With the increasing use of algorithms in high-stakes areas such as criminal justice and health has come a significant concern about the fairness of prediction-based decision procedures. In this article I argue that a prominent class of mathematically incompatible performance parity criteria can all be understood as applications of John Broome’s account of fairness as the proportional satisfaction of claims. On this interpretation these criteria do not disagree on what it means for an algorithm to be _fair_. Rather they express (...) different understandings of what grounds a claim to a good being allocated by an algorithmic decision procedure. I then argue that an important implication of the Broomean interpretation is that it strengthens the case for outcome-based criteria. Finally, I consider how a version of the levelling-down objection to performance parity criteria arises within the Broomean account. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the prospects for a rights-based approach to the morality of pure risk-imposition. In particular, I discuss a practical challenge to proponents of the thesis that we have a right against being imposed a risk of harm. According to an influential criticism, a right against risk-imposition will rule out all ordinary activities. The paper examines two strategies that rights theorists may follow in response to this “Paralysis Problem”. The first strategy introduces a threshold for when a (...) risk-imposition is a rights violation. The second strategy drops the claim that rights are absolute and maintains that all rights infringements generate compensation duties. It is argued that both strategies face significant practical problems of their own and that the Paralysis Problem seems fatal for a right against risk-imposition in the absence of an adequate account of the morally relevant threshold risk. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the connection between accounts of biological teleology and the biocentrist claim that all living beings have a good of their own. I first present the background for biocentrists’ appeal to biological teleology. Then I raise a problem of scope for teleology-based biocentrism and, drawing in part on recent work by Basl and Sandler, I discuss Taylor and Varner’s responses to this problem. I then challenge Basl and Sandler’s own response to the scope problem for its (...) reliance on a selectionist account of organismic teleology. Finally I examine the prospects for a biocentrist response to the problem of scope based on an alternative organisational account of internal teleology. I conclude by assessing the prospects for teleology-based biocentrism. (shrink)

What does it mean for algorithmic classifications to be fair to different socially salient groups? According to classification parity criteria, what is required is equality across groups with respect to some performance measure such as error rates. Critics of classification parity object that classification parity entails that achieving fairness may require us to choose an algorithm that makes no group better off and some groups worse off than an alternative. In this article, I interpret the problem of algorithmic fairness as (...) a case concerning the ethics of the distribution of algorithmic classifications across groups (as opposed to, e.g., the fairness of data collection). I begin with a short introduction of algorithmic fairness as a problem discussed in machine learning. I then show how the criticism raised against classification parity is a form of leveling down objection, and I interpret the egalitarianism of classification parity as deontic egalitarianism. I then discuss a challenge to this interpretation and suggest a revision. Finally, I examine how my interpretation provides proponents of classification parity with a response to the leveling down criticism and how it relates to a recent suggestion to evaluate fairness for automated decision-making systems based on risk and welfare considerations from behind a veil of ignorance. (shrink)

The use of algorithms to support prediction-based decision-making is becoming commonplace in a range of domains including health, criminal justice, education, social services, lending, and hiring. An assumption governing such decisions is that there is a property Y such that individual a should be allocated resource R by decision-maker D if a is Y. When there is uncertainty about whether a is Y, algorithms may provide valuable decision support by accurately predicting whether a is Y on the basis of known (...) features of a. Based on recent work on statistical evidence in epistemology this article presents an argument against relying exclusively on algorithmic predictions to allocate resources when they provide purely statistical evidence that a is Y. The article then responds to the objection that any evidence that will increase the proportion of correct decisions should be accepted as the basis for allocations regardless of its epistemic deficiency. Finally, some important practical aspects of the conclusion are considered. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the aetiological account of biological interests, developed by Varner, in the context of artefactual organisms envisioned by current research in synthetic biology. In “Sections 2–5”, I present Varner's theory and criticise it for being incapable of ascribing non-derivative interests to artefactual organisms due to their lack of a history of natural selection. In “Sections 6–7”, I develop a new alternative to Varner's account, building on the organisational theory of biological teleology and function. I argue that (...) the organisational account of biological interest is superior to Varner's aetiological account because it can accommodate both artefactual and naturally evolved organisms, provides a non-arbitrary and practical way of determining biological interests, supports the claim that organisms have interests in a sense in which artefacts do not, and avoids the possibility of there being a conflict between what an organismic part is supposed to do and what is in the interest of the organism. (shrink)

