The first sustained critique of how domestic courts in the EU apply the European Convention on Human Rights and interact with the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. This book considers the British, French, and German approaches to the ECHR and shows that domestic courts apply and develop the Convention faithfully and positively.

: This article examines Slavoj Žižek’s reading of F.W.J. Schelling’s Ages of the World from the standpoint of the ontological status of nothingness in Schelling’s idealism as contrasted with Žižek’s methodology of dialectical materialism. Although Schelling’s theosophical theism differs from Žižek’s materialist hermeneutic, Schelling’s thought nevertheless enacts an important breakthrough in Western philosophy that anticipates the dynamics of the Marxist interpretation of the dialectic. In particular, his positing of opposed unconscious drives within the ante-cosmic Godhead prefigures Sigmund Freud’s theory of (...) the death drive. (shrink)

The climb of Gasherbrum IV’s (7,925 m) ‘Shining Wall’ in 1985 by Voytek Kurtyka and Robert Schauer is considered one of the greatest mountaineering achievements in the twentieth century, even though the two climbers did not reach the summit. The article explores three ways of understanding mountaineering without the objective of reaching the summit. I start with a game-playing approach and then a view on mountaineering that takes its inspiration from deep ecology and argue that while both have the potential (...) for explaining important aspects of mountaineering, neither will fully account for the value of climbing mountains without summiting. Finally, I argue that we can supplement either of these two views with a radically different way of understanding mountaineering, which involves creating and appreciating a work of art. (shrink)

The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the (...) overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. (shrink)

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

Background:Healthcare personnel in the municipal healthcare systems experience many ethical challenges in their everyday work. In Norway, 243 municipalities participated in a national ethics project, aimed to increase ethical competence in municipal healthcare services. In this study, we wanted to map out what participants in ethics reflection groups experienced as promoters or as barriers to successful reflection.Objectives:To examine what the staff experience as promoters or as barriers to successful ethics reflection.Research design:The study has a qualitative design, where 56 participants in (...) municipal healthcare participated in 10 different focus-group interviews.Ethical considerations:The data collection was based on the participants’ informed consent and approved by the Data Protection Official of the Norwegian Centre for Research Data.Results:The informants had different experiences from ethics reflection group. Nevertheless, we found that there were several factors that were consistently mentioned: competence, facilitator’s role, ethics reflection groups organizing, and organizational support were all experienced as promoters and as a significant effect on ethics reflection groups. The absence of such factors would constitute important barriers to successful ethics reflection.Discussion:The results are coincident with other studies, and indicate some conditions that may increase the possibility to succeed with ethics reflection groups. A systematic approach seems to be important, the systematics of the actual reflections, but also in the organization of ethics reflection group at the workplace. Community healthcare is characterized by organizational instabilities as many vacancies, high workloads, and lack of predictability. This can be a hinder for ethics reflection group.Conclusion:Both internal and external factors seem to influence the organization of ethics reflection group. The municipalities’ instabilities challenging this work, and perceived as a clear inhibitor for the development. The participants experienced that the facilitator is the most important success factor for establishing, carrying out, and to succeed with ethics reflection groups. (shrink)

Would primary care services benefit from the aid of a clinical ethics committee (CEC)? The implementation of CECs in primary care in four Norwegian municipalities was supported and their activities followed for 2.5 years. In this study, the CECs’ structure and activities are described, with special emphasis on what characterizes the cases they have discussed. In total, the four CECs discussed 54 cases from primary care services, with the four most common topics being patient autonomy, competence and coercion; professionalism; cooperation (...) and disagreement with next of kin; and priority setting, resource use and quality. Nursing homes and home care were the primary care services most often involved. Next of kin were present in 10 case deliberations, whereas patients were never present. The investigation indicates that it might be feasible for new CECs to attain a high level of activity including case deliberations within the time frame. It also confirms that significant, characteristic and complex moral problems arise in primary care services. (shrink)

