. The necessity for medical ethicists to take active role in Medical Ethics Debates, either in Committees at the institutional level, or at any other decision-making mechanisms is justified in this thesis. In addition to this, the thesis also justifies medical ethicists’ role as expert consultants to clinicians and individuals alike This justification is based on complex moral problems accentuated by medical technology, which are far from being easily solved through mere appeal to individual reason, but rather by involving medical ethicists based on their specialized knowledge and high level understanding of research and practice. Although critics question the authority with which experts speak on these issues, nevertheless, the thesis unravels the roles, functions, significance and components of expert’s expertise that separate him/her from the crowd. Arguments are critically analysed and medical ethicists’ limits and professional flaws are addressed, with a view to establishing a virile foundation for the profession of medical ethics.</p>

<p>Uppsatsen tar upp Arne Naess djupekologi. Den undersöker djupekologins struktur och vilka krav som ställs på en teori för att den skall vara en djupekologi. Uppsatsen tar även upp skillnader mellan djupekologi och grundekologi på en praktisk nivå. Uppsatsen behandlar Warwick Fox kritik rörande djupet i djupekologin och Arne Naess svar på den kritiken. Författaren till uppsatsen finner att Fox kritik inte är helt träffande och att Naess svar på kritiken är för svag.</p> / <p>This paper discusses Arne Naess’ theory of deep ecology. It investigates the structure of deep ecology and what conditions a theory has to fulfil to be a deep ecology. The paper demonstrates differences between deep ecology and shallow ecology on a practical level. The paper presents a criticism put forward by Warwick Fox which focuses on the deepness of deep ecology, and an answer from Arne Naess on this criticism. The author of this paper finds Fox’ criticism not quite convincing, and that Naess’ answer is too weak.</p>

<p>An empirical study of how Malaysian pluralism is understood through Islam Hadhari, Article 11 and the Inter-faith Commission against the backdrop of current Malaysian political and social history, coupled with a theoretical analysis through John Rawls' Political Liberalism, with particular emphasis on the idea of Overlapping Consensus.</p><p>The thesis is an attempt at applying Rawls' theory on the practical case of Malaysia, as a plural society, while at the same time using the practical case of Malaysia to highlight parts of Rawls' own theory.</p>

<p>The paper explores theoretical shortcomings in the egalitarian theory by John Rawls and provides a complementary view on the problem of morally arbitrary contingencies. The conception of natural lottery, which Rawls presents to signify the starting range of morally arbitrary inequalities, falls short in philosophical grounding. According to critics, the notion of natural lottery appeals to the philosophical conception of moral luck which undermines ascription of moral responsibility. Since moral responsibility is a basic prerequisite for egalitarian justice, the appeal to morally arbitrary contingencies of the natural lottery may be self-defeating for the theory.</p><p>Criticizing Rawls’s approach to morally arbitrary contingencies Susan Hurley investigates philosophical groundings for judgment of moral responsibility. Philosophical inquiries into moral luck differentiate four categories of luck and expose the difficulties of ascription of moral responsibility for it. The conception of moral luck implies epistemological shortcomings in the rational judgment of moral responsibility. Hurley claims that ascription of moral responsibility requires another logical strategy.</p><p>The critical discussion by Norman Daniels refers to another egalitarian theory by Ronald Dworkin which suggests ascription of moral responsibility on a gradual scale. The theory divides the naturally contingent recourses into categories of brute luck and option luck. This strategy stratifies normative standards of responsibility by the criteria of individual choice and circumstances.</p><p>Considering the strategy of gradual ascription of responsibility, I suggest to apply a moral developmental perspective as an additional outlook on the moral responsibility in egalitarian theory. The theory of moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg provides an explanation of a gradual development of moral responsibility through a natural order of developmental stages. It stratifies the moral responsibility into a hierarchical model of measurement and systematizes the order of normative standards.</p>

<p>This essay describes the philosophy of science that Thomas Kuhn puts forth in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The question is, does his description of the scientific paradigm work as well today as in the examples he gave in the book?</p><p>The conclusion is that there are certain factors that make for a number of differences between science today and, for example in the seventeenth century. There is also a growing theory or vision of a post normal science laid developed by among others Jerome Ravetz. This theory or vision is an idea of a science close to peer-communities and fast as well as critical decisions involving opposite values.</p>

