How should national societies build legitimate and inclusive collective identities amidst prolific multiculturalism and linguistic diversity? We argue that cultural ownership of particular ways of framing ethics should be part of this collective identity building process. We should avoid unfair domination of minority cultural identities, but how do we do this when ethical discourses themselves tend to be shaped by particular dominant identities? We look into the case of the challenges that a particular multicultural society, the Philippines, faces in its (...) ongoing collective identity building project on three levels: ethnic and linguistic differences, the historical layers of foreign culture that have each influenced these distinct cultural identities in different degrees, and the apparent domination of Tagalog linguistic culture over others. Our answer to the question of legitimate and inclusive collective identity comes from an inter-linguistic dialogue that can be effected between cultures by harnessing similarities of ethical concepts, without compromising cultural differences. We present three different possible approaches under the following headings: Pilipino ethics, Filipino ethics and Philippine ethics, each representing a particular stance to the dominant Tagalog linguistic culture. We argue for the third option, which is the most inclusive because of how it equalizes the status of all participating cultures in the dialogue. We also draw from the possibilities afforded by the phenomena of Scandinavian semicommunication and what this practice offers in making collective identity building more inclusive. (shrink)

International research collaborations engage multiple countries, researchers, and universities. This enhances the magnitude of contextual challenges, including legal and ethical dimensions across various jurisdictions, that must be bridged in qualitative research regardless of discipline, also in the construction of informed consents. From a Scandinavian perspective, this discussion paper explores challenges pertaining to the construction of informed consents related to EU data protection legislation, to which research institutions are subject when processing data related to EU residents. Next, it discusses challenges (...) related to different traditions in terms of handling informed consent and research participants’ integrity, including the possibilities to waive anonymity in research. In international, multidisciplinary studies where researchers also operate in relatively ‘unknown territory’, it is especially important to be aware of and reflect on (inter)national possibilities and limitations related to laws, ethics, and culture/traditions in societies and within the academic fields. The variations in laws, ethical guidelines, and traditions in different countries demand that researchers are up to date with laws and ethical guidelines in the studied countries. Their practical implementation in the countries at stake in international, collaborative research endeavours are important, especially since such regulations and guidelines are far from static and change over time. The implementation of good ethical research practice requires democratic, reflexive, and responsive processes in all phases of research. Especially the preparation phase functions as a period to increase and ensure the knowledge and legal/ethical competences of the entire research team to meet the demands in the countries at stake. (shrink)

The central theme in the discussion of how education about religion can, and should, be developed in pluralistic societies concerns challenges and opportunities involving intercultural religious education (RE). One example is Robert Jackson’s report Signposts, commissioned by the Council of Europe, in which various aspects of intercultural competence are captured and made visible regarding a religious didactic context. Here, different dimensions of what can be described as ‘ethical competence’ appear to be central. In this article, the interpretive approach, strongly connected (...) with Jackson, is considered to be in need of a development of a theoretical framing of forceful strategies for handling ethical challenges taking place in multicultural, multireligious and multi-confessional classrooms. It is argued that such strategies will depend on a careful analysis of the concept of ethical competence. A theoretical platform for the argument is presented with reference to James Rest’s analysis of ethical competence, which is shown to be relevant to an examination of how the concept of ethical competence can contribute to the development of strategies for teaching intercultural RE. As a basis for this examination, the Danish, Finnish and Norwegian syllabuses for compulsory school RE are analysed regarding how they express conceptions of ethical competence. This selection shaped the curricular arena of the investigation as being non-confessional, whilst simultaneously, more or less explicitly, resting on a shared historical Protestant anchorage. This twofold interpretation is shown to allow for an analysis of ethical competence, in relation to which an identification of certain prerequisites for developing strategies for teaching intercultural RE is possible. (shrink)

This article focus on paradigms, methods and ethics of action research in the Scandinavian countries. The specific features of the action research paradigm are identified. a historical overview follows of some main action research projects in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The tendency towards upscale action research projects from organisational or small community projects to large-scale, regional based network approaches are also outlined and discussed. Finally, a synthesised approach of the classical, socio-technical action research approach and the large-scale network and (...) holistic approaches is suggested as a promising approach for the future. (shrink)

In this article, we first provide evidence that Scandinavian contributions to stakeholder theory over the past 50 years play a much larger role in its development than is presently acknowledged. These contributions include the first publication and description of the term “stakeholder”, the first stakeholder map, and the development of three fundamental tenets of stakeholder theory: jointness of interests, cooperative strategic posture, and rejection of a narrowly economic view of the firm. We then explore the current practices of (...) class='Hi'>Scandinavian companies through which we identify the evidence of relationships to these historical contributions. Thus, we propose that Scandinavia offers a particularly promising context from which to draw inspiration regarding effective company-stakeholder cooperation and where ample of examples of what is more recently referred to as “creating shared value” can be found. We conclude by endorsing the expression “Scandinavian cooperative advantage” in an effort to draw attention to the Scandinavian context and encourage the field of strategic management to shift its focus from achieving a competitive advantage toward achieving a cooperative advantage. (shrink)

The health care systems are fairly similar in theScandinavian countries. The exact details vary, but inall three countries the system is almost exclusivelypublicly funded through taxation, and most (or all)hospitals are also publicly owned and managed. Thecountries also have a fairly strong primary caresector (even though it varies between the countries),with family physicians to various degrees acting asgatekeepers to specialist services. In Denmark most ofthe GP services are free. For the patient in Norwayand Sweden there are out-of-pocket co-payments for GPconsultations, (...) with upper limits, but consultations forchildren are free. Hospital treatment is free inDenmark while the other countries use a system without-of-pocket co-payment. There is a very strongpublic commitment to access to high quality healthcare for all. Solidarity and equality form theideological basis for the Scandinavian welfare state.Means testing, for instance, has been widely rejectedin the Scandinavian countries on the grounds thatpublic services should not stigmatise any particulargroup. Solidarity also means devoting specialconsideration to the needs of those who have lesschance than others of making their voices heard orexercising their rights. Issues of limited access arenow, however, challenging the thinking about a healthcare system based on solidarity. (shrink)