Abduction, deduction and induction are different forms of inference in science. However, only a few attempts have been made to introduce the idea of abductive reasoning as an extended way of thinking about clinical practice in nursing research. The aim of this paper was to encourage critical reflections about abductive reasoning based on three empirical examples from nursing research and includes three research questions on what abductive reasoning is, how the process has taken place, and how knowledge about abductive reasoning (...) based on the examples can inform nursing research and clinical practice. The study has a descriptive and explorative approach using a convenience sample of three empirical studies from nursing research. The three studies illustrate different ways to enter the abductive reasoning process in steps. They represent new caring models, which offer visual and cognitive maps for expanding nursing research, education and thus informing care. Therefore, we suggest that abductive reasoning may be beneficial for different ways of knowing and demonstrates scientific innovation to shed new light on health phenomena, which can help researchers and practitioners to gain a broader and deeper understanding of nursing care inquiry. However, more studies are needed to broaden this scope. (shrink)

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.

From the 5th edition of Beauchamp and Childress' Principles of Biomedical Ethics, the problem of common morality has been given a more prominent role and emphasis. With the publication of the 6th and latest edition, the authors not only attempt to ground their theory in common morality, but there is also an increased tendency to identify the former with the latter. While this stratagem may give the impression of a more robust, and hence stable, foundation for their theoretical construct, we (...) fear that it comes with a cost, namely the need to keep any theory in medical ethics open to, and thereby aware of, the challenges arising from biomedical research and clinical practice, as well as healthcare systems. By too readily identifying the moral life of common morality with rule-following behaviour, Beauchamp and Childress may even be wrong about the nature of common morality as such, thereby founding their, by now, classic theory on quicksand instead of solid rock. (shrink)

Background: Ought nursing homes to establish clinical ethics committees? An answer to this question must begin with an understanding of how a clinical ethics committee might be beneficial in a nursing home context – to patients, next of kin, professionals, managers, and the institution. With the present article, we aim to contribute to such an understanding. Aim: We ask, in which ways can clinical ethics committees be helpful to stakeholders in a nursing home context? We describe in depth a clinical (...) ethics committee case consultation deemed successful by stakeholders, then reflect on how it was helpful. Research design: Case study using the clinical ethics committee’s written case report and self-evaluation form, and two research interviews, as data. Participants and research context: The nursing home’s ward manager and the patient’s son participated in research interviews. Ethical considerations: Data were collected as part of an implementation study. Clinical ethics committee members and interviewed stakeholders consented to study participation, and also gave specific approval for the publication of the present article. Findings/results: Six different roles played by the clinical ethics committee in the case consultation are described: analyst, advisor, support, moderator, builder of consensus and trust, and disseminator. Discussion: The case study indicates that clinical ethics committees might sometimes be of help to stakeholders in moral challenges in nursing homes. Conclusions: Demanding moral challenges arise in the nursing home setting. More research is needed to examine whether clinical ethics committees might be suitable as ethics support structures in nursing homes and community care. (shrink)

BackgroundHow should clinical ethics support services such as clinical ethics committees (CECs) be implemented and evaluated? We argue that both the CEC itself and theimplementationof the CEC should be considered as ‘complex interventions’.Main textWe present a research project involving the implementation of CECs in community care in four Norwegian municipalities. We show that when both the CEC and its implementation are considered as complex interventions, important consequences follow – both for implementation and the study thereof. Emphasizing four such sets of (...) consequences, we argue, first, that the complexity of the intervention necessitates small-scale testing before larger-scale implementation and testing is attempted; second, that it is necessary to theorize the intervention in sufficient depth; third, that the identification of casual connections charted in so-called logic models allows the identification of factors that are vital for the intervention to succeed and which must therefore be studied; fourth, that an important part of a feasibility study must be to identify and chart as many as possible of the causally important contextual factors.ConclusionThe conceptualization of the implementation of a CEC as a complex intervention shapes the intervention and the way evaluation research should be performed, in several significant ways. We recommend that researchers consider whether a complex intervention approach is called for when studying CESS implementation and impact. (shrink)

