PART ONE: THE PREMISSES 1. Looking for a More Reflective Alliance

2018

In several fields of both positive-, as well as of negative-integration, EU law (including the CJEU) refer to science, which addresses the question, whether this import of non-legal concepts should take place in an absolute or in a relative way. In line with what I have argued elsewhere for the integration of concepts of ethics and morality into EU law, a relative approach has to be taken. While we find clear statements e.g. of the CJEU with regard to the international state-of-the-art, still major questions remain left open. The second part of this presentation puts a special emphasis on the precautionary principle, as defined (especially) by the CJEU in its case-law. This part focuses on the fields where is applied, the actors that can rely on it, the different stages of identification, risk assessment and risk management (although not always clearly separable), etc.

The language of "laws" is used in both science and in civil society but the laws that scientists seek are fundamentally different from the laws that legislators promulgate. Yet both kinds of laws are proposed and adopted by people deploying the same cognitive processes, and in both cases we encounter problematic situations that can lead to the revision or replacement of previously accepted laws. In all cases, I argue, the adoption or reconsideration of a law requires decisions that depends on fallible human judgment.

2017

Comparative law often compares institutions or sources of law from various countries. This article rather compares civil law and common law families, but does use Germany and the USA to represent the two families respectively. Rather than focus upon institutions or sources of law, this article compares how these two families understand their practices of law, specifically in reference to science. First the concept of comparison itself is examined through its western conceptions in the discipline of rhetoric. Then the relationship of law to science is discussed, comparing the legal standard of scientist as authority on science to judge as ultimate adjudicator on scientific matters. The author concludes that law requires an evaluative element in its practices if it is to effect justice and further concludes that the evaluative element is better conceived by philosophy than science. Lawyers are thus encouraged to seriously consider evaluative practices, but are invited to do so on thei...

2017

Lingue e Linguaggi, 2019

This corpus-based study investigates linguistic practices and strategies of dealing with issues of bioethics in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights ("ECtHR"). The study aims at researching the linguistic strategies of knowledge production and entextualisation in 92 judgments of the ECtHR, focusing on the interaction between legal and bioethical term-related phraseological unitsi.e. multi-word terms and term-embedding collocations with a verbtheir structure and distributional patterns. Recurrent phraseological units are identified and analysed using methods of corpus linguistics and the theoretical framework of specialised phraseology. The study pursues general descriptive goals and aims at researching the balance and intersection between bioethically charged phraseology and legal phraseology. The main focus is placed on the analysis of typicality of patterning, expressed in terms of domain specificity, association score and log-likelihood.

2016

Moral experts — people who presumably know more about moral issues than others — play an important role in giving advice to governments on how to deal with ethical questions through ethics committees. The existence of these committees raises fundamental normative questions concerning the limits and the legitimate role of moral experts in decision-making processes. It is contested whether moral expertise exists. However, it is difficult to have any meaningful understanding of these institutional arrangements if we cannot expect these moral experts to deliver good advice to governments. The assumption that moral expertise exists therefore underlies this thesis. In fact, the legitimacy of ethics committees is intimately connected to their members’ performance as moral experts, and it is therefore important to develop criteria to evaluate their performance. Therefore, in the first part of this thesis, relevant epistemic criteria for assessing deliberation of moral experts on ethics comm...

Biolaw Journal Rivista Di Biodiritto, 2014

Overview of Uncertain Bioethics: Moral Risk and Human Dignity

2021

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. The content and reliability of the articles are the responsibility of the authors. When using and borrowing materials reference to the publication is required. Collection of scientific articles published is the scientific and practical publication, which contains scientific articles of students, graduate students, Candidates and Doctors of Sciences, research workers and practitioners from Europe and Ukraine. The articles contain the study, reflecting the processes and changes in the structure of modern science.