Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

University of Southern Denmark | SDU · Department for the Study of Culture

In this article we pose three questions: 1) What are the questions that gave rise to the introduction of the concept and subdiscipline of meta-ethics? 2) What characterises the view of meta-ethics as a subdiscipline of moral philosophy? And 3) is it in fact possible to uphold a systematic distinction between normative moral philosophy and meta-ethi...

The amount of data available to healthcare practitioners is growing, and the rapid increase in available patient data is becoming a problem for healthcare practitioners, as they are often unable to fully survey and process the data relevant for the treatment or care of a patient. Consequently, there are currently several efforts to develop systems...

Background As a preamble to an attempt to develop a tool that can aid health professionals at hospitals in identifying whether the patient may have an alcohol abuse problem, this study investigates opinions and attitudes among both health professionals and patients about using patient data from electronic health records (EHRs) in an algorithm scree...

Since the publication of Annette Baier’s agenda-setting article entitled ‘Trust and Antitrust’, trust has become an increasingly popular topic, not only in moral philosophy and epistemology but also in the fields of economics, psychology, anthropology and the social sciences. Yet, the importance of K.E. Løgstrup’s highly original work on trust is s...

This is a work in moral philosophy and its ambition is to contribute to a renewed understanding of moral philosophy, the role of moral theory, and the relation between moral philosophy and moral life. It is motivated by the belief that the lack of a coherent answer to the question of the role and status of moral philosophy and the theories it devel...

This chapter explores the role of particularities in moral thought and moral life and the forms of understanding of these particularities necessary in moral philosophy in order to substantiate the idea, developed in Chapter 3, that moral philosophy is a descriptive activity facing a dual task, both general and particular. The chapter falls into two...

The chapter presents a critique of the idea that morality is impersonal and an investigation of how and to what extent personal features of our lives may be morally relevant and shape us as moral agents. In doing so, the chapter explains why moral life resists theorisation of the form criticised in Chapter 2, and it provides a better understanding...

We can only become competent moral thinkers by engaging in our community, but even if our communal practices and language in this way provide us with the resources necessary for moral thought, they may also be the source of moral bias, distortion, and corruption, a problem which is explored in this chapter with the aim of understanding the connecti...

This chapter provides the motivation for the book by arguing for a need to address the question of the role and status of moral philosophy in light of the criticisms directed against the theory-based understanding of moral philosophy of the twentieth century. The chapter also presents the three main aims of the book, to discuss what form of moral t...

This chapter develops an alternative, descriptive understanding of moral theory in order to reconcile two apparently conflicting insights; the insight of the critics of moral theory into the problems of the dominant conception of moral theory and the insight into the relevance that we still attribute to the positions traditionally conceived as theo...

The final chapter develops the conception of a descriptive, pluralistic, and elucidatory moral philosophy established throughout the book and investigates the relationship between moral philosophy and moral life. It expands on two central suggestions of this work, namely that moral philosophy is fundamentally descriptive, and that the moral cannot...

This chapter surveys criticisms raised against moral theory from positions such as virtue ethics, particularism, anti-theory, and Wittgensteinian moral philosophy in order to identify the most central and damaging objections. It locates the origin of theory critique in two classic papers by Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe and proceeds to give a...

The chapter contributes to the development of a pluralistic conception of moral philosophy consisting of a diversity of descriptive activities by exploring one example of how to combine an understanding of the particulars of moral life with the more general and abstract insights traditionally developed in moral philosophy, namely via moral philosop...

In this article, I investigate how we may include investigations of actual context in the investigation of moral problems in philosophy. The article has three main parts. The focus of the first is a survey of the dominant view of how to incorporate context into moral philosophy and to exemplify this view, I investigate examples from influential int...

This study aims to investigate the attitudes and opinions that are present among patients and health professionals toward addressing patients' alcohol use during a hospital stay. We conducted semi-structured interviews with nine health professionals and five patients to explore their opinions and attitudes toward asking and being asked about alcoho...