A number of recent environmental philosophers (Vogel, Morton, Latour) have proclaimed the end of nature. They oppose what they consider to be an outdated view of nature as a basis for environmental philosophy and political ecology. Instead of “thinking like a mountain” (Leopold), we should begin “thinking like a mall” (Vogel). These end-of-nature thinkers claim that the concept of nature in environmental discourses is bound to be something that is outside of us because man is understood as doing something to (...) nature. Without putting forth a clearly defined concept of “nature,” we argue that proclaiming the end of nature is misguided. This proclamation means forgetting the body. If we really want to get beyond understanding nature as something outside of us, and truly sense and understand ourselves as natural or environmental beings who are a part of the earth’s ecosystem, we should direct our attention to how nature as the biotic, inner/outer environment is experienced and sensed in and through our bodies. We thus suggest that environmental philosophy should encourage sensing like embodied beings before introducing notions like thinking like a mountain, mall, water, or a plant for that matter. This approach is among other things based on the phenomemology of the body (Merleau-Ponty) and phenomenology of the real (Conrad-Martius).”. (shrink)

Background: Food is an important part of nursing care and recognized as a basic need and a human right. Nutritional care for older adults in institutions represents a particularly important area to address in nursing education and practice, as the right to food can be at risk and health personnel experience ethical challenges related to food and nutrition. Objective: The present study investigates the development of coursework on nutritional care with a human rights perspective in a nursing programme for first-year (...) nursing students and draws upon reflections and lessons learned. Research design: The study utilized educational design research. The coursework, developed through two rounds, combined on-campus learning and clinical placement in nursing homes. Nursing studentsʼ perspectives and experiences gathered through focus groups and a written assignment informed the development and evaluation of the coursework. Participants and research context: In the first round, multistage focus group interviews were conducted with 18 nursing students before, during and after placement. In the second round, four focus group interviews with 26 nursing students were conducted shortly after placement. Ethical consideration: The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Three main ʽlessons learnedʼ emerged regarding introducing a human rights perspective in nursing education: 1) the contribution of the human rights perspective in changing the narrative of ʽvulnerable and malnourished patientsʼ, 2) the importance of relationships and experiences for learning about human rights and 3) the benefit of combining development of ethical competence with a human rights perspective. Conclusion: A human rights perspective enabled the students to give meaning to nutritional care beyond understanding of food as a basic physical need. Incorporating human rights in nursing education can support nursing students and nurses in recognizing and addressing ethical and structural challenges and being able to fulfil the right to food for patients. (shrink)

Background: Human rights are an important part of nursing practice. Although there is increasing recognition regarding the importance of including human rights education in nursing education, few studies have focused on nursing students’ perspectives and experiences in relation to human rights in nursing, especially regarding older nursing home residents’ right to food. Objective: To explore nursing students’ perspectives and experiences in relation to the right to food. Research design: The study followed a qualitative interpretative research design. Data were collected from (...) multistage focus groups before, during and after clinical placement in a nursing home and analysed through thematic analysis. Participants and research context: Participants were 18 first-year nursing students; the study was conducted in 2017. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Students’ understanding of older nursing home residents’ right to food was a dynamic process. Their perceptions evolved from a polarized perspective to a reality orientation and finally to retrospective reflection. Discussion: The article discusses how nursing students learn about and understand human rights within and throughout their placements. Conclusion: The study bridges human rights theory and practice. Findings suggest that the human right to food must be enacted in daily practice for students to learn in context. Human rights education, specifically pertaining to nutritional care, thus benefits from a practice-oriented approach preparing students to face ‘real life’ challenges and ethical dilemmas. Findings will help nurse educators tailor education in this field. (shrink)

