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This article offers a Kantian account of dignity violations in the context of contemporary migration to western states. It considers three major issues: “modern slavery,” statutory detention, and lack of rights to engage in economic activity. While most Kantian accounts emphasize the dignity violations of treating people as “mere means,” we point out that this does not capture the central issue: the “hostile environment” that so many migrants face. The first part of the article briefly sets out a Kantian account of dignity violations. The second part highlights two key differences between modern slavery and its historical forebears. It emphasizes the interpersonal rather than institutional character of modern slavery, and distinguishes trafficking from smuggling. The third part argues that migrants who lack formal rights to remain and work face institutional exclusions that violate human dignity. Policies that aim to discourage and restrict immigration demean people’s status as ends in themselves. Moreover, they do so by actively denying opportunities to act as means for others. As such, the article draws a link between Kant’s well-known cosmopolitan right not to be treated with hostility and his less well-known ethical duty, “to be a useful member of the world.” Dignity can be found in acting as a means for others; hostility and exclusion can violate dignity just as much as instrumentalization.

Negligence reminds us that we often do and cause things unawares, occasionally with grave results. Given the lack of foresight and intention, some authors argue that people should not be judged culpable for negligence. This paper offers a contrasting view. It argues that gaining control (over our agency, over a risky world) is itself a fundamental responsibility, with both collective and individual elements. The paper underlines both sides, focussing on how they relate as we ascribe responsibility or culpability. Following the introduction, Section 2 (“Culpability and Control: The Negligence Sceptics”) argues that conscious awareness is neither necessary nor sufficient for control. Control is not a property of deliberate choice, so much as a practical achievement. Section 3 (“Non-negligence as a Shared Task”) stresses the collective aspects of non-negligence: creating knowledge about risks, structuring environments to guard against them, and developing standards of care. Failings in the collective task, rather than lack of individual control, mean it can often be unfair to pin culpability on a single individual. Section 4 (“Culpability for Negligence Revisited”) suggests that a basic duty of a responsible person is to acknowledge the ways in which we may do more or less than we mean to, often in ways that create risks. It then sketches an approach to culpability as part of a collective exercise: as we take responsibility for standards of care, and for our own and others’ agency.

This article considers the charge that citizens of developed societies are complicit in large‐scale harms, using climate destabilisation as its central example. It contends that we have yet to create a lived morality – a fabric of practices and institutions – that is adequate to our situation. As a result, we participate in systematic injustice, despite all good efforts and intentions. To make this case, the article draws on recent discussions of Kant's ethics and politics. Section 2 considers Tamar Schapiro's account of how otherwise decent actions can be corrupted by others’ betrayals, and hence fall into complicity. Section 3 turns to discussions by Christine Korsgaard and Lucy Allais, which highlight how people can be left without innocent choices if shared frameworks of interaction do not instantiate core ideals. Section 4 brings these ideas together in order to make sense of the charge of complicity in grave collective harms, and addresses some worries that the idea of unavoidable complicity may raise.

Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive—a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards.

Many attempts have been made to formalize ethical requirements for research. Among the most prominent mechanisms are informed consent requirements and data protection regimes. These mechanisms, however, sometimes appear as obstacles to research. In this opinion paper, we critically discuss conventional approaches to research ethics that emphasize consent and data protection. Several recent debates have highlighted other important ethical issues and underlined the need for greater openness in order to uphold the integrity of health-related research. Some of these measures, such as the sharing of individual-level data, pose problems for standard understandings of consent and privacy. Here, we argue that these interpretations tend to be overdemanding: They do not really protect research subjects and they hinder the research process. Accordingly, we suggest another way of framing these requirements. Individual consent must be situated alongside the wider distribution of knowledge created when the actions, commitments, and procedures of researchers and their institutions are opened to scrutiny. And instead of simply emphasizing privacy or data protection, we should understand confidentiality as a principle that facilitates the sharing of information while upholding important safeguards. Consent and confidentiality belong to a broader set of safeguards and procedures to uphold the integrity of the research process.

Person-centered healthcare requires providers to appreciate the knowledge and perspectives of patients. Effective and appropriate care depends on such knowledge. Medical institutions can only function well when they acknowledge patients’ own experiences. Yet a range of evidence shows that professionals and organisations often ignore patients’ own knowledge about their condition and treatment. This article aims to explain why this epistemic injustice occurs and persists. (Epistemic: to do with knowledge. Justice, because professionals and organisations do wrong when they bypass or deny patients’ own knowledge.) The explanation focuses on problems of power and accountability. Illness is a disempowering experience, partly for bodily and psychological reasons, partly because the ill person depends on others for help, partly because professionals and organisations are specially empowered in order that they may help. Occupying a lesser power position, patients often walk a tightrope between conflicting demands and may be caught in double binds: situations where every possibility for action risks bad outcomes. By contrast, professionals need not notice their greater power position and how this opens up paths of least resistance, whereby it is easy to ignore or belittle patients’ knowledge. When it is hard for patients to voice their “complaints” (the details of their illness, their sense of being badly treated), accountability falters. Healthcare providers may see themselves as expert and responsible, even as they fail many persons they are meant to help.

Attrition may lead to bias in epidemiological cohorts, since participants who are healthier and have a higher social position are less likely to drop out. We investigated possible selection effects regarding key exposures and outcomes in the IDEFICS/I.Family study, a large European cohort on the etiology of overweight, obesity and related disorders during childhood and adulthood. We applied multilevel logistic regression to investigate associations of attrition with sociodemographic variables, weight status, and study compliance and assessed attrition across time regarding children's weight status and variations of attrition across participating countries. We investigated selection effects with regard to social position, adherence to key messages concerning a healthy lifestyle, and children's weight status. Attrition was associated with a higher weight status of children, lower children's study compliance, older age, lower parental education, and parent's migration background, consistent across time and participating countries. Although overweight (odds ratio 1.17, 99% confidence interval 1.05–1.29) or obese children (odds ratio 1.18, 99% confidence interval 1.03–1.36) were more prone to drop-out, attrition only seemed to slightly distort the distribution of children's BMI at the upper tail. Restricting the sample to subgroups with different attrition characteristics only marginally affected exposure-outcome associations. Our results suggest that IDEFICS/I.Family provides valid estimates of relations between socio-economic position, health-related behaviors, and weight status. on behalf of the IDEFICS and I.Family ConsortiaCC BY 4.0

Background: The aim of this study was to explore whether the IDEFICS intervention had a differential effect on 11,041 children’s weight trajectories depending on their baseline body mass index status. Methods: Two subgroups of children are considered in the present analysis: those who were overweight or obese prior to the intervention and those who were neither overweight nor obese. Results: Among children in all eight countries who did not have prevalent overweight or obesity (OWOB) at baseline, 2 years later, there was no significant difference between intervention and control groups in risk of having developed OWOB. However, we observed a strong regional heterogeneity, which could be attributed to the presence of one distinctly outlying country, Belgium, where the intervention group had increased risk for becoming overweight. In contrast, among the sample of children with prevalent OWOB at baseline, we observed a significantly greater probability of normalized weight status after 2 years. In other words, a protective effect against persistent OWOB was observed in children in intervention regions compared with controls, which corresponded to an adjusted odds ratio of 0.76 (95% confidence interval: 0.58, 0.98). Discussion: This analysis thus provided evidence of a differential effect of the IDEFICS intervention, in which children with overweight may have benefited without having been specifically targeted. However, no overall primary preventive effect could be observed in children without initial overweight or obesity.

Introduction: As considered in the rest of this volume, the effects of the IDEFICS intervention on obesity rates were not encouraging. This paper considers how far findings from the IDEFICS study and similar intervention studies are relevant to the policy process and political decision-making. Methods: The paper offers theoretical and policy-level arguments concerning the evaluation of evidence and its implications for policymaking. The paper is divided into three parts. The first considers problems in the nature and applicability of evidence gained from school- and community-level obesity interventions. The second part considers whether such interventions present a model that policy-makers could implement. The third part considers how we should think about policy measures given the limited evidence we can obtain and the many different goals that public policy must take account of. Results: The paper argues that (1) there are clear reasons why we are not obtaining good evidence for effective school- and community-level interventions; (2) public policy is not in a good position to mandate larger-scale, long-term versions of these interventions; and (3) there are serious problems in obtaining ‘evidence’ for most public policy options, but this should not deter us from pursuing options that tackle systemic problems and have a good likelihood of delivering benefits on several dimensions. Conclusions: Research on school- and community-level obesity interventions has not produced much evidence that is directly relevant to policymaking. Instead, it shows how difficult it is to affect obesity rates without changing wider social and economic factors. Public policy should focus on these.

Introduction: From April 2008 to August 2010 the Identification and prevention of Dietary- and lifestyle-induced health EFfects In Children and infantS (IDEFICS) intervention aimed to encourage healthier diets, higher physical activity levels and lower stress levels among European children and their families. While the intervention was intended to improve children’s health, we also wished to assess whether there were unwelcome aspects or negative side-effects. Therefore all parents of children who participated in the IDEFICS intervention were asked for their views on different aspects of the intervention. Methods: A total of 10,016 parents of children who participated in the IDEFICS survey and who were involved in the intervention were invited to complete a questionnaire on positive and negative impacts of the intervention. Responses to each of the statements were coded on a four point Likert-type scale. Demographic data were collected as part of the baseline (T0) and first follow-up (T1) surveys; intervention exposure data was also collected in the T1 follow-up survey. Anthropometric data was collected in the same surveys, and child’s weight status was assessed according to Cole and Lobstein. After initial review of the univariate statistics multi-level logistic regression was conducted to analyse the influence of socio-economic factors, child’s weight status and intervention exposure on parental responses. Results: In total 4,997 responses were received. Approval rates were high, and few parents reported negative effects. Parents who reported higher levels of exposure to the intervention were more likely to approve of it and were also no more likely to notice negative aspects. Less-educated and lower income parents were more likely to report that the intervention would make a lasting positive difference, but also more likely to report that the intervention had had negative effects. Parents of overweight and obese children were more likely to report negative effects – above all, that ‘the intervention had made their child feel as if he/she was “fat” or “overweight.”’ Conclusion: While the results represent a broad endorsement of the IDEFICS intervention, they also suggest the importance of vigilance concerning the psychological effects of obesity interventions on overweight and obese children.

Information on familial resemblance is important for the design of effective family-based interventions. We aimed to quantify familial correlations and estimate the proportion of variation attributable to genetic and shared environmental effects (i.e., familiality) for dietary intake variables and determine whether they vary by generation, sex, dietary quality, or by the age of the children. The study sample consisted of 1435 families (1007 mothers, 438 fathers, 1035 daughters, and 1080 sons) from the multi-center I.Family study. Dietary intake was assessed in parents and their 2–19 years old children using repeated 24-h dietary recalls, from which the usual energy and food intakes were estimated with the U.S. National Cancer Institute Method. Food items were categorized as healthy or unhealthy based on their sugar, fat, and fiber content. Interclass and intraclass correlations were calculated for relative pairs. Familiality was estimated using variance component methods. Parent–offspring (r = 0.11–0.33), sibling (r = 0.21–0.43), and spouse (r = 0.15–0.33) correlations were modest. Parent–offspring correlations were stronger for the intake of healthy (r = 0.33) than unhealthy (r = 0.10) foods. Familiality estimates were 61% (95% CI: 54–68%) for the intake of fruit and vegetables and the sum of healthy foods and only 30% (95% CI: 23–38%) for the sum of unhealthy foods. Familial factors explained a larger proportion of the variance in healthy food intake (71%; 95% CI: 62–81%) in younger children below the age of 11 than in older children equal or above the age of 11 (48%; 95% CI: 38–58%). Factors shared by family members such as genetics and/or the shared home environment play a stronger role in shaping children’s intake of healthy foods than unhealthy foods. This suggests that family-based interventions are likely to have greater effects when targeting healthy food choices and families with younger children, and that other sorts of intervention are needed to address the intake of unhealthy foods by children.

