Let the Chips Fall! Public Nudging Arrangements, Coercion, and the Role of Independent Shopkeepers.

Nudging, according to its inventors and defenders, is supposed to provide a non-coercive way of changing human behavior for the better-a freedom-respecting form of "libertarian paternalism." Its original point was to complement coercive modes of influence without any need of justification in liberal frameworks. This article shows, using the example of food-product placement in grocery stores, how this image is deceptive. Although nudging practices may not restrict the freedom of consumers, nudging arrangements by public health authorities do restrict the freedom of shopkeepers in standard liberal senses. Libertarianism cannot justify this coercion, and the creed is best left out of the equation as the ideological ruse that it, in this discussion, is. Other liberal theories can justify the coercion, but on grounds that can also be applied to other methods of public health promotion by subsidies and regulation. This result reaffirms that nudging should be seen to complement, not to replace, those other methods.

Justainability.

Sustainability, properly understood, is an existential moral ideal. The United Nations, however, defines it in terms of 17 indivisible sustainable development goals. This definition changes the core idea of the concept. It turns sustainability from a moral ideal into a set of economy-based political aspirations. The European Union's bioeconomy strategy demonstrates the shift aptly and reveals its main problem. When economy is prioritized, social and ecological concerns become secondary. This has been the United Nations line since the Brundtland Commission's report, Our Common Future in 1987. Considerations of justice illustrate the inadequacy of the approach. Equality and justice require that all those affected by decisions are heard in making them. Under the current operationalization, decisions related to the natural environment and climate change are currently being made without hearing voices that advocate deeper social and ecological equality. After an explication of the problem and the state of the art as outlined above, a new notion of justainability is introduced and it is argued that assuming it would be a step in the right direction in taking also noneconomic values properly into account in international decision making.

Physicians Controlling Women's Reproductive Choices: The Slow Liberalization of Abortion Laws in Finland.

This paper provides an overview of the development and the sociopolitical background of legislation pertaining to abortion in Finland from the nineteenth century to the current day. The first Abortion Act came to force in 1950. Before that, abortions were handled under criminal law. The 1950 law was restrictive and allowed abortions in very limited circumstances only. Its main aim was to reduce the number of abortions and especially illegal abortions. It was not very successful in reaching these goals, but, significantly, it moved abortions from the realm of the criminal law to the hands of medical professionals. The birth of the welfare state and the prenatal attitudes of 1930s and 1940s Europe played their part in shaping the law. By late 1960s, with the rise of the women's rights movement and other changes in society, there was pressure to change the outdated law. The new 1970 Abortion Act was broader and allowed abortions for limited social reasons too but left very limited, if any, room for a woman's right to choose. After a citizen's initiative in 2020, the year 2023 will see a significant amendment to the 1970 law; during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, an abortion can be performed on the woman's request alone. However, there is still a long way to go in terms of women's rights and abortion laws in Finland.

Commentary: In Search of Medical Ethics and Its Foundation with Rosamond Rhodes.

In her thorough and thoughtful contribution to the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics titled "Medical Ethics: Common or Uncommon Morality" Rosamond Rhodes argues that contrary to American mainstream bioethics, medical ethics is not, and should not be, based on common morality, but rather, that the medical profession requires its own distinctive morality.1 She goes on to list sixteen duties that, according to her, form the core of medical ethics proper.

Research Ethics and Justice: The Case of Finland.

This paper explores how Finnish research ethics deals with matters of justice on the levels of practical regulation, political morality, and theoretical studies. The bioethical sets of principles introduced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in the United States and Jacob Dahl Rendtorff and Peter Kemp in Europe provide the conceptual background, together with a recently introduced conceptual map of theories of justice and their dimensions. The most striking finding is that the internationally recognized requirement of informed consent for research on humans can be ideologically tricky in a Scandinavian welfare state setting.

Genetic Moralism and Health.

This article examines the moralistic language and arguments used in relation to genetics. The focus is on three practices: (1) the claims that there is a duty to know about one's own genetic makeup, (2) assertions that genetic information should be used to inform reproductive decisions, and (3) the proposition that there are moral reasons to participate in biobank research. With these three, the author contends that there are equally good, if not better, arguments to challenge them from a Millian perspective. Furthermore, especially in the current political climate, there is a need to respect people's privacy concerns.

Artificial gametes, the unnatural and the artefactual.

In debates on the ethics of artificial gametes, concepts of naturalness have been used in a number of different ways. Some have argued that the unnaturalness of artificial gametes means that it is unacceptable to use them in fertility treatments. Others have suggested that artificial gametes are no less natural than many other tissues or processes in common medical use. We suggest that establishing the naturalness or unnaturalness of artificial gametes is unlikely to provide easy answers as to the acceptability of using them in fertility medicine. However, we also suggest that we should be cautious about repudiating any relationship between nature and moral evaluation. The property of being natural or man-made may not per se tell us anything about an entity's moral status, but it has an important impact on the moral relationship between the creator and the created organism.

Finding Hope in Synthetic Biology.

For some, synthetic biology represents great hope in offering possible solutions to many of the world's biggest problems, from hunger to sustainable development. Others remain fearful of the harmful uses, such as bioweapons, that synthetic biology can lend itself to, and most hold that issues of biosafety are of utmost importance. In this article, I will evaluate these points of view and conclude that although the biggest promises of synthetic biology are unlikely to become reality, and the probability of accidents is fairly substantial, synthetic biology could still be seen to benefit humanity by enhancing our ethical understanding and by offering a boost to world economy.

Get to the point! Philosophical bioethics and the struggle to remain relevant.

This article argues that practicality is currently overemphasized in philosophical contributions to bioethics. The inclinations to aim at relevance, to ground normativity on common morality, and to involve many academic disciplines in ethical discussions is understandable, but they are all poorly founded. When answers to difficult questions are already known at the outset, these endeavors can help decisionmakers in gaining the acceptance of the general public. Wider theoretical analyses, in which philosophers could excel, however, tend to be lost in these practical enterprises.

Playing God: the rock opera that endeavors to become a bioethics education tool.

This article describes and introduces a new innovative tool for bioethics education: a rock opera on the ethics of genetics written by two academics and a drummer legend. The origin of the idea, the characters and their development, and the themes and approaches as well as initial responses to the music and the show are described, and the various educational usages are explored.