In this article, we first provide evidence that Scandinavian contributions to stakeholder theory over the past 50 years play a much larger role in its development than is presently acknowledged. These contributions include the first publication and description of the term “stakeholder”, the first stakeholder map, and the development of three fundamental tenets of stakeholder theory: jointness of interests, cooperative strategic posture, and rejection of a narrowly economic view of the firm. We then explore the current practices of (...) class='Hi'>Scandinavian companies through which we identify the evidence of relationships to these historical contributions. Thus, we propose that Scandinavia offers a particularly promising context from which to draw inspiration regarding effective company-stakeholder cooperation and where ample of examples of what is more recently referred to as “creating shared value” can be found. We conclude by endorsing the expression “Scandinavian cooperative advantage” in an effort to draw attention to the Scandinavian context and encourage the field of strategic management to shift its focus from achieving a competitive advantage toward achieving a cooperative advantage. (shrink)

This article contributes to the literature on national varieties of socially responsible investment (SRI) by demonstrating how Scandinavian SRI developed from the 60s and onwards. Combining findings on Scandinavian SRI with insights from previous research and institutional theory, the article accounts for the role of changes in societal values and norms, the mechanisms by which SRI practices spread, and how investors adopt and transform practices to suit their surrounding institutional contexts. Especially, the article draws attention to how different (...) categories of investors act as institutional entrepreneurs during specific historical periods, and how these roles come to shift as institutional rule systems of varying societal levels change. Thus, the insights gained are useful in the future research agenda concerned with advancing knowledge on idiosyncrasies and commonalities of national SRI manifestations, and to understand the reasons underlying such characteristics. (shrink)

This article examines corporate responsibility in the supply chains of four of the largest Scandinavian multinational corporations - IKEA, Nokia, Novo Nordisk, and StatoilHydro - and offers two key findings. First, these Scandinavian companies have all implemented responsible supply chain practices where suppliers in developing nations, and the communities of these suppliers, are engaged as key stakeholders and treated as partners. Second, these supply chain practices all share the common bond of having honesty and the establishment of trust-based (...) relationships at their foundation. As a result, these Scandinavian companies have developed a "cooperative advantage" in their ability to form successful, long-term partnerships in their respective supply chains. (shrink)

The Scandinavian welfare states are known for their universal access to healthcare; however, health inequalities affecting ethnic minority patients are prevalent. Ethnic minority patients' encounters with healthcare systems are often portrayed as part of a system that represents objectivity and neutrality. However, the Danish healthcare sector is a political apparatus that is affected by policies and conceptualisations. Health policies towards ethnic minorities are analysed using Bacchi's policy analysis, to show how implicit problem representations are translated from political and societal (...) discourses into the Danish healthcare system. Our analysis shows that health policies are based on different ideas of who ethnic minority patients are and what kinds of challenges they entail. Two main issues are raised: First, ethnic minorities are positioned as bearers of ‘culture’ and ‘ethnicity’. These concepts of ‘othering’ become both explanations for and the cause of inappropriate healthcare behaviour. Second, the Scandinavian welfare states are known for their solidarity, collectivism, equality and tolerance, also grounded in a postracial, colour‐blind and noncolonial past ideology that forms the societal self‐image. Combined with the ethical and legal responsibility of healthcare professionals to treat all patients equally, our findings indicate little leeway for addressing the discrimination experienced by ethnic minority patients. (shrink)

In this article, we first provide evidence that Scandinavian contributions to stakeholder theory over the past 50 years play a much larger role in its development than is presently acknowledged. These contributions include the first publication and description of the term “stakeholder”, the first stakeholder map, and the development of three fundamental tenets of stakeholder theory: jointness of interests, cooperative strategic posture, and rejection of a narrowly economic view of the firm. We then explore the current practices of (...) class='Hi'>Scandinavian companies through which we identify the evidence of relationships to these historical contributions. Thus, we propose that Scandinavia offers a particularly promising context from which to draw inspiration regarding effective company-stakeholder cooperation and where ample of examples of what is more recently referred to as “creating shared value” can be found. We conclude by endorsing the expression “Scandinavian cooperative advantage” in an effort to draw attention to the Scandinavian context and encourage the field of strategic management to shift its focus from achieving a competitive advantage toward achieving a cooperative advantage. (shrink)

In this article, we first provide evidence that Scandinavian contributions to stakeholder theory over the past 50 years play a much larger role in its development than is presently acknowledged. These contributions include the first publication and description of the term “stakeholder”, the first stakeholder map, and the development of three fundamental tenets of stakeholder theory: jointness of interests, cooperative strategic posture, and rejection of a narrowly economic view of the firm. We then explore the current practices of (...) class='Hi'>Scandinavian companies through which we identify the evidence of relationships to these historical contributions. Thus, we propose that Scandinavia offers a particularly promising context from which to draw inspiration regarding effective company-stakeholder cooperation and where ample of examples of what is more recently referred to as “creating shared value” can be found. We conclude by endorsing the expression “Scandinavian cooperative advantage” in an effort to draw attention to the Scandinavian context and encourage the field of strategic management to shift its focus from achieving a competitive advantage toward achieving a cooperative advantage. (shrink)

