Etikk i praksis - Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics

Applying ethical reflection to ongoing challenges society face

2022-12-21T15:39:49+00:00

As the year 2022 ends, we continue to face challenging issues and uncertainties about what should be the right approach to various ethical problems society face. In approaching these problems we reflect on our existing guiding values but also discover new ones. We then try to figure out how our actions and decisions could align with our well-considered judgments until we achieve some degree of reflective equilibrium.

Nazism, Genocide and the Threat of The Global West. Russian Moral Justification of War in Ukraine

2022-11-04T07:50:50+00:00

A few public actions prepared the way for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the purpose of which was to define a special military operation as forced, necessary and inevitable. The use of armed force against Ukraine was discussed during those public events. The Russian authorities applied many arguments, and a great deal of attention was paid to the moral justification of war. In this article, I consistently analyze three problems: why did Russian officials use moral language to justify the war, what arguments did they use, and would these arguments retain their effect in the long term. I will examine several addresses made by the President of Russia and the Russian Federation Security Council meeting materials to address these questions. I conclude that Putin's lack of legitimacy forced him to justify the war in moral terms, and the peculiarities of Russian moral discourse allowed him to do that. However, even if this strategy was effective to a certain extent at the beginning of the war, it can hardly be stable and sustainable.

Keywords: invasion of Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine, just war, morality

Socratic dialogue on responsible innovation – a methodological experiment in empirical ethics

2022-09-07T12:04:12+00:00

This article presents an experiment in using Socratic dialogue as a methodological approach to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in an interdisciplinary life sciences research project. The approach seeks to avoid imposing a set of predetermined substantive norms by engaging the researchers in knowledge-seeking group discussions. We adapted Svend Brinkmann’s method of epistemic interviewing, in order to facilitate reflection on normative issues concerning responsibility in research and innovation in two research group sessions. Two elements characterize this approach, relating it to empirical ethics methodologies: (1) the aim is not to map and analyse opinions, but to develop knowledge based on the dialogue; and (2) the facilitators of the discussion are also active participants in the dialogue rather than mere “spectators”. Through a description of the approach and discussion of some key challenges, we show the method’s potential as a supplement to the catalogue of RRI approaches and argue that it serves a dual purpose of contributing to knowledge production and reflexivity.

Keywords: Epistemic interviewing, bioethics, responsibility, reflexivity

Constructing a Crisis: Putin, the West and War in Ukraine

2022-12-21T10:49:31+00:00

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was met with condemnation from the European Union and the United States as an "unprovoked and unjustified military aggression" that undermines the liberal international order. However, some international relations scholars, such as John Mearsheimer, argue that Russia had genuine security concerns with regard to Ukraine and that the invasion was a response to the threat of NATO membership for Ukraine. Both liberal and realist perspectives on the invasion rely on the assumption of rational, cost-benefit calculations by actors, but cultural factors and irreconcilable non-material interests may also be at play in shaping the actions and motivations of states. Understanding the cultural and national identity factors at play in the invasion of Ukraine is complex and difficult, but they cannot be ignored in attempting to understand and address the conflict.