Background Ethical challenges constitute an inseparable part of daily decision-making processes in all areas of healthcare. Ethical challenges are associated with moral distress that can lead to burnout. Clinical ethics support has proven useful to address and manage such challenges. This paper explores how prehospital emergency personnel manage ethical challenges. The study is part of a larger action research project to develop and test an approach to clinical ethics support that is sensitive to the context of emergency medicine. Methods We (...) explored ethical challenges and management strategies in three focus groups, with 15 participants in total, each attended by emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and prehospital anaesthesiologists. Focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. The approach to data analysis was systematic text condensation approach. Results We stratified the management of ethical challenges into actions before, during, and after incidents. Before incidents, participants stressed the importance of mutual understandings, shared worldviews, and a supportive approach to managing emotions. During an incident, the participants employed moral perception, moral judgments, and moral actions. After an incident, the participants described sharing ethical challenges only to a limited extent as sharing was emotionally challenging, and not actively supported by workplace culture, or organisational procedures. The participants primarily managed ethical challenges informally, often using humour to cope. Conclusion Our analysis supports and clarifies that confidence, trust, and safety in relation to colleagues, management, and the wider organisation are essential for prehospital emergency personnel to share ethical challenges and preventing moral distress turning into burnout. (shrink)

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy‐making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small‐ and medium‐sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove ‘the business case for CSR’. Perhaps we should rather focus on the ‘how’ and (...) the ‘with what impact’ questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

This article explores the everyday emotional attachments to martial discourses through the embodiment of popular culture representations of war bodies in cosplay. In cosplay – the creatio...

Cognitive Phenomenology Phenomenal states are mental states in which there is something that it is like for their subjects to be in; they are states with a phenomenology. What it is like to be in a mental state is that state´s phenomenal character. There is general agreement among philosophers of mind that the category of mental states includes at least some sensory states. For example, there is something that it is like to taste chocolate, to smell coffee, to feel the (...) wind in one´s hair, to see the blue sky and to feel a pain in one´s toe. Is there also something that it is like to consciously think, to consciously judge and to consciously believe something? Are such cognitive states, when conscious, phenomenal states? Is there a clear distinction between sensory states and cognitive states? Or, can our knowledge, thoughts and beliefs influence our sensory experiences? Is there a cognitive phenomenology? It is challenging to give a clear characterization of the cognitive phenomenology debate, since different contributors conceive of the debate in different ways. Central for the debate is the question of whether conscious thoughts possess a non-sensory phenomenology. Intuitively, there is something that it is like to consciously think, consciously judge and consciously believe something. However, the debate about cognitive phenomenology is not, strictly speaking, about whether there is something that it is like to consciously think. Rather, the debate concerns the nature of cognitive phenomenology. Is the phenomenology of cognitive states reducible to purely sensory phenomenology? Or, is there an irreducible cognitive phenomenology? A sceptic about cognitive phenomenology claims that conscious cognitive states are non-phenomenal. But, conscious cognitive states may seem to be phenomenal because they are accompanied by sensory states. For instance, when one thinks that ´Paris is a beautiful city`, one´s thought may be expressed in inner-speech and an image of Paris may accompany it. These accompanying sensory states are phenomenal states, and not the thought itself. Contrary to this, the proponent of cognitive phenomenology claims that a conscious cognitive state can have a phenomenology that is irreducible to purely sensory phenomenology. Other debates have also been placed under the ´cognitive phenomenology’ label. There is an ongoing debate within the philosophy of perception about how cognition influences our sensory experiences. Philosophers tend to agree that, for example, an expert ornithologist´s perceptual experience of a type of bird can differ from that of a novice, even if the viewing conditions for both expert and novice are the same. The expert´s knowledge of birds can influence her experience. However, what philosophers disagree about is how the expert´s knowledge influences her experience, and how her knowledge contributes to what her experience is like. (shrink)

Bioethical research has tended to focus on theoretical discussion of the principles on which the analysis of ethical issues in biomedicine should be based. But this discussion often seems remote from biomedical practice where researchers and physicians confront ethical problems. On the other hand, published empirical research on the ethical reasoning of health care professionals offer only descriptions of how physicians and nurses actually reason ethically. The question remains whether these descriptions have any normative implications for nurses and physicians? In (...) this article, we illustrate an approach that integrates empirical research into the formulation of normative ethical principles using the moral-philosophical method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE). The research method discussed in this article was developed in connection with the project ‘Bioethics in Theory and Practice’. The purpose of this project is to investigate ethical reasoning in biomedical practice in Denmark empirically. In this article, we take the research method as our point of departure, but we exclusively discuss the theoretical framework of the method, not its empirical results. We argue that the descriptive phenomenological hermeneutical method developed by Lindseth and Norberg (2004) and Pedersen (1999) can be combined with the theory of WRE to arrive at a decision procedure and thus a foundation for the formulation of normative ethical principles. This could provide health care professionals and biomedical researchers with normative principles about how to analyse, reason and act in ethically difficult situations in their practice. We also show how to use existing bioethical principles as inspiration for interpreting the empirical findings of qualitative studies. This may help researchers design their own empirical studies in the field of ethics. (shrink)

Both traditional and recent accounts of the beneficial and therapeutic effects of psychedelic experiences tie these effects to specifically epistemic changes, for example the enabling of spiritual or psychological insight, or disruption of problematic beliefs or thought patterns. While these alleged benefits have sometimes been thought to be facilitated by false or even delusional beliefs (e.g. Pollan 2015), recent philosophical discussion strikes a more optimistic tone, arguing that the epistemic risks involved with psychedelic drug use tend to be relatively benign (...) and outweighed by epistemic benefits (Letheby 2021). In this paper, we seek to nuance this picture by drawing attention to the crucial role played by social factors in determining the epistemic effects of psychedelic experiences. We argue that the very openness of mind and heightened sense of clarity and certainty that is often thought to facilitate the epistemic benefits of psychedelic drug use, also make the user more vulnerable to adverse epistemic influence from the social environment, to a degree not acknowledged in the current literature. Examining the epistemic influences of the social environment is thus important for understanding the necessary precautions of informed consent and overall safe drug use. (shrink)

One of the key features of the contemporary data economy is the widespread circulation of data and its interoperability. Critical data scholars have analysed data repurposing practices and other factors facilitating the travelling of data. While this approach focused on flows provides great potential, in this article we argue that it tends to overlook questions of attachment and belonging. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Danish data-linkage infrastructure, and building upon insights from archival science, we discuss the work of data (...) practitioners enabling the repurposing of pathology samples extracted from patients for the conduct of ‘personal medicine’ – our term to discuss the so-called old-fashioned treatment of patients – towards personalised medicine. This first involves ‘getting to know’ the tissues and unpacking their previous uses and meanings, then detaching them from their original source to extract data from such tissues and making them flow towards a new container where they can be worked on and connected with other data. As data practitioners make these tissues travel, transforming them into research data, they organise the attachments of data to new agendas, persons and places. Crucially, in our case, we observe the prominence of national attachments, whereby managing tissues and data in and out of containers involves tying them to the nation to serve its interests. We thus expose how the building of data linkage infrastructures entails more than the accumulation and curation of data, but also involves crafting meanings, futures and belonging to specific communities and territories. (shrink)

In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to close down the lab. The moral landscape (...) had changed, and it was no longer considered acceptable to use nonhuman primates in Danish biomedicine. From being considered a biological resource serving as a model of man, the monkeys had become moral subjects with a claim to a life suiting their natural needs. Simultaneously, the monkeys became instrumental in creating moral legitimacy for the actors involved in their rescue. What we see is an instance of pathfinding in a changing moral landscape where actors negotiate nonhuman primate nature as they create new moral positions for themselves. (shrink)

Beliefs about the importance of ethical behavior to competent practice have prompted major shifts in psychology ethics over time. Yet few studies examine ethical beliefs and behavior after training, and most comprehensive research is now 30 years old. As such, it is unclear whether shifts in the field have resulted in general improvements in ethical practice: Are we psychologists “ships in the rising sea,” lifted by changes in ethical codes and training over time? Participants completed a survey of ethical beliefs (...) and behaviors. Analyses examined group differences, consistency of frequency and ethicality ratings, and comparisons with past data. More than half of behaviors were rated as less ethical and occurring less frequently than in 1987, with early career psychologists generally reporting less ethically questionable behavior. Recommendations for enhancing ethics education are discussed. (shrink)