This article assesses the similarity and difference between the Western European style of doing bioethics and the Scandinavian one. First, it reviews the introductory article by the editor, C. Delkeskamp-Hayes in the first issue of Christian Bioethics , devoted to the possibility of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe. Second, it analyses bioethics debates in Scandinavian today. In light of Delkeskamp-Hayes' article, the main similarity is that both regions are facing secularization as a threat to basic Christian values, (...) for example, to the Christian view of the sanctity and dignity of the human life. But the Scandinavian tends to reduce Christian bioethics to Luther's concept of the worldly kingdom, supposed to foster a dialogue between Christians and non-Christians on controversial ethical issues. Despite the positive value of the dialogue, this strategy renders Christian ethics powerless. Third, from an evangelical theological standpoint, it proposes some strategies for enhancing the influence of Christian commitments on bioethical laws and policies. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explain the transition from implicit CSR to explicit CSR that has taken place in Scandinavia over the last two decades. Matten and Moon’s distinction between implicit and explicit CSR is the point of departure for the analysis, which is based on case studies of two Norwegian companies: HÅG and Hydro. On the basis of these case studies, we identify two forces that are pushing the transition from implicit to explicit CSR in Scandinavia: Organizational (...) expressiveness and Re-legitimizing. Both of these measures are adjustments to the globalization of the economy, altering the competitive situation even in highly institutionalized, Scandinavian economies. HÅG, a midsized Norwegian manufacturer of office chairs, made CSR and environmental values an integral part of their expressive strategy in the early 1990s. Hydro, a big Norwegian aluminium producer, made CSR an explicit issue around the turn of the millennium, in an attempt to re-legitimize their business operations in a new market situation where plants in local communities in Norway were shut down and relocated to less regulated regimes in low-cost regions abroad. (shrink)

This paper describes an exploratory study of corporate responsibility, corporate reputation, and stakeholder support in Norway, Sweden and Denmark—countries recognized worldwide as providing an institutional climate uniquely conducive to responsible business practice. Conducting a secondary analysis of Scandinavian data from Reputation Institute’s extensive global research on corporate reputation and responsibility, we examine four key questions: First, do Scandinavians agree with external observers that firms in their countries demonstrate superior levels of corporate responsibility? Second, relative to other reputation drivers, to (...) what extent does corporate responsibility predict corporate reputation for the countries in our dataset? Third, to what extent does corporate responsibility predict stakeholder intent in these countries to engage in supportive behavior toward the firm? Finally, are stakeholder perceptions of and responses to corporate responsibility sufficiently similar across Norway, Sweden, and Denmark to justify claims for a monolithic “Scandinavian approach” to CSR? Previous research examining the relationship of corporate responsibility to corporate reputation and stakeholder support is reviewed, analytical methods are described, results presented, and implications discussed. The article concludes with analysis of study limitations and directions for future research. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper explores how Finnish research ethics deals with matters of justice on the levels of practical regulation, political morality, and theoretical studies. The bioethical sets of principles introduced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in the United States and Jacob Dahl Rendtorff and Peter Kemp in Europe provide the conceptual background, together with a recently introduced conceptual map of theories of justice and their dimensions. The most striking finding is that the internationally recognized requirement of informed consent for research (...) on humans can be ideologically tricky in a Scandinavian welfare state setting. (shrink)

Two of the Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Finland have recently joined the European Communities. Together with a third Scandinavian country, Denmark, which joined the Communities two decades ago it seems likely that Scandinavian views and attitudes will make a great impact on the future work of the European Communities — including the on-going harmonisation in the field of corporate social responsibility.This article provides an examination of the Scandinavian view on the five best known models for achieving (...) corporate social responsibility and it shows the likely impact of the admittance of the Scandinavian countries on the future work in the European Communities with regard to corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This article assesses the similarity and difference between the Western European style of doing bioethics and the Scandinavian one. First, it reviews the introductory article by the editor, C. Delkeskamp-Hayes in the first issue of Christian Bioethics (2008), devoted to the possibility of a specifically Christian bioethics in Europe. Second, it analyses bioethics debates in Scandinavian today. In light of Delkeskamp-Hayes' article, the main similarity is that both regions are facing secularization as a threat to basic Christian values, (...) for example, to the Christian view of the sanctity and dignity of the human life. But the Scandinavian tends to reduce Christian bioethics to Luther's concept of the worldly kingdom, supposed to foster a dialogue between Christians and non-Christians on controversial ethical issues. Despite the positive value of the dialogue, this strategy renders Christian ethics powerless. Third, from an evangelical theological standpoint, it proposes some strategies for enhancing the influence of Christian commitments on bioethical laws and policies. (shrink)

This research explored the ethical issues that nurses reported in the process of elaboration and further disclosure after an initial diagnosis of a terminal illness had been given. One hundred and six hospice nurses in Norway and Denmark completed a questionnaire containing 45 items of forced-choice and open-ended questions. This questionnaire was tested and used in three countries prior to this study; for this research it was tested on Danish and Norwegian nurses. All respondents supported the ethics of ongoing disclosure (...) to terminally ill patients based on ethical principles embedded in their country’s Patients’ Rights Acts. Truth, as an intrinsic value, proved foundational to patient autonomy, the most frequent ethical principle these nurses reported to justify their ethical position on information disclosure to terminally ill people. Telling the truth about a diagnosis was not the end of ethics in hospice care, but rather the beginning because what occurs ethically in dealing with prognosis issues became central to these hospice nurses, the patients and their families. Coupled with truth-telling, compassionate interaction and care become extensions of patients’ rights. (shrink)

Body care is considered a key aspect of nursing and imperative for the health, wellbeing, and dignity of older people. In Scandinavian countries, body care as a professional practice has undergone considerable changes, bringing new understandings, values, and dilemmas into nursing. A systematic mapping review was conducted with the aims of identifying and mapping international nursing research on body care of older people in different institutionalized settings in the healthcare system and to critically discuss the dominant assumptions within the (...) research by adapting a problematization approach. Most identified papers reported on empirical research with a biomedical approach focusing on outcome and effectiveness. Conceptual papers, papers with a focus on the perspectives of the older people, or contextual and material aspects were lacking. The research field is dominated by four dominant assumptions: Body care as an evidence‐based practice, body care as a relational ethical practice, the body as a body‐object and a body‐subject, the objects in the body care practices as nonrelational materialities. Given the complexities of professional body care practices, there is a need for other research designs and theoretical perspectives within nursing that expand our understanding of body care taking into consideration the multiple social and material realities. (shrink)