Stanisław Lem’s short story Are you there Mr. Jones?, first published in 1955, is set in a courtroom. The plaintiff is Cybernetics Company – a provider of prosthetics – and the defendant is Harry Jones, a race-car driver. It turns out that Mr. Jones, after a series of grave accidents, has had his entire body gradually replaced by prostheses. He is now deep in debt to the provider, Cybernetics Company, which consequently has sued him to reclaim their property. We aim (...) to show that this short story illustrates important philosophical questions concerning personal identity and persistence over time, and that Lem in fact anticipates several of the main insights of functionalism, later introduced by Putnam (1967) and today a main contender for a theory of the mind. If the identity of Mr. Jones is constituted solely by his prostheses’ functional role, i.e., their causal relations to input, output and other bodily and mental states, Lem here gives us an early example of causal-theoretical functionalism. This brings us to the next question, implicitly raised by Lem: Is functional identity sufficient for personal identity? Is Mr. Jones the same person as he was before replacing all his body parts? In court, Mr. Jones argues for his continued personhood by appealing to memories from the past. This suggests the view that his persistence as a person depends on some form of psychological continuity, and we will discuss how the case of Mr. Jones relates to views on personal identity. (shrink)

Though the authors of this commentary have deep felt doubts about the fruitfulness of Björkman and Hansson’s analysis of bodily rights, they do not doubt their capacity to develop both creative and provocative thoughtsIt is always welcoming to be confronted with thoughts that, even though one wholeheartedly disagrees with them, have the effect of stimulating one’s own reflections on matters, which without such confrontations, would have been less distinct, less critical—and we would gladly admit, less polemical. Thus it is thanks (...) to Barbro Björkman and Sven Ove Hansson’s article, “Bodily rights and property rights”, that we have been able to set our present course into these murky waters. The issue they want to address is by no means of a kind that lends itself easily to theoretical speculation. This has, perhaps, as much to do with the inherent intricacy of the issue itself as with the controversy it has managed to arouse. The issue is: is it possible to have ownership over one’s own body—that is, is it appropriate to treat the body and its components as property? What are the implications of conceptualising the body and its parts in terms of property? Should one, as a general rule, be able to sell and buy human biological material? If so, who should be allowed to buy and sell it? Does the sale or donation of one’s own bodily parts imply a transfer of ownership rights to the buyer or receiver, or is it rather that ownership of human bodily parts can only be acquired after the material has been, say, manipulated in a laboratory?Contrary to Björkman and Hansson, who see “the primary normative issue” to be “what combination of rights a person should have to a particular item of biological material”, we believe that their decision to construe …. (shrink)

Abstract:The aim of this article is to analyze and discuss the role that sociological theory plays in music education scholarship. Using books published internationally and explicitly on the topic of the sociology of music education during the recent decade as well as abstracts published in the programs from the 2017 and 2019 International Symposium on the Sociology of Music Education biennial conferences as entryways into this discussion, the questions asked are: What kinds of sociological theory are put to use in (...) this material? Which sociologists or sociological theoreticians seem to be the main contributors in this regard? Which questions are asked by utilizing the approaches in play? In other words, what is sociological theory used for? In order to create a backdrop for the analysis, the article provides brief overviews of some of the similarities and differences between the field of philosophy and that of sociology in general as well as the state of sociological theory within music sociology and cultural sociology. Compared with the latter two scholarly fields, that of music education sociology comes through as one in considerable lack of theory creation, and as more invested in the logic of practice than subscribing to the rules of the scholastic game. It is also predominantly Western-centric. Following Bourdieu, these features are interpreted as conveying some of music education’s “epistemic unconscious.”. (shrink)

