Background The European Union aims to optimize patient protection and efficiency of health-care research by harmonizing procedures across Member States. Nonetheless, further improvements are required to increase multicenter research efficiency. We investigated IRB procedures in a large prospective European multicenter study on traumatic brain injury, aiming to inform and stimulate initiatives to improve efficiency. Methods We reviewed relevant documents regarding IRB submission and IRB approval from European neurotrauma centers participating in the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in Traumatic Brain Injury. (...) Documents included detailed information on IRB procedures and the duration from IRB submission until approval. They were translated and analyzed to determine the level of harmonization of IRB procedures within Europe. Results From 18 countries, 66 centers provided the requested documents. The primary IRB review was conducted centrally or locally and primary IRB approval was obtained after one, two or three review rounds with a median duration of respectively 50 and 98 days until primary IRB approval. Additional IRB approval was required in 55% of countries and could increase duration to 535 days. Total duration from submission until required IRB approval was obtained was 114 days and appeared to be shorter after submission to local IRBs compared to central IRBs. Conclusion We found variation in IRB procedures between and within European countries. There were differences in submission and approval requirements, number of review rounds and total duration. Research collaborations could benefit from the implementation of more uniform legislation and regulation while acknowledging local cultural habits and moral values between countries. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with new self-tracking technologies. In particular, it focuses on a conceptual tension between the idea that disclosing personal information increases one’s autonomy and the idea that informational privacy is a condition for autonomous personhood. I argue that while self-tracking may sometimes prove to be an adequate method to shed light on particular aspects of oneself and can be used to strengthen one’s autonomy, self-tracking technologies often cancel out these benefits by exposing too much about oneself to (...) an unspecified audience, thus undermining the informational privacy boundaries necessary for living an autonomous life. (shrink)

This paper explores and rehabilitates the value of decisional privacy as a conceptual tool, complementary to informational privacy, for critiquing personalized choice architectures employed by self-tracking technologies. Self-tracking technologies are promoted and used as a means to self-improvement. Based on large aggregates of personal data and the data of other users, self-tracking technologies offer personalized feedback that nudges the user into behavioral change. The real-time personalization of choice architectures requires continuous surveillance and is a very powerful technology, recently coined as (...) “hypernudging.” While users celebrate the increased personalization of their coaching devices, “hypernudging” technologies raise concerns about manipulation. This paper addresses that intuition by claiming that decisional privacy is at stake. It thus counters the trend to solely focus on informational privacy when evaluating information and communication technologies. It proposes that decisional privacy and informational privacy are often part of a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Hypernudging is used as a key example to illustrate that the two dimensions should not be treated separately. Hypernudging self-tracking technologies compromise autonomy because they violate informational and decisional privacy. In order to effectively judge whether technologies that use hypernudges empower users, we need both privacy dimensions as conceptual tools. (shrink)

Nurses find themselves in a unique position - between patient and physicians, and in close proximity to the patient. Moral sensitivity can help nurses to cope with the daily turmoil of demands and opinions while delivering care in concordance with the value system of the patient. This article aims to reconsider the concept of moral sensitivity by discussing the function of emotions in morality. We turn to the ideas of historic and contemporary authors on the function of emotions in morality (...) to expand our understanding of moral sensitivity. Ancient philosophers and contemporary psychologists uphold different strategies on the orientation of morality being (a) personal growth or (b) community living, and the primordial function of (c) reason and (d) emotions in the creation of judgements about good and bad. The theoretical discussion on the function of emotions in morality shows that by focusing on reason alone, one leaves out an essential part of morality. The concept of moral sensitivity should (1) include an initial judgment of good and bad based on emotions, (2) hold the ability to reflect on the initial judgement and the associated emotions, (3) include the ability to understand other stakeholders' perspectives based on the ideal-types and (4) include a personal decision on the right course of action. (shrink)

Carl Knight argues that lexical sufficientarianism, which holds that sufficientarian concerns should have lexical priority over other distributive goals, is ‘excessive’ in many distinct ways and that sufficientarians should either defend weighted sufficientarianism or become prioritarians. In this article, I distinguish three types of weighted sufficientarianism and propose a weighted sufficientarian view that meets the excessiveness objection and is preferable to both Knight’s proposal and prioritarianism. More specifically, I defend a multi-threshold view which gives weighted priority to benefits directly above (...) and below its thresholds, but gives benefits below the lowest threshold lexical priority over benefits above the highest threshold. (shrink)

E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She focuses (...) on these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also "more" than its current materiality in co-creating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake. (shrink)

