International relations are in constant turbulence. Globalisation, the rise and fall of superpowers, the fragilisation of the EU, trade wars, real wars, terrorism, persecution, new nationalism and identity politics, climate change, are just a few of the recent disturbing developments. How can international issues be understood and addressed from a Christian faith perspective? In this book answers are presented from various Christian traditions: Neo-calvinism, Catholic social teaching, critical theory and Christian realism. The volume offers fundamental theological and Christian philosophical perspectives (...) on international relations and global challenges, case studies about inspiring Christian leaders such as Robert Schuman, Dag Hammarskjöld, Abraham Kuyper and prophetic critiques of supranational issues. (shrink)

This book investigates humanities, social sciences and politics from the perspective of the concept of creation order. It is the second volume in a series that provides a unique and topical overview of attempts to assess the current health of the concept of creation order within Reformational philosophy when it is compared with other perspectives. Divided into a section on fundamental reflections and a section on normative practices, it discusses issues such as redemption, beauty, nature, love, justice, morality, and ethics. (...) It concludes with discussions on a practice-based theory to explain religion in international relations and a normative model for the practice of cooperation in development. This series reflects the role that the branch of Christian philosophy called ‘Reformational’ philosophy plays in the discussion on the status of laws of nature. Ever since its inception, almost a century ago, the concepts of order and law have been at the heart of this philosophy. One way to characterise this tradition is as a philosophy of creation order. Firmly rejecting both scholastic metaphysics and Deism, Reformational philosophers have maintained the notion of law as ‘holding’ for reality. Questions have arisen about the nature of such law: is it a religious or philosophical concept; does law just mean ‘orderliness’? How does it relate to laws of nature? Have they always existed or do they ‘emerge’ during the process of evolution? (shrink)

8-9 January 2013 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, a seminar took place bringing together people from various parts of the world, various disciplines, and various academic and non-academic professions — philosophers, economists, theologians, historians, social scientists as well as bankers, businessmen, investors and others — to analyze and discuss the economic crisis as it developed in the aftermath ofthe American financial crisis of 2008. An explicit goal was as well to bring together people from various generations, to facilitate and promote (...) a true ‘intergenerational dialogue’. The title of the seminar was ‘Economics, Christianity & the Crisis: Towards a New Architectonic Critique’. More specifically, the aim of the seminar was to develop Christianly inspired reflections on the crisis. An insight that was foundational for the seminar was that the 2008 credit crisis not only was a crisis in the economy, but implied also a crisis in the basic concepts and assumptions that underlie our contemporary thinking about economics, economics as a science as well as economics as a social domain. The crisis, as it erupted and evolved, simultaneously raised urgent questions at the macro- or system-level, at the intermediate level of behavior of banks and corporations, and at the level of personal morality, the vices and virtues involved in business transactions. (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.

Research integrity is usually discussed in terms of responsibilities that individual researchers bear towards the scientific work they conduct, as well as responsibilities that institutions have to enable those individual researchers to do so. In addition to these two bearers of responsibility, a third category often surfaces, which is variably referred to as culture and practice. These notions merit further development beyond a residual category that is to contain everything that is not covered by attributions to individuals and institutions. This (...) paper discusses how thinking in RI can take benefit from more specific ideas on practice and culture. We start by articulating elements of practice and culture, and explore how values central to RI are related to these elements. These insights help identify additional points of intervention for fostering responsible conduct. This helps to build “cultures and practices of research integrity”, as it makes clear that specific times and places are connected to specific practices and cultures and should have a place in the debate on Research Integrity. With this conceptual framework, practitioners as well as theorists can avoid using the notions as residual categories that de facto amount to vague, additional burdens of responsibility for the individual. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question ofhowthe responsibilities are to be divided between the individual and the institution has hitherto received little attention. We therefore performed an analysis of research codes of conduct to investigate how responsibilities are positioned as individual or institutional, and (...) how the boundary between the two is drawn.MethodWe selected 12 institutional, national and international codes of conduct that apply to medical research in the Netherlands and subjected them to a close-reading content analysis. We first identified the dominant themes and then investigated how responsibility is attributed to individuals and institutions.ResultsWe observed that the attribution of responsibility to either the individual or the institution is often not entirely clear, and that the notion ofcultureemerges as a residual category for such attributions. We see this notion of responsible research cultures as important; it is something that mediates between the individual level and the institutional level. However, at the same time it largely lacks substantiation.ConclusionsWhile many attributions of individual and institutional responsibility are clear, the exact boundary between the two is often problematic. We suggest two possible avenues for improving codes of conduct: either to clearly attribute responsibilities to individuals or institutions and depend less on the notion of culture, or to make culture a more explicit concern and articulate what it is and how a good culture might be fostered. (shrink)