BACKGROUND As a preamble to an attempt to develop a tool that can aid health professionals at hospitals in identifying whether the patient may have an alcohol abuse problem, this study investigates opinions and attitudes among both health professionals and patients about using patient data from electronic health records (EHRs) in an algorithm scree...

In this article, I investigate the similarities and differences between the ways we relate to the other in ethics and in love through an engagement with the thinking of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas. My point of departure will be a reading of a novel by Maja Lucas, Mother (2016), which brings out the important and complicated nature of the rel...

The aim of this chapter is to open the question of this pervasiveness of the moral by arguing for the impossibility of delimiting the moral in one specific case, that of psychological self-ascription. The first part presents two views of the relationship between nature and morality found in forms of scientific and relaxed naturalism. In the main pa...

In his diaries from the beginning of the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein comments extensively both on Søren Kierkegaard's view of philosophical method and on his view of love. The aim of this article is to show how Wittgenstein's reflections on Kierkegaard's view of love reveal a fundamental difference between the two thinkers' views of philosophical me...

After receiving a copy of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s friend Brian Medlin writes back: ‘So far I think I disagree with what you say in “Wittgenstein and the Inner Life,” but I’ll have to make sure that I’ve understood you aright (so there!) before I launch into a complaint.’ Here, I reconstruct Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein and...

Applying philosophical theories with a view to increasing understanding gives us a platform to discuss issues such as moral responsibility in the context of an alcohol use disorder (AUD). The present study investigates moral responsibility and control in people suffering from AUD using the theory of reasons-responsiveness (TRR). Three participants...

Control and moral responsibility are important considerations in our understanding of alcohol use disorders (AUDs). The ability of persons experiencing AUD, especially the degree of freedom they enjoy in the presence of craving, is pivotal. The theory of reasons-responsiveness (TRR) offer a theoretical framework to explore the degree of freedom tha...

The aim of the present article is to explore relational views of the source of ethical obligation, that is, views according to which the source and binding character of ethical obligation lies in our relation to something else, that being the world or the other person. Relational views are represented here by the views of ethics found in the ethica...

The phenomenon of ‘innocent guilt’ regards cases where people feel guilty without being responsible for the wrongdoing or suffering at which the guilt is directed. The aim of this article is to develop a consistent account of innocent guilt and show how it may arise in the aftermath of conflicts. In order to do this, innocent guilt is contrasted wi...

Most commentators working on Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics note that he rejects the very possibility of traditional normative ethics, that is, a philosophically justified normative guide for right conduct. In this article, Wittgenstein’s view of ethical reflection as presented in his notebooks from 1936 to 1938 is investigated, and the question...

Ludwig Wittgenstein is very critical of philosophers' attempts at discussing ethics, especially all attempts at developing forms of ethical theory. In his critique of moral philosophy, Wittgenstein does not express reservations about the possibility of reflecting on ordinary ethical discussions or of elucidating ethically significant uses of words....

Der er i disse år et stigende ønske om at kvalitetssikre universitetsundervisning. På trods af mange gode intentioner kan denne udvikling give problemer på to fronter. For det første erder en potentiel spænding mellem undervisningens erfaringsbaserede karakter og de eksterne og kvantitative kriterier, der ofte opstilles i kvalitetssikringen, dens e...

In this paper, my major concern is to place the ethical remarks of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus within a wider discussion in moral philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I sketch a reading of the Tractatus that brings out a particular feature of ethics, namely the fact that ethical discourse is shaped by both subjective and objective concer...

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus we find Wittgenstein’s first and most substantial published investigation of ethics. I will argue that if the ethical sections of the Tractatus are seen in connection with a particular concept of showing, they then reveal a coherent and radical alternative to traditional conceptions of ethics; an alternative wh...

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus we find Wittgenstein’s first and most substantial published investigation of ethics. I will argue that if the ethical sections of the Tractatus are seen in connection with a particular concept of showing, they then reveal a coherent and radical alternative to traditional conceptions of ethics; an alternative wh...