Op 4 mei 2011 overleed Koen Raes. Hij was verbonden aan de Vakgroep grondslagen en geschiedenis van het recht van de Universiteit Gent en speelde decennia lang als publieke intellectueel en ethicus een belangrijke rol in maatschappelijke en ethische debatten in Vlaanderen, België, Nederland, maar ook daarbuiten. In dit boek is een brede selectie van ingeleide teksten van hem opgenomen. Het verschijnt parallel met een (dubbel)nummer van het tijdschrift 'Ethiek en Maatschappij' - een tijdschrift door Koen Raes in 1998 opgericht (...) en waarvan hij tot recent ook de gedreven hoofdredacteur van was. Uit de hier door Gily Coene verzamelde teksten en uit de inleidingen erop blijkt overduidelijk hoe scherp en helder Koen Raes complexe maatschappelijk-ethische problemen en thema's in kaart kon brengen en hier een gefundeerde positie over kon ontwikkelen. (shrink)

Hymen construction and nontherapeutic male circumcision are medical nonindicated interventions that give rise to specific ethical concerns. In Europe, hymen construction is generally more contested among medical professionals than male circumcision. Yet, from a standard biomedical framework, guided by the principles of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice, circumcision of boys is, as this article explains, more problematic than hymen construction. While there is a growing debate on the acceptability of infant circumcision, in the case of competent minors and adults the (...) surgery is not questioned. In the case of hymenoplasty, usually requested by a competent patient, it is recommended to only perform the operation after extensive counseling and if there are compelling conditions. The article further explores why attitudes of medical professionals toward both surgeries diverge and seeks to explain how this is largely informed by gendered and socio-cultural understandings. The arti... (shrink)

Social egg freezing has become an expanding clinical practice and there is a growing body of empirical literature on women's attitudes and the sociocultural implications of this phenomenon. Yet, its impact remains subject to ethical controversy. This article reports on a qualitative study, drawing on 18 interviews with women who had elected to initiate at least one egg freezing cycle in Belgium. Our findings, facilitated by a ‘symbiotic empirical ethics’ approach, shed light on the concerns and perceptions that accompany women's (...) decisions while supporting a more context-sensitive reading of the ethical debate. We identified three key themes: feeling overwhelmed with uncertainty and a threatening future, bodily discomfort and distress during the medical process, and the endless pursuit of peace of mind. One of the issues that emerges from these findings is the risk ritual function of social egg freezing, referring to routine actions of risk anticipation that mitigate uncertainty and express a sense of individual responsibility. While more research is needed, this conceptualisation provides a starting point to flesh out the wider context of this moral practice and its symbolic meaning for women. (shrink)

Recently, Petersen provided in this journal a critical discussion of individualisation arguments in the context of social egg freezing. This argument underlines the idea that it is morally problematic to use individual technological solutions to solve societal challenges that women face. So far, however, there is a lack of empirical data to contextualise his central normative claim that individualisation arguments are implausible. This article discusses an empirical study that supports a contextualised reading of the normative work of Petersen. Based on (...) a qualitative interview study, we found that most women could make sense of this argument but addressed other concerns that are overlooked in the premises of moral individualisation arguments, for instance, the influence of relationship formation on the demand of egg freezing. Furthermore, women did not experience social egg freezing as morally problematic. Nonetheless, the interviewees pointed to a need of more societal solutions and even actively advocated for efforts to increase accessibility such as a partial reimbursement and better quality of information. The implications of these findings for empirical bioethics are discussed. While more research is needed, we argue that, in order to better address individualisation arguments and related ethical concerns, we need to contextualise normative evaluations within women’s moral reasoning. (shrink)

Access to public healthcare services for Belgium’s undocumented migrants is regulated through a parallel, administrative procedure within the legal framework of Urgent Medical Aid. This imposes several constraints on their access to healthcare services. Drawing on empirical-ethical methodologies, we show how this procedure impacts on the relationship between patients with undocumented status and healthcare workers. We use the concept of relational autonomy to show how the imposed legal constraints reduce the formal treatment options available to healthcare workers, but simultaneously lead (...) to informal care practices, and how the latter increase the discretionary power of the healthcare workers. We argue that in this context, provision becomes unpredictable and arbitrary, with undocumented migrants tending to value strong personal relations with one particular, trusted healthcare worker. Although this leads to increased dependence, it also increases patients’ options and autonomy by providing access to wider professional networks attached to that healthcare worker. (shrink)