This paper discusses a recent solution to the problem of artifact phantom functions by Beth Preston. A phantom function is a function associated with a kind of artifact that it is structurally incapable of performing. Preston proposes a criterion of artifact proper function according to which phantom functions can be proper functions. This paper argues that Preston’s criterion cannot ground the teleological and normative aspects definitive of proper functions and that the proposed criterion is not consistent with Preston’s account of (...) how copies of novel prototypes acquire proper functions. The paper defends an understanding of phantom functions suggested in earlier work by Preston. (shrink)

When is it justified to use opaque artificial intelligence (AI) output in medical decision-making? Consideration of this question is of central importance for the responsible use of opaque machine learning (ML) models, which have been shown to produce accurate and reliable diagnoses, prognoses, and treatment suggestions in medicine. In this article, I discuss the merits of two answers to the question. According to the Explanation View, clinicians must have access to an explanation of why an output was produced. According to (...) the Validation View, it is sufficient that the AI system has been validated using established standards for safety and reliability. I defend the Explanation View against two lines of criticism, and I argue that within the framework of evidence-based medicine mere validation seems insufficient for the use of AI output. I end by characterizing the epistemic responsibility of clinicians and point out how a mere AI output cannot in itself ground a practical conclusion about what to do. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that contractualism faces a dilemma when it comes to justifying risks generated by socially valuable activities. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether contractualists should adopt an ex post or an ex ante perspective when assessing whether an action or policy is justifiable to each person. In this paper I argue for the modest conclusion that ex post contractualism is a live option notwithstanding recent criticisms raised by proponents of the ex ante (...) perspective. I then consider how an ex post contractualist can best respond to the problem that it seems to prohibit a range of intuitively permissible and socially valuable activities. (shrink)

One reason for the popularity of Craver’s mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance is that it seems to make good sense of the experimental practices and constitutive reasoning in the life sciences. Two recent papers propose a theoretical alternative to in light of several important conceptual objections. Their alternative approach, the no de-coupling account, conceives of constitution as a dependence relation that once postulated provides the best explanation of the impossibility of breaking the common cause coupling of a macro-level mechanism (...) and its micro-level components. This entails an abductive view of constitutive inference. Proponents of the NDC or abductive account recognize that their discussion leaves open a big question concerning the practical dimension of the notion of constitutive relevanssssce: Is it possible to faithfully reconstruct constitutional reasoning in science in terms of a failure to de-couple, via interlevel experiments, phenomena from their mechanistic constituents? Focusing on the field of memory and long-term potential research, this article argues that the abductive account provides a more adequate description of interlevel experiments in neuroscience. We also suggest that the account highlights some significant practical recommendations of how to interpret the findings of interlevel experiments. 1Introduction 2Mutual Manipulability and Constitutive Relevance 2.1Constitutive relevance through an interventionist lens 2.2Mutual manipulability: A methodological application 3Trouble for the Mutual Manipulability Account 4The Abductive Account of Constitution 5The Abductive Account: A Methodological Application 5.1Long-term potential and memory experiments 5.2A comparative summary 6Conclusions. (shrink)

Theorists analyzing the concept of disease on the basis of the notion of dysfunction consider disease to be dysfunction requiring. More specifically, dysfunction-requiring theories of disease claim that for an individual to be diseased certain biological facts about it must be the case. Disease is not wholly a matter of evaluative attitudes. In this paper, I consider the dysfunction-requiring component of Wakefield’s hybrid account of disease in light of the artifactual organisms envisioned by current research in synthetic biology. In particular, (...) I argue that the possibility of artifactual organisms and the case of oncomice and other bred or genetically modified strains of organism constitute a significant objection to Wakefield’s etiological account of the dysfunction requirement. I then develop a new alternative understanding of the dysfunction requirement that builds on the organizational theory of function. I conclude that my suggestion is superior to Wakefield’s theory because it (a) can accommodate both artifactual and naturally evolved organisms, (b) avoids the possibility of there being a conflict between what an organismic part is supposed to do and the health of the organism, and (c) provides a nonarbitrary and practical way of determining whether dysfunction occurs. (shrink)

Several studies have documented that when presented with data from social media platforms machine learning (ML) models can make accurate predictions about users, e.g., about whether they are likely to suffer health-related conditions such as depression, mental disorders, and risk of suicide. In a recent article, Ploug (Philos Technol 36:14, 2023) defends a right not to be subjected to AI profiling based on publicly available data. In this comment, I raise some questions in relation to Ploug’s argument that I think (...) deserves further discussion. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the explanatory powers of theories of function in the context of products that may result from synthetic biology. The aim is not to develop a new theory of functions, but to assess existing theories of function in relation to a new kind of biological and artifactual entity that might be produced in the not-too-distant future by means of synthetic biology. The paper thus investigates how to conceive of the functional nature of living systems that are (...) not the result of evolution by natural selection, or instantly generated by cosmic coincidence, but which are products of intelligent design. The paper argues that the aetiological theory of proper functions in organisms and artifacts is inadequate as an account of proper functions in such ‘Paley organisms’ and defends an alternative organisational approach. The paper ends by considering the implications of the discussion of biological function for questions about the interests and moral status of non-sentient organisms. (shrink)

A widespread and influential characterization of synthetic biology emphasizes that synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to living systems. Furthermore, there is a strong tendency to express the engineering approach to organisms in terms of what seems to be an ontological claim: organisms are machines. In the paper I investigate the ontological and heuristic significance of the machine analogy in synthetic biology. I argue that the use of the machine analogy and the aim of producing rationally designed organisms (...) does not necessarily imply a commitment to mechanical biology. The ideal of applying engineering principles to biology is best understood as expressing recognition of the machine-unlikeness of natural organisms and the limits of human cognition. The paper suggests an interpretation of the identification of organisms with machines in synthetic biology according to which it expresses a strategy for representing, understanding, and constructing living systems that are more machine-like than natural organisms. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that aims to apply rational engineering principles in the design and creation of organisms that are exquisitely tailored to human ends. The creation of artificial life raises conceptual, methodological and normative challenges that are ripe for philosophical investigation. This special issue examines the defining concepts and methods of synthetic biology, details the contours of the organism–artifact distinction, situates the products of synthetic biology vis-à-vis this conceptual typology and against historical human manipulation of the living (...) world, and explores the normative implications of these conclusions. In addressing the challenges posed by emerging biotechnologies, new light can be thrown on old problems in the philosophy of biology, such as the nature of the organism, the structure of biological teleology, the utility of engineering metaphors and methods in biological science, and humankind’s relationship to nature. (shrink)

This article considers naturalistic analyses of the concepts of health and disease in light of the possibility of constructing novel living systems. The article begins by introducing the vision of synthetic biology as the application of engineering principles to the construction of biological systems, the main analyses of the concepts of health and disease, and the standard theories of function in artefacts and organisms. The article then suggests that reflection on the possibility of artefactual organisms amounts to a challenge to (...) the functional theories of health and disease proposed by Wakefield and Boorse. More specifically, Wakefield and Boorse's theories are reconstructed as responses to a dilemma concerning how to allow for the ascription of health and disease to artefactual organisms without at the same time opening up the possibility of diseased nonliving artefacts such as cars and computers. It is argued that neither response will enable us to ascribe health and disease to artefactual organisms, because both theories, in order to rule out the possibility of ascribing health and disease to nonliving artefacts, make such ascriptions conditional on having a natural-selection history or being part of a species which has been designed by evolution. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms are expected to improve referral decisions. In this article I discuss the legitimacy of deferring referral decisions in primary care to recommendations from such algorithms. The standard justification for introducing algorithmic decision procedures to make referral decisions is that they are more accurate than the available practitioners. The improvement in accuracy will ensure more efficient use of scarce health resources and improve patient care. In this article I introduce a proceduralist framework for discussing the legitimacy of algorithmic (...) referral decisions and I argue that in the context of referral decisions the legitimacy of an algorithmic decision procedure can be fully accounted for in terms of the instrumental values of accuracy and fairness. I end by considering how my discussion of procedural algorithmic legitimacy relates to the debate on algorithmic fairness. (shrink)