The baseline data collection and the first follow-up work as part of the IDEFICS Study(www.idefics.eu) were financially supported by the European Commission within the Sixth RTD Framework Programme Contract No. 016181 (FOOD). The most recent follow-up was conducted in the framework of the I. Family study [www.ifamilystudy.eu] which was funded by the European Commission within the Seventh RTD Framework Programme Contract No. 266044 (KBBE 2010-14). Additional resources were invested by all participating partners. J.K. is supported by the Academy of Finland (grants #265240 & 263278). T.V. received the support of the Ministry of Education and Science, grant IUT 42-2. L.L. acknowledges the Swedish Research Councils (VR and Forte) for support of the IDEFICS and I. Family studies.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Grunde, die dafur sprechen, Verantwortung mit den Fahigkeiten des moralischen Denkens und Urteilens in Verbindung zu bringen. Er stellt funf verschiedene Ansatze vor, die Verantwortung und Rationalitat miteinander verknupfen: die Arbeiten von Susan Wolf, R. Jay Wallace, Angela M. Smith und Pamela Hieronymi sowie die Gemeinschaftsarbeit von John Martin Fischer und Mark Ravizza. Am Leitfaden dieser Autoren wird gezeigt, dass der Begriff des rationalen Vermogens zentral ist fur das Verstandnis und die Begrundung unserer Verantwortungspraxis. Die Debatte uber diesen Zusammenhang hat bereits deutliche Fortschritte gezeitigt, doch wirft der Begriff eines rationalen oder moralischen Vermogens nach wie vor erhebliche Verstandnisprobleme auf. Ein denkbarer Grund hierfur, der erortert wird, ist der, dass dieses Vermogen in einem konstitutiven Verhaltnis zur Praxis des Zur-Verantwortung-Ziehens und Verantwortung-Ubernehmens stehen konnte – und dass dieses Verhaltnis noch grundlicher Erforschung harrt.

Hannah Arendt is one of the few philosophers to examine the dynamics of political action at length. Intriguingly, she emphasises the disclosure of who the actor is as a specific distinction of political action. This emphasis is connected with some long-standing worries about Arendt’s account that centre on its apparent unconcern for political responsibility. In this paper, I argue that Arendt’s emphasis on disclosure actually harbours a profound concern with responsibility. I do so by examining three questions. The main part of the paper focuses on how disclosure is bound up with political actors’ attempts to act with one another. It asks: what would it be for an actor to evade disclosure? And: what is involved in an actor acknowledging the fact of disclosure? – Looking at the matter negatively, attempts to evade disclosure and its implications lead to irresponsibility. Positively, for the actor to accept disclosure is to see herself as bound to her fellow actors and audience by relations of joint action and mutual accountability. The conclusion asks a third question: what would it mean for on-lookers to deny the relevance of actors’ disclosure? I argue that Arendt’s historiography – which revolves around stories in which political actors reveal who they are – reflects her conviction that people can and must take responsibility for their world.

Who, in particular, may hold us responsible for our moral failings? Most discussions of moral responsibility bracket this question, despite its obvious practical importance. In this article, I investigate the moral authority involved and how it arises in the context of personal relationships, such as friendship or family relations. My account is based on the idea that parties to a personal relationship not only share responsibility for their relationship, but also — to some degree that is negotiated between them — for one another's lives. In sharing these responsibilities, we grant people a particular authority to respond to us. By highlighting the responsibility that we assume when we hold someone responsible, I also suggest that this analysis contains important lessons for thinking about responsibility in other contexts.

Personal e-health systems are the next generation of e-health applications and their goal is to assist patients in managing their disease and to help both patients and healthy people maintain behaviours that promote health. To do this, e-health systems collect, process, store and communicate the individual’s personal data. This paper presents an analysis of personal e-health systems and identifies privacy issues as a first step towards a ‘privacy by design’ methodology and practical guidelines.

Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom insists that, ‘Freedom, understood as independence of another person’s choice, is [all] that matters’. In this paper I suggest that this premise leads Ripstein to an instrumentalisation of democracy which neglects a properly public and collective notion of freedom. The paper first criticises Ripstein’s key argument against any extension of public purposes beyond the upholding of persons’ ‘independence of others’ choice’. More constructively, the paper then suggests that a space of public freedom is opened up when people deliberate in order to form and pursue democratic purposes. Citizens may act together to promote ends that they think are worthwhile, without dominating one another or restricting individual freedom.

The methodology of the IDEFICS (Identification and prevention of dietary- and lifestyle-induced health effects in children and infants) study raises a number of important ethical questions. Many of these are already well recognised in ethical guidelines that uphold principles of individual and parental consent, confidentiality and scientific review. There are, however, wider issues that require ethical reflection. In this paper, we focus on a set of problems surrounding the evaluation of complex social interventions, and argue that comprehensive and objective evaluation is a much more ethically charged aim than it may first appear. In particular, we contend that standard scientific measures-of body size and biomarkers-convey only part of the story. This is partly because, when we intervene in communities, we are also concerned with complex social effects. These effects are made even more complex by contemporary social anxieties about fat and physical appearance, as well as about the safety and security of children. Such anxieties increase the risk of undesirable side effects that are themselves difficult to gauge. In the face of these and other complexities, we argue that the evaluation of interventions should involve a strong ethical dimension. First, it must include-as does the IDEFICS study-consideration of the opinions of the people affected, who are subjected to interventions in ways that necessarily go beyond individual consent. Second, we suggest that interventions might also be assessed by how much they empower people-and especially those persons, such as children, who are otherwise often disempowered.