Limitarianism holds that there is an upper limit to how many resources, such as wealth and income, people can permissibly have. In this article, I examine the conceptual structure of limitarianism. I focus on the upper limit and the idea that resources above the limit are ‘excess resources’. I distinguish two possible limitarian views about such resources: (i) that excess resources have zero moral value for the holder; and (ii) that excess resources do have moral value for the holder but (...) that their claim to such resources is outweighed by other normative concerns. Moreover, I argue that, depending on the values limitarianism seeks to promote, limitarians should care about the number of people with excess resources or the total amount of excess resources (or both), that they can adopt redistributive measures and/or predistributive measures, and that some versions of limitarianism should take into account the distribution of risk among those above the riches line. (shrink)

A central question in contemporary ethics and political philosophy concerns which entities have moral status. In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the view that moral status comes in degrees. I argue that degrees of moral status can be specified along two dimensions: (i) the weight of the reason to protect an entity’s morally significant rights and interests; and/or (ii) the rights and interests that are considered morally significant. And I explore some of the complexities that arise when (...) we link degrees of moral status to the weight of reasons to protect bundles and/or the content and size of these bundles, in particular regarding the attribution of moral status to nonparadigmatic entities (e.g. people with severe cognitive disabilities, children, embryos and foetuses, robots, non-human animals, ecosystems, and rivers). (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 61-67.

The world as we currently know it is troubled by climate change, leaving a marked trace in our affective landscape, for example, in the form of shame, anger, and depression. This affective landscape needs further philosophical exploration, and in this paper I use analyses by Aristotle, Heidegger, and Butler to discuss anxiety and grief. I focus on these two affects because they a) often collaborate in times of ecological destruction, and b) can be distinguished in terms of short-term intentional “emotions” (...) and as long-term, atmospheric “moods.” Due to their temporal and atmospheric flexibility, these affects gain particular traction in relating to the deep-time timescale of the Anthropocene. At the end of the paper, I discuss trust, since the affective constellation of long-term atmospheric anxiety and grief can become especially productive when combined with the safety of trust, in that such constellation may enable constructive transformations building environmentally sustainable futures. (shrink)

In the present research we investigated gender-specific beliefs about emotional behaviour. In Study 1, 180 respondents rated the extent to which they agreed with different types of beliefs (prescriptive, descriptive, stereotypical, and contra-stereotypical) regarding the emotional behaviour of men and women. As anticipated, respondents agreed more with descriptive than with prescriptive beliefs, and more with stereotypical than with contra-stereotypical beliefs. However, respondents agreed more with stereotypical beliefs about the emotional behaviour of women than with those about men. These results were (...) replicated in Study 2 with a sample of 75 students and 80 nonstudents. In Study 3, a sample of 279 respondents rated the extent of agreement with the same items, this time with respect to then own emotional behaviour. A similar pattern of results was obtained, although agreement rates were higher than in Study 1 and 2. (shrink)

My book seeks to carve out a new way to examine affectivity, by using interdisciplinary methods for scholarship of affectivity, and by focusing on specific, concrete, material interfaces: in plants, birds, placentas, human skin, and, finally, soil. In my response to Florian Grosser, Jea Sophia Oh, and Miguel José Paley, I emphasize this focus on local material e-co-affectivity because it explains in large part why I, strategically, (1) have or have not used certain sources or ideas in Aristotle and Heidegger, (...) and (2) how I see my new research developing and addressing some of the concerns of the respondents regarding the need to tend to the inequities of vulnerability. Moreover, I will try to address (3) questions regarding post-human agency, as well as (4) cross-cultural comparisons with the Chinese concept of wuwei and the Korean concept of jeong (emotions or feeling). I conclude (5) by addressing concerns regarding the meaning of temporality as it is lived on the skin. (shrink)

In this Précis I provide a brief overview of my monograph E-Co-Affectivity, which combines biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies. I briefly outline central concepts such as affectivity, interface, community, and the middle voice.

This research statement presents a roadmap for the ethical evaluation of contact tracing apps. Assuming the possible development of an effective and secure contact tracing app, this roadmap explores three ethical concerns—privacy, data monopolists and coercion- based on three scenarios. The first scenario envisions and critically evaluates an app that is built on the conceptualization of privacy as anonymity and a mere individual right rather than a social value. The second scenario sketches and critically discusses an app that adequately addresses (...) privacy concerns but is facilitated by data monopolists such as Google and Apple. The final scenario discusses the coerced installation and use of a privacy-friendly, independently developed contact tracing app. The main worry is coercion through societal exclusion and limited societal participation. The statement concludes with three suggestions for designing an ethical contact tracing app and a research agenda. (shrink)