It has been argued that the precautionary principle is incoherent and thus useless as a guide for regulatory policy. In a recent paper in Bioethics, Wareham and Nardini propose a response to the ‘precautionary paradox’ according to which the precautionary principle's usefulness for decision making in policy and regulation contexts can be justified by appeal to a probability threshold discriminating between negligible and non‐negligible risks. It would be of great significance to debates about risk and precaution if there were a (...) sound method for determining a minimum probability threshold of negligible risk. This is what Wareham and Nardini aim to do. The novelty of their approach is that they suggest that such a threshold should be determined by a method of public deliberation. In this article I discuss the merits of Wareham and Nardini’s public deliberation method for determining thresholds. I raise an epistemic worry about the public deliberation method they suggest, and argue that their proposal is inadequate due to a hidden assumption that the acceptability of a risk can be completely analysed in terms of its probability. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 25-28, March 2012.

According to Bedau and Triant decision-makers will be substantially ignorant about the consequences of their candidate choices when making decisions about synthetic biology. Bedau and Triant charac...

In this article I consider two pertinent questions that practitioners must consider when they deploy an algorithmic system as support in clinical shared decision‐making. The first question concerns how to interpret and assess the significance of different performance measures for clinical decision‐making. The second question concerns the professional obligations that practitioners have to communicate information about the quality of an algorithm's output to patients in light of the principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice. In the article I review the four (...) standard performance measures used to evaluate and validate algorithms, outline their role in the discussion of algorithmic fairness, and discuss the professional responsibilities that practitioners face when communicating information about these measures to patients. (shrink)

The Precautionary Principle is a highly influential feature of an extensive body of environmental law, and is also highly controversial and continues to generate scholarly debates along several dim...

Philosophical Perspectives on the Engineering Approach in Biology provides a philosophical examination of what has been called the most powerful metaphor in biology: The machine metaphor. The chapters collected in this volume discuss the idea that living systems can be understood through the lens of engineering methods and machine metaphors from both historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives. In their contributions the authors examine questions about scientific explanation and methodology, the interrelationship between science and engineering, and the impact that the use (...) of engineering metaphors in science may have for bioethics and science communication, such as the worry that its wide application reinforces public misconceptions of the nature of new biotechnology and biological life. The book also contains an introduction that describes the rise of the machine analogy and the many ways in which it plays a central role in fundamental debates about e.g. design, adaptation and reductionism in the philosophy of biology. The book will be useful as a core reading to professionals as well as graduate and undergraduate students in courses of philosophy of science and for life scientists taking courses in philosophy of science and bioethics. (shrink)

Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology.

Review of Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry.

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)

Environmental Ethics is a systematic account of values carried by the natural world, coupled with an inquiry into duties toward animals, plants, species, and ecosystems. A comprehensive philosophy of nature is illustrated by and integrated with numerous actual examples of ethical decisions made in encounters with fauna and flora, endangered species, and threatened ecosystems. The ethics developed is informed throughout by ecological science and evolutionary biology, with attention to the logic of moving from what is in nature to what ought (...) to be. The ethical theory is applied in detail to social, public, and business policy. Written in an engaging style, using diagrams and figures as well as numerous case studies, Environmental Ethics prods the reader into concrete application and invites reader participation in the ethical discussions. The ethics concludes by exploring the historical experiences of personal residence in a surrounding environment. Here is an adventure into what it means to live as responsible human beings in the community of life on Earth. In the series Ethics and Action, edited by Tom Regan. (shrink)

