I respond to this article agreeing with Nyika.

ABSTRACTThe principle of informed refusal poses a specific problem when it is invoked by a pregnant woman who, in spite of having accepted her pregnancy, refuses the diagnostic and/or therapeutic measures that would ensure the well‐being of her endangered fetus. Guidelines issued by professional bodies in the developed world are conflicting: either they allow autonomy and informed consent to be overruled to the benefit of the fetus, or they recommend the full respect of these principles. A number of medical ethicists (...) advocate the overruling of alleged irrational or unreasonable refusal for the benefit of the fetus. The present essay supports the view of fetal rights to health and to life based on the principle that an ‘accepted’ fetus is a ‘third person’. In developing countries, however, the implementation of the latter principle is likely to be in conflict with a ‘communitarian’ perception of the individual – in this case, the pregnant woman. Within the scope of the limitations to the right to autonomy of J.S. Mill's ‘harm principle’, the South African Patients’ Charter makes provision for informed refusal. The fact that, in practice, it is not implemented illustrates the well‐known difficulty of applying Western bioethical principles in real life in the developing world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The principle of informed refusal poses a specific problem when it is invoked by a pregnant woman who, in spite of having accepted her pregnancy, refuses the diagnostic and/or therapeutic measures that would ensure the well‐being of her endangered fetus. Guidelines issued by professional bodies in the developed world are conflicting: either they allow autonomy and informed consent to be overruled to the benefit of the fetus, or they recommend the full respect of these principles. A number of medical (...) ethicists advocate the overruling of alleged irrational or unreasonable refusal for the benefit of the fetus. The present essay supports the view of fetal rights to health and to life based on the principle that an ‘accepted’ fetus is a ‘third person’. In developing countries, however, the implementation of the latter principle is likely to be in conflict with a ‘communitarian’ perception of the individual – in this case, the pregnant woman. Within the scope of the limitations to the right to autonomy of J.S. Mill's ‘harm principle’, the South African Patients’ Charter makes provision for informed refusal. The fact that, in practice, it is not implemented illustrates the well‐known difficulty of applying Western bioethical principles in real life in the developing world. (shrink)

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

This article deals with the concept of sentience, and more specifically with the argument from sentience as it is used by utilitarians in the abortion debate and in the advocacy of animal rights. It is argued that sentience is more than feeling pleasure and pain (with empha sis on pain), and that pain is an inborn protection required to fit into the world rather than the substance of evil. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(3) 2004: 292-301.

The South African Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996 gives women the right to voluntary abortion on request. The reality factor, however, is that five years later there are still more ‘technically illegal’ abortions than legal ones. Amongst other factors, one of the main obstacles to access to this constitutionally enshrined human right is the right to conscientious objection/refusal. Although the right to conscientious objection is also a basic human right, the case of refusal to provide abortion (...) services on conscientious objection grounds should not be seen as absolute and inalienable, at least in the developing world. In the developed world, where referral to another service provider is for the most part accessible, a conscientious objector to abortion does not really put the abortion seeker’s life at risk. The same cannot be said in developing countries even when abortion is decriminalised. This is because referral procedures are fraught with major obstacles. Therefore, it is argued that the right to conscientious objection to abortion should be limited by the circumstances in which the request for abortion arises. (shrink)

Largely, the concept of energy or vital force, as first analysed by Placide Tempels in Bantu Philosophy, permeates most African ontology systems, worldviews and life views. The Ntomba Chief is chosen because of his above average vital force. This puts him in the position of intermediary between the Supreme Being, the ancestors, and his subordinates. The waning of his energy is incompatible with his position because his energy is that of his tribe. When installed, he takes an oath that, when (...) this happens, he has to accept mohilo, the ‘hastening of death’. In the Chief's case, the hastening of death is not intended to relieve his pain, as it would be with other creatures. The Chief's dying a natural death would result in the loss of the entire community's vital force. Therefore, he has to be killed ritually to avoid that risk. That the Chief agrees to be killed – via a form of advanced directive – poses an ethical dilemma for a Western observer. From the Ntomba perspective, however, where the energy is being, and being is energy, it is the only way to preserve and protect the community's raison d’être. (shrink)

Conversational artificial agents and artificially intelligent voice assistants are becoming increasingly popular. Digital virtual assistants such as Siri, or conversational devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Home are permeating everyday life, and are designed to be more and more humanlike in their speech. This study investigates the effect this can have on one’s conformity with an AI assistant. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch’s already demonstrated the power and danger of conformity amongst people. In these classical experiments test persons were (...) asked to answer relatively simple questions, whilst others pretending to be participants tried to convince the test person to give wrong answers. These studies were later replicated with embodied robots, but these physical robots are still rare. In light of our increasing reliance on AI assistants, this study investigates to what extent an individual will conform to a disembodied virtual assistant. We also investigate if there is a difference between a group that interacts with an assistant that communicates through text, one that has a robotic voice and one that has a humanlike voice. The assistant attempts to subtly influence participants’ final responses in a general knowledge quiz, and we measure how often participants change their answer after having been given advice. Results show that participants conformed significantly more often to the assistant with a human voice than the one that communicated through text. (shrink)

This is a volume of twelve essays concerning the fundamental tension in personalised medicine between individual choice and the common good.