BackgroundContradictory evidence exists about the emotional burden of participating in qualitative research for palliative care patients and carers and this raises questions about whether this type of research is ethically justified in a vulnerable population. This study aimed to investigate palliative care patients' and carers' perceptions of the benefits and problems associated with open interviews and to understand what causes distress and what is helpful about participation in a research interview.MethodsA descriptive qualitative study. The data were collected in the context (...) of two studies exploring the experiences of care of palliative care patients and carers. The interviews ended with questions about patients' and carers' thoughts on participating in the studies and whether this had been a distressing or helpful event. We used a qualitative descriptive analysis strategy generated from the interviews and the observational and interactional data obtained in the course of the study.ResultsThe interviews were considered helpful: sharing problems was therapeutic and being able to contribute to research was empowering. However, thinking about the future was reported to be the most challenging. Consent forms were sometimes read with apprehension and being physically unable to sign was experienced as upsetting. Interviewing patients and carers separately was sometimes difficult and not always possible.ConclusionThe open interview enables the perspectives of patients and carers to be heard, unfettered from the structure of closed questions. It also enables those patients or carers to take part who would be unable to participate in other study designs. The context is at least as important as the format of the research interview taking into account the relational circumstances with carers and appropriate ways of obtaining informed consent. Retrospective consent could be a solution to enhancing participants control over the interview. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure the recent publication of Heidegger’s lecture course Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and focuses upon Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s concept of pathos. Through a comparative analysis of Aristotle’s concept of pathos and Heidegger’s inventive reading of this concept, I aim to show the strengths and weaknesses of Heidegger’s reading. It is my thesis that Heidegger’s account is extremely rich and innovative as he frees up pathos from the narrow confines of psychology and (...) incidental change and places it squarely into the center of the fundamental changes affecting a living being’s existence; simultaneously, however, Heidegger sometimes overstates the ties that pathos has with other concepts such as ousia and logos and highlights exceptional rather than common meanings of pathos, thereby risking the charge of being unfaithful to Aristotle’s text. (shrink)

Algorithmic Justice Algorithmic bias can lead to harmful forms of algorithmic discrimination. In this article, I argue that technology does not exist in a vacuum and is always part of power relations. I therefore criticize technological fixes that reduce social problems to a technical solution. Dominant solutions like ‘debiasing’, while important, avoid questions about deep-rooted injustices. They ‘accept’ and work with and within the frames of existing social (power) structures. Justice requires considering the structural dimensions of inequality. I draw attention (...) to Langdon Winner’s call to ask whether a technology is ‘just’ rather than approaching the issue of algorithmic discrimination from a solutionist angle of optimization and functionality. I propose that we draw inspiration from the work of philosophers who approach justice from a structural or systemic perspective. This results in a philosophical approach that stretches the concept of ‘discrimination’ and exposes the relationships between inequalities. Moreover, it questions the structures and boundaries in which the technology is embedded. Finally, I criticize the current hype around AI that distracts us from the fact that we have had existential problems with AI for a long time and that these problems are deeply intertwined with (the history of) our social power relations. (shrink)

The interest in meaningful work has significantly increased over the last two decades. Much of the associated managerial research has focused on researching ways to 'provide and manage meaning' through leadership or organizational culture. This stands in sharp contrast with the literature of the humanities which suggests that meaningfulness does not need to be provided, as the distinct feature of a human being is that he or she has an intrinsic 'will to meaning'. The research that has been done based (...) on the humanistic paradigm has been quite fragmented. This article aims to address these gaps through an action research project that actively involved participants in the process of affirming and uncovering the meaningfulness of their work. Our findings contribute to current organizational scholarship and practice as they enable scholars to clearly distinguish 'meaningful work' from 'the management of meaning', bring together the various sources of meaningful work in one framework and show their relationship with each other, clearly show the importance of engaging with both the inspiration towards the ideal as well as the often less than perfect self and the organizational reality in which meaning gets expressed and contribute to our understanding of how to engage individuals in conversations about meaningful work that are not prescriptive or exclusive, but that also show where meanings are commonly held. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of what sort of role is played by the idea of a threshold within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around views that employ thresholds. In this article, I develop an account of the concept of thresholds in distributive justice. I argue that this concept contains three elements, which threshold views deploy when ranking possible distributions. These elements are (i) (...) the level of the threshold, (ii) what constitutes the value of the threshold, and (iii) how benefits above and below the threshold must be allocated. I highlight three contributions that this particular account of thresholds makes: it clarifies the nature of the shift that occurs at the threshold; it resolves a common misunderstanding about headcount principles; and it shows how the arbitrariness objection can be met. (shrink)

(2011). The relationship between first‐year achievement and the pedagogical‐didactical fit between secondary school and university. Educational Studies: Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 557-568.