When people talk about anarchism, what they have in mind is typically political anarchism, that is, the view that there should be no state. As the philosopher and anarchism scholar David Miller observes, however, anarchism itself is a more general view, namely the view that there should be no rulers. Miller writes that “although the state is the most distinctive object of anarchist attack, it is by no means the only object. Any institution which, like the state, appears to anarchists (...) coercive, punitive, exploitative or destructive is condemned in the same way”—including, for example, religious institutions, schools, or economic systems (Miller 1984: 8). In this sense, one can be an anarchist about different things. Relationship anarchy is anarchism about personal relationships. -/- Several thinkers in the anarchist tradition have held views on personal relationships (e.g., Godwin 1793; Bakunin 1866; Goldman 1910). In what follows, however, our focus is not on the general issue of anarchist views on relationships, but on the ideas of the contemporary movement of self-identifying relationship anarchists. -/- The ideas of relationship anarchy in this sense—hereafter RA—have been developed in queer and countercultural communities over the last two decades. Rather than focusing primarily on mechanisms of political power, RA theorists have been concerned with understanding and challenging the power dynamics at play in close personal relationships. Andie Nordgren, the movement’s central, founding theorist, describes RA as a radical commitment “to avoid defining relationships by attempts to exercise power over each other” (Nordgren 2018). -/- Our aim is to give a concise presentation and defense of RA. We will approach RA as a theory in applied ethics—in particular, as a theory in sexual ethics and relationship ethics—and relate it to ongoing debates in these areas. We, the authors, are both queer men with a background in countercultures where RA is widely practiced and discussed. One of us is an activist working on trans- and sex workers’ rights (Sørlie), the other is a philosophy professor (Moen). Although we make several claims about the scope, content, and justification of RA, we do not claim to speak with any special authority on the issue. Moreover, many of the points that we make here, while not attributable to a specific source, are not original to us, but are the result of several years of fruitful discussion with others in the RA community. -/- We start by considering the cases where, from an RA perspective, current mainstream relationship norms are too restrictive. Then we turn to the cases where current norms are too permissive. Our views on what counts as “mainstream” relationship norms are, no doubt, influenced by the fact that we are writing from a Scandinavian perspective. -/- We then proceed to consider the relationship between RA and polyamory. We argue that RA is compatible with some, but not all, forms of polyamorous practice. We also argue that, from an RA perspective, the increasingly popular term “consensual non-monogamy” is a misleading term that should be avoided. In the conclusion, we explain how RA, as a position in applied ethics, can be justified within consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethical frameworks alike. -/- We have restricted our scope, in what follows, to chosen relationships between adults. Thus, we are not dealing with, for example, kinship relationships into which one is born, nor relationships between adults and minors. Although many issues and arguments deserve to be explored in greater depth than we can do here, we hope, nevertheless, to be able to convey the main nature and thrust of RA. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to get a deeper understanding of student nurses’ experiences of personal caring ethics by reflection on caring encounters with patients in clinical practice, ethical caring ideals, ethical problems, and sources for inner strength that give courage to practice good caring. In all, 24 Scandinavian student nurses participated voluntarily in an interview study. The interviews were analyzed within a phenomenological–hermeneutical approach and revealed three themes. The students found themselves in two different states of vulnerability: (...) one in which they were overwhelmed by their vulnerability and began to suffer themselves and the other where their vulnerability became a source of development with focus on the patient. The students’ ethical caring ideals served as fixed reference points in their ethical development, but their ideals were at risk of decline. The students reflected on the barriers for performing ethical care and nurtured their ethical ideals by providing ethical care in secret. Caring in secret occurred also when student nurses did not experience a shared ethos. (shrink)

Why do so many doctors have profound misgivings about the push to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide? Ole Hartling uses his background as a physician, university professor and former president of the Danish Council of Ethics to introduce new elements into what can often be understood as an all too simple debate. Alive to the case that assisted dying can be driven by an unattainable yearning for control, Hartling concentrates on two fundamental questions: whether the answer to suffering is to (...) remove the sufferer, and whether self-determination in dying and death is an illusion. He draws on his own experience as a medical doctor to personalize the ethical arguments, share patients' narratives and make references to medical literature. Here is a sceptical stance towards euthanasia, one that is respectful to those who hold different opinions and well-informed about the details and nuances of different euthanasia practices. Written from a Scandinavian perspective, where respect for autonomy and high quality palliative care go hand in hand, Hartling's is a nuanced, valuable contribution to the arguments that surround a question doctors have faced since the birth of medicine. He shows us how the intentions of doing something good can sometimes lead to even greater dilemmas, opening us up to those situations where an inclination to end suffering by ending life is deeply conflicting both for the clinician and for any fellow human being. (shrink)

Editorial for issue 28 of Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 'Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory'.

As public awareness of environmental issues and animal welfare has risen, catering to public concerns and views on these issues has become a potentially profitable strategy for marketing a number of product types, of which animal products such as dairy and meat are obvious examples. Our analysis suggests that specific marketing instruments are used to sell animal products by blurring the difference between the paradigms of animal welfare used by producers, and the paradigms of animal welfare as perceived by the (...) public. These instruments rely on ethical, political and sustainable consumption discourses in order to sell one image of animal welfare in intensive animal production while the actual production at the same time presupposes a quite different paradigm of animal welfare. Specifically, product advertising utilizes representations tied to concepts of naturalness in depictions of both animal lives and product processes as “natural”. Product marketing suggests a coherence between nature, production process, and end product, thereby creating associations that the lives of production animals are lived in nature and that their products bring a wholesome and sustainable naturalness to the consumer—thus attempting to display a green, eco-, climate-, and animal friendly production. By analyzing a number of cases from the Scandinavian food market, this paper thus illustrates the tensions between paradigms of animal welfare and concepts of naturalness as these are used in animal product marketing, discusses the ethical implications of this type of marketing communication, and stresses the need for transparency in the area of animal welfare. (shrink)