While scientific inquiry crucially relies on the extraction of patterns from data, we still have a far from perfect understanding of the metaphysics of patterns—and, in particular, of what makes a pattern real. In this paper we derive a criterion of real-patternhood from the notion of conditional Kolmogorov complexity. The resulting account belongs to the philosophical tradition, initiated by Dennett :27–51, 1991), that links real-patternhood to data compressibility, but is simpler and formally more perspicuous than other proposals previously defended in (...) the literature. It also successfully enforces a non-redundancy principle, suggested by Ladyman and Ross, that aims to exclude from real-patternhood those patterns that can be ignored without loss of information about the target dataset, and which their own account fails to enforce. (shrink)

Anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark and cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style.

The spectrum of a first-order sentence is the set of natural numbers occurring as the cardinalities of finite models of the sentence. In a recent survey, Durand et al. introduce a new class of real numbers, the spectral reals, induced by spectra and pose two open problems associated to this class. In the present note, we answer these open problems as well as other open problems from an earlier, unpublished version of the survey. Specifically, we prove that every algebraic real (...) is spectral, every automatic real is spectral, the subword density of a spectral real is either 0 or 1, and both may occur, and every right-computable real number between 0 and 1 occurs as the subword entropy of a spectral real. In addition, Durand et al. note that the set of spectral reals is not closed under addition or multiplication. We extend this result by showing that the class of spectral reals is not closed under any computable operation satisfying some mild conditions. (shrink)

Auf den ersten Blick haben Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault kaum etwas gemein. Tatsächlich beziehen sie sich jedoch auf die identischen Topoi der Philosophiegeschichte - wenn ihre Auslegungen der Quellen auch denkbar verschieden sind. Als Grund hierfür bestimmt Hannah Holme die komplementären Perspektiven der beiden, die sie als Aneignungen des heideggerschen Sorgebegriffs deutet: die ethische Sorge um sich Foucaults und die politische Sorge um die Welt Arendts. Am Ende steht ein Plädoyer für eine Verbindung des machtkritischen Ethos der Sorge um (...) sich mit der Macht des politischen Handelns, das der Sorge um die Welt unterstellt ist. (shrink)

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Education identifies and confronts key ethical issues generated over years of AI research, development, and deployment in learning contexts. Adaptive, automated, and data-driven education systems are increasingly being implemented in universities, schools, and corporate training worldwide, but the ethical consequences of engaging with these technologies remain unexplored. Featuring expert perspectives from inside and outside the AIED scholarly community, this book provides AI researchers, learning scientists, educational technologists, and others with questions, frameworks, guidelines, policies, and (...) regulations to ensure the positive impact of artificial intelligence in learning. (shrink)

The common neurotrophin receptor (p75NTR) regulates various functions in the developing and adult nervous system. Cell survival, cell death, axonal and growth cone retraction, and regulation of the cell cycle can be regulated by p75NTR‐mediated signals following activation by either mature or pro‐neurotrophins and in combination with various co‐receptors, including Trk receptors and sortilin. Here, we review the known functions of p75NTR by cell type, receptor‐ligand combination, and whether regulated intra‐membrane proteolysis of p75NTR is required for signalling. We highlight that (...) the generation of the intracellular domain fragment of p75NTR is associated with many of the receptor functions, regardless of its ligand and co‐receptor interactions. (shrink)

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher's fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers. Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjöholm draws (...) a clear line from Arendt's consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia. This delicate effort allows Sjöholm to revisit Arendt's political concepts of freedom, plurality, and judgment from an aesthetic point of view and incorporate Arendt's insight into current discussions of literature, music, theater, and visual art. Though Arendt did not explicitly outline an aesthetics, Sjöholm's work substantively incorporates her perspective into contemporary reckonings with radical politics and their relationship to art. (shrink)

