What would happen if we more often put away our prestigious masks of knowledge and instead freed our sincerest questions? Not only in individual conversations, but also in public. How would our voices sound if we openly gave ourselves time to wait for clarity? What would philosophy sound like in a society that does not […]
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The Ethics Blog
A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
Contemporary research on consciousness is ambiguous, like the double-faced god Janus. On the one hand, it has achieved impressive practical results. We can today detect conscious activity in the brain for a number of purposes, including better therapeutic approaches to people affected by disorders of consciousness such as coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state. […]
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The challenge of finding an appropriate way to handle informed consent to biobank research is big and has often been discussed here on the Ethics Blog. Personal data and biological samples are collected and saved for a long time to be used in future research, for example, on how genes and the environment interact in […]
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In order to improve care, insight is needed into the challenges that one experiences in the daily care work. One way to gain insight is to conduct interview studies with healthcare staff. The analysis of the interviews can provide a well-founded perspective on the challenges, as they are experienced from within the practices. In Sweden, […]
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Neuroscience contributes to human self-understanding, but it also raises concerns that it might change humanness, for example, through new neurotechnology that affects the brain so deeply that humans no longer are truly human, or no longer experience themselves as human. Patients who are treated with deep brain stimulation, for example, can state that they feel […]
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During the spring, several doctoral students at CRB successfully defended their dissertations. Karin Schölin Bywall defended her dissertation on May 12, 2021. The dissertation, like the two previous ones, reflects a trend in bioethics from theoretical investigations to empirical studies of people’s perceptions of bioethical issues. An innovative approach in Karin Schölin Bywall’s dissertation is […]
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Why can we feel metaphysical nausea at the thought of cloned humans? I guess it has to do with how we, without giving ourselves sufficient time to reflect, are captivated by a simple image of individuality and cloning. The image then controls our thinking. We may imagine that cloning consists in multiplying our unique individuality […]
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable results in recent decades, especially thanks to the refinement of an old and for a long time neglected technology called Deep Learning (DL), a class of machine learning algorithms. Some achievements of DL had a significant impact on public opinion thanks to important media coverage, like the cases of […]
Continue readingWhat should the healthcare team do when established treatments do not help the patient? Should one be allowed to test a so-called non-validated treatment on the patient, where efficacy and side effects have not yet been determined scientifically? Gert Helgesson comments on this problem in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. His comment concerns suggestions from authors […]
Continue readingSometimes the intellectual claims on science are so big that they risk obscuring the actual research. This seems to happen not least when the claims are associated with some great prestigious question, such as the origin of life or the nature of consciousness. By emphasizing the big question, one often wants to show that modern […]
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Welcome to the Ethics Blog!
This blog is published by the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University.
Supported by the Human Brain Project, Neuroethics and Philosophy.
Meet the editor
Pär Segerdahl is the editor of the Ethics Blog and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)
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