Given the prevalence of emotional and psychological problems among professional psychologists, a primary concern to the field is impairment, or problems of professional competence. Graduate students, in particular, are an especially vulnerable subpopulation of mental health care professionals. Despite graduate students' heightened risk of impairment, relatively little attention has been paid in the literature to the handling of impairment in graduate students in academic training programs. Recommendations for a proactive approach to addressing impairment in trainees are discussed with respect to (...) students, supervisors, and training programs. As graduate school is the first major milestone in a therapist's development, psychologists as gatekeepers of the field of psychology must accept an ethical responsibility to appropriately monitor, acknowledge, and manage impairment among trainees. (shrink)

While it is generally agreed that companies need to manage their relationships with their stakeholders, the way in which they choose to do so varies considerably. In this paper, it is argued that when companies want to communicate with stakeholders about their CSR initiatives, they need to involve those stakeholders in a two-way communication process, defined as an ongoing iterative sense-giving and sense-making process. The paper also argues that companies need to communicate through carefully crafted and increasingly sophisticated processes. Three (...) CSR communication strategies are developed. Based on empirical illustrations and prior research, the authors argue that managers need to move from ‘informing’ and ‘responding’ to ‘involving’ stakeholders in CSR communication itself. They conclude that managers need to expand the role of stakeholders in corporate CSR communication processes if they want to improve their efforts to build legitimacy, a positive reputation and lasting stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to outline an integrative account of experiential and narrative dimensions of the self based on Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. I argue that we should discard “strong narrativism” which holds that our experiential life has a narrative structure and, accordingly, that experiential and narrative dimensions of the self coincide. We should also refrain from equating the experiential self with the minimal self, as the former does not simply constitute a formally individuated subject as the latter but (...) a properly individualized one with personal characteristics and habituality. Husserl’s genetic phenomenology offers both a description of the individualized self as experiential, i.e. as pre-reflective and embodied, and as narrative, i.e. as an autonomous linguistic agent. Through Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation and secondary passivity, we can explain the dialectical relationship between experiential and narrative dimensions of the self. (shrink)

The classical forms of both modified realizability and relative realizability are naturally described in terms of the Sierpinski topos. The paper puts these two observations together and explains abstractly the existence of the geometric morphisms and logical functors connecting the various toposes at issue. This is done by advancing the theory of triposes over internal partial combinatory algebras and by employing a novel notion of elementary map.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly entering our daily lives in the form of driverless cars, automated online assistants and virtual reality experiences. In so doing, AI has already substituted human employment in areas that were previously thought to be uncomputerizable. Based on current trends, the technological displacement of labor is predicted to be significant in the future – if left unchecked this will lead to catastrophic societal unemployment levels. This paper presents a means to mitigate future technological unemployment through the introduction (...) of a Basic Income scheme, accompanied by reforms in school curricula and retraining programs. Our proposal argues that such a scheme can be funded by a special tax on those industries that make use of robotic labour; it includes a practical roadmap that would see a government take this proposal from the conceptual phase and implement it nationwide in the span of one decade. (shrink)

An ethics reflection group is one of a range of ethics support services developed to better handle ethical challenges in healthcare. The aim of this article is to evaluate the implementation process of interdisciplinary ERGs in psychiatric and general hospital departments in Denmark. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ERG implementation to include both psychiatric and general hospital departments. The implementation and evaluation strategies are inspired by action research, using a qualitative approach and systematic text condensation of (...) 28 individual interviews and 4 focus groups with clinicians, ethics facilitators and ward managers. The implementation process was influenced by both structural factors and factors related to clinicians having different values, interests and experiences. Structural barriers and promotors in the process to implement ERG included the following sub-categories: Organizational factors, recruitment and training of ethics facilitators, the deliberation model, planning and recruitment of participants to the ERGs, the support of the ward managers and the project group. Barriers and promotors found among clinicians included the following sub-categories: Expectations and pre-understandings of ERGs, understandings of a physician’s job, challenges experienced by ethics facilitators. At the end of the study, when it was decided that the ERGs should be continued, the implementation strategies were remodeled by the participants to meet new challenges. The study of ERG implementation identified important structural and professional barriers and promotors that are likely to be relevant to anyone wanting to implement ethics support services across various types of healthcare services. (shrink)

This collection of new essays addresses emotion in relation to the arts. The essays consider such topics as the paradox of fiction, emotion in the pure and abstract arts, and the rationality and ethics of emotional responses to art.