Due to aging populations and the prolonging of working lives, the number of senior workers will increase. Therefore, this study investigates the use of SOC strategies across organizational levels as a means for senior workers to maintain workability and age successfully at work. The need to expand the perspective of the SOC model beyond the individual level, when applied to a work context, has been emphasized theoretically in the literature, nevertheless, SOC strategies have so far only been examined at the (...) individual level. This study is the first to explore SOC strategies at the organizational, leadership, and group level. We focus on senior employees and the SOC strategies they use to balance out demands and limited resources. Based on 23 semi-structured interviews with senior employees and immediate managers at two hospitals, and two dairies, we explore which specific SOC strategies are used at each level and reflect on the applicability of broadening the perspective of the SOC model when applying it to a work context. Based on the empirical findings and the discussion of the empirical exploration of SOC strategies beyond the individual level, we argue that it is advantageous to further pursue this line of inquiry and include the group, leadership, and organizational level when applying the SOC model in a work setting. (shrink)

Cities and road authorities in many countries have started colouring their cycle lanes. Some road authorities choose red, some blue, and some green. The reasoning behind this choice is not clear, and it is uncertain whether some colours are superior to others. The current study aims to examine whether coloured cycle lanes are viewed more positively than uncoloured lanes, and whether one of the typically chosen colours is perceived as safer and more inviting to cyclists or more deterring to motorists. (...) Participants were invited to respond to a web survey. Respondents (N= 560) were from the four largest cities in Norway, both genders (42.1% women), and of a wide age range (79.6% between 30 and 70). Depending on cycling frequency, respondents were categorised as either motorist (n= 354) or cyclist (n= 206). All respondents rated different cycle lanes (uncoloured, blue, green, and red) on different attributes. The uncoloured lane was consistently rated least positively, with the lowest scores on visibility, perceived safety for both motorists and cyclist and how inviting it seemed to cycle in the lane. It was also estimated to be the lane that would experience the greatest degree of violation from motorists, in terms of driving or stopping in the cycle lane. The green and red lanes were consistently rated more positively than the blue lane, but whether green or red was preferred depended on whether the respondent had lived a place with coloured cycle lanes. People familiar with coloured cycle lanes, which in Norway are red, rated the red lane more positively than the green lane, while the opposite was true for people who were not used to coloured cycle lanes. The difference in ratings between different colours were similar to, or greater than, the difference from uncoloured to coloured, which implies that it not only mattersthata lane is coloured, but alsowhich colourit has. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between materialism, dialectics, and theology in Alain Badiou's work. The first three sections of the article focus on Badiou's reading of Hegelian dialectics in his 1982 work, Theory of the Subject. The first section accounts for Badiou's splitting of Hegel into an idealist and materialist dialectic, and presents an exposition of the latter. The second section outlines Badiou's critical analysis of the theological model implicit in Hegel's dialectics. The third section investigates the core of this (...) criticism through a discussion of Badiou's reading of the “negation of the negation.” The remaining four sections examine the anti-dialectical interpretation of the Christ-event that Badiou presents in his book Saint Paul. Here the article illustrates how Badiou's insistence on separating the death of Christ from the resurrection is linked to his rejection of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, and how this drives Badiou towards idealism. (shrink)

This paper examines Alain Badiou’s critical engagement with religion. It is argued that there are two central points at which religion enters the scene of Badiou’s philosophy. First, in his critique, the ‘motif of finitude’ Badiou repeatedly refers to religion, claiming that ‘the obsession with finitude is a remnant of the tyranny of the sacred’. Second, Badiou stages his attempt to regenerate philosophy against the proclamation of its end as a confrontation with the religion, through philosophy’s detachment from the poetization (...) of philosophy and its reattachment to mathematics. By examining these two points, the paper aims to encircle Badiou’s notion of religion and thus clarify the role it plays in his philosophical system. This paper suggests that his notion of religion is a by-product of his polemics and therefore needs to be ‘extracted’ from his writings. Hence, the ‘critique of religion’ present in Badiou’s work is not straightforward and explicit critique. Another central aspect of Badiou’s critique of religion is related to his effort to separate the concept of truth from the category of meaning, which he understands as the emblem of religion. The paper sheds light on this matter and its setting in Jacques Lacan’s considerations on religion. (shrink)

The first section of this paper argues that we can find in Kierkegaard an idea of equality, epitomized in the notion of “the neighbor” presented in Works of Love, which is highly relevant for, among other things, a critical engagement with today’s “identity politics.” The second section argues that Kierkegaard’s idea of equality is a religious-existential task, but also a task concerning our relationship with other human beings. The third section demonstrates how this idea of equality is evinced in the (...) notion of “the neighbor.” The last section offers some reflections on how we might begin to rethink the political based on this idea of equality. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Are Aesthetic Objects? Lines and Routes Preference and Personal Taste Is Proprioception an Aesthetic Sense? Beautiful Movements or Beautiful Routes? Summary Notes.