As technology has the ability to displace power and politics, it needs to be at the centre of political concern. This article develops the idea that technological citizenship is an important concept in cultivating political sensitivity to technology. Rather than straightforwardly correcting for the displacement of power, technological citizenship must cultivate this displacement and engage with it through contestation. Drawing on insights from the critical theory of technology, this article reconceptualizes the political effects of technology as internal to both politics (...) and technology design, rather than externalities. By recontextualizing, the critical theory aims to reshape the input space of technology design, and include a broader range of values. This conflation of the political and the technical shows remarkable parallels with the generic concept of sustainability. It is thus concluded that technological citizenship is essentially sustainable citizenship. (shrink)

In recent years a large empirical literature has appeared on suffering at the end of life. In this literature it is recognized that suffering has existential and social dimensions in addition to physical and psychological ones. The non-physical aspects of suffering, however, are still understood as pathological symptoms, to be reduced by therapeutical interventions as much as possible. But suffering itself and the negative emotional states it consists of are intentional states of mind which, as such, make cognitive claims: they (...) are more or less appropriate responses to the actual circumstances of the patient. These circumstances often are such that it would rather be a pathological symptom not to be sad and not to suffer. Suffering, therefore, is sometimes and to some extent a condition to be respected. Although I do not dispute that the alleviation of suffering is the main aim of palliative care, in pursuing that aim we should acknowledge a constraint of realism. (shrink)

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The basic question concerning the compatibility of donation after circulatory death (DCD) protocols with the dead donor rule is whether such protocols can guarantee that the loss of relevant biological functions is truly irreversible. Which functions are the relevant ones? I argue that the answer to this question can be derived neither from a proper understanding of the meaning of the term “death” nor from a proper understanding of the nature of death as a biological phenomenon. The concept of death (...) can be made fully determinate only by stipulation. I propose to focus on the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness and the capacity for spontaneous breathing. Having accepted that proposal, the meaning of “irreversibility” need not be twisted in order to claim that DCD protocols can guarantee that the loss of these functions is irreversible. And this guarantee does not mean that reversing that loss is either conceptually impossible or known to be impossible with absolute certainty. (shrink)

Opt-out systems of postmortem organ procurement are often supposed to be justifiable by presumed consent, but this justification turns out to depend on a mistaken mental state conception of consent. A promising alternative justification appeals to the analogical situation that occurs when an emergency decision has to be made about medical treatment for a patient who is unable to give or withhold his consent. In such cases, the decision should be made in the best interests of the patient. The analogous (...) suggestion to be considered, then, is, if the potential donor has not registered either his willingness or his refusal to donate, the probabilities that he would or would not have preferred the removal of his organs need to be weighed. And in some actual cases the probability of the first alternative may be greater. This article considers whether the analogy to which this argument appeals is cogent, and concludes that there are important differences between the emergency and the organ removal cases, both as regards the nature of the interests involved and the nature of the right not to be treated without one’s consent. Rather, if opt-out systems are to be justified, the needs of patients with organ failure and/or the possibility of tacit consent should be considered. (shrink)

Bei der „terminalen Sedierung“ wird ein unheilbar kranker und schwer leidender Patient für den Rest seines Lebens in ein tiefes Koma versetzt. Das hierzu verwendete Morphin bzw. Midazolam kann lebensverkürzend wirken. Ist dies also eine Maßnahme, die das Leben des Patienten beendet, auf seinen Wunsch hin oder nicht? Gewöhnlich wird diese Frage mit nein beantwortet, wenn die lebensverkürzende Wirkung nur vorhersehbar, aber nicht beabsichtigt ist. Allerdings ist der Zugang der Menschen auch zu ihren eigenen Intentionen fallibel, so dass sogar ihre (...) Selbstangaben in komplexen Fällen nicht sehr zuverlässig sind. Wenn ein Arzt sagt, dass er „beabsichtigt“, das Leben eines Patienten zu verkürzen, meint er damit möglicherweise nur, dass dieses vorhersehbare Ergebnis ein erwünschtes ist. Diese Art der Einschätzung kann nicht als solche moralisch diskreditiert werden, weil sie bei anderen allgemein akzeptierten Entscheidungen unvermeidlich ist, z. B. von einer „vergeblichen“ Behandlung Abstand zu nehmen. Legitimerweise können wir von einem Fachmann erwarten, dass er begründet handelt. Deshalb sollte unsere Klassifikation von ärztlichem Handeln als „terminale Sedierung“ oder „Beendigung des Lebens des Patienten“ nicht von den Intentionen des Arztes abhängen, sondern von den in dieser speziellen Krankheitsphase bei diesem speziellen Patienten verwendeten Dosierungen. (shrink)

This paper argues, against Pettit’s thesis about the incorporation of responsibility, that holding collective agents criminally responsible is necessarily either redundant or unfair: redundant if responsibility can be distributed without remainder over individual persons; unfair if it cannot. It should be the task of legal systems to create chains of individual criminal responsibility encompassing executives, officials, and members of corporate agents.

When the decision has been made to stop treatment of a newborn child with a bad prognosis, the child usually dies in a short time. Sometimes, however, gasping occurs, and although it is usually thought that this is not a sign of suffering, the parents can hardly fail to interpret it as such. Could that be a reason to administer muscle relaxants to the child? It would not harm the child and may greatly benefit the parents. So it seems the (...) humane thing to do. Legally, however, the action would count as killing, and the prohibition of killing normally implies a denial of the authority to decide on exceptions, which should be understood as a protection of public trust. I discuss three ways of arguing why the law, nevertheless, should allow for an exception in this case. The discussion identifies and describes this kind of conflict, and shows how to evaluate proposals for solving it, using a particularly clear exemplary case by way of illustration. (shrink)

In 2015 Robert Veatch published the second edition of his Transplantation ethics, this time together with Lainie Ross. The chapters on postmortem organ procurement distinguish between ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ systems, and argue that ‘taking’ systems may promise a greater yield of organs for transplantation, but inevitably violate a requirement of respect for the deceased's autonomy. That argument has been very influential, and is also representative of a way of thinking that is widespread in the literature and in public debate. In (...) this paper I contend that it is conceptually flawed in a number of important respects. These concern the understanding of both the concept of ‘consent’ and the requirement of respect for autonomy, the role of the relatives in any procurement system, and the factors that actually determine the extent to which a system respects autonomy, under any interpretation of that requirement. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic, and an account of consequence offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. This text presents what the authors term as 'logical pluralism' arguing that the notion of logical consequence doesn't pin down one deductive consequence relation; it allows for many of them.

Many books have been published about physician-assisted death. This book offers a comprehensive and in-depth examination of that subject, but it also extends the discussion to a broader range of end-of-life decisions including suicide, palliative care and sedation until death. In every jurisdiction that has laws permitting some kind of physician-assisted death, a central point of controversy is whether such assistance should only be available to dying patients, or to everyone who wants to end his life. The right to determine (...) the manner and time of one's own death, however, does not necessarily mean that physicians should be permitted to cooperate in ensuring a quick and peaceful death. In this book, Govert den Hartogh considers the fundamental and practical matters-including concrete issues of legal regulation-related to end-of life decision making. He proposes a two-tiered system. Everyone should have access to humane means of ending his life, if his decision to end it is voluntary, well-considered and durable. But doctors should only participate in a joint action of ending the patient's life on his request if they also are convinced of acting in the patient's best interests, in particular by ending intolerable and unrelievable suffering. And perhaps there is reason to restrict that second service to dying patients. The whole argument, however, depends on the extent to which, in both tiers of the system, we can design legal safeguards that will enable us to trust judgments about the requesting person's request and about his suffering. The book considers much new evidence in regard to this issue. What Kind of Death will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in bioethics, applied ethics, philosophy of law and health law. (shrink)

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw (...) that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

Abstract I argue that meaning in life is importantly influenced by bioloical ties. More specifically, I maintain that knowing one's relatives and especially one's parents provides a kind of self-knowledge that is of irreplaceable value in the life-task of identity formation. These claims lead me to the conclusion that it is immoral to create children with the intention that they be alienated from their bioloical relatives?for example, by donor conception.

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg offers a path to a new kind of religious outlook. Reflection on our early stage in the evolutionary process leads to skepticism about religion, but also offers a new answer to the problem of faith and reason, and the possibility of a new, evolutionary form of religion.

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)