Scientists working on an obesity intervention project were asked questions, via questionnaire and interviews, relating to ethical and public-policy aspects of tackling childhood obesity. The main areas of enquiry concerned elements responsible for the rise in childhood obesity, key ethical areas of obesity interventions, helpfulness and effectiveness of policy measures, socioeconomic factors, and media coverage and political debate. Key results from this indicate that: there is disagreement about the amount of information about the causes of obesity that is needed before implementing interventions; an improvement in health and nutrition education of both children and adults through positive messages is seen as highly desirable; scientists regard environment, rather than genetics, as playing the major role in rising obesity levels; the level of individual responsibility being placed on parents and children may be unfair and unhelpful; whole-system, long-term and sensitive policy actions are needed rather than relying on quick fixes such as miracle pills; and there are country-specific issues related to rising obesity levels that need to be considered, though the respondents tended to have a great deal of faith in EU-wide interventions.

The claim that happiness and virtue ought to be proportionate to one another has often been expressed in the idea of a future world of divine justice, despite many moral difficulties with this idea. This paper argues that human efforts to enact such a proportionment are, ironically, justified by the same reasons that make the idea of divine justice seem so problematic. Moralists have often regarded our frailty and fallibility as reasons for abstaining from the judgment of others; and doubts about our deserving some proportionment of happiness or unhappiness often arise insofar as virtue and vice may be explained on a causal basis. This paper argues that our fallibility and our susceptibility to social influence render judgment and response indispensable, because – given these characteristics – our actions and responses decide the morality that we actually share with one another. In this situation, to ‘judge not’ is to abandon the field to those with no such scruples.

As we have seen in the cases of Serbia and Israel, collectives can be mobilised to perpetrate grave wrongs on the basis of patently ideological claims about the harms they have suffered. This article seeks a theoretical understanding of this troubling phenomenon. It does so, first, by contrasting mobilisation based on vicarious victimhood with revenge. The groups in question do not exhibit the contact with reality and clear sense of agency that are prerequisites for revenge. However, these evasions of agency and reality are not specific to group identities centred on victimhood. Second, therefore, the article considers the attractions of such an identity and how it reinforces groups’ tendencies to myth-making and irresponsibility. Among its more harmful effects, it obscures the realities of state power and forecloses meaningful accountability to those outside the group. It also sets in train a vicious circle, whereby the group discovers perverse incentives to harm others – and to harm itself. Yet these harms only reinforce the group’s self-anointed status as victim: as always done by, never doing to.

This paper looks at the attribution of moral responsibility in the light of Kant's claim that the maxims of our actions should be universalizable. Assuming that it is often difficult for us to judge which actions satisfy this test, it suggests one way of translating Kantian morality into practice. Suppose that it is possible to read each action, via its maxim, as a communication addressed to the world: as an attempt to set the terms on which we should interact with one another. The paper suggests that respect for the actor requires us to take this communication seriously. When we suppose that an action is wrong, we then have a powerful reason to dispute its message: to hold the actor responsible for her deed. Although we are often unreliable judges ‘in our own case’, our mutual attributions of responsibility show us judging together, what the moral law should mean in practice.

Many attempts have been made to formalize ethical requirements for research. Among the most prominent mechanisms are informed consent requirements and data protection regimes. These mechanisms, however, sometimes appear as obstacles to research. In this opinion paper, we critically discuss conventional approaches to research ethics that emphasize consent and data protection. Several recent debates have highlighted other important ethical issues and underlined the need for greater openness in order to uphold the integrity of health-related research. Some of these measures, such as the sharing of individual-level data, pose problems for standard understandings of consent and privacy. Here, we argue that these interpretations tend to be overdemanding: They do not really protect research subjects and they hinder the research process. Accordingly, we suggest another way of framing these requirements. Individual consent must be situated alongside the wider distribution of knowledge created when the actions, commitments, and procedures of researchers and their institutions are opened to scrutiny. And instead of simply emphasizing privacy or data protection, we should understand confidentiality as a principle that facilitates the sharing of information while upholding important safeguards. Consent and confidentiality belong to a broader set of safeguards and procedures to uphold the integrity of the research process.