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the Swedish debate regarding genetically modified food products. What does the moral disagreements within this debate entail? In which way would it be possible to obtain and maintain a true dialogue? Is consensus a plausible or even a desirable goal? Can communicative ethics contribute? These questions are analysed in this research project.</p><p>The project focuses on three themes of the debate on genetically modified food 1990-2000 in Sweden. The first theme is in relation to the concepts: natural and unnatural. Within the debate on genetically modified food, there have been various wide ranging arguments on whether or not genetic modification is natural or unnatural. </p><p>The second theme concerns the concepts of risk and benefit. Safety questions and possible risks and benefits have been subjects of discussion and debate for a long time. This analysis highlights the way risks or benefits are valued. What does it mean if something is a risk? </p><p>The third theme concerns the argumentations regarding democracy, mostlyin relation to labelling discussions. Democracy is used to describe freedom of choice, another argumentation focuses on the right to be a part of the decision making process.</p><p>The last part of the thesis discusses the question whether communicative ethics can contribute to obtain dialogue between various parties, and whether consensus is possible or even a desirable as a goal. How would this function in a debate where there is an ethical disagreement based on divergent ethical standpoints? </p>

I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the Swedish debate regarding genetically modified food products. What does the moral disagreements within this debate entail? In which way would it be possible to obtain and maintain a true dialogue? Is consensus a plausible or even a desirable goal? Can communicative ethics contribute? These questions are analysed in this research project. The project focuses on three themes of the debate on genetically modified food 1990-2000 in Sweden. The first theme is in relation to the concepts: natural and unnatural. Within the debate on genetically modified food, there have been various wide ranging arguments on whether or not genetic modification is natural or unnatural. The second theme concerns the concepts of risk and benefit. Safety questions and possible risks and benefits have been subjects of discussion and debate for a long time. This analysis highlights the way risks or benefits are valued. What does it mean if something is a risk? The third theme concerns the argumentations regarding democracy, mostlyin relation to labelling discussions. Democracy is used to describe freedom of choice, another argumentation focuses on the right to be a part of the decision making process. The last part of the thesis discusses the question whether communicative ethics can contribute to obtain dialogue between various parties, and whether consensus is possible or even a desirable as a goal. How would this function in a debate where there is an ethical disagreement based on divergent ethical standpoints?

The globalization of political and economic processes is a growing moral concern for theologians and political philosophers alike. My thesis aims to outline, analyze, and compare church studies of globalization with global theories of justice. To do this, I draw upon recent studies of globalization made by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The WCC and LWF are two global reaching church organizations. They have a common aim of uniting churches for ecumenical dialogue and are involved in social, economic, political, and ecological questions. The WCC and LWF analyze globalization by applying biblical and theological principles from the Christian tradition. Out of this analysis comes an invitation to resist globalization and seek economic alternatives. Their work forms a moral discourse about globalization from a theological ethical perspective. In comparison, I consider theories of global justice by political philosophers in the liberal tradition (i.e., John Rawls). The two philosophers I draw upon are Thomas Pogge and Kok-Chor Tan. Their recent work forms a moral discourse that attempts to globalize Rawls’s liberal principles of political and economic justice. These principles challenge globalization and build an argument for greater global justice. This argument calls for a restructuring of today’s global political and financial institutions. In my thesis, this work also acts as lens for which to critically analyze the church studies. Finally, I consider a potential and positive relationship between these two kinds of global moral discourses, between theological ethics and political philosophy. This relationship helps the church develop ethics for a realistic global citizenship. More importantly, this relationship creates a reasonable and broad based consensus for global justice. Such a consensus is demanded in a global context of plurality and secularity.

The paper contains comment, clarification and criticism, even constructive criticism, of some theses that have been put forward by Laurence Bonjour in his In Defense of Pure Reason. It presents a concept of experience that deals with the relation between cognizer and object of experience that has a great similarity to that of Bonjour. Through analysis it is shown that the concept of a priori entails that Bonjour has two concepts of a priori, a narrow and a broad one. The narrow one is, in my own words: According to moderate rationalism a proposition p is a priori justified if and only if you apprehend that p must be true in every possible world. This doesn’t mean that Bonjour doesn’t believe in an epistemological, metaphysical and semantic realm. The broad one does not mention anything about possible worlds. Casullo in his A priori justification rejects Bonjour’s argument against Quine’s coherentism. A defense is put forward with the concept ‘an ideal of science for apparent rational insights’. The concept of axiomatic system and foundationalism is used. If we assume that the colour proposition ‘nothing can be red all over and green all over at the same time’ has the meaning that we, in this very moment, are representing a property in the world, thus we have an argument of superposition for the correctness of the proposition. The ground for this argumentation relies on the identification of colours with superposing electromagnetic waves.