Research
Current
Current research focuses on global bioethics
- The project exploring the associations between color, bioethics, and healthcare has been completed and the resulting book has been published. In Color, Healthcare and Bioethics the role and significance of color is examined in two areas of human activity: healthcare and bioethics. Whereas colors are all around us and we directly experience them, and often enjoy the world as colored, they do not receive much attention in medical and care activities, and even less in ethical analyses. Usually, color is regarded as something secondary and trivial. As a subjective impression it is less important than objective observations and findings. Nonetheless, as discussed in this book, color has played and continues to play an important role in healthcare, not only in diagnostic but also therapeutic endeavours. The same is true for ethics. It used to be clearly demarcated from aesthetics, relegating color to the domain of emotions, feelings, intuitions and subjective experiences while ethics is characterized by rational arguments and deliberation. In present-day bioethical debate this distinction can no longer be upheld since in practice colors (particularly black and white) are associated with moral appreciations and interpretations which influence ethical judgments before they are rationally articulated.
The book is published by Open Book Publishers and is freely downloadable on the website. - Research and writing is focused on exploring and analyzing the main challenges for global bioethics. Potter’s priority problems (the 6 Ps) identified in the 1970s are still the major challenges of today: poverty, war, environmental degradation, hunger an malnutrition, corruption, and the myth of growth. How will global bioethics be able to deal with them? This question is especially relevant now that the globalization and the rules-based world order are increasingly under attack. When international human rights discourse is ignored, violated and denigrated, what are the prospects for global bioethics?
New
New research projects have focused on critical examination of the philosophical and ethical presuppositions of contemporary bioethical debate.
A new project has scrutinized the challenges and potentials of global bioethics in the current context of anti-globalism and apocalyptic scenarios. This has resulted in a manuscript entitled Bioethics in apocalyptic times.
The argument of this book is that a more resilient bioethics is needed because the global context of ethical discourse is significantly changing. Humanity is confronted with apocalyptic scenarios. Many people, especially younger generations, are anxious about the future due to climate change, violence and war, geopolitical tensions, rising inequalities and insecurities. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has enhanced this sense of doom and gloom, amplifying feelings of powerlessness and generating a pervasive sense of vulnerability. Against this background the framework of moral values and principles that has developed over the last few decades in response to processes of globalisation and a growing number of global threats seems helpless and futile. It is not the case, however, that we do not have moral views about what should be done. A comprehensive discourse of bioethics, and later global bioethics has emerged that clearly articulates norms and principles for possible decisions and actions. The problem is that this ethical framework is only affirmed in theory but not translated in practices. Facing a multiplicity of crises moral arguments for effective action and change are either neglected and marginalized or relegated to a secondary role. This book argues that bioethical discourse can be reframed in order to make it resilient to apocalyptic sentiments in a global context in which human survival is jeopardized, so that it can offer perspectives that are motivated by the hope that a better future will be possible. This will require an imaginative ethical approach that will first of all re-evaluate the historical and current context in which we happen to find ourselves. It will furthermore call for a reorientation of bioethics discourse itself towards practical activities, citizen initiatives, social movements, and localized modes of governance, motivated by the hope that a better future is possible and can be realized.
Key features of the manuscript
- The book provides a critical analysis of today’s apocalyptic sentiments in regard to the future.
- It shows how ethical imagination can be resilient and creative in encouraging hope that a better future is possible.
- The book gives many examples how individuals, citizen collectives, communities and social movements may be inspired by bioethical discourse to make the world into a better place for everyone.