Search results for "Ethics"
showing 10 items of 2130 documents
Risk in perspective
2001
A partial micro-foundation for the ‘two-worlds’ theory of morality policymaking: Evidence from Germany
2020
The two-worlds framework is currently the most important account of morality policymaking in Europe. For this theory of elite behaviour to be valid, a number of implicit assumptions about political belief systems at the mass level must hold. This contribution spells out these assumptions and tests them within a structural equation modelling framework, using original survey data from Germany, a country that constitutes a crucial case for the two-worlds theory. The results showed that the implicit individual-level preconditions of the two-worlds framework were fulfilled. Political secularism and partisanship were strongly associated. Political secularism also had strong effects on morality p…
Strange bedfellows: the Bundestag’s free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) reveals how Germany’s restrictive bioethics legislation is …
2015
Germany’s bioethical legislation presents a puzzle: given structural factors, the country should be at the forefront of reproductive medicine, but its embryology regime remains one of the strictest in Western Europe. Past research has linked this fact to an unusual coalition of Christian and New Left groups, which both draw a connection from modern embryology to eugenics under the Nazis. In this article, the workings of this alleged alliance are demonstrated at the micro-level for the first time. The behaviour of individual MPs in a crucial free vote on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is modelled using data on their political, sectoral and religious affiliations. Identifying as a …
Rethinking science communication in a changing landscape
2021
Science communication continues to grow, develop and change, as a practice and field of research. The boundaries between science and the rest of society are blurring. Digitalization transforms the public sphere. This JCOM special issue aims to rethink science communication in light of the changing science communication landscape. How to characterize the emerging science communication ecosystem in relation to the introduction of new media and actors involved? What new practices are emerging? How is the quality of science communication maintained or improved? We present a selection of papers that provide different perspectives on these questions and challenges.
Climate Change, Uncertainty and Ethical Superstorms
2021
I argue that one of the most urgent tasks of geoethics is how to deal with climate change in a just and equitable way. At worst, our current path could lead to multi-metre sea-level rise, increases in storms and climate extremes, causing devastating social disruption and economic consequences. I present some alternatives on how to handle this alarming prospect, arguing that we cannot condense our decision-making on climate change into numerical calculations, but should instead make ethical judgements. The commonly used expected utility maximation can be considered a gamble on future generations’ expense for the benefit of the current ones. Thus, from a Rawlsian perspective, we will instead …
Minding morality : ethical artificial societies for public policy modeling
2020
AbstractPublic policies are designed to have an impact on particular societies, yet policy-oriented computer models and simulations often focus more on articulating the policies to be applied than on realistically rendering the cultural dynamics of the target society. This approach can lead to policy assessments that ignore crucial social contextual factors. For example, by leaving out distinctive moral and normative dimensions of cultural contexts in artificial societies, estimations of downstream policy effectiveness fail to account for dynamics that are fundamental in human life and central to many public policy challenges. In this paper, we supply evidence that incorporating morally sal…
Humanity in Times of Crisis
2014
The belief in a politics of humanity, even in times of crisis, can be argued to serve as the basis of Hannah Arendt’s political thought. By presupposing freedom as a human condition, Arendt’s account of the political addresses what she takes to be humans’ capability to begin something anew, which involves new-born children as well critique of the society. Also, one way in which Arendt may be read, is by holding that the politics of humanity is, fundamentally speaking, grounded in new-born’s embodiment. Although Arendt rejects a direct link between the body and the political respectively, it still seems as if her account of humanity and dignity should be interpreted as depending on the ontol…