BackgroundDuring the last decade, the possibility for women to cryopreserve oocytes in anticipation of age-related fertility loss, also referred to as social egg freezing, has become an established practice at fertility clinics around the globe. In Europe, there is extensive variation in the costs for this procedure, with the common denominator that there are almost no funding arrangements or reimbursement policies. This is the first qualitative study that specifically explores viewpoints on the (lack of) reimbursement for women who had considered (...) to uptake at least one social egg freezing cycle in Belgium.MethodsTo understand the moral considerations of these women, drawing from twenty-one interviews, this paper integrates elements of a symbiotic empirical ethics approach and thematic analysis.ResultsWe identify four themes: (1) being confronted with unclear information; (2) financial costs as ongoing concern; (3) necessity of coverage; (4) extent of reimbursement. In the first theme, we found that some women were concerned about the lack of clear information about the cost of social egg freezing. In the second theme, we report moral sentiments of injustice and discrimination which some women attributed to their struggles and needs not being recognised. The third theme illustrates diverse views on reimbursement, ranging from viewing social egg freezing as an elective treatment not appropriate for reimbursement to preferences for greater public responsibility and wider access. Finally, we describe the participants’ varying proposals for partial reimbursement and the idea that it should not be made available for free.ConclusionsThis research adds important empirical insights to the bioethics debate on social egg freezing, in particular by presenting (potential) users’ views on the lack of reimbursement. While there is much more to say about the ethical and political complexities of the reimbursement of this procedure, our study highlighted the voices of (potential) users and showed that at least some of them would welcome the coverage of SEF through the public healthcare insurance. (shrink)

This book presents empirical studies of the rise, expansion, and influence of scientific discourse and organization throughout the world, over the past century. Using quantitative cross-national data, it shows the impact of this scientized world polity on national societies. It examines how this world scientific system and national reflections of it have influenced a wide variety of institutional spheres—the economy, political systems, human rights, environmentalism, and organizational reforms. The authors argue that the triumph of science across social domains and around (...) the world is due to its institutionalized cultural authority rather than to its instrumental utility for societies or for their dominant elites. Thus, following the Stanford approach to institutional theory in sociology, the book emphasizes the symbolic or religious role science plays in the modern world. (shrink)

Not long after his arrival in the south-central highlands of Papua New Guinea, the British missionary John Henry Holmes was awoken in the early hours of the morning by a strange cry that issued, it...

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories (...) of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment. (shrink)

This article portrays the unique aspects of ethics education in a multicultural, multireligious and conflict-based atmosphere among Jewish and Arab nursing students in Jerusalem, Israel. It discusses the principles and the methods used for rising above this tension and dealing with this complicated situation, based on Yoder's `bridging' method. An example is used of Jewish and Arab students together implementing two projects in 2008, when the faculty decided to co-operate with communities in East Jerusalem, the Arab side of the city. (...) The students took it upon themselves to chaperon the teachers who came to watch them at work, translate, and facilitate interaction with a guarded and suspicious community. This approach could also be relevant to less extreme conditions in any inter-religious environment when trying to produce graduates with a strong ethical awareness. (shrink)

Prosthetic devices that replace an absent body part are generally considered to be either cosmetic or functional. Functional prostheses aim to restore (some degree of) lost physical functioning. Cosmetic prostheses attempt to restore a “normal” appearance to bodies that lack (one or more) limbs by emulating the absent body part’s looks. In this article, we investigate how cosmetic prostheses establish a normal appearance by drawing on the stories of the users of a specific type of artificial limb: the facial prosthesis. (...) Given that prostheses are first and foremost devices worn upon the body, such an analysis requires an understanding of the ways in which bodies and technologies interact. We thus interpret users’ stories by critically engaging with the work of disability researcher and Actor-Network theorist Myriam Winance, as well as with the postphenomenological scholarship of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. Using this framework, we explore users’ attempts to achieve a proper fit between their faces and their prostheses, the technological transparency such a fit enables, and the ways in which transparency mediates users’ everyday exchanges with others. We conclude that a normal appearance, when it is achieved by means of prosthetics, enables the device’s user to navigate a precarious social environment as they encounter and interact with others in public. (shrink)

This paper uses basic concepts from sociological process theory to assess new forms of public management in innovation policy and their relevance to business strategy. We describe this policy process as chains of events, outcomes, and re-coupling. It is argued that these process sequences occur in three analytically separate domains, namely the social, the cultural, and the cognitive domain. The paper identifies three collective learning variables of cooperation, collectivity, and content, to arrive at an explanatory scheme to systematically investigate business (...) strategy in complex process dynamics. (shrink)

René Hoven’s _Dictionary of Renaissance Latin from prose sources_ has since its first appearance in 1993 become a recognised and valued resource for Latinists and Neo-Latinists and an indispensable working tool for academic libraries. A highly practical lexicon, it provides researchers, teaching staff and students in the field of Early Modern Studies with concise, essential information.