After the approval of a code of ethics, the creation of a permanent board‐level ethics committee is the next step in the institutionalization of business ethics. This study explores how the board's structure and demographic characteristics explain the decision to form an ethics committee. The analysis is based on the constituents of the Standard and Poor's Europe 350 index. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that ethics committees are more likely to be found in firms with a lower presence of (...) executive directors and of directors holding MBA degrees. However, we also observe that boards chaired by executive directors seem to favor the creation of an ethics committee. Additionally, as we had anticipated, firms with stronger agency conflicts seem to be more willing to create committees. The analysis conducted with segmented samples reveals that the model has greater explanatory power when applied to firms from common‐law and French civil‐law countries than when applied to firms from the German–Scandinavian civil‐law area. Finally, our results indicate that a firm's country of origin is a more influential factor in explaining the decision to create an ethics committee than the industry to which it belongs or even the magnitude of its agency conflicts. (shrink)

Researchers sometimes engage in various forms of dishonesty and unethical behavior, which has led to regulatory efforts to ensure that they work according to acceptable standards. Such regulation is a difficult task, as research is a diverse and dynamic endeavor. Researchers can disagree about what counts as good and acceptable standards, and these standards are constantly developing. This paper presents and discusses recent changes in research integrity and ethics regulation in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Recognizing that research norms are developed (...) through practice and are therefore unsuited for comprehensive national regulation, the Scandinavian countries focus on empowering the research community to regulate itself instead, except for the most severe cases of misconduct. This empowerment takes the form of giving research institutions tools and investigatory powers while also holding them responsible for ensuring that both the institution and individual researchers are up to date on relevant norms. In this way, the Scandinavian governments seek to avoid some of the challenges found in more legalistic approaches, which risk lagging behind the continuous development of research norms and can be insensitive to the fact that different disciplines have different norms. While the new approach in Scandinavian has several potential benefits, it also involves potential trade-offs and limitations. The new laws can create confusion about what researchers are allowed to do. Another issue is that it only addresses the fundamental drivers of misconduct to a limited extent. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

In this collection of original essays on metaethics, the nature of morality, and the structure of moral reasoning are characterized, the limits of justification in ethics are examined, and the underlying rationale of moral philosophy is probed. Around mid-century metaethics held centre stage in discussions of moral philosophy in Anglo-American and Scandinavian philosophical environments. During the 1970s, its "foundational" position was challenged by developments within analytic philosophy itself by a renewal of systematic substantive ethics largely, but not exclusively, of (...) a Rawlsian inspiration and by a reinvigorated interest in substantive moral problems on the part of philosophers. However, as work went on here, philosophers encountered problems concerning the methods of moral reasoning and the structure of justification of moral claims that were recognized to be metaethical. This led to a renewal of metaethics now freed from its previously narrow linguistic focus and aprioristic restrictions. The essays in this volume contribute both to this renewal and to a continued skeptical probing of the very rationale of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Background: As part of an ongoing Scandinavian project on the dignity of care for older people, this study is based on ‘clinical caring science’ as a scientific discipline. Clinical caring science examines how ground concepts, axioms and theories are expressed in different clinical contexts. Central notions are caring culture, dignity, at-home-ness, the little extra, non-caring cultures versus caring cultures and ethical context – and climate. Aim and assumptions: This study investigates the individual variations of caring cultures in relation to (...) dignity and how it is expressed in caring acts and ethical contexts. Three assumptions are formulated: (1) the caring culture of nursing homes influences whether dignified care is provided, (2) an ethos that is reflected on and appropriated by the caregiver mirrors itself in ethical caring acts and as artful caring in an ethical context and (3) caring culture is assumed to be a more ontological or universal concept than, for example, an ethical context or ethical person-to-person acts. Research design: The methodological approach is hermeneutic. The data consist of 28 interviews with relatives of older persons from Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Ethical considerations: The principles of voluntariness, confidentiality and anonymity were respected during the whole research process. Findings: Three patterns were revealed: dignity as at-home-ness, dignity as the little extra and non-dignifying ethical context. Discussion: Caring communion, invitation, at-home-ness and ‘the little extra’ are expressions of ethical contexts and caring acts in a caring culture. A non-caring culture may not consider the dignity of its residents and may be represented by routinized care that values organizational efficiency and instrumentalism rather than an individual’s dignity and self-worth. Conclusion: An ethos must be integrated in both the organization and in the individual caregiver in order to be expressed in caring acts and in an ethical context that supports these caring acts. (shrink)

Background: As part of an ongoing Scandinavian project on the dignity of care for older people, this study is based on ‘clinical caring science’ as a scientific discipline. Clinical caring science examines how ground concepts, axioms and theories are expressed in different clinical contexts. Central notions are caring culture, dignity, at-home-ness, the little extra, non-caring cultures versus caring cultures and ethical context – and climate. Aim and assumptions: This study investigates the individual variations of caring cultures in relation to (...) dignity and how it is expressed in caring acts and ethical contexts. Three assumptions are formulated: (1) the caring culture of nursing homes influences whether dignified care is provided, (2) an ethos that is reflected on and appropriated by the caregiver mirrors itself in ethical caring acts and as artful caring in an ethical context and (3) caring culture is assumed to be a more ontological or universal concept than, for example, an ethical context or ethical person-to-person acts. Research design: The methodological approach is hermeneutic. The data consist of 28 interviews with relatives of older persons from Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Ethical considerations: The principles of voluntariness, confidentiality and anonymity were respected during the whole research process. Findings: Three patterns were revealed: dignity as at-home-ness, dignity as the little extra and non-dignifying ethical context. Discussion: Caring communion, invitation, at-home-ness and ‘the little extra’ are expressions of ethical contexts and caring acts in a caring culture. A non-caring culture may not consider the dignity of its residents and may be represented by routinized care that values organizational efficiency and instrumentalism rather than an individual’s dignity and self-worth. Conclusion: An ethos must be integrated in both the organization and in the individual caregiver in order to be expressed in caring acts and in an ethical context that supports these caring acts. (shrink)

This volume explores the concept of the honest merchant, taking a broad perspective and covering a wide range of aspects. It looks at the different types of “honest merchant” conceptions originating from different cultures and literary traditions. The book covers Japanese, Islamic, Scandinavian, Russian, German, Spanish, as well as other aspects, and studies different disciplinary backgrounds of the honest merchant, such as philosophical, economic, neuroethical, sociological and literary ones. The concept of the honest merchant has a long tradition in (...) business ethics. In the Hanseatic League and in medieval Italy, the ideal of the honest businessman was taught since the late Middle Ages. It originated during a time when travelling merchants were often regarded with a sceptical eye. The honest merchants of their time however held clear principles in their business and took responsibility for their community. In later times, the religious notions of the concept lost their pivotal place to reason and morality. This book goes beyond the tradition of discussing business ethics in association with concepts from the Hanseatic League and medieval Italy, and puts the central concept of business ethics in a much greater perspective. (shrink)

Background: Physical impairment and dependency on others may be a threat to dignity. Research questions: The purpose of this study was to explore dignity as a core concept in caring, and how healthcare personnel focus on and foster dignity in nursing home residents. Research design: This study has a hermeneutic design. Participants and research context: In all, 40 healthcare personnel from six nursing homes in Scandinavia participated in focus group interviews in this study. Ethical considerations: This study has been evaluated (...) and approved by the Regional Ethical Committees and the Social Science Data Services in the respective Scandinavian countries. Findings: Two main themes emerged: dignity as distinction (I), and dignity as influence and participation (II). Discussion: A common understanding was that stress and business was a daily challenge. Conclusion: Therefore, and according to the health personnel, maintaining human dignity requires slow caring in nursing homes, as an essential approach. (shrink)

This volume is based on papers presented at the XV Internordic Philosophical Symposium in Helsinki in May, 2004. It covers a number of important and timely philosophical issues: naturalism - its strengths, weaknesses, and limits - in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science; the relation between philosophical and scientific methodology; the ethics of science and, more generally, the place of science in society; the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities; as well as the ways in which scientific (...) progress may challenge traditional philosophical concepts and problems and, on the other hand, the ways in which philosophical arguments and/or artistic innovations - or philosophical interpretations of them - may challenge some claims made in the name of science. In addition to several Scandinavian authors, a number of leading philosophers from outside the Nordic countries are among the contributors to this volume. This collection of original articles thus contributes to the current lively philosophical debates on the relations between science, philosophy, and society. (shrink)

BackgroundThere is a lack of empirical research regarding the outcomes of such clinical ethics support methods as moral case deliberation (MCD). Empirical research in how healthcare professionals perceive potential outcomes is needed in order to evaluate the value and effectiveness of ethics support; and help to design future outcomes research. The aim was to use the European Moral Case Deliberation Outcome Instrument (Euro-MCD) instrument to examine the importance of various MCD outcomes, according to healthcare professionals, prior to participation.MethodsA North European (...) field survey among healthcare professionals drawn from 73 workplaces in a variety of healthcare settings in the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The Euro-MCD instrument was used.ResultsAll outcomes regarding the domains of moral reflexivity, moral attitude, emotional support, collaboration, impact at organisational level and concrete results, were perceived as very or quite important by 76%–97% of the 703 respondents. Outcomes regarding collaboration and concrete results were perceived as most important. Outcomes assessed as least important were mostly about moral attitude. ‘Better interactions with patient/family’ emerged as a new domain from the qualitative analysis. Dutch respondents perceived most of the outcomes as significantly less important than the Scandinavians, especially regarding emotional support. Furthermore, men, those who were younger, and physician-respondents scored most of the outcomes as statistically significantly less important compared with the other respondents.ConclusionsThe findings indicate a need for a broad instrument such as the Euro-MCD. Outcomes related to better interactions between professionals and patients must also be included in the future. The empirical findings raise the normative question of whether outcomes that were perceived as less important, such asmoralreflexivity andmoralattitude outcomes, should still be included. In the future, a combination of empirical findings (practice) and normative reflection (theories) will contribute to the revision of the instrument. (shrink)

Retractions solicited by authors following the discovery of an unintentional error—what we henceforth call a “self-retraction”—are a new phenomenon of growing importance, about which very little is known. Here we present results of a small qualitative study aimed at gaining preliminary insights about circumstances, motivations and beliefs that accompanied the experience of a self-retraction. We identified retraction notes that unambiguously reported an honest error and that had been published between the years 2010 and 2015. We limited our sample to retractions (...) with at least one co-author based in the Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany or a Scandinavian country, and we invited these authors to a semi-structured interview. Fourteen authors accepted our invitation. Contrary to our initial assumptions, most of our interviewees had not originally intended to retract their paper. They had contacted the journal to request a correction and the decision to retract had been made by journal editors. All interviewees reported that having to retract their own publication made them concerned for their scientific reputation and career, often causing considerable stress and anxiety. Interviewees also encountered difficulties in communicating with the journal and recalled other procedural issues that had unnecessarily slowed down the process of self-retraction. Intriguingly, however, all interviewees reported how, contrary to their own expectations, the self-retraction had brought no damage to their reputation and in some cases had actually improved it. We also examined the ethical motivations that interviewees ascribed, retrospectively, to their actions and found that such motivations included a combination of moral and prudential considerations. These preliminary results suggest that scientists would welcome innovations to facilitate the process of self-retraction. (shrink)

This research shows how business students’ disciplinary specializations can affect their sense of personal responsibility by providing rationalizations for moral disengagement. It thereby conceptualizes business students’ disciplinary specializations as a key dimension of the business school responsibility learning environment. Students use four main rationalizations to displace responsibility variously away from their own disciplinary specializations, to claim responsibility as the prerogative of their specialization, and to shiftirresponsibility onto disciplinary out-groups. Yet despite their disciplinary identifications, students largely rationalized that their sense of (...) responsibility was an individual matter that was unlikely to be affected by contextual influences, and they attributedirresponsible behavior to incorrigible ‘bad apples.’ A theoretical model is offered which illustrates these dynamics by combining Bandura’s social cognitive theory with social identity theory. The research is based on secondary data, specifically focus-group interviews conducted with undergraduate students at a major Scandinavian business school in connection with the implementation of the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative. The implications for management education include the need to strengthen students’ ‘disciplinary reflexivity,’ and to explicitly address the tension between students’ disciplinary solidarities and their faith in their own individual moral infallibility. (shrink)

