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Ethics is ever-present in all aspects of human interaction and, in any physiotherapy situation there is an inherent claim to act and care for the patient in the best possible way. The physiotherapy profession is provided with rules, guidelines and codes to support and ensure ethical professional conduct. In recent decades however, physiotherapy literature has emphasized how ethical agency is immersed in clinical reasoning in each particular situation, in the doing of physiotherapy. The Danish philosopher and theologian Knud E. Løgstrup offers a bottom-up approach to ethics, which may augment the philosophical underpinning of this development in ethical thinking. Løgstrup departs from the given pre-conditions of life; a point of departure where the ethical claim emerges from sensation in the concrete situations. This paper introduces Løgstrup's situational ethics and its ontological framing, with four foci: how we can tune in to sensation and sense the ethical claim of the other; how human interdependence can be heard in what Løgstrup calls sovereign life utterances; relational responsibility and ethical norms; and the metaphorical importance of poetic understandings of the world. In four themes we reflect on how these ethical issues are at stake in physiotherapy practice with regards to: (1) uncertainty, tuned sensation and therapeutic attitude in physiotherapy; (2) sensuous, narrative and poetic meaning-making in physiotherapy; (3) physiotherapy and coming to oneself in new embodied experiences; and (4) ethical claims and codes of conduct in physiotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Artificial Intelligence researchers attempt to emulate human intelligence and transhumanists work toward superintelligence, philosophers and theologians confront a dilemma: we must either, on the one horn, (1) abandon the view that the defining feature of humanity is rationality and propose an account of spirituality that dissociates it from reason; or, on the other horn, (2) find a way to invalidate the growing faith in a posthuman future shaped by the enhancements of Intelligence Amplification (IA) or the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI). I grasp both horns of the dilemma and offer three recommendations. First, it is love understood as agape, not rational intelligence, which tells us how to live a godly life. Love tells us how to be truly human. Second, the transhumanist vision of a posthuman superintelligence is not only unrealistic, it portends the kind of tragedy we expect from a false messiah. Third, if as a byproduct of AI and IA research combined with H+ zeal the wellbeing of the human species and our planet is enhanced, we should be grateful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seems to be a broad agreement that curiosity is important in education. However, current research often seeks to answer the question of how best to nurture curiosity and fails to ask the normative question of why this should be done. A closer look reveals that the reasons for justifying the importance of curiosity vary, with some theorists pointing to its role in cognitive development as a starting point for learning, and others praising it as an element of democracy and a child's right to participation. Most of these approaches understand curiosity as an individual urge or desire for knowledge. In contrast, this article will examine a relational understanding of the concept by focussing on social curiosity. Instead of following a cognitive developmentalist, intellectual virtue or emancipatory approach to valuing curiosity, I will employ relational ethical theory. The argument then explores a possible analogy between social curiosity and the concept of sovereign expressions of life, as developed by the Danish philosopher and theologian K.E. Løgstrup. By drawing on his relational ethics, the article aims to expand the theoretical grounds on which curiosity can be normatively legitimised in education. With children spending longer and longer hours in educational, structured and adult-led settings, I conclude with a twofold normative claim: Social curiosity should be a part of all relations in education and its absence should lead to an ethical demand. In addition, an awareness of the actual deeds through which social curiosity is realised is also a topic that must be addressed by educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The relationship between the nurse and the patient is understood as fundamental in nursing care. However, numerous challenges can be related to the provision of relationship-based nursing care. Challenges exist when nurses do not respond adequately to the patient's appeal for help. Moreover, challenges arising in the nurse--patient relationship can be understood as more destructive demands from the patient to the nurse, thus begging inquiry into such a relationship. Research question: The overall aim is to explore and argue the relevance of problematizing destructive demands evident within relationship-based nursing care. Research design: This theoretical article explores destructive demands based on the phenomenological philosophy of the Danish theologian and philosopher Knud E. Løgstrup and provides examples of nurses' experiences in everyday nursing care. The examples are drawn from a Norwegian empirical study based on a hermeneutical research design. Participants and research context: Data consisted of qualitative interviews and qualitative follow-up interviews with 13 nurses with varying work experience within the primary and secondary somatic and psychiatric health service, from inside as well as outside institutions. Ethical consideration: The original empirical study was approved by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Information was given and consent was obtained from the participants. Findings: Two themes are described: strong impressions formed in meetings with patients and persistent concern over the burden of work and ability to endure. Discussion: Destructive demands related to relationship-based nursing care are discussed along two lines, first, by further elucidating nurses' everyday experiences connected to destructive demands and, second, by highlighting the significance of including destructive demands within the relationship-based nursing care. Conclusion: Including destructive demands related to relationship-based nursing care is of particular significance in enabling the proposition that radical, one-sided demands are based on relationality, reciprocity and thereby expectations of life. In short, both the nurse and the patient are human beings in need of love and goodness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses two sub-themes emerging from Robert Innis’ article on philosophy and cultural psychology. First, the distinction between the two fields of inquiry is discussed, and it is argued that a traditional separation of a normative philosophy and a descriptive and explanatory psychology cannot hold, because of the inherent normativity of all things psychological, as argued among others by John Dewey. Second, Innis’ search for a normative frame for cultural psychology is continued by moving in two directions at the same time: One that locates the source of normativity in historically evolved social practices (following the work of Alasdair MacIntyre), and another that looks phenomenologically at the ethical demand arising from human interdependency (following the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and K. E. Løgstrup). Such a two-sided normative frame can possibly acknowledge both the historicity of human morality and the existence of certain universal moral values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers increasingly consider ethical and sustainable attributes of products in their purchasing decisions, in particular with reference to food consumption. Among agri-food products, coffee is a pioneering food for sustainability