41 research outputs found
The interplay between societal concerns and the regulatory frame on GM crops in the European Union
Recapitulating how genetic modification technology and its agro-food
products aroused strong societal opposition in the European Union, this
paper demonstrates how this opposition contributed to shape the European
regulatory frame on GM crops. More specifically, it describes how this
opposition contributed to a de facto moratorium on the commercialization of new GM
crop events in the end of the nineties. From this period onwards, the
regulatory frame has been continuously revised in order to slow down further
erosion of public and market confidence. Various scientific and technical
reforms were made to meet societal concerns relating to the safety of GM
crops. In this context, the precautionary principle, environmental
post-market monitoring and traceability were adopted as ways to cope with
scientific uncertainties. Labeling, traceability, co-existence and public
information were installed in an attempt to meet the general public request
for more information about GM agro-food products, and the specific demand to
respect the consumers' and farmers' freedom of choice. Despite these
efforts, today, the explicit role of public participation and/or ethical
consultation during authorization procedures is at best minimal. Moreover,
no legal room was created to progress to an integral sustainability
evaluation during market procedures. It remains to be seen whether the
recent policy shift towards greater transparency about value judgments,
plural viewpoints and scientific uncertainties will be one step forward in
integrating ethical concerns more explicitly in risk analysis. As such, the
regulatory frame stands open for further interpretation, reflecting in
various degrees a continued interplay with societal concerns relating to GM
agro-food products. In this regard, both societal concerns and diversely
interpreted regulatory criteria can be inferred as signaling a request –
and even a quest – to render more explicit the broader-than-scientific
dimension of the actual risk analysis
Fascinerend leven : markante figuren en ideeën uit de geschiedenis van de biologie
Met literatuuropgave, register.Rectoraat UGen
Normative Ethics Does Not Need a Foundation: It Needs More Science
The impact of science on ethics forms since long the subject of intense debate. Although there is a growing consensus that science can describe morality and explain its evolutionary origins, there is less consensus about the ability of science to provide input to the normative domain of ethics. Whereas defenders of a scientific normative ethics appeal to naturalism, its critics either see the naturalistic fallacy committed or argue that the relevance of science to normative ethics remains undemonstrated. In this paper, we argue that current scientific normative ethicists commit no fallacy, that criticisms of scientific ethics contradict each other, and that scientific insights are relevant to normative inquiries by informing ethics about the options open to the ethical debate. Moreover, when conceiving normative ethics as being a nonfoundational ethics, science can be used to evaluate every possible norm. This stands in contrast to foundational ethics in which some norms remain beyond scientific inquiry. Finally, we state that a difference in conception of normative ethics underlies the disagreement between proponents and opponents of a scientific ethics. Our argument is based on and preceded by a reconsideration of the notions naturalistic fallacy and foundational ethics. This argument differs from previous work in scientific ethics: whereas before the philosophical project of naturalizing the normative has been stressed, here we focus on concrete consequences of biological findings for normative decisions or on the day-to-day normative relevance of these scientific insights
'Philosophers and biologists exploring epigenetics'
letter regarding the interdisciplinary conference "Contextualizing the genome : when philosophers and biologists meet