To better understand the available publications addressing ethical issues in rural health care we sought to identify the ethics literature that specifically focuses on rural America. We wanted to determine the extent to which the rural ethics literature was distributed between general commentaries, descriptive summaries of research, and original research publications. We identified 55 publications that specifically and substantively addressed rural health care ethics, published between 1966 and 2004. Only 7 (13%) of these publications were original research articles while (12) (...) 22% were descriptive summaries of research and 36 (65%) were general commentaries. The majority of publications examined (55%) were clinically focused while 27% addressed organizational ethics and 18% addressed ethical ramifications of rural health care policy at a national or community level. Our findings indicate that there are a limited number of publications focusing on rural health care ethics, suggesting a need for scholars and researchers to more rigorously address rural ethics issues. (shrink)

Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab, discusses his vision for a “new economy” where business is a “force for good.” In this interview, Coen Gilbert provides an overview of how B Lab’s various initiatives—Certified B Corporations, the B Impact Assessment, B Analytics, GIIRS, and Benefit Corporations—function interdependently to accelerate a culture shift to redefine success in business. Coen Gilbert then focuses on the role of benefit corporations in this larger movement. The benefit corporation is a new legal form of (...) business that requires a corporate purpose dedicated to “general public benefit” and the delivery of demonstrable “material positive impact on society and the environment.” Novel fiduciary and reporting requirements differentiate the benefit corporation from the traditional corporation founded on shareholder primacy. Coen Gilbert explains how the benefit corporation is better suited to create long-term shareholder value as well as sustainable value for society, the environment, and other stakeholders. He addresses critiques of and challenges to the benefit corporation as an agent of change for business. (shrink)

Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university.

Prosthetic devices that replace an absent body part are generally considered to be either cosmetic or functional. Functional prostheses aim to restore (some degree of) lost physical functioning. Cosmetic prostheses attempt to restore a “normal” appearance to bodies that lack (one or more) limbs by emulating the absent body part’s looks. In this article, we investigate how cosmetic prostheses establish a normal appearance by drawing on the stories of the users of a specific type of artificial limb: the facial prosthesis. (...) Given that prostheses are first and foremost devices worn upon the body, such an analysis requires an understanding of the ways in which bodies and technologies interact. We thus interpret users’ stories by critically engaging with the work of disability researcher and Actor-Network theorist Myriam Winance, as well as with the postphenomenological scholarship of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. Using this framework, we explore users’ attempts to achieve a proper fit between their faces and their prostheses, the technological transparency such a fit enables, and the ways in which transparency mediates users’ everyday exchanges with others. We conclude that a normal appearance, when it is achieved by means of prosthetics, enables the device’s user to navigate a precarious social environment as they encounter and interact with others in public. (shrink)

The problematic issues connected to post-truth communication emerged in all their social relevance after the victory of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Fake news, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and a crisis of experts are some of the phenomena of this epoch of digital revolution that everyone is forced to deal with on daily basis. Public media echoed the plea for a return to a connection between reality, truth, and communication that has been advocated for by philosophy and communication studies (...) since the beginning of the century. However, the strategy for effecting this return is not clear. The paper presents two of the most common strategies employed by practitioners of communication in the newsrooms: reliance on a new form of positivism and the necessity of inculcating critical media literacy into the general population. Concluding that both proposals are inadequate, the paper proposes a rich, relational realism stemming from Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical studies. (shrink)

Aristotle's explanation of what is said ‘of every’ and ‘of none’ has been interpreted either as involving individuals, or as regarding exclusively universal terms. I claim that Alexander of Aphrodisias endorsed this latter interpretation of the dictum de omni et de nullo. This interpretation affects our understanding of Alexander's syllogistic: as a matter of fact, Alexander maintained that the dictum de omni et de nullo is one of the core principles of syllogistic.

Thomas Aquinas maintained that God foreknows future contingent events and that his foreknowledge does not entail that they are necessarily the case. More specifically, he stated that if God knows a future contingent event, this future contingent event will be necessarily the case de sensu composito, but not de sensu diviso. After emphasizing the unified nature of Aquinas’ notion of necessity, we propose an interpretation of his theses by restating them within the framework of non-normal modal logics. In this framework, (...) the K-axiom does not hold, i.e. the necessity operator does not distribute over the material implication. Moreover, assuming that Aquinas rejected the K-axiom is not only consistent, but also leads to a logical framework that allows us to understand other theses maintained by the Doctor Angelicus. In particular, we argue that Aquinas’ remarks on the principle of non-contradiction rest on an impossible worlds semantics for non-normal modal logics. (shrink)

Facilitating access to asylum and other forms of refugee protection for the millions displaced by mass atrocities in Syria and Iraq is essential to the implementation of the international norm of the Responsibility to Protect. This responsibility, however, has been disproportionately shouldered by several states in the Middle East and Europe. This article explores the challenges associated with refugee responsibility-sharing in the context of RtoP and draws on work in climate justice and political realism to articulate a framework for integrating (...) culpability as a key criterion in allocating states’ responsibilities to protect refugees. An empirical and normative assessment of U.S. responsibilities to protect refugees in the cases of conflict-induced displacement in Syria and Iraq outlines several potential paths of culpability. The article ultimately argues for greater attention to culpability, equity, and legitimacy within the discourse surrounding RtoP and refugee protection. The article also advocates linking the benefits of refugee responsibility-sharing with states’ national interests and highlights several such links with regard to U.S. responsibilities in Syria and Iraq. (shrink)

This essay argues for the relevance of the history of family life to the history of science, taking the example of the Exners of Vienna. The Exners were an influential case of the nineteenth‐century European phenomenon of the “scientific dynasty.” The focus here is on their collaborative research on color theory at the turn of the twentieth century. At first glance, this project looks like a reactionary strike against aesthetic innovation, a symptom of what historians assume was an unbridgeable gulf (...) between scientific reason and artistic modernism. We can better understand the Exners’ motivations by situating this research at the intersection of the family's public and private lives. The domestic context sheds light on their use of such scientific terms as “subjective,” “normal,” and “universal,” providing a more nuanced sense of what rationality really meant in fin‐de‐siècle Vienna. (shrink)

In this paper I compare Philoponus’s account of the laws of conversion for categorical and modal propositions with Alexander’s exposition of the same topic. I argue that Philoponus’s main source was Alexander’s commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and that Philoponus had no access to independent sources to reconstruct Theophrastus’s proof for the conversion of universal negative propositions. I suggest that the different solutions that Alexander and Philoponus offer to the puzzles of the doctrine of the laws of conversion depend on (...) the two commentators’ different exegetical strategies. Alexander tries to solve the puzzles by means of doctrines, which Aristotle expounded elsewhere. Philoponus instead interprets Aristotle’s passage as implying a hierarchy among propositions - a doctrine which is not explicitly present in Aristotle’s text. (shrink)

ArgumentBetween 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the world's first national earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens a vital part of this undertaking. This paper examines the texture of communication between Swiss scientists and lay observers and traces the development of a language for seismology that was simultaneously scientific and vernacular. This is the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk, an alternative abandoned on the way to the (...) increasingly technical science of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Aristotelian philosophers have been always puzzled by the ambiguous status of essences: it is not clear whether an Aristotelian should admit that an essence, taken in itself, is real, even though essences do not exist over and above particular things, as Platonists posit; furthermore, it is not clear whether an Aristotelian should endorse the view that essences have a certain unity, even if they are taken in themselves, namely, by abstracting from the individuals of which they are essences. I tackle (...) Thomas Cajetan’s analysis of this problem: this analysis is more sophisticated than that developed by Aquinas—whose texts had been commented upon by Cajetan. Cajetan distinguishes two senses of “real” and of “unity,” in order to speak of the reality and of the unity of essences, taken in themselves, though not endorsing a Platonist’s ontology. I suggest that his solution is appealing for the contemporary debate about this problem. (shrink)

This article examines the contradictions inherent in blind women’s appearance management. Based on an anthropological analysis of interviews with 40 blind women in Israel, the article argues that while serving as a valuable tool within stigma management, appearance management operates simultaneously as a site of rigorous discipline of the body in an effort to comply with feminine visual norms, and as a vehicle for the expression and reception of sensory pleasure. It argues for the significant role of blind women’s appearance (...) in negotiating normalcy and rejecting the normative, stigmatizing script written for them as disabled-blind-women. By studying the role of appearance in the lives of women who do not rely on sight as a central mode of perception, the article addresses the complicated position of blind women in visual culture and challenges the traditional ocular focus of the study of feminine identity and gender performance. (shrink)

In his paper “Aquinas, Geach, and Existence”, D. Costa maintains that Aquinas’ solution to the puzzle of future contingent events entails that future contingent entities already exist. This is tantamount to state that Aquinas endorsed a form of eternalism, since he maintained that past, present and future timelessly exist in God’s sight. I object that Aquinas’ texts are also compatible with another reading. In any statement of the form “S will be P”, the verb “will be” simply states the truth (...) of the predicative link between S and P, not the existence of either S or P. In other words, I take the verb “to be” occurring in sentences describing future events as having the meaning of the “esse ut verum”. (shrink)