In this article I discuss Geoffrey Vickers' ideas from the perspective of moral and political philosophy. His thought is presented through three key terms, which I suggest can encapsulate his philosophy: (i) our human capacity to respond aptly to our situation; (ii) the analysis of modern society in terms of institutions; and (iii) the moral importance of responsibility to the maintenance of human culture and cooperation.

This paper examines the creation of independent agencies within the EU, such as the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Central Bank (ECB). Majone and others have argued the case for European regulatory agencies. Such agencies can provide for continuity, expertise, accountability and effective authority – in short, an institutionalisation of responsibility. Against this optimism, I argue that a dilemma of institutional design naturally arises from the agencies' situation in the EU. On the one side, we risk creating powerful agencies that institutionalise monomania – that is, agencies that single-mindedly and all-too-effectively pursue narrow agendas, inadequately checked by other bodies. On the other, we are also likely to encounter relatively impotent agencies which institutionalise schizophrenia — that is, agencies that must scout around for audience and support, and hence are unable to act effectively.

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame others. On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined. There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a refusal to judge is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities. Yet, the paper argues, these problems need not arise when we hold others responsible. This paper therefore investigates what, exactly, can be questionable about attempts to assign guilt, and the structural logic that lies behind these problems – what will be called, adapting a term from social psychology, a belief in a just world. Such a belief takes for granted what needs to be worked for through human activity, and therefore tends to be counter-productive in dealing with misdeeds and adverse outcomes.

Biobanks correspond to different situations: research and technological development, medical diagnosis or therapeutic activities. Their status is not clearly defined. We aimed to investigate human biobanking in Europe, particularly in relation to organisational, economic and ethical issues in various national contexts. Data from a survey in six EU countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK) were collected as part of a European Research Project examining human and non-human biobanking (EUROGENBANK, coordinated by Professor JC Galloux). A total of 147 institutions concerned with biobanking of human samples and data were investigated by questionnaires and interviews. Most institutions surveyed belong to the public or private non-profit-making sectors, which have a key role in biobanking. This activity is increasing in all countries because few samples are discarded and genetic research is proliferating. Collections vary in size, many being small and only a few very large. Their purpose is often research, or research and healthcare, mostly in the context of disease studies. A specific budget is very rarely allocated to biobanking and costs are not often evaluated. Samples are usually provided free of charge and gifts and exchanges are the common rule. Good practice guidelines are generally followed and quality controls are performed but quality procedures are not always clearly explained. Associated data are usually computerised (identified or identifiable samples). Biobankers generally favour centralisation of data rather than of samples. Legal and ethical harmonisation within Europe is considered likely to facilitate international collaboration. We propose a series of recommendations and suggestions arising from the EUROGENBANK project.

DNA-Banken fur humangenetische Forschung sind eine der wichtigsten Wissenschaftsressourcen fur Pharmakogenomik und Populationsgenetik. Diese Banken stellen umfangreiche, zentralisierte und standardisierte genotypische Daten sowie damit verbundene klinische und personliche Informationen zur Verfugung. Die Etablierung solcher Banken wirft ethische Fragen auf. Unser Artikel konzentriert sich auf informierte Einwilligung als Mittel zur Gewahrleistung der Rechte der Probanden und als Schutz fur altruistische Spenden. Die Anforderungen an den Informationsumfang sind erheblich, darunter fallen Implikationen fremdnutziger Forschung, Feedback-Regelungen, Einwilligungsart und mogliche Datenschutzprobleme sowie Konsequenzen fur Drittbeteiligte. Infolgedessen fragen wir: Reicht informierte Einwilligung als Konzept zur Steuerung von DNA-Banken? Wir glauben nicht und argumentieren, dass Treuhander richtungsweisend in die Steuerung der DNA-Banken eingreifen sollten, damit die altruistischen DNA-Spenden nicht nur kommerziellen, sondern auch allgemeinnutzigen Interessen zu Gute kommen.

Part of a symposium on Steve Buckler, Hannah Arendt and political theory: challenging the tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). This short appreciation of Buckler’s book highlights the two guiding features of Arendt’s method that he brings to the fore. First, its concern with timeliness: are there specific feature of contemporary affairs that political theory must take account of, and if so how? Second, how can political theory abstract from specific political constellations while still remaining relevant to actual political questions? It concludes with a brief note on how Arendt's approach contrasts with other ways of approaching political philosophy.