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Nanay provides an original and interesting discussion of the connections between aesthetics and the philosophy of perception. According to Nanay, many topics within aesthetics are about experiences of various kinds. Aesthetics is not philosophy of perception, but there are important questions within aesthetics that we can address in an interesting way (...) by using the conceptual apparatus of the philosophy of perception.The main theme of this book is the role of attention in those perceptual experiences that are relevant for aesthetics. Nanay claims that in some paradigmatic examples of aesthetic experiences our attention is exercised in the way of being distributed across properties. He argues that various versions of distributed attention can explain our experiences of aesthetic... (shrink)

We present a general notion of realizability encompassing both standard Kleene style realizability over partial combinatory algebras and Kleene style realizability over more general structures, including all partial cartesian closed categories. We shown how the general notion of realizability can be used to get models of dependent predicate logic, thus obtaining as a corollary (the known result) that the category Equ of equilogical spaces models dependent predicate logic. Moreover, we characterize when the general notion of realizability gives rise to a (...) topos, i.e., a model of impredicative intuitionistic higher-order logic. (shrink)

Ethics & Behavior, Volume 21, Issue 5, Page 431-434, September-October 2011.

Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ‘‘genres’’. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ‘‘do ANT,’’ and, doing so after ‘‘doing (...) ANT on ANT.’’ In particular the authors examine two post-ANT case studies by Annemarie Mol and Marilyn Strathern and outline the notions of complexity, multiplicity, and fractality. The purpose is to illustrate the analytical consequences of thinking with post-ANT. The analysis offers insights into how it is possible to ‘‘go beyond ANT,’’ without leaving it entirely behind. (shrink)

Chief executive officers (CEOs) engage in activism when they take public stances on sensitive socio-political issues. In this study, we address the less-explored activities that constitute CEO activism beyond single stances as the activism is maintained over time. The data cover 6 years of campaign and media materials from a case company with several CEO-initiated activist campaigns. Our findings from an inductive analysis contribute to CEO activism theorizing in three ways. First, we extend CEO activism conceptually by identifying five underlying (...) activities that support a public stance: anchoring motivations, modeling action, taking agency, enduring criticism, and normalizing activism. Second, we bridge individual- and organization-level analyses by depicting how a CEO involves a company in activism through activities that justify interrelated topic frame and role frame. Third, we develop a processual model that includes the pre-stance, stance-taking, and post-stance phases and explains how the underlying activities are interrelated and follow a pattern that serves to maintain CEO activism. Accordingly, CEO activism includes activities, through the pre-stance, stance-taking, and post-stance phases, whereby a CEO deliberately engages personally and through a company in public debate about sensitive socio-political issues and the role of businesses in addressing them. (shrink)

This is a biological approach to the philosophy of mind that feeds an investigation of the phenomena of “social” and “emotional”, both of which are widespread in nature. I scrutinize the non-dualistic Darwinian concept of the continuity of mind. For practical reasons, I address mind at different levels of organization: The systemic mind are the properties of which a common, coherent evolution works upon. Separated from this is “language-mind”: the crystallization of thought in words, which is a strictly human phenomenon. (...) As the phenomenology of the body is a theory of philosophy that lie beyond language it can—to a certain extent—be extrapolated across a species boundary. In the process the phenomenology of the body comes to resemble biosemiotics and with this tool, I investigate a field study of social play behavior in canids. This leads to a possibility to study the non-human experience of emotion as “locally meaningful phenomena”. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy-making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small- and medium-sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove 'the business case for CSR'. Perhaps we should rather focus on the 'how' and (...) the 'with what impact' questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR. (shrink)

Visual Associative agnosia is a rare perceptual impairment generally resulting from lesions in the infero temporal cortex. Patients suffering from associative agnosia are able to make accurate copies of line drawings, but they are unable to visually recognize objects - including those represented in line drawings - as belonging to familiar high-level kinds. The Rich Content View claims that visual experience can represent high-level kind properties. The phenomenon of associative agnosia appears to present us with a strong case for the (...) Rich Content View. There are reasons for thinking that the experiences of an agnosic patient differ from those of a healthy subject. Given that there is a phenomenal contrast between the experiences of an associative agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver, one may argue that this contrast is due to differences in abilities to represent high-level kinds. I claim that there is indeed a phenomenal contrast between the visual experiences of an agnosic and those of a healthy perceiver. However, the explanation of this contrast that best fits the empirical data is compatible with the view that visual experience does not represent high-level kinds. (shrink)

Many bioethicists promote and defend the ‘bedside rationing paradigm’; a pertinent example is the recent publication by Morten Magelssen and colleagues, in which they attack my previous criticism in the field. The present response focuses on what I consider to be the main side-effects of the ‘bedside rationing paradigm’: the ignorance towards intentions and societal roles, the crumbling of political practice, and the fiduciary loss in the physician–patient relationship. Further, I claim that these side effects are related to certain underlying (...) presumptions, such as the conception of fairness as equivalent with distributive justice and the belief in the presence of universally valid, context-independent moral principles. These presumptions are characteristics of modernist ethics; thus, the ‘bedside rationing paradigm’ illustrates some fundamental shortcomings of this moral theory. I argue that an ethics of virtue is better suited to the practice of medicine as well as to the rationing dilemmas. (shrink)

In 2005, The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) developed four new ethical principles of organic agriculture to guide its future development: the principles of health, ecology, care, and fairness. The key distinctive concept of animal welfare in organic agriculture combines naturalness and human care, and can be linked meaningfully with these principles. In practice, a number of challenges are connected with making organic livestock systems work. These challenges are particularly dominant in immature agro-ecological systems, for example those that (...) are characterized by industrialization and monoculture. Some of the current challenges are partly created by shortages of land and manure, which encourage zero-grazing and other confined systems. Other challenges are created in part by the conditions for farming and the way in which global food distribution systems are organized, e.g., how live animals are transported, how feed is traded and transported all over the globe, and the development of infrastructure and large herds. We find that the overall organic principles should be included when formulating guidelines for practical organic animal farming. This article explores how the special organic conceptions of animal welfare are related to the overall principles of organic agriculture. The aim is to identify potential routes for future development of organic livestock systems in different contexts and with reference to the specific understanding of animal welfare in organic agriculture. We include two contrasting cases represented by organic livestock systems in northwestern Europe and farming systems in tropical low-income countries; we use these cases to explore the widely different challenges of organic livestock systems in different parts of the world. (shrink)

Cet article comprend l’étude et l’édition du Versus de historia euangelica, un poème anonyme de 288 hexamètres léonins, qui relate l’histoire de la naissance du Christ, de son ministère et de sa crucifixion. En raison de la nature contradictoire et répétitive des récits évangéliques, le poète suit l’organisation du matériel biblique de l’ Historia scholastica de Pierre le Mangeur, dont l’achèvement en 1173 constitue le terminus post quem de la composition du poème. On peut appeler le style du Versus épigrammatique. (...) En fait, le poème dans son entier se lit comme une collection de brefs tituli indépendants qui pourraient être sortis de leur contexte et utilisés comme légendes pour des représentations figuratives appropriées. (shrink)

This article presents a study and a critical edition of the short anonymous treatise on the rainbow starting with the incipit Inter omnes impressiones. The text was known to Nicole Oresme who engages with it twice: in his Questiones in Meteorologica de prima lectura and in Le livre du ciel et du monde. This Tractatus de iride, previously unknown to scholars, is transmitted in three late thirteenth-century manuscripts. It uses Robert Grosseteste’s theories of the rainbow as caused by the refraction (...) of sunlight and of colour as light incorporated in aereal particles. However, contrary to Grosseteste, the Tractatus de iride adopts the idea of different degrees of incorporation of light, which is also found in the scientific writings by Adam of Exeter, a Franciscan scholar belonging to the same Oxonian circle as Grosseteste. Moreover, the Tractatus de iride develops original propositions in regard to the role of individual raindrops, the importance of the angle from which the rainbow is observed, and the idea of the spirituality of the colours in the medium, which were central also for Roger Bacon’s and Nicole Oresme’s own theories of the rainbow. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that the informed consent process, in which patients are warned about potential side effects of a treatment, can trigger a nocebo effect where expectations about side effects increase side effect occurrence. This has sparked an ethical debate about how much information patients ought to receive before a treatment while trying to balance the moral principles of patient autonomy and nonmaleficence. In keeping with the principle of patient autonomy, the opinion of patients themselves in relation (...) to how much information they want about side effects is of utmost relevance in this debate. The literature was searched to identify surveys assessing patient attitudes towards side effect information. Across a broad variety of patient populations, treatment types, and countries, the majority of patients wished to be fully informed of potential side effects, particularly in relation to frequent and severe side effects, while only a small minority wanted minimal or no information at all. Results from this review suggest that nocebo research should focus on methods of avoiding nocebo effects of informed consent while ensuring that patients are well-informed about potential side effects. (shrink)

Proponents of precision medicine envision that digital phenotyping can enable more individualized strategies to manage current and future health conditions. We problematize the interpretation of digital phenotypes as straightforward representations of individuals through examples of what we call data inheritance. Rather than being a digital copy of a presumed original, digital phenotypes are shaped by larger data collectives that precede and continuously change how the individual is represented. We contend that looking beyond the individual is crucial for understanding the factors (...) that can ‘bend’ digital mirrors in specific directions. Since algorithms used for digital profiling are based on historical data, their predictions often inherit and increase the values and perspectives of past data practices. Moreover, the data legacies we leave behind today may return as so-called ‘data phantoms’ that conflict with the interests of the individual and contest who and what the ‘original’ is. (shrink)

The experience with genetically modified foods has been prominent in motivating science, industry and regulatory bodies to address the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. The overall objective is to gain the general public’s acceptance of nanotechnology in order not to provoke a consumer boycott as it happened with genetically modified foods. It is stated implicitly in reports on nanotechnology research and development that this acceptance depends on the public’s confidence in the technology and that the confidence is created on (...) the basis of information, education, openness and debate about scientific and technological developments. Hence, it is assumed that informing and educating the public will create trust, which will consequently lead to an acceptance of nanotechnology. Thus, the humanities and social sciences are seen as tools to achieve public acceptance. In this paper, the author argues that this is a narrow apprehension of the role of the humanities and social sciences. The humanities and social sciences have a critical function asking fundamental questions and informing the public about these reflections. This may lead to scepticism, however, the motivation for addressing the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology should not be public acceptance but informed judgement. The author illustrates this critical function by discussing the role, motivation and contribution of ethics as an example. Lastly, the author shows that a possible strategy for incorporating the humanities and the social sciences into nanotechnology research and development is Real-Time Technology Assessment, where the purpose is to integrate natural science and engineering investigations with ethical, legal and social science from the outset. (shrink)

The experience with genetically modified foods has been prominent in motivating science, industry and regulatory bodies to address the social and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. The overall objective is to gain the general public’s acceptance of nanotechnology in order not to provoke a consumer boycott as it happened with genetically modified foods. It is stated implicitly in reports on nanotechnology research and development that this acceptance depends on the public’s confidence in the technology and that the confidence is created on (...) the basis of information, education, openness and debate about scientific and technological developments. Hence, it is assumed that informing and educating the public will create trust, which will consequently lead to an acceptance of nanotechnology. Thus, the humanities and social sciences are seen as tools to achieve public acceptance. (shrink)

Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article explores the configuration of the wireless ICD patient by following a number of patients through (...) hospitalisation, implantation, in-clinic follow-up, and remote monitoring. Wireless therapy, we argue, scripts the patient as data. In high-tech clinical encounters, data are enacted as extensions and copies of the patient, and even proxies that, in patients’ experiences, may turn into identity thieves. In illuminating the multiple positions that data take in such clinical encounters and in patients’ experiences we discuss the ambiguities that arise when patients go wireless. (shrink)