Awesome Resource for Public Health Ethics Scholarship and Training Available Online for Free!

Yes indeed! Super kudos to the editorial team of Drue H. Barrett, Leonard H. Ortmann, Angus Dawson, Carla Saenz, Andreas Reis and Gail Bolan – and the sponsor CDC – for putting together this freely available, pioneering and one of a kind collection of case studies and background texts for global public health ethics study, research and training. With contribution by a pack of high octane scholars, such as Ruth Gaare Bernheim, Jo A. Valentine, Lisa M. Lee , Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Maneesha Sakhuja, Norman Daniels, Michael J. Selgelid, Janani Suraksha Yojana, Harald Schmidt, Bruce Jennings, Anthony Wrigley, Eric M. Meslin, Ibrahim Garba, Natalie Brown and Barbara R. DeCausey. 

Available for free download as PDF wherever you are. Just go here.

New paper online: Ethical Hazards in Monitoring and Addressing Patient Decision Capacity in Clinical Practice

Just a little heads-up about a new research paper now being online (free to read and download). This one is lead by my Ph.D. student, Thomas Hartvigsson (presently visiting at Queen's University, Canada) and addresses aspects of his thesis topic about the normative roles of decision competence, for instance, in areas such as law or health care.

Together with Gun Forsander, chief senior clinical consultant at a childhood diabetes clinic, we use studies made in the area of teenage diabetes care, to argue that patient educational interventions meant to monitor and promote patients' intellectual understanding of general facts about their disease and the treatment brings ethical hazards likely to undermine some patient's decision-making capacities rather than enhancing or safeguarding them. At the same time, we find a strong general case for the idea of monitoring and addressing decision competence in patient groups where there is good reason to suspect especially fragile decision capacities, and sketch some challenges regarding staff competence and care organisation related to that.

The paper is freely available online for reading and download here.

Come and Work with Us on Moral and Legal Responsibility and Agency!

The practical philosophy group at my department has for many years been working on building a research environment focusing broadly on responsibility as a topical theme. This theme encompasses all aspects of moral and legal responsibility and agency, and ranges from the applied and practice oriented (related to different areas and institutions), to the most general and fundamental issues in philosophy, moral and legal theory. It also contains openings for cross-disciplinary collaborations, e.g., with psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, law, politics and economics. Last year, thanks to a major 10-year grant from the Swedish Research Council, we could welcome Paul Russell as new professor within this theme, who now leads the resulting Gothenburg Responsibility Project (GRP), and also a first round of post docs.

Now the GRP is opening its second call for post docs, and we are, of course, very keen on having applications from people in the postdoctoral phase of their careers, who feel that their field of research fits the GRP theme, and that spending a few years at our department is an attractive prospect. If that's you, please go here for more practical details!