In this paper, I argue that limitarian policies are a good means to further political equality. Limitarianism, which is a view coined and defended by Robeyns, is a partial view in distributive justice which claims that under non-ideal circumstances it is morally impermissible to be rich. In a recent paper, Volacu and Dumitru level two arguments against Robeyns’ Democratic Argument for limitarianism. The Democratic Argument states that limitarianism is called for given the undermining influence current inequalities in income and wealth (...) have for the value of democracy and political equality. Volacu and Dumitru’s Incentive Objection holds that limitarianism places an excessive and inefficient burden on the rich in ensuring political equality. The Efficacy Objection holds that even if limitarianism limits excessive wealth it still fails to ensure the preservation of political equality. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections fail, but on separate grounds. I argue that the Incentive objection fails because one could appeal to limitarian policies that are different from the ones discussed by Volacu and Dumitru and which escape the problem of reduced productivity. I argue against the Efficacy Objection that limitarian policies are a partial but highly valuable step towards establishing political equality, and that they can and should complement or be complemented by other strategies. (shrink)

The institution of marriage makes women vulnerable, as does being unmarried in a society that idealises marriage as the norm. It is argued that the use of civil unions as an alternative to legal marriage does not protect women from this vulnerability, and nor do proposed reforms to the institution. The institution of legal marriage therefore must be abolished. A hybrid of Clare Chambers’ piecemeal regulation of relationships and Elizabeth Brake’s minimal marriage, termed the anti-vulnerability approach to relationship regulation (or (...) the AVA) is put forward as the best means to regulate relationships in a way that will protect women from vulnerability. The AVA is implementable in countries where Western marriage is not always the norm, such as South Africa, and is also strongly compatible with LGBTQIA+ relationship styles and arguments against marriage. However, as a piecemeal regulation of relationships cannot be implemented alongside holistic regulation systems, such as legal marriage, legal marriage would need to be abolished to create a system of regulating relationships that will be able to protect women from vulnerability. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism. I argue that sufficientarianism combines three claims: a priority claim that we have non-instrumental reasons to prioritize benefits in certain ranges over benefits in other ranges; a continuum claim that at least two of those ranges are on one continuum; and a deficiency claim that the lower a range on a continuum, the more priority benefits in that range have. This characterization of sufficientarianism sheds new light on two long-standing philosophical (...) debates, namely about the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and about the common objections to sufficientarianism. (shrink)

Argument quality has consistently been shown to have strong and lasting persuasive effects. The question is what criteria people use to distinguish strong from weak arguments and how these criteria relate to the ones proposed in normative argumentation theory. In an experiment 235 participants without training in argumentation theory rated the acceptance of 30 claims about the desirability of a consequence that were supported by either an argument from analogy, from authority, or from consequences. The supporting arguments were systematically manipulated (...) to violate argument type specific criteria. Participants proved sensitive to the violation of most, but not all, argument type specific criteria. From a normative perspective these findings suggest that people act in a fairly adequate way. These findings also enable a more precise description of what people may do when critically appraising arguments, which has important implications for the use of argument quality as a methodological tool in persuasion research. (shrink)

In projects concerning big data, ethical questions need to be answered during the design process. In this paper the Value Sensitive Design method is applied in the context of data-driven health services aimed at disease prevention. It shows how Value Sensitive Design, with the use of a moral dialogue and an ethical matrix, can support the identification and operationalization of moral values that are at stake in the design of such services. It also shows that using this method can support (...) meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation. (shrink)

Starting from first person experience, I argue that early miscarriage may invoke a sense of loss that is enigmatic and ambiguous, often times complicated by the fact that the topic of miscarriage is culturally silenced. Understanding the frequency of such occurrences of early pregnancy loss (in terms of the “miscarriage iceberg”) adds to the existential need to conceptualize such losses as they bleed into life at its very emergence. The prevalent cultural discourse on loss, even when it deals with ambiguity, (...) is focused upon individuation and personhood, which may complicate the grieving process in the case of early pregnancy loss.In searching for alternative epistemologies to address early pregnancy loss and its consequent grief, I propose the following conceptual pathways to elucidate the nature of this loss. First, early pregnancy loss may be understood in terms of the dissipation of a pregnant constellation, thereby putting less emphasis on losing a “being” but rather a sense of participation. This clarifies the kind of loss involved but does not yet completely explain what kind of relationality is lost. Secondly, the grief involved in early pregnancy loss benefits from the Freudian-inspired theories of Pauline Boss and Judith Butler, who emphasize that grief entails absence and presence (Boss, The myth of closure: ambiguous loss in a time of pandemic and change. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2021) as well as a deep loss of identity given the loss of relational ties that inform identity (Butler, Stud Gender Sexuality 4(1):9–37, 2003). This deepens the account of grief but does not precisely address the loss of mere emergent relationality. Thirdly, following Gilbert Simondon’s theory on ontogenesis (Simondon, The genesis of the individual. In Crary J, Kwinter S (eds) Incorporations. Zone Books, New York, 297–319, 1992), pregnancy loss involves losing a bridge to a pre-individual relationality, due to which the formerly pregnant body cannot easily leap “back” into former forms of individuation nor leap forward into a socially recognized altered collectivity. This account is able to clarify the kind of relational loss involved in early pregnancy loss. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing so, (...) cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation. (shrink)