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We imagine a minimal context where a programmer A serves as the provider of a program X for a user B. A survey is given of plausible promises and accusations in connection with the delivery and deployment of X. When X is used, various problems may arise. The focus of the paper is on the role of accusations which may plausibly arise in various scenarios. We discuss different accusation patterns that may occur outside informatics and see whether such patterns may appear in the context of programming as well.

Questions of sustainability will be of crucial importance for the twenty-first century. But do we have to think about questions of responsibilities regarding future people in terms of human rights? And if duties regarding sustainability fall outside the scope of human rights, what would this imply for the moral and political importance of human rights in general? This article investigates conceptually how we should see the relationship between human rights and long-term global ecological challenges. We will discuss how a human rights approach to questions of sustainability would be different from other approaches and what would be required to see those ecological challenges as human rights questions. We will discuss the possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between human rights and sustainability. And we will briefly draw some conclusions in terms of topics for further debate.

Dit stuk bespreekt de ‘vluchtelingencrisis’ in het licht van het concept ‘menselijke waardigheid’ – het basisprincipe van het mensenrechtenregime. Mensen ‘verkrijgen’ waardigheid niet pas als ze op Europese grond zijn. Maar als dat zo is, hebben wij ook verdergaande verplichtingen jegens mensen buiten Europa die ons politieke handelen zouden moeten leiden.

This chapter discusses the foundations of a future-oriented rights-based approach. It sketches some questions regarding the political dimension of the topic. The chapter also discusses the ethical significance of risk and uncertainty, and outlines how those questions are related to issues of more general cultural and philosophical significance. Respect for the basic rights of people requires likewise that we ensure that future people are able to live an autonomous life and that current people are able to decide themselves about basic aspects of their life. Hence, there is a duty to implement democratic institutions worldwide for future generations to inherit. The chapter concludes with some methodological issues regarding the appropriate form of an ethical debate, and attempts to outline what an appropriate attitude towards an 'ethics of the future' might be. It is impossible to do justice to the problem without discussing quite fundamental questions of our understanding of politics, history and the place of human beings in the world.

This chapter investigates how human dignity might be understood as a normative concept for the regulation of technologies. First, various distinctions that are relevant for the way human dignity can be understood are discussed. It is argued that it is particularly important that we should see human dignity as a concept that ascribes a specific status that forms the basis of the human rights regimes. Second, the author’s own approach, inspired by Kant and Gewirth, is presented, it being proposed that we should see the concrete content of human dignity as the protection of the authority of human beings to govern their own lives. Third, various consequences for the evaluation of technologies are discussed. In a context of major global and ecological challenges, together with the replacement of human action by automation, the role of human dignity becomes one of guiding the development of a technology-responsive human rights regime.

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Human beings orient themselves in the world via judgments; factual, moral, prudential, aesthetic, and all kinds of mixed judgments. Particularly for normative orientation in complex and contested contexts of action, it can be challenging to form judgments. This paper explores what one can reