In addition to a code of conduct for researchers, it is desirable to implement a code of conduct for funders of research. This is because researchers often behave unethically as a result of direct and/or indirect pressure from funders. The paper provides an expansion of the first proposal for such a code of conduct and includes several elements such as “policy relevant research should not be contracted and supervised by a client with an interest in the outcomes”, and “policy relevant (...) research should always be examined by an independent institute”. (shrink)

Background: Metaphors are often used within the context of ethics and healthcare but have hardly been explored in relation to moral reasoning. Objective: To describe a central set of metaphors in one case and to explore their contribution to moral reasoning. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 parents of a child suffering from the neurodegenerative disease CLN3. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and metaphors were analyzed. The researchers wrote memos and discussed about their analyses until they reached consensus. Ethical (...) considerations: Participants gave oral and written consent and their confidentiality and anonymity were respected. Findings: A central set of metaphors referred to the semantic field of the hands and arms and consisted of two central metaphors that existed in a dialectical relationship: grasping versus letting go. Participants used these metaphors to describe their child’s experiences, who had to “let go” of abilities, while “clinging” to structures and the relationship with their parent(s). They also used it to describe their own experiences: participants tried to “grab” the good moments with their child and had to “let go” of their child when (s)he approached death. Participants, in addition, “held” onto caring for their child while being confronted with the necessity to “let go” of this care, leaving it to professional caregivers. Discussion: The ethical analysis of the findings shows that thinking in terms of the dialectical relationship between “grasping” and “letting go” helps professional caregivers to critically think about images of good care for children with CLN3. It also helps them to bear witness to the vulnerable, dependent, and embodied nature of the moral self of children with CLN3 and their parents. Conclusion: Metaphorical reasoning may support the inclusion of marginalized perspectives in moral reasoning. Future studies should further explore the contribution of metaphorical reasoning to moral reasoning in other cases. (shrink)

A rule of recognition for a legal order L seems utterly circular if it refers to behaviour of “officials.” For it takes a rule of recognition to identify who, for L, counts as an official and who does not. I will argue that a Kelsenian account of legal authority can solve the aporia, provided that we accept a, perhaps unorthodox, re‐interpretation of Kelsen's norm theory and his idea of the Grundnorm. I submit that we should learn to see it as (...) the vanishing point rather than the final basis of validity in a legal order. To prepare the ground for this proposal, I will briefly explore the claim to authority that is characteristic of politics. Then I sketch a multi‐layered canonical form of the legal norm, including their “empowering” character (Paulson) in terms of performative operators. I show how it leads to a “perspectival” account of the basic norm. In conclusion, I briefly point to the example of sovereignty and acquis communautair in international law to illustrate this view. (shrink)

The nature of the census figures produced by Demetrius of Phaleron, crucial evidence for the size of the Athenian population, has been misunderstood. The census categories were not 'native Athenians, foreign residents and slaves', but 'citizens above the property qualification, residents without political rights and members of households'. The property qualification of 1,000 drachmas associated with Demetrius' regime was the requirement for holding the highest offices; the property requirement for citizenship rights was lower, as it was in the spurious constitution (...) of Draco described in Athenaion Politeia 4, which was probably invented and inserted during Demetrius' reign. In the light of this reinterpretation of the evidence for the structure of the Athenian population under Demetrius, a reconsideration of the evidence for the size of the Athenian population in 322 BC suggests that there were ea. 30,000 adult male citizens and far fewer metics than generally assumed, probably ea. 5,000. The distribution of property among the citizen population was very uneven, with the richest 30% of the population owning about 80% of the wealth. According to Demetrius' census as reinterpreted here, slaves outnumbered free residents by 'only' about 3:1, which still seems an implausibly high figure, but needs to be taken seriously as a government estimate rather than a rhetorical exaggeration. (shrink)

What decides the outcome of a Homeric battle? This may sound like one of those arcane problems only a devoted Homer-specialist would care to raise, but in fact the question strikes at the root of major issues in archaic Greek history. The orthodox answer is that Homeric battles were decided by single combats between champions, with the rest of the warriors only marginally influencing the fighting. It is added that these champions were aristocrats, ‘knights’. On this interpretation many have argued (...) that the political dominance of archaic Greek aristocrats was largely based on their military dominance, and that their power was seriously impaired when, in the seventh century B.C., military prominence shifted to the mass, the ‘commoners’; this change in the balance of power contributed crucially to the rise of the polis and the emergence of tyrannies. In outline the theory derives from Aristotle and is firmly entrenched in modern works. (shrink)

At a time when the Greek army is on the verge of annihilation, the Iliad tells us, two warriors have detached themselves from the fight. Idomeneus, having accompanied a wounded man back to the ships, and Mērionēs, on his way to fetch himself a new spear, meet at the former's hut. They stand and talk for a while, assuring one another that they are afraid of nothing and no-one, and finally decide to plunge into battle again, though only after discussing (...) at some length whether to go to fight in the centre or at the left of the front line. At first sight their behaviour might not seem particularly strange, but when one realises that the poet has told us more than once that these two are the leaders of the Cretan contingent, some four thousand warriors strong, one may begin to wonder. How could a poet, if he had even the slightest notion of what armies and battles were like, let these men behave as if they were alone on the field, leaving the fight for trivial reasons, re-entering it when and where it suits them, not even bothering to return to their own leaderless countrymen? Such doubts have led scholars to argue that, in fact, the poet did not have the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Some seek to show that epic society is vague and unreal — ‘Homeric kings are like the king and the prince in Cinderella — they reveal nothing about any social structure in the real world’ — and have suggested that the historian may dismiss it as literary fiction. (shrink)

The Transformation of Learning gives an overview of some significant advances of the cultural-historical activity theory, also known as CHAT in the educational domain. Developments are described with respect to both the theoretical framework and research. The book's main focus is on the evolution of the learning concept and school practices under the influence of cultural-historical activity theory. Activity theory has contributed to this transformation of views on learning, both conceptually and practically. It has provided us with a useful approach (...) to the understanding of learning in cultural contexts. (shrink)

We present a logic, \, for the discovery of deterministic causal regularities starting from empirical data. Our approach is inspired by Mackie’s theory of causes as INUS-conditions, and implements a more recent adjustment to Mackie’s theory according to which the left-hand side of causal regularities is required to be a minimal disjunction of minimal conjunctions. To derive such regularities from a given set of data, we make use of the adaptive logics framework. Our knowledge of deterministic causal regularities is, as (...) Mackie noted, most often gappy or elliptical. The adaptive logics framework is well-suited to explicate both the internal and the external dynamics of the discovery of such gappy regularities. After presenting \, we first discuss these forms of dynamics in more detail. Next, we consider some criticisms of the INUS-account and show how our approach avoids them, and we compare \ with the CNA algorithm that was recently proposed by Michael Baumgartner. (shrink)

In the past 25 years, many philosophers have endorsed the view that the practical value of causal knowledge lies in the fact that manipulation of causes is a good way to bring about a desired change in the effect. This view is intuitively very plausible. For instance, we can predict a storm on the basis of a barometer reading, but we cannot avoid the storm by manipulating the state of the barometer (barometer status and storm are effects of a common (...) cause, viz. atmospheric conditions). In §1 we present textual evidence which shows that this view is very popular. In §2 we show that this standard view is too restrictive: the practical value of causal knowledge is wider. In §3 we introduce the distinction between ‘manipulative policy’ and ‘selective policy’ as a theoretical framework to account for this wider practical value. (shrink)

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

Moral case deliberation (MCD) is a specific form of clinical ethics, aiming to stimulate ethical reflection in daily practice in order to improve the quality of care. This article focuses on the implementation of MCD in nursing homes and the questions how and where to organize MCD. The purpose of this study was to evaluate one way of organizing MCD in two Dutch nursing homes. In both of these nursing homes the MCD groups had a heterogeneous composition and were organized (...) apart from existing institutional communication structures. As part of a naturalistic evaluation, systematic observations, interviews and focus groups were completed. The findings indicate that the heterogeneous composition and MCD meetings separate from existing structures have benefits. However, the participants also reported negative experiences. This gives rise to the question whether a mixed MCD group which meets separately is an effective way to embed MCD as an instrument for reflection on moral issues in daily practice. We conclude that there is no single answer to that question. In the end, the two implementation strategies (i.e. within existing communication structures and a mixed MCD group) can be complementary to each other. (shrink)

We investigate how conventional asset managers account for environmental, social, and governance factors in their investment process. We do so on the basis of an international survey among fund managers. We find that many conventional managers integrate responsible investing in their investment process. Furthermore, we find that ESG information in particular is being used for red flagging and to manage risk. We find that many conventional fund managers have already adopted features of responsible investing in the investment process. Furthermore, we (...) argue and show that ESG investing is highly similar to fundamental investing. We also reveal that there is a substantial difference in the ways in which U.S. and European asset managers view ESG. (shrink)

This issue is a special investigation into phenomenology of law through the thought of Bernard Waldenfels. Waldenfels, who is presently emeritus professor of philosophy at Ruhr Universität, Bochum, has made a name for himself in his own research and publications on the nexus surrounding the other as non-phenomenon, language as response, and the fissures of corporeality.Along side his expansive introduction and own separate article, guest editor Bert van Roermund has collected together six outstanding contributions to this ‘Waldenfeldian’ phenomenology of (...) law.Waldenfels himself kicks of this number with an original article outlining his conception of the legal order within a phenomenology of the other. Arguing that the legal order, like all orders, must have its own particular ‘outside’ or ‘unsaid,’ he investigates the critical perspectives that thus emerge.Then, David Janssens takes up Waldenfels’ treatment of Plato, which Janssens approaches through a Socratic investigation into the aporias at the foundation of the Platonic legal order. Waldenfels’ Plato seems rather Socratic in his confrontation of the reader with alterity.Next, William Conklin offers an in-depth investigation into the question as to how can human rights be considered universal by the very tribunals that also grant nations the right to define those who may legally be considered persons? Waldenfels’s notion of territorial structure offers its apparatus to Conklin’s substantial critique.Petra Gehring goes into the phenomenological theory of law, looking the ability of the law as an order to respond to claims of the alien. Claiming that law in fact is unable to respond, Gehring argues that phenomenology should legal phenomena critically as a problem of order within the double nature of what Waldenfels calls Anspruch and Antwort.Hans Lindahl analyzes the spatio-temporal borders of the European Union to lay bare the genesis of the Community’s legal order. Lindahl reveals this genesis to embody Waldenfels’ notion of the “chiasm of strangeness,” wherein the foundation of a Heimwelt simultaneously generates a Fremdwelt, and thus questions the very ability of Europe to be its own place.Finally, guest-editor Bert van Roermund supplements his introduction with yet another original contribution arguing that modern legislation is self-legislation. Attempting to identify the different voices comprising this self in an analytical scheme he terms [LEX], van Roermund borrows from Waldenfel’s notion of response and alterity in his analysis of how this structure responds to the classical notion of justice for every subject. (shrink)

* The editorial board wishes to thank Hildegard Penn of Tilburg University for her meticulous editorial work on this issue.

Background: Empirical studies in Muslim communities on organ donation and blood transfusion show that Muslim counsellors play an important role in the decision process. Despite the emerging importance of online English Sunni fatwas, these fatwas on organ donation and blood transfusion have hardly been studied, thus creating a gap in our knowledge of contemporary Islamic views on the subject.Method: We analysed 70 English Sunni e-fatwas and subjected them to an in-depth text analysis in order to reveal the key concepts in (...) the Islamic ethical framework regarding organ donation and blood transfusion.Results: All 70 fatwas allow for organ donation and blood transfusion. Autotransplantation is no problem at all if done for medical reasons. Allotransplantation, both from a living and a dead donor, appears to be possible though only in quite restricted ways. Xenotransplantation is less often mentioned but can be allowed in case of necessity. Transplantation in general is seen as an ongoing form of charity. Nearly half of the fatwas allowing blood transfusion do so without mentioning any restriction or problem whatsoever. The other half of the fatwas on transfusion contain the same conditional approval as found in the arguments pro organ transplantation.Conclusion: Our findings are very much in line with the international literature on the subject. We found two new elements: debates on the definition of the moment of death are hardly mentioned in the English Sunni fatwas and organ donation and blood transfusion are presented as an ongoing form of charity. (shrink)

This book discusses issues regarding conceptualization, governance and implementation of responsible innovation. It treats different approaches to making responsible innovation a reality and it contains new case studies that illustrate challenges and solutions. Research on Responsible Innovation is by its nature highly multidisciplinary, and also pro-active, design-oriented and policy-relevant. Until a few years back, the concept of Responsible Innovation was hardly used - nowadays it is increasingly receiving attention from both researchers and policy makers. This is indispensable reading for anyone (...) interested in or working on innovation. (shrink)

Surveys carried out among palliative care physicians have shown that most participants do not support euthanasia and assisted suicide. Belgium, however, is one of the few countries in the world in which voluntary euthanasia is allowed by law. The potential influence of this legal dimension thus warranted a study of the attitudes of Belgian palliative care physicians toward euthanasia and assisted suicide. To this end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire in Dutch was sent to all physicians working in Flemish palliative care. (...) 99 physicians responded .A majority of the physicians who responded are of the opinion that voluntary euthanasia can be ethically justified . Most physicians believe, nonetheless, that non-voluntary euthanasia is always unethical . More than three quarters of the respondents favour the inclusion of a ‘palliative filter’ in the law on euthanasia. Using a traditional cluster algorithm, the following three clusters were obtained: staunch advocates of euthanasia , opponents of euthanasia , and an intermediate group . There were no significant differences between the clusters on the level of gender, age, and years of experience in palliative care. A statistically significant association exists, however, between the euthanasia clusters and the religious or ideological clusters we had obtained in an earlier study. Church attending respondents are least likely to be staunch advocates of euthanasia. The majority of the physicians favour legalisation on assisted suicide. There is no significant association between the euthanasia clusters and attitudes toward assisted suicide.We conclude that although most Flemish palliative care physicians agree that there may be circumstances in which a euthanasia request is justified, they also strongly believe in the effects of good palliative care and want the ‘palliative filter’ to be included in the law on euthanasia. Religion and worldview are an important factor determining attitudes towards euthanasia. (shrink)

Sovereignty and representation are the two concepts that legal theory is quick to regard as redundant in any account of legal authority. Sovereignty is alleged to be at odds with both the facts and the values of political pluralism; representation is, at most, a provisional substitute for participation in supra- and infra-national legal development. Antonio Negri, however, analyses sovereignty and representation as the two, closely linked, conceptual devices by which a legal order neutralizes constitutive political power. He argues that constitutionalism (...) and institutionalism are but the contemporary guises of these traditional notions and advocates openness for the multifarious initiatives of 'the multitude' to create new societal structures. This article argues that Negri is right in his critique of, in particular, institutionalism, but that he is wrong in thinking that Lefort's position can be reduced to its simple version. In the background of Lefort's theory we should see the political analogon of Merleau-Ponty's celebrated distinction between parole parlante and parole parlée. Negri himself appears unable to avoid the appeal to questionable referents of sovereignty and representation. (shrink)

Legislation in Modernity is self-legislation: legislation by a collective self. I argue that it can be formally characterised as a first-person plural intention, featuring an index ‘we’ at four different positions: the originator of the speech act expressing the intention, the subject of the intention expressed, the agent of the action intended, and the beneficiaries of the action to be performed. I carve out these four positions or ‘voices’ of the first person inlegislation, summarising them in an analytical scheme [LEX].But (...) self-legislation presupposes self-inclusion. Thus, it constitutes a boundary between the plural self and its alien. Taking my cue from Waldenfels’ explorations of responsiveness to ‘the alien,’ I ask how and why [LEX] responds to the classical appeal of justice: ‘to give everyonehis or her due.’ What does it mean to say that a self-enclosed ‘we’ is the agent of this giving? I will argue that the boundary constituted by this enclosure is possible only if it is imagined to be traversable.Throughout the argument, my main concern is with the question in what sense and to what extent a legal order requires unity. (shrink)

The topic of recognition has come to occupy a central place in debates in social and political theory. Developed by George Herbert Mead and Charles Taylor, it has been given expression in the program for Critical Theory developed by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. Honneth's research program offers an empirically insightful way of reflecting on emancipatory struggles for greater justice and a powerful theoretical tool for generating a conception of justice and the good that enables the (...) normative evaluation of such struggles. This 2007 volume offers a critical clarification and evaluation of this research program, particularly its relationship to the other major development in critical social and political theory; namely, the focus on power as formative of practical identities proposed by Michel Foucault and developed by theorists such as Judith Butler, James Tully, and Iris Marion Young. (shrink)

The French Code civil , including the tradition of legal practice and scholarship it stands for, is the child of two parents: Enlightenment and Restoration. They came together in the person of Jean Etienne Marie Portalis (1746-1807), who was the main drafter of the code under Napoleon. I want to investigate which line of philosophical argument he followed in uniting the two and critically assess the value of this argumentation. In section 1 I briefly sketch the codification of civil law (...) in the (post-)revolutionary setting of the time, as well as Portalis’ philosophical background. Section 2 turns to the principled and wide-ranging discourse he delivered at the occasion of the formal presentation of the draft civil code to the legislature. This discourse, in turn, found its deeper roots in an extensive treatise that he wrote prior to the former, on the use and abuse of reason in times of Enlightenment (Section 3). I will focus, in particular, on the twin concepts of knowledge (section 4) and nature (section 5) in this treatise. From this vantage point, section 6 analyzes the eclectic way in which Portalis uses his philosophical godfathers Montesquieu and Rousseau, while section 7 shows why his preoccupation with the protection of established property rights can explain such eclecticism. Section 8 takes stock and submits that at least one of Portalis’ arguments presents a real challenge to Enlightenment philosophy up until the present day. (shrink)

Starting from a Vygotskian analysis of imagination as “image formation,” this paper explores some emergent qualities of the phenomenon of imagination in the play activities of young children. In the context of the early grades of Dutch primary schools (4-7-year old children) different activities of children were studied while they were making symbolic representations of real or imaginary situations. Observations in two activity settings show that the children got engaged in two types of imagination: an ‘etc-act of imagination’ and a (...) ‘production of alternatives.’ It wIll be argued that these types of imagination are basic modes of thinking that relate to respectively abstract thinking and to creative thinking. (shrink)

Clinical ethics support mechanisms in healthcare are increasing but little is known about the specific developments in elderly care. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic literature review on the characteristics of existing ethics support mechanisms in institutional elderly care. A review was performed in three electronic databases . Sixty papers were included in the review. The ethics support mechanisms are classified in four categories: ‘institutional bodies’ ; ‘frameworks’ ; ‘educational programmes and moral case deliberation’; and ‘written (...) documents and policies’. For each category the goals, methods and ways of organising are described. Ethics support often serves several goals and can be targeted at various levels: case, professional or organisation. Over the past decades a number of changes have taken place in the development of ethics support in elderly care. Considering the goals, ethics support has become more outreaching and proactive, aiming to qualify professionals to integrate ethics in daily care processes. The approaches in clinical ethics support have become more diverse, more focused on everyday ethical issues and better adapted to the concrete learning style of the nursing staff. Ethics support has become less centrally organised and more connected to local contexts and primary process within the organisation. (shrink)