Isolated habitats, the consequence of the fragmentation process, are the object of external disturbance. This divides the patch area into two zones: interior and edge. The interior-to-edge ratio quantifies the potential disturbance impact. A method is presented to calculate a reference value for the interior-to-edge ratio, based upon the minimum edge for a given interior. The method is based on pixel geometry features and mathematical morphology. A corrected interior-to-edge ratio is defined using the reference value. The method is illustrated for (...) woodlot fragments in the Belgian Kempen region. (shrink)

In this exploratory, correlational study, several psychophysiological measures were assessed and the relation between these measures and an experimental self-report questionnaire to measure the seven implicit beliefs of sexual offenders ) was established in a sample of Dutch participants recruited from the healthy population using correlational analyses. After analyzing task performance, electroencephalogram data and electrocardiogram data, the psychophysiological variables were correlated with the experimental QITSO subscales. The subscale “children as sexual beings” correlated positively with the P300 amplitude at electrode Pz. (...) The subscale “women are unknowable” correlated positively with resting-state beta activity during eyes closed and eyes open, and with alpha activity during eyes open. Additionally, the subscale “entitlement’ correlated positively with low frequency heart rate variability power during eyes closed and eyes open, and with high frequency power during eyes closed. This study is a first exploratory step towards establishing a psychophysiological profile underlying the self-report questionnaire QITSO. (shrink)

In the case of surrogacy, it is not new biotechnologies themselves that have challenged well-established principles in law and ethics, but rather political and social phenomena such as commodification of women’s reproductive tissue and labour, demands to allow new ways of forming families and (before Covid-19, at least) the comparative ease of international travel that enabled cross-border surrogacy to develop into a market valued at up to $2 billion annually in India alone as of 2016 (Dickenson 2016, citing an estimate (...) from The Indian National Commission for Women). This phenomenon stands the usual truth on its head: it is not new technologies but new pressures that have challenged the existing law and ethics of surrogate motherhood. (shrink)

Perforation or gap formation in a vegetation is a major process in landscape transformation. The occurrence of gaps profoundly alters the microclimatical conditions in a vegetation. A method is proposed to quantify perforation by using the three main 2-D characteristics of the gaps: area, number and boundary length. New measures are developed by normalizing the observed values to the reference status of minimum and maximum perforation. As minimum perforation status, the presence of one single gap with area equal to the (...) map resolution is assumed. The new measures are combined using a 3-D Euclidean distance to visualize the process and to detect changes. The method is exemplified using a field case of gaps in a tropical terra firme rainforest at Tiputini, Ecuador. (shrink)

This short essay presents a critical cartography of the critical new materialist notion and methodology of diffraction.

Formulating how biomimicry relates to nature has been crucial to ‘deepening’ its theory. Currently, an autopoietic model of nature dominates the literature. However, advances in the natural and human sciences have demonstrated that autopoiesis does not adequately explain complex, dynamic, responsive, and situated systems. This article draws on Beth Dempster’s (1998) characterisation of ecosystems as sympoietic, that is as homeorhetic, evolutionary, distributively controlled, unpredictable, and adaptive, and on Donna Jeanne Haraway’s (2016) critique that entities do not pre-exist their relationships. (...) We argue that using sympoietic processes of becoming as our model, measure, and mentor impacts biomimicry’s practice and relation to sustainability. Taking John Todd’s Living Machines as a case study, we explicate how sympoiesis unfurls autopoiesis. By integrating advances in the natural and human sciences into the philosophy of biomimicry, we address the limitations of the autopoietic model and provide a more comprehensive and adequate model of ‘nature.’. (shrink)

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so (...) who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

According to the traditional view in the philosophy of logic facts of logic bear normative authority regarding how one ought to reason. Usually this is to mean that the relation of logical consequence between statements has some special relevance for how one’s beliefs should cohere. However, as I will argue in this article, this is just one way in which logic is normative for reasoning. For one thing, belief is not the only kind of mental state involved in reasoning. Besides (...) adopting and revising beliefs, rational agents pose and resolve questions. For another thing, the consequence relation of classical logic can be conservatively extended such that it includes logical relations between questions as well. Therefore, there is an argument to be made that not only the inference of new beliefs from extant beliefs but also the process of raising additional questions falls under the normative authority of logic. Accordingly, a nuanced account of the normativity of logic presents itself, which convincingly deals with problems such as clutter-avoidance and the paradox of the preface. (shrink)

How are we to appraise new technological developments that may bring revolutionary social changes? Currently this is often done by trying to predict or anticipate social consequences and to use these as a basis for moral and regulatory appraisal. Such an approach can, however, not deal with the uncertainties and unknowns that are inherent in social changes induced by technological development. An alternative approach is proposed that conceives of the introduction of new technologies into society as a social experiment. An (...) ethical framework for the acceptability of such experiments is developed based on the bioethical principles for experiments with human subjects: non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, and justice. This provides a handle for the moral and regulatory assessment of new technologies and their impact on society. (shrink)

This paper challenges the two aims of Michael Cholbi’s Rational Will View (RWV) which are to (1) offer an account of why paternalism is presumptively or pro tanto wrong and (2) relate the relative wrongness of paternalistic interventions to the rational powers that such interventions target (Sections 1 and 2). Some of a paternalizee’s choices harm their future selves in ways that would be wrong if they were done to others. I claim this challenges Cholbi’s second aim (2) because the (...) cases his account deems particularly wrong turn out to be not to be as wrongful as expected (Section 3). When this second aim is challenged, it has knock-on effects on the capacity of the RWV to discern which cases of paternalism are generally more wrongful than others, which undermines Cholbi’s first aim (1). I consider responses on behalf of Cholbi’s view but conclude that the account is insufficient on its own to vindicate its two aims (Section 4). Finally, I draw on recent work that adopts ideas from the practical reasoning literature to help determine paternalism’s wrongness (Section 5). I argue this helps Cholbi’s view withstand my objections, but we must remain skeptical of why interceding with rational powers is particularly wrong. (shrink)