Seppe Segers is a faculty member in ethics and moral science at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Ghent University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Ethics at Maastricht University. Segers is a senior member of the Bioethics Institute Ghent, and he is the Senior Deputy of the Special Interest Group Ethics and Law of ESHRE. His research and teaching focus on theoretical and substantive ethics, encompassing areas such as moral epistemology, bioethics, and value theory.
Domains of expertise
- Feminist ethics
- Bioethics
- Normative ethics
- Metaethics
Selected projects & research platforms
Moral science as a relatively unique discipline can be roughly situated in the broad domain of ethics, and more specifically as a particular way of confronting the integration of ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. While neighboring to (more or less) recent developments like ‘empirical ethics’, the ‘moral scientific’ approach uncovers fundamental methodological and philosophical questions that are relevant and timely for value theory (‘axiology’) in general. Three axes of such questions concern (i) the feasibility of demarcating moral from non-moral value, (ii) speculation as a normative activity to emancipate from what ‘is’ to what ‘ought to be’, and (iii) the (paradoxical) trade-off between contextualization and systematization. This project aims to study these three axes from the distinct moral scientific point of view, merging theoretical ethics with case-studies from practical ethics. Link to Website: https://research.ugent.be/web/result/project/e228bac4-8bbb-11ef-9d3c-83fa004205c1/details/doct-012621-current-challenges-in-value-theory--a-moral-scientific-approach/en
Selected publications
- Segers, S., & De Proost, M. (2024). Take five? A coherentist argument why medical AI does not require a new ethical principle. THEORETICAL MEDICINE AND BIOETHICS, 45(5), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-024-09676-0
- Accoe, D., Van Ginneken, C., De Proost, M., & Segers, S. (2025). Definitions as boundaries : bioethics, Palestine and climate catastrophes. BIOETHICS, 39(5), 523–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13411
- Segers, S. (2024). Why we should (not) worry about generative AI in medical ethics teaching. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS EDUCATION, 9, 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40889-023-00179-5
Work details
- Seppe.Segers@UGent.be
- Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Ghent (Belgium)
- https://research.ugent.be/web/person/seppe-segers-0/en