Priority setting in health care is ubiquitous and health authorities are increasingly recognising the need for priority setting guidelines to ensure efficient, fair, and equitable resource allocation. While cost-effectiveness concerns seem to dominate many policies, the tension between utilitarian and deontological concerns is salient to many, and various severity criteria appear to fill this gap. Severity, then, must be subjected to rigorous ethical and philosophical analysis. Here we first give a brief history of the path to today’s severity criteria in (...) Norway and Sweden. The Scandinavian perspective on severity might be conducive to the international discussion, given its long-standing use as a priority setting criterion, despite having reached rather different conclusions so far. We then argue that severity can be viewed as a multidimensional concept, drawing on accounts of need, urgency, fairness, duty to save lives, and human dignity. Such concerns will often be relative to local mores, and the weighting placed on the various dimensions cannot be expected to be fixed. Thirdly, we present what we think are the most pertinent questions to answer about severity in order to facilitate decision making in the coming years of increased scarcity, and to further the understanding of underlying assumptions and values that go into these decisions. We conclude that severity is poorly understood, and that the topic needs substantial further inquiry; thus we hope this article may set a challenging and important research agenda. (shrink)

The article depicts the traditional fishing, the outdoor drying of Stockfish, and its cultural and culinary uses in a historic context and today. The fishing of the North East Arctic cod (Gadus morhua) is a sustainable coastal fishery for millennia in the North of Norway, but climate change challenges the outdoor drying of stockfish. The article follows the stockfish history during the hanseatic office in Bergen until the present trade. The early commercial production of stockfish was due to urban expansion, (...) fasting rules and the need to provide nutritious food to the poor in Northern Europe and beyond. The article follows the traces of stockfish expansion as a staple food, first to Northern Europe, later to central Europe and the Mediterranean countries, before ending up as an important food supply to West-African countries in the nineteenth century. The article explains the early Greek and Renaissance concerns for eating fish and for stockfish in particular due to dietetic and medical beliefs. Then the cultural impact of stockfish is explained by showing some examples of both living and disappearing culinary traditions. The use of lye for soaking stockfish is not only a Scandinavian tradition but a little known shared European craft and culinary practice. Battering the stockfish with a wooden hammer, the use of lye for durability and water for softening the hard fish texture was practiced for preparing stockfish. Finally, the article touches upon rules, regulations and organisations that can help strengthening and preserve the traditional craft and culinary uses of stockfish today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 21-39 [Access article in PDF] Capability and Language in the Novels of Tarjei Vesaas Catherine Wilson I THOUGH RELATIVELY UNKNOWN to English-speaking readers, Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) is recognized as one of the great Scandinavian novelists and literary innovators of the last century. His oeuvre is substantial, extending to thirty-four volumes published between 1923 and 1966, many of them translated into English and European (...) languages. He was one of four nominees for the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, and he received a number of other awards and citations in the course of his life. At the same time, his work has failed almost entirely to generate a secondary literature going beyond plot summary, stylistics, and moral approval, and even that literature remains strongly regionalized. 1 Vesaas wrote in nynorsk or "New Norwegian," the minority language of the country created from south-central dialects and distinct from the official, bureaucratic bokmal. He settled permanently on a farm in the remote Telemark district of Norway and assumed no role in European culture as critic or essayist, refusing to discuss his own work in literary or philosophical terms. As a result, analytic and comparative studies have proved difficult to launch.The present essay is intended to provide one such analytical study, addressed specifically to the philosophical themes of ethical resignation, the precariousness of communication, and inwardness. These are familiar themes in twentieth-century literature. In his study of the "literary conquest of the void," R. M. Adams shows how Moravia, Musil, and Beckett amongst others make use of devices of paralysis, immobility, exhaustion, and incomprehension that have their origins in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, notably in Baudelaire [End Page 21] and Gogol. 2 Literary modernism rejected certain nineteenth-century conventions of plot and character, but did not abandon the fascination of the preceding century with nihilistic themes. Vesaas's work demands to be read in this literary context. The novels, at once semirealistic and highly stylized, deal almost exclusively with rural people and their struggles against the elemental forces of nature. The main characters are often children and adolescents who suffer some degree of helplessness. Simple contrasts are posed: warmth and cold; loss and retrieval, childbirth and death. Agricultural cycle motifs abound. The choice of protagonists and the dominance of vitalistic and biological themes pose the threat of sentimentality and preciousness, but it is avoided by the ubiquity of devastation and destruction in the moral landscape. According to Randi Brox's note in the Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, the early novels in particular "advocate as the highest goal in life an accepting, contented attitude toward the human condition." 3This judgment reflects what might be termed a judicial-theological picture of fiction. On this view, a novel constitutes a testing ground for discovering what sort of world we live in and what pursuits are possible and worthwhile. Various alternatives are set up as hypotheses, and novels prove and disprove them through narrative demonstrations of the causal effects of adopting them. False theories of the human world and untenable values are subject to refutation. This template is surprisingly useful, not only with respect to the nineteenth-century novel, with its apparent tendency to confident judgment, but even to modern fiction. Moravia, for example, can be seen to be awarding divergent roles to characters and allowing the qualities they represent to struggle for supremacy. 4Yet poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism have cast doubt on the notion that, to the extent that they are important, such contests can ever be decided, and it is increasingly clear that the greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Hardy and Eliot, did not regard the hierarchy of values as settled and demonstrable. Persons, we are coming to understand, are more plausibly seen as sites of conflict; thus fictional representations of persons are repositories of opposing values. Vesaas's novels reflect such an understanding of persons and values, and so the judicial-theological template is inapplicable.The critical view that Vesaas's novels are essentially instructions in adaptation is untenable, because the goal of... (shrink)

In this paper a case is made concerning how important levels of media technology and new interactive tex-tures affect urban landscapes. The case is based on experiences and empirical examples from a Scandinavian city in which levels of interactive infrastructures, mediated spaces, and places, are high, and in which accessibility and social inclusion traditionally have been strong components in societal and systems design. Our designerly approach discloses some of ways that the city is enacted by a new digital materiality. (...) This materiality can only bee disclosed if the relationship between the city and ICT is understood as a meaningful whole – a totality – in this text illustrated by the notions of landmarks and imprints. Based on our case we suggest that it is possible to employ an ethical dwelling reflecting the endless, active and ongo-ing responsibility for the city and its interactive textures in everyday life. (shrink)

Background Several studies suggest that deviations from proper authorship practices are commonplace in medicine. The aim of this study was to explore experiences of and attitudes towards the handling of authorship in PhD theses at medical faculties in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Methods Those who defended their PhD thesis at a medical faculty in Scandinavia during the second half of 2020 were offered, by e-mail, to participate in an online survey. Survey questions dealt with experiences of violations of the first (...) three of the ICMJE authorship criteria and misuse of authorship order in the thesis articles, as well as respondents’ attitudes to these matters. Both questions with fixed response alternatives and questions with free-text responses were used. Quantitative data were analysed statistically using the Table functions in SPSS 25 and Chi-2 tests. Free-text responses were analysed qualitatively using manifest content analysis. Results 287 valid questionnaires were returned (response rate: 34.1%). Almost half (46.0%) of the respondents reported that the ICMJE authorship criteria were not fully respected in at least one of the papers in their thesis, while a vast majority (96.7%) found it important that authorship is handled according to the ICMJE authorship criteria. 24.4% reported inadequate handling of authorship order in at least one paper. The qualitative results provide a wide spectrum of examples of how the ICMJE authorship criteria are circumvented. Conclusion Despite increasing educational efforts to reduce deviations from good research practice at Scandinavian universities, the handling of authorship in medical papers remains problematic. (shrink)

This edited volume explores ideas of legal realism which emerge through the works of Russian legal philosophers. Apart from the well-known American and Scandinavian versions of legal realism, there also exists a Russian one: readers will discover fresh perspectives and that the collection of early twentieth century ideas on law discussed in Russia can be understood as a unified school of legal thought – as Russian legal realism. These chapters by renowned European and Eastern European legal philosophers add to (...) ongoing discussions about the nature of law, especially in the context of developments around our scientific knowledge about the mind and behaviour. Analyses of legal phenomena carried out by legal realists in Russia offer novel arguments in favour of embracing psychological and sociological perspectives on the law. The book includes analysis of the St. Petersburg school of legal philosophy and Leon Petrażycki’s psychological theory of law. This original and multifaceted research on Russian realists is of considerable value to an international audience. Researchers and postgraduate students of law, legal theory and legal ethics will find the book particularly appealing, but it will also interest those investigating the philosophy or sociology of law, or legal history. (shrink)

The paper aims to understand the various legacies of eugenics in the postwar period to recognize both the continuities and discontinuities of eugenics with an approach which is both conceptually sound and historically correct. Building on earlier work of Lene Koch, the paper endeavours to chart the historical trajectory of eugenics by examining how its definition and those of its related or oppositional concepts have evolved within selected lexicon entries across various stages of the century. The inclusion and publication of (...) a concept within a lexicon indicate its significance, linguistic vitality, and prevalence in public discourse. These entries serve as a window into the contemporary understanding and application of concepts over an entire century, offering insights into the practices of eugenics as interpreted by the authoritative scholars of the era. Additionally, these lexicon entries offer more than just a mirror to the past’s prevailing attitudes. The very act of articulating a concept may be viewed as a pivotal element in social struggles, influencing the course of eugenic practices and their interpretations. Both conceptual history and discourse analysis share common ground in their perception of concepts, considering the use of language as a social activity endowed with performative capabilities. They recognize that language does not merely reflect reality but can actively shape it, playing a significant role in societal dynamics and power relations. The Hungarian lexicon entries on eugenics reveal notable disparities in the identified content, the periodization, and the evolution of changes when compared to Lene Koch’s earlier study on Scandinavian eugenics. In Hungary, the concept of eugenics underwent significant changes over four successive periods. The history and interpretation of eugenics can vary significantly from one country to another. Different nations have had their unique experiences and trajectories with the eugenics movement, which have been shaped by their specific cultural, political, and social contexts. These variations emphasize the importance of considering the localized and historical perspectives when examining the concept of eugenics. (shrink)

The paper deals with certain issues with which Olivecrona was mainly concerned in his Philosophy of Law, notably (i) his views about the logical or syntactical form of imperatives as used in the law, and (ii) his views on the semantics of imperatives in the law and on the question whether and to what extent the notions of truth and falsity are applicable to those imperatives at all. In the light of an important critical notice of Olivecrona's work by Marc-Wogau (...) (1940 ), we examine some textual evidence for attributing to Olivecrona a so-called Atheoretical Thesis to the effect that imperatives in the law are neither true nor false or lack truth-value altogether. We close the paper by commenting on the celebrated distinction due to Hedenius (1941 ) and further elaborated by Wedberg (1951 ) between genuine ("rule-stating") normative sentences in the law and spurious ones (stating merely that a given rule is (or is not) in force in a given society at a given time). Two interesting difficulties bound up with that distinction will be dealt with. By means of various quotations we try to capture something of the flavour characterizing the legal philosophical discussion in Sweden in the mid-twentieth century during la belle époque of Scandinavian Legal Realism of which Olivecrona was a typical representative. (shrink)

In what it will be convenient to call “the Scandinavian school”; of jurisprudence, Hagerstrom is clearly the master. But his leadership is of a somewhat special kind. For all that he wrote a large book on Roman law, Hägerström was trained as, and continued to be, a philosopher, not a jurisprudentialist or a sociologist. His essays on law and morals are ancillary to his main purpose: to destroy transcendental metaphysics. The epigraphhe chose to head his contribution to Die Philosophic (...) der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen was uncompromising: “Praeterea censeo metaphysicam esse delendam.” If, in his published work, he to so considerable a degree concentrated his attention on ethics and jurisprudence, that is because he took them to be a particularly rich source of metaphysical mystery-mongering. Through a study of men's moral and legal ideas, Hägerström thought he could bring out the sources, the defects—and even, in a way, the strength—of metaphysical thinking. (shrink)