ABSTRACT In The Netherlands, the public funding of a number of health care services is controversial. What can we learn from this about the moral concerns that underlie these judgements? And, if there is anything to learn, can we use this improved understanding to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions concerning the public funding of health care services? In the present paper, I will analyse three cases: corrective surgey, In Vitro Fertilisation and liver transplantation. I will summarise the arguments that (...) have been used to support or to challenge the public funding of these services. I will then assess the merits of Daniels’fair equality of opportunity account of justice in health care. Can this account improve our understanding of the moral concerns underlying our judgements about the public funding of these services? Can it serve to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions that are made concerning the public funding of health care services? My answer to both questions will be a qualified yes. Daniels’account can provide guidance, but not because we can deductively infer from it what is right and what is wrong. Instead, I will argue for a more casuistic use of the concept of fair equality of opportunity. (shrink)

This paper provides an empirical case study of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the new competition regulation in the Netherlands. The leading question in this case study is whether the new institutional arrangement has allowed for the possibility that reasonable exceptions can be made to the principle that inter-firm cooperation is prohibited. That is to say: does the new institutional arrangement allow for the possibility of 'well organized but not 'perfect' markets'? The investigation focuses on the Netherlands, (...) which constitutes an exemplary case as the Dutch are committed to both strengthen the competitiveness of the market and allow for exceptions on behalf of non-economic values such as CSR. The authors expect that the Dutch context will prevent a doctrinal and categorical rejecting of any good argument to make an exception to the rule that inter-firm cooperation must be prohibited. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn The Netherlands, the public funding of a number of health care services is controversial. What can we learn from this about the moral concerns that underlie these judgements? And, if there is anything to learn, can we use this improved understanding to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions concerning the public funding of health care services? In the present paper, I will analyse three cases: corrective surgey, In Vitro Fertilisation and liver transplantation. I will summarise the arguments that have (...) been used to support or to challenge the public funding of these services. I will then assess the merits of Daniels’fair equality of opportunity account of justice in health care. Can this account improve our understanding of the moral concerns underlying our judgements about the public funding of these services? Can it serve to scrutinise the adequacy of particular decisions that are made concerning the public funding of health care services? My answer to both questions will be a qualified yes. Daniels’account can provide guidance, but not because we can deductively infer from it what is right and what is wrong. Instead, I will argue for a more casuistic use of the concept of fair equality of opportunity. (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 handbook offers an in depth and comprehensive state of the art survey of the linguistic domains of modality and mood. An international team of experts in the field examine the full range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the many facets of the phenomena involved. Following an opening section that provides an introduction and historical background to the topic, the volume is divided into five parts. Parts 1 and 2 present the basic linguistic facts about the systems of modality (...) and mood in the languages of the world, covering the semantics and the expression of different subtypes of modality and mood respectively. The authors also examine the interaction of modality and mood, mutually and with other semantic categories such as aspect, time, negation, and evidentiality. In Part 3, authors discuss the features of the modality and mood systems in five typologically different language groups, while chapters in Part 4 deal with wider perspectives on modality and mood: diachrony, areality, first language acquisition, and sign language. Finally, Part 5 looks at how modality and mood are handled in different theoretical approaches: formal syntax, functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, and formal semantics. (shrink)

This paper provides preliminary insights into the process of sense-making and developing meaning with regard to corporate social responsibility (CSR) within 18 Dutch companies. It is based upon a research project carried out within the framework of the Dutch National Research Programme on CSR. The paper questions how change agents promoting CSR within these companies made sense of the meaning of CSR. How did they use language (and other instruments) to stimulate and underpin the contextual essence of CSR? Why did (...) they do that in this particular way? What were the consequences of this approach for shaping the process of CSR in their company? Did their efforts contribute to a new way of thinking and acting or was it merely putting old wine in new barrels? A preliminary conclusion is that change agents use above all linguistic artefacts (words and notions) and carry out practical projects while constructing meaning. Still, the meaning of meaning itself remains highly intangible, situational and personality related. (shrink)

A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies. From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of (...) bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato’s literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. “The Voice of Misery is a special book. Van der Heiden has presented an argument that is poised to challenge discourse in analytic philosophy, reshape approaches in continental philosophy, and give new orientation to interdisciplinary research in continental philosophy and literary theory. The book will find a large readership across the discipline of philosophy and in several areas of the humanities.” — Theodore George, author of Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology. (shrink)

