Anders Melin | Malmö University (original) (raw)

Papers by Anders Melin

Denna populärvetenskapliga rapport redogör för de viktigaste empiriska resultaten från den första... more Denna populärvetenskapliga rapport redogör för de viktigaste empiriska resultaten från den första delen (work package 1) av projektet ’Energiscenarier och rättvisa – en fallstudie av Sverige’, vilken genomfördes år 2020. Resultaten kommer att analyseras ytterligare med avsikt att publicera dem i vetenskapliga tidskrifter. Projektet i sin helhet pågår år 2020-2022. Under projektets andra del (work package 2) som pågår år 2021-2022 kommer vi att genomföra fokusgrupper som syftar till att bedöma energiscenarier ur ett rättviseperspektiv. Deltagare kommer att vara olika intressenter såsom politiker, tjänstemän och representanter för frivilligorganisationer. Ytterligare två populärvetenskapliga rapporter baserade på projektets andra del kommer att författas. Projektet beviljades medel av Energimyndigheten inom ramen för forskningsprogrammet Människa, Energisystem och Samhälle (MESAM). Det övergripande syftet med projektet är att utveckla metoder och riktlinjer för deltagande scenarier so...

Syntetisk biologi, det vill saga det forsknings- och teknikomrade som syftar till att skapa artif... more Syntetisk biologi, det vill saga det forsknings- och teknikomrade som syftar till att skapa artificiella biologiska system och levande organismer, vacker manga etiska fragor. I detta kapitel granskas olika mojliga argumentet for att skapandet av artificiella organismer bor ses som moraliskt otillatet.

Artikeln beskriver den nutida skandinaviska pilgrimsrorelsen och ger forklaringar till det okande... more Artikeln beskriver den nutida skandinaviska pilgrimsrorelsen och ger forklaringar till det okande intresset for pilgrimsvandringar, bade fran vandrarnas och fran de skandinaviska kyrkornas perspektiv.

As well as impinging upon issues of law and governance, astrobiology is also bound up with questi... more As well as impinging upon issues of law and governance, astrobiology is also bound up with questions concerning who we are and where we come from, worldview questions of a more existential and philosophical sort. The questions that it seeks to tackle have, for centuries, been central to the humanities and to social science disciplines.

Originally, the Capabilities Approach had a strong anthropocentric orientation because of its foc... more Originally, the Capabilities Approach had a strong anthropocentric orientation because of its focus on the entitlements of individual humans. However, as a part of the interest to employ it within animal and environmental ethics, it has been discussed whether the Capabilities Approach should consider also non-human life forms for their own sake. The most influential and elaborated contribution to this debate is Martha Nussbaum’s extension of the Capabilities Approach to include sentient animals. In this article, we argue that Nussbaum’s ascription of capabilities to animals is problematic, since the concept of a capability normally denotes an opportunity to choose between different functionings. When Nussbaum ascribes capabilities to animals, the concept seems to simply denote specific abilities. Such a use is problematic since it waters down the concept and makes it less meaningful, and it may obscure the fact that normal, adult humans, in contrast to sentient animals, can act as c...

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, 2017

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2021

This special issue emerges from the conference “Energy justice and the Capability Approach—interd... more This special issue emerges from the conference “Energy justice and the Capability Approach—interdisciplinary perspectives”, which took place in Malmö in the south of Sweden 12–13 September 2018. The point of departure was the burgeoning interest in studying issues of energy justice among social scientists and philosophers, together with the fact that the Capability Approach has become one of the most influential theoretical tools for conceptualising questions related to social justice. The purpose of the conference was to explore the potential of the Capability Approach for approaching issues of energy justice. At the conference, keynote lectures and papers with that purpose were presented from the perspective of the social sciences and philosophy. They covered diverse topics, such as energy justice in the Brazilian Amazon, ethics and nuclear energy, and natural gas development in central Arkansas. Building on the conference’s success, this special issue now extends the theoretical,...

Science and Engineering Ethics

In this paper, we apply the capabilities approach—with the addition of capability ceilings—to ene... more In this paper, we apply the capabilities approach—with the addition of capability ceilings—to energy justice. We argue that, to ensure energy justice, energy policies and scenarios should consider enabling not only minimal capability thresholds but also maximum capability ceilings. It is permissible, perhaps even morally required, to limit the capabilities of those above the threshold if it is necessary for enabling those below the threshold to reach the level required by justice. We make a distinction between tragic and non-tragic conflicts of capabilities: tragic conflicts are instances when one cannot raise an agent’s capabilities above the threshold that justice requires without pushing someone else below the threshold or restricting someone from reaching the threshold. In contrast, a non-tragic choice is when increasing someone above the threshold required by justice does not entail pushing someone else’s capabilities below the threshold. We utilise this framework to discuss en...

Religion in the Anthropocene

A significant aspect of the Anthropocene is that less and less room is left for non-human species... more A significant aspect of the Anthropocene is that less and less room is left for non-human species. The increasing rate of species extinction raises the question of what responsibility humans have t ...

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics

Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is today one of the most influential theories of justice.... more Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is today one of the most influential theories of justice. In her earlier works on the capabilities approach, Nussbaum only applies it to humans, but in later works she extends the capabilities approach to include sentient animals. Contrary to Nussbaum’s own view, some scholars, for example, David Schlosberg, Teea Kortetmäki and Daniel L. Crescenzo, want to extend the capabilities approach even further to include collective entities, such as species and ecosystems. Though I think we have strong reasons for preserving ecosystems and species within the capabilities approach, there are several problems with ascribing capabilities to them, especially if we connect it with the view that species and ecosystems are subjects of justice. These problems are partly a consequence of the fact that an ascription of capabilities to species and ecosystems needs to be based on an overlapping consensus between different comprehensive doctrines, in accordance wit...

In this paper I discuss how a virtue ethic for the preservation of biodiversity may look like. Th... more In this paper I discuss how a virtue ethic for the preservation of biodiversity may look like. The starting-point is the virtue ethic proposed by Celia Deane-Drummond. She suggests that the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance should form the basis of an ethic of nature. Of this four, prudence is the most fundamental. Moreover, Deane-Drummond states that the intellectual virtue of wisdom also is important in the context of environmental policy-making. In this paper I argue that another fundamental virtue is needed whose degree of abstractness is situated somewhere in between prudence and wisdom and I propose that respect could be such a virtue. In the last section I outline how it can be applied in the context of biodiversity preservation. (Less)

De Ethica. A Journal of Philosophical, Theological and Applied Ethics

Recently, philosophers and social scientists have shown increased interest in questions of social... more Recently, philosophers and social scientists have shown increased interest in questions of social, global, and intergenerational distributive justice related to energy production and consumption. However, so far there have been only a few attempts to analyse questions of distributive energy justice from a religious point of view, which should be considered a lack since religions are an important basis of morality for a large part of the world's population. In this article, I analyse issues of distributive energy justice from a Christian theological viewpoint by employing the Catholic common good tradition as a theoretical framework. First, I present and argue for a global and ecological interpretation of the Catholic common good tradition. Then I analyse the implications of such an interpretation on questions of distributive energy justice, focusing on the view of property rights within the Catholic common good tradition. I conclude that, in comparison with Nussbaum's liberal capabilities approach, the common good tradition provides stronger reasons for individuals and groups in more economically developed countries to share their resources and knowledge with individuals and groups in less economically developed countries.

Challenges

The project “A Plurality of Lives” was funded and hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced ... more The project “A Plurality of Lives” was funded and hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies at Lund University, Sweden. The aim of the project was to better understand how a second origin of life, either in the form of a discovery of extraterrestrial life, life developed in a laboratory, or machines equipped with abilities previously only ascribed to living beings, will change how we understand and relate to life. Because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the project aim, the project took an interdisciplinary approach with a research group made up of 12 senior researchers representing 12 different disciplines. The project resulted in a joint volume, an international symposium, several new projects, and a network of researchers in the field, all continuing to communicate about and advance the aim of the project.

Etikk i praksis - Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics

Energy production and consumption give rise to issues of justice for future humans. By analysing ... more Energy production and consumption give rise to issues of justice for future humans. By analysing a specific case – Swedish energy politics – this article contributes to the discussion of how consideration for future humans should affect energy policy making. It outlines three different energy scenarios for the period 2035-2065 – the nuclear-renewables, the renewables-low and the renewables-high scenarios – and assesses them from the point of view of justice for future individuals by using the capabilities approach as a normative framework. We cannot make a definitive assessment of the different scenarios due to the great uncertainties involved in determining the impacts on individuals living between 2035 and 2065 and individuals born thereafter, but we still conclude that we have certain reasons to prefer the renewables-low scenario since it avoids certain risks connected with the other scenarios. The economic growth in this scenario is lower than in the others, but we question whet...

De Ethica. A Journal of Philosophical, Theological and Applied Ethics, 2016

Pa Spaning Fran Svenska Kyrkans Forskardagar 2007, 2008

Since the end of the 1960s the questions of what duties current generations owe towards future ge... more Since the end of the 1960s the questions of what duties current generations owe towards future generations and what duties human beings owe towards natural entities have been increasingly discussed ...