and ethical certification, such as organic and Fair Trade, whose success depends significantly on consumers' willingness to pay a premium price for these attributes. This study uses a choice experiment (CE) to investigate the attitudes towards organic and Fair Trade coffee among Italian consumers. The results show considerable heterogeneity among respondents, the majority of whom tend to be more interested in organic coffee than Fair Trade coffee, even if a large group of them are willing to pay a premium price to consume Fair Trade coffee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zygmunt Bauman’s entire body of work has been dedicated to exploring sociological issues. However, problems of moral philosophy have come to play an increasingly crucial role for his understanding of social life in later works. In particular, the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s moral philosophy has shaped Bauman’s thinking. Løgstrup argued that there is an unconditional imperative in the ethical demand to take care of the Other, and this imperative cannot be superseded, rationalized, calculated, or strategically managed. Bauman is right in telling us that the personal ethics is the point of departure for a moral judgement. In this context it is very relevant to integrate Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s considerations. However, this perspective cannot stand alone. It is necessary to move forward to a form of Habermasian communicative ethics that can transmit the substantial moral judgement from a spontaneous communal perspective to a pragmatic societal perspective expressed in political terms. In other words, both perspectives are essential: on the one hand Bauman’s, Levinas’ and Løgstrup’s substantial phenomenological perspective, on the other hand Habermas’ pragmatic communicative perspective. Therefore, it would be more fruitful to consider these two perspectives as complementary instead of as in opposition, as is mostly done. They are both needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the background and some of the controversy surrounding Zygmunt Bauman's sociology of morality. In much of his extensive writing, ethics has been a recurrent theme — he has contributed significantly to putting ethical issues on the sociological agenda. Bauman is highly critical of what he calls the canonical Durkheimian view of morality as a product of societal processes, which he describes as a sociological reduction; traditional sociology of morality needs a thorough revision. With reference to the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Knud E. Løgstrup, he anchors morality in pre-societal sources and in what he describes as an independent existential mode of social norms», whose hallmark is «responsibility». According to Bauman, responsibility is something that comes to meet us — we encounter it unconditioned by understanding and cultural influence, and it takes place in social contexts. Immorality, on the other hand, is linked to structural societal conditions which manipulate and weaken an impulse of responsibility. The article questions the assertion that social condition always destroys moral action, as Bauman argues, and asks whether responsibility and ethical demand can play together with understanding, social norms and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this column the authors discuss the ethics of information exchange in nursing practice with children. Five concepts identified in three Swedish grounded theory studies and a content analysis that used the theoretical framework of ethical demand were analyzed. A simultaneous concept analysis found five related concepts: being interconnected, acting according to accepted procedure, completeness, interdependence, and social intercourse. These concepts are synthesized in the concept of intergrade, which emphasizes the value of maintaining the integrity of all involved in information exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will attempt a cross-fertilization between some ideas of the Danish professor of ethics and philosophy of religion, K.E. Løgstrup and some of the therapeutic ideas of Sandor Ferenczi. I will especially discuss the phenomenon of trust, and the response it awakens in the person to whom the trust is directed, especially as evident in the thearapeutic relationship.The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (2007) 67, 283–290. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350028 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emmanuel Levinas sets up alterity as a fundamental ontological category, irreducible to being and nothingess. There are two difficulties in understanding this ontological alterity. On the one hand, Levinas formulates it with negative terms - infinition, abstraction, ab-solutenes, trace of a past that has never been present. On the other hand, Levinas invokes the notions of the superlative, the Good, and God. These notions are very difficult to separate from the notion of a redoubling of the positivity by which the things of the world are posited in their own subsistent being. The quasi-concepts with which Levinas has thematized the alterity of the others who face us in an ontological sphere of infinition, absoluteness, and abstractness have determined negatively what he envisions as beyond negativity and positivity. They reduce the determinateness of the wants and needs of another, and reduce the otherness of one other from other others. In addition, the positivism with which Levinas eliminates the imperatives with which the elements summon us and the material imperatives with which the things put demands on us effaces the phenomenality of the other whose want and needs are inscribed on the susceptibility and vulnerability of his surfaces of skin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hem M. H. & Heggen K. (2004) Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 11, 55–63 Rejection – a neglected phenomenon in psychiatric nursing The basically asymmetric character of the ‘psychotic patient–psychiatric nurse’ relationship constitutes an ethical challenge for the nurse. One aspect of this relationship is that nurses must constantly self-consciously control their behaviour towards the patient. There is some evidence that the patient sometimes feels offended because of his perception that the nurse rejects him. The purpose of this article is to examine the role rejection plays in the ‘psychotic patient–psychiatric nurse’ relationship and ethical implications this might have for the field of psychiatric nursing. This study is conducted using an ethnographic research design that includes participant observation and narrative interviews of nurses working on an acute ward of a psychiatric hospital. One case is analysed and discussed in depth through the philosophical insights (particularly ‘the ethical demand’) of the Danish moral philosopher K.E. Løgstrup. The psychotic patient, being vulnerable, dependent, and trusting, confronts the psychiatric nurse with a constant ‘ethical demand’ to take care of him. The patient's trust, and his fight to maintain his dignity, creates a risk of being rejected. The nurse, by resorting to the tactic of ‘impersonal professional routine’, which does not define the relationship as a personal encounter, creates boundaries between herself and the patient. The nurse's withdrawal from the patient's perception of reality is experienced by the patient as rejection and hence an offence of his dignity. The nurse's rejection of the patient has two causes: external factors – for example inadequate staffing – cause the nurse to be unable to live up to the professional ideal of ‘welcoming’ the patient; internal factors – for example the profession's understanding of itself – create an unclear understanding of the nurse's role and responsibilities. It is necessary to work with both the external and internal factors to improve psychiatric nursing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]