Toleration and respect are types of relations between different agents. The standard analyses of toleration and respect are attitudinal; toleration and respect require subjects to have appropriate types of attitudes towards the objects of toleration or respect. The paper investigates whether states can sensibly be described as tolerant or respectful in ways theoretically relevantly similar to the standard analyses. This is a descriptive question about the applicability of concepts rather than a normative question about whether, when and why states should (...) be tolerant or respectful. The problem of institutional application is that institutions in general and the state in particular arguably cannot have attitudes of the required kind. This problem is distinct from, and broader than, well‐known problems about whether political toleration is normatively legitimate. To make sense of political toleration or respect, the paper proposes that the analysis of institutional toleration and respect should not be solely agent‐centred (as in attitudinal analyses) or patient‐centred (as in explanations of the good of toleration or respect in terms of the effects of being tolerated or respected). The analysis should also include features about the relation itself. We can describe institutions as tolerant or respectful in a sense relevantly similar to the standard analyses if we focus on the public features of the relation between institutions and citizens or groups, without ascribing attitudes in the problematic sense. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes the ethical issues that arise in the context of the use of physical enhancement techniques, i.e.techniques that aim at enhancing one or more physical functions of human beings. First, it discusses the different types of physical enhancement and points doping in sports is only a minor part of the whole enhancement field. Considerable attention is devoted to enhancement in sports, primarily because of the extensive extant literature. Then, the chapter moves on to problematize the concept of enhancement. (...) It shows that deciding whether something should count as an enhancement is not a matter for pure personal decision. The chapter engages with the ethical arguments put forward in the enhancement debate, showing that the validity of both the pro‐ and the anti‐enhancement arguments is context‐dependent and the growth hormone treatment can only be justifiably claimed if it aims at giving someone a height in the normal range. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's main work in political philosophy, the _Social Contract_, contains two beginnings; on the one hand, it commences, quite conventionally, with a social contract between individuals, on the other hand it also states that a lawmaker needs to precede the agreement of such a contract. This curious co-existence of two beginnings in the text has usually been ignored or played down by interpreters. This article, on the other hand, presents a reading of their interplay inspired by Zizek's theory of (...) ideology. It demonstrates how one of the beginnings, if seen from this point of view, may be understood as the truth about the other, and how the figure of the lawmaker specifically reveals the text as torn apart by contradictory internal tendencies. (shrink)

Women most fully experience the consequences of human reproductive technologies. Men who convene to evaluate such technologies discuss "them": the women who must accept, avoid, or even resist these technologies; the women who consume technologies they did not devise; the women who are the objects of policies made by men. So often the input of women is neither sought nor listened to. The privileged insights and perspectives that women bring to the consideration of technologies in human reproduction are the subject (...) of these volumes, which constitute the revised and edited record of a Workshop on "Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women" (EIRTAW), held in June, 1979, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some 80 members of the workshop, 90 percent of them women (from 24 states), represented diverse occupations and personal histories, different races and classes, varied political commitments. They included doctors, nurses, and scientists, lay midwives, consumer advocates, historians, and sociologists, lawyers, policy analysts, and ethicists. Each session, however, made plain that ethics is an everyday concern for women in general, as well as an academic profession for some. (shrink)

This paper provides a theoretical discussion with point of departure in the case of Denmark of some of the theoretical issues concerning the relation liberal states may have to religion in general and religious minorities in particular. Liberal political philosophy has long taken for granted that liberal states have to be religiously neutral. The paper asks what a liberal state is with respect to religion and religious minorities if it is not a strictly religiously neutral state with full separation of (...) church and state and of religion and politics. To illuminate this question, the paper investigates a particular case of an arguably reasonably liberal state, namely the Danish state, which is used as a particular illustration of the more general phenomenon of “moderately secular” states, and considers how one might understand its relations to religion. The paper then considers the applicability to this case of three theoretical concepts drawn from liberal political philosophy, namely neutrality, toleration and recognition, while simultaneously using the case to suggest ways in which standard understandings of these concepts may be problematic and have to be refined. (shrink)