Umeå University's logo

In a reply to my recent paper “The Cost of Denying Intrinsic Value in Nature,” Rut Vinterkvist raises an important objection to my claim that environmentalists must ascribe intrinsic value to some natural entities to consistently defend the protectionist views I believe many of them have. To defend this claim, I provided three hypothetical cases, involving threatened natural entities, designed to show that only an intrinsic value of these respective entities could explain a reason to protect them. My claim was that, even in these cases, environmentalists would generally find the natural entities in question protection-worthy. Against this claim, Vinterkvist argues that environmentalists can consistently opt for protection of these entities without ascribing any intrinsic value to them, the idea being that we can argue for protection of the entities on the basis that other people care for them (for whatever reasons, if any). We should protect them, not for their own sake, but for the sake of those who care for them. In this response, I explain why I believe her suggestion—challenging to my argument as it is—does not provide a proper option for environmentalists who want to argue for protection in these and similar cases.

This chapter is based on the results of a questionnaire that was distributed to students at Umeå University, Sweden, and investigates their propensity to accept online surveillance in relation to three conditions that could increase their acceptance of it: 1) that it results in personal benefits; 2) that they have consented to it; and 3) that society can benefit from it. To categorise the respondents’ positions, I use a conceptual apparatus from moral philosophy, namely, the distinction between deontological and consequentialist ethical views. The study reveals two clear tendencies among the respondents: The most considerable difference among them is a difference in their general attitudes to being surveilled online rather than a difference in ethical thinking of a kind that can be framed in terms of deontology and consequentialism; the personal benefits that can result from allowing online surveillance do not generally have any significant impact on their acceptance of it. 

The contributions in this book shed light on the complexity of surveillance in a digital age and problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. More and more actors and practices play an increasing role in our contemporary digitalised society, and the chapters show how people negotiate surveillance in their use of digital media, often knowingly leaving digital footprints, and sometimes trying to avoid surveillance. The digital transformation will continue in the foreseeable future. The coordination and analysis of data is viewed by many government agencies, corporations, and other actors as important tools for improving public administration, health, and economic growth. For this development to be legitimate, it is important that hard values, such as technical and legal developments, and soft values, such as ethical and cultural values, are taken into consideration. 

Over the recent decades, the possibilities to surveil people have increased and been refined with the ongoing digital transformation of society. Surveillance can now go in any direction, and various forms of online surveillance saturate most people’s lives, which are increasingly lived in digital environments.

To understand this situation and nuance the contemporary discussions about surveillance – not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries – we must adopt cultural and ethical perspectives in studying people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours. The “culture of surveillance”, to borrow David Lyon’s term, is a culture where questions about privacy and publicness, and rights and benefits, are once again brought to the fore.

This anthology takes up this challenge, with contributions from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks that discuss and shed light on the complexity of contemporary surveillance and thus problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. The contributions highlight how more and more actors and practices play a part in our increasingly digitalised society.

The book is an outcome of the research project "iAccept: Soft surveillance – between acceptance and resistance", financed by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. The anthology’s editors are project members, all based at Umeå University, Sweden: Lars Samuelsson, associate professor of philosophy; Coppélie Cocq, professor of Sámi studies and digital humanities; Stefan Gelfgren, associate professor of sociology of religion; and Jesper Enbom, associate professor of media studies.

The possibilities to surveil people have increased and been further refined with the implementation of digital communication over the last couple of decades, and with the ongoing process of digital transformation, surveillance can now go in any direction, leaving a label such as “surveillance state” somewhat outdated. Corporations and governmental organisations may surveil people, people may surveil each other, and surveillance may take place in subtle ways that are difficult for the surveilled to detect. In David Lyon’s terms, we are living in a “culture of surveillance”, a culture that surrounds and affects our everyday life. Today, it is of utmost relevance to study people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours in relation to the fact that we live in a culture of surveillance. This includes the need for cultural and ethical perspectives to understand and nuanced contemporary discussions on surveillance, not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries. The chapters in this anthology address these issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks.  

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is nowadays internationally considered an important aspect of the overall education of children and young people in the world. It is included among the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Besides its content – sustainable development – ESD is also characterized by its emphasis on a democratic and participatory educational procedure. In this paper, we show how both these aspects of ESD – its content and procedure – reveal the importance of bringing ethical considerations into ESD, as well as provide challenges for ethics teaching in ESD.

In a seminal paper from 1998, Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer, and Maurice Rickard (hereafter referred to as KSR) defend impartial over partial moral reasoning, outlining these two kinds of moral reasoning, or perspectives, as follows:

“Partial moral reasoning… involves judgments that emphasize personal relationships and attachments. These sorts of judgments and dispositions differ from impartialist judgments in that they favour people with whom we are personally connected over people with whom we are not. Impartialist reasoning, by contrast, … involves judgments and dispositions that are detached and do not favour personal attachments.” (H. Kuhse, P. Singer & M. Rickard, 1998, “Reconciling Impartial Morality and a Feminist Ethic of Care”, The Journal of Value Inquiry 32, p. 453.)

In short and simplified, KSR’s argument for impartial morality looks as follows: (1) Either (a) morality is fundamentally divided into a partial type of morality and an impartial type of morality with no common ground, or (b) one of these two perspectives must be the most fundamental one, in terms of which the other one should be understood. (2) Option (a) would involve “a fairly radical and unsettling conclusion about morality” and should therefore be rejected. (3) The perspective we have reason to believe to be the most fundamental one is the perspective with the best explanatory power. (4) The impartial perspective is the perspective with the best explanatory power, since it best explains our widely held pre-theoretic moral intuitions and our empirically observed dispositions to approach moral problems. (5) Consequently, we have reason to believe the impartial perspective to be the most fundamental one, in terms of which the partial perspective should be understood. (pp. 457ff.)

In this talk, we problematize this argument and distinguish between two different ways in which impartial moral reasoning can be understood. We refer to these as internal and external impartiality, respectively. Internal impartiality concerns the judgements and dispositions of the acting agent, while external impartiality concerns the judgements and dispositions of someone other than the acting agent, for instance an idealized hypothetical agent judging or responding to the judgements and dispositions of the acting agent. While KSR seem to be concerned with internal impartiality, we argue that external impartiality can do a better job with regards to both explanatory power and reconciling the partialist and the impartialist perspectives. 

First, we note that KSR’s argument rests on a false dichotomy. Besides the two alternatives in option (b) above, a third possibility is that the partial as well as the (internally) impartial perspective can be explained in terms of some other, even more fundamental component of sound moral reasoning. Second, we argue that there is indeed such a more fundamental component of sound moral reasoning, namely the widely accepted requirement of universalizability (see T. Jollimore, 2014, “Impartiality”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta.). Third, we explain how we take external impartiality to be related to the requirement of universalizability.

In recent research on moral psychology, the human consciousness has been compared to a tongue, with different taste buds, which together can cause a variety of sensations. According to this theory, people in general have a preparedness to react to situations, which can provide opportunities or pose threats in a social context. Moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has described these receptors as pairs, for example: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. Which of these foundations the individual develops a taste for depends, largely, on the social and cultural context. Hence, the choices teachers make of which issues to address and in what way can contribute to a learning environment that influences their pupils’ moral outlook. The purpose of this study is to investigate which of these moral intuitions or taste preferences that teachers want to endorse and cultivate in their pedagogical practices. Against this background, a number of qualitative research interviews were conducted with experienced teachers in the non-confessional subject religious education (RE), who have a particular responsibility for moral education in the Swedish school system. The interviews were based on a modified version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which was deliberately developed to determine the participants’ moral taste, and the participants were asked to elaborate their answers. The results indicate that the participants tended to favour harm and fairness over loyalty, authority and sanctity. As one of the participants puts it: “many of my examples relate to the weak and vulnerable or the ones that are denied their rights in society… these pedagogical choices are based on the content of the curriculum but also mirror my own preferences”. In this paper we analyse the interviews with the RE teachers and critically discuss the consequences the moral foundations theory has for moral education.  

Teachers in the non-confessional Swedish subject religious education have conflicting responsibilities to convey values and facilitate critical thinking. The research regarding these responsibilities has often been considered a theoretical problem and the discussion has concerned theoretical solutions. However, the problem is not only theoretical. It is in fact also a practical problem that many teachers frequently encounter. The overall aim of this paper is thus to draw attention to these conflicting responsibilities as a practical problem that teachers face and are expected to solve in their pedagogical practices. In line with this aim, a number of qualitative research interviews were conducted with experienced religious education teachers, who are considered to have a particular responsibility for moral education in the Swedish school system. The purpose of the interviews was to investigate how they relate to their sometimes conflicting responsibilities and consequently make an empirically informed contribution to the debate. This is an important task since there are no official guidelines on how teachers are to balance these responsibilities in their pedagogical practices.