The paper considers the role of universities as actors in regional development, and the implications for approaches to knowledge, including knowledge construction. The new role for universities requires the production of knowledge, which relates to the needs of the region. Particular attention was given to the Agder region of Norway, and Agder University College.

Teaching ethics is crucial to health sciences education. Doing it well requires a willingness to engage contentious social issues. Those issues introduce conflict and risk, but avoiding them ignores moral diversity and renders the work of ethics education irrelevant. Therefore, when (not if) contentious issues and moral differences arise, they must be acknowledged and can be addressed with humility, collegiality, and openness to support learning. Faculty must risk moments when not everyone will “feel safe,” so the candor implied in psychological (...) safety can emerge. The deliberative and social work of ethics education involves generous listening, wading into difference, and wondering together if our beliefs and arguments are as sound as we once thought. By forecasting the need for candid engagement with contentious issues and moral difference, establishing ground rules, and bolstering due process structures for faculty and students, a riskier and more relevant ethics pedagogy can emerge. Doing so will prepare everyone for the moral diversity they can expect in our common life and in practice. (shrink)

Transgression in Games and Play is a collection of original research that explores what transgression means in the context of videogames and play, how boundaries are being crossed by game content as well as by player actions, and how players respond to different kinds of infringements. It explores questions such as: How are controversial game content experienced during the course of gameplay? Why would players intentionally put themselves or others under distress when playing games, and how does such content affect (...) the playful attitude? Are there any ethical or aesthetical limits for what type of contents that can be presented in games? If so, are these limits different from other media? What are the means and motivation for designers to create transgressive game content. (shrink)

This paper presents an introduction to Arne Grøn’s existential hermeneutics as a philosophical method, while also attempting to indicate how Grøn’s work contributes to and engages in a number of crucial topics in modern continental philosophy. The first section of the paper shows how Grøn draws on Paul Ricoeur and Michael Theunissen to rethink the concept of existence through a reading of Kierkegaard that uncouples this concept from the self-evident status it attained in twenty-century existentialism. The second section of the (...) paper argues that Grøn proposes an existential ethics that takes the Kierkegaardian notion that humans are inherently normative beings and uses this as a basis for a critique of ethics, as well as for establishing an ethics of vision inspired by Kierkegaard. The third section of the paper presents a reading of Grøn’s notion of religion as an inextricable part of human existence. (shrink)

The argument in this article is that knowledge is an important phenomenon to understand in order to discuss development and innovation in modern workplaces. Predominant theories on knowledge in organisation and innovation literature, we argue, are based on a dualist concept of knowledge. The arguments found in these theories argue for one type of knowledge in contrast to another. The most prevailing dualism is that between local and universal knowledge. We believe that arguing along this line does not bring us (...) further in order to understand what knowledge is and what it does. We argue that there are contradictory arguments in the dualist conception of knowledge. We discuss how to move beyond this. We present a framework for discussing what knowledge is. We discuss what type of meta perspective will allow us to compare different knowledge kinds. We argue that insight into this has implications for understanding knowledge generation and innovation. (shrink)

This article introduces the work of the research team in Agder, providing a context for the seven following articles. The writers have been personally engaged in the processes which they describe, and seek to draw general conclusions from their experience. Agder is a prosperous region, which has not experienced crisis, and is able to devote considerable resources to regional development.

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past >Has Us Before We Have.