Live streaming platforms such as Twitch that facilitate participatory online communities have become an integral part of game culture. Users of these platforms are predominantly teenagers and young adults, who increasingly spend time socializing online rather than offline. This shift to online behavior can be a double-edged sword when coping with difficult periods in life such as relationship issues, the death of a loved one, or job loss. On the one hand, platforms such as Twitch offer pleasure, distraction, and relatedness (...) with others to help with coping, and the increased sense of anonymity and control could stimulate self-disclosure. However, the prevalence of trolling and memes may also discourage people from opening up, and relationships that are built online—especially those with microcelebrity streamers—could be perceived as more meaningful than they actually are. To create a deeper understanding of Twitch as a new media platform embedded in game culture, and how users perceive its potential as a coping mechanism, we have conducted a first exploration by means of a survey. The questions focused on general Twitch behavior, the difficult period in life, and the role of Twitch during this period. It was distributed online among people who considered themselves active Twitch users, and who had gone through a difficult period. Eighty-four participants completed the entire survey. The majority of participants indicated that Twitch helped them cope, and that it became a larger part of their lives during the difficult period compared to regular viewing. Recurring themes were the entertainment, distraction, and sense of community Twitch offers. Viewing behavior during difficult periods appears to remain largely the same in terms of the streamers that are watched, although time spent viewing increases, and there is a change toward more time spent actively watching rather than having the stream on in the background. With this work, we aim to create a deeper understanding of Twitch as a platform, and its importance for gamers that are going through difficult periods in life. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems (...) approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

The much-acclaimed present-day philosophical turn to the letters of Saint Paul points to a profound consonance between ancient and modern thought. Such is the bold claim of this study in which scholars from contemporary continental philosophy, new testamentary studies and ancient philosophy discuss with each other the meaning Paul's terms pistis, faith. In this volume, this theme discusses in detail the threefold relation between Paul and continental thought, the Graeco-Roman world, and political theology. It is shown that pistis does not (...) only concern a mode of knowing, but rather concerns the human ethos or mode of existence as a whole. Moreover, it is shown that the present-day political theological interest in Paul can be seen as an attempt to recuperate Paul’s pistis in this comprehensive sense. Finally, an important discussion concerning the specific ontological implications and background of this reinterpretation of pistis is examined by comparing the ancient ontological commitments to those of the present-day philosophers. Thus, the volume offers an insight in a crucial consonance of ancient and modern thought concerning the question of pistis in Paul while not forgetting to stipulate important differences. (shrink)

_Phenomenological Perspectives on Plurality_ offers twelve essays that discuss how the question of plurality is thought in contemporary continental philosophy. Its essays investigate how this issue influences topics in ontology, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy.

This article investigates how companies make sense of CSR. It is based on an explorative comparative case study of 18 companies in the Netherlands using background information, interviews and annual reports. Initially, the sensemaking process of CSR is guided and coordinated by change agents who are specifically appointed to explore the implementation of CSR in their company. These change agents initiate the CSR process within their own organisations. The meaning they develop stems from their personal and organisational values and frames (...) of reference. By attuning the vocabulary of CSR to the language of their colleagues, they aim to gain support for this undertaking in their organisation. This sensemaking procedure can be divided into pragmatic, external, procedural, policy‐oriented and value‐driven processes. The capability of an organisation to embed CSR is the result of trial and error, personal preferences and the use of language by the change agent that fits the (dynamic) situation at hand. Thus, each organisation needs a tailor‐made approach to implement CSR successfully. (shrink)

This article investigates how companies make sense of CSR. It is based on an explorative comparative case study of 18 companies in the Netherlands using background information, interviews and annual reports. Initially, the sensemaking process of CSR is guided and coordinated by change agents who are specifically appointed to explore the implementation of CSR in their company. These change agents initiate the CSR process within their own organisations. The meaning they develop stems from their personal and organisational values and frames (...) of reference. By attuning the vocabulary of CSR to the language of their colleagues, they aim to gain support for this undertaking in their organisation. This sensemaking procedure can be divided into pragmatic, external, procedural, policy‐oriented and value‐driven processes. The capability of an organisation to embed CSR is the result of trial and error, personal preferences and the use of language by the change agent that fits the (dynamic) situation at hand. Thus, each organisation needs a tailor‐made approach to implement CSR successfully. (shrink)

The view that persons are entitled to respect because of their moral agency is commonplace in contemporary moral theory. What exactly this respect entails, however, is far less uncontroversial. In this book, Van der Rijt argues powerfully that this respect for persons’ moral agency must also encompass respect for their subjective moral judgments – even when these judgments can be shown to be fundamentally flawed. Van der Rijt scrutinises the role persons’ subjective moral judgments play within the context of coercion (...) and domination. His fresh, original analysis of Kant’s third formulation of the Categorical Imperative reveals how these judgments are intimately connected to a person’s dignity. The result is an insightful new account of coercion, a novel Kantian reformulation of the republican notion of non-domination and a compelling, innovative argument in favour of retributive justice. "In this admirably clear and insightful work, Van der Rijt develops an original account of coercion and dignity. On the basis of his analysis of the relation between these two concepts, he also provides an intriguing new angle on the nature of republicanism. I recommend this book to anyone interested in freedom and power and their roles in normative political theory." Ian Carter - University of Pavia "In this carefully argued and original study Jan-Willem van der Rijt offers an analysis of coercion, a broadly Kantian argument that coercion is an affront to dignity, and an illuminating contrast with Philip Pettit's republicanism. A most welcome contribution." Thomas E. Hill, Jr. - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Jan-Willem van der Rijt has written a well argued, original book that will prove to be extremely helpful for the philosophical inquiry of the relationship between coercion and human dignity as well as for the assessment of republicanism and its consequences." Ralf Stoecker - University of Potsdam. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these (...) readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein, chrēsis and charis. (shrink)

Moral exemplars are often held up as objects to be admired. Such admiration is thought beneficial to the admirer, inducing him or her to emulate virtuous conduct, and deemed flattering to the admired. This paper offers a critical examination of admiration from a broadly Kantian perspective, arguing that admiration – even of genuine moral exemplars – violates the duty of self-respect. It also provides an explanation for the fact that moral exemplars themselves typically shun admiration. Lastly, it questions the assumption (...) that admiration leads to emulation on the basis of scientific findings that indicate that admiration induces passivity in the admirer rather than an incentive to self-improvement. (shrink)

Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, and with new technology, new ethical problems emerge. The academic field that addresses these problems—which we tentatively call ‘digital ethics’—can be an important intellectual resource for policy making and regulation. This is why it is important to understand how the new ethical challenges of a digital society are being met by academic research. We have undertaken a scientometric analysis to arrive at a better understanding of the nature, scope and dynamics of (...) the field of digital ethics. Our approach in this paper shows how the field of digital ethics is distributed over various academic disciplines. By first having experts select a collection of keywords central to digital ethics, we have generated a dataset of articles discussing these issues. This approach allows us to generate a scientometric visualisation of the field of digital ethics, without being constrained by any preconceived definitions of academic disciplines. We have first of all found that the number of publications pertaining to digital ethics is exponentially increasing. We furthermore established that whereas one may expect digital ethics to be a species of ethics, we in fact found that the various questions pertaining to digital ethics are predominantly being discussed in computer science, law and biomedical science. It is in these fields, more than in the independent field of ethics, that ethical discourse is being developed around concrete and often technical issues. Moreover, it appears that some important ethical values are very prominent in one field (e.g., autonomy in medical science), while being almost absent in others. We conclude that to get a thorough understanding of, and grip on, all the hard ethical questions of a digital society, ethicists, policy makers and legal scholars will need to familiarize themselves with the concrete and practical work that is being done across a range of different scientific fields to deal with these questions. (shrink)

Health technology assessment consists of thesystematic study of the consequences of theintroduction or continued use of the technology in aparticular context, with the explicit objective toarrive at a judgment of the value or merit of thetechnology. Ideally, it is aimed at assessing allaspects of a given technology or group oftechnologies, including non-technical, e.g.socio-ethical, aspects. However, methods for assessingsocio-ethical implications of health technology arerelatively undeveloped and few mechanisms exist totake action based on the results of such evaluations.Still, the examples of cochlear (...) inplants and other cases illustratethat HTA is not a matter of merely collecting thefacts about a technology. The facts must beplausible and relevant from a particular framework,which is not always shared by different groups. It ishere that socio-ethical aspects are encountered. Ifhealth technology assessment aims to enhance theaccountability of the decision making processregarding funding and use of health technology, it isa major challenge to assessors of health technologiesto deal adequately with existing value pluralism. Inthis respect interactive evaluation may have somethingto offer. (shrink)

Exploration of Alfred North Whitehead's influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature.

Symptomatic of the crisis of the current global political order are the millions of displaced that have fled their homes but are not allowed to enter the country in which they seek refuge. Instead, they are placed in camps. To understand the site of the camp and the bare life it produces, testimonies of refugees are indispensable. This essay aims to examine and listen to these testimonies by, first, introducing the notion of testimony and some of the characteristics of the (...) testimony of refugees; second, examining what it means to listen to testimony and which role is played therein by the narrative, literary structure of testimony; and, third, by interpreting the form of life to which the testimonies of the camp attest, which several witnesses describe as a life in “limbo.” This essay concludes with some brief remarks on the relation between experience, truth, and language in testimony. (shrink)

Departing from two diverging lines of inquiry of testimony that characterize philosophy today, this article aims to show what a hermeneutic phenomenology of witnessing and testimony is and how this approach to testimony offers a new framework to understand witnessing and testimony, which also repositions the present-day main lines of inquiry of testimony. The first section offers a critical assessment of the state of the art in the philosophy of testimony today and the second section reinterprets the two main diverging (...) lines of inquiry as a conflict. The major part of this article is devoted to a hermeneutic-phenomenological account of witnessing and testimony. The third and fourth sections describe several relations between subject matter, witness, acts of bearing witness, and addressee, to develop this hermeneutic-phenomenological framework and in the process also shows which place is awarded to the two main lines of the present-day inquiry within this framework. (shrink)

_Exploration of Alfred North Whitehead's influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of nature._.