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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell

What should not be bought and sold?

Alternative title: Hva bør man ikke kunne kjøpe og selge?

Awarded: NOK 8.2 mill.

While most of us have no objections to things such as pets, books, and childcare being bought and sold, many feel uncomfortable when it comes to pregnancies and sexual services. When we consider the buying and selling of friendships, babies, human organs, and political votes, the vast majority would say that a line has been crossed. But where do we draw the line? And how do we determine that? This project has worked on these types of questions, in a collaboration between UiO, Yale, and Oxford, for five years, and has developed from focusing on particular to more general ethical problems related to commodification. The members of the project groups have argued that it is difficult to justify categorical bans on trades in certain good or services. In most cases it is more instructive to discuss under what conditions, and in what ways, trades of different kinds may be justified. Concretely, we have argued for a so-called «monopsony» – where the government is the only permitted buyer – in the case of human kidneys. We have also argued that a prize should accompany a price in case of socially beneficial trades that might involve a personal sacrifice for sellers, as in the case of kidney selling under a monopsony. Alongside this, we have published research on topics such recreational drugs, sex selection in the context of surrogacy, payment for egg freezing for social (rather than medical) reasons, and access to computer-generated pornography, and have argued that regulation is all things considered superior to prohibition in all of these cases. In addition to publishing research on individual topics, we have also published work on methodology in applied ethics. Here we have described and defended the argumentative procedures that we have used in our discussions of individual topics, including our method of arguing for views in applied ethics while remaining agnostic regarding what overall ethical theory we should accept. This has generated publications in leading international journals including Bioethics, Journal of Medical Ethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Neuroethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies. The project has, throughout its period, involved extensive research communication in national media.

Hensikten med prosjektet har vært å bringe klarhet til en viktig, men understudert, tema innen den grenen av filosofifaget som kalles anvendt etikk: Hvor bør vi trekke grensene for hva som med rette kan byttes mot penger? Arbeidet på prosjektet ved Universitetet i Oslo fra 2017-2022 har gitt viktige, originale bidrag til etisk forskning knyttet til organdonasjon, surrogati, regulering av tilgang til robot- og medieteknologier, kjønnsseleksjonsteknologier og rusmidler, og til mer grunnleggende metodespørsmål i anvendt etikk. Siden dette har vært et prosjekt innen fagområdet filosofi har det ikke gitt resultater i form av oppfinnelser, patenter eller metoder til bruk i næringslivet. Det har imidlertid store effekter i det offentlige ordskiftet. Prosjektdeltakerne videreutvikler nå også forskningen basert på funnene i prosjektet i nært samarbeid med forskere ved prosjektets primære samarbeidspartner, University of Oxford, og bidrar aktivt til å informere bioetiske policy-avgjørelser både i Norge og Storbritannia. Forskningen fra prosjektet ligger også til grunn for forskningsarbeid utført fagpersoner uten tilknytning til prosjektet, som er publisert i bl.a. Columbia Law Review. I Norge videreføres forskningsarbeidet nå ved OsloMet - storbyuniversitetet, der prosjektleder nå arbeider som professor og prosjektets stipendiat nå arbeider som postdoktor og leder et FRIPRO-mobilitetsstipend i samarbeid med Harvard University.

While most of us have no objections to things such as pets, books, and childcare being bought and sold, many feel uncomfortable when it comes to pregnancies and sexual services. When we consider the buying and selling of friendships, babies, human organs, and political votes, the vast majority would say that a line has been crossed. But where do we draw the line? And how do we determine that? Those are pressing ethical questions, for how we understand and delimit markets has a profound impact on society, and as technological development advances, more and more things become potential commodities. This project will contribute to the development of ethical criteria for what should, and what should not, be treated as commodities. The first aim of the project is to systematize and make accessible the ethical commodification debate, which is currently fragmented. A further aim is to identify and correct three recurring conflations in influential commodification arguments. These are conflations between objections to: (a) people trading item A and people having item A, (b) people trading item A and people trading item A under certain conditions, (c) people trading item A and what causes people to trade item A. On the basis of this, three central lessons will be drawn. One lesson is that the proper scope of commodification is independent of the proper scope of distributive justice. Two other lessons involve the identification of a new informal fallacy in applied ethics (The Bulldozing Fallacy) and a new phenomenon in moral psychology (Moral Mist). The final aim of the project is to draw lessons from the commodification debate to the methods of applied ethics more broadly. In doing so, this project will move the frontiers of commodification ethics, one of the areas of philosophy that are most urgently relevant to public policy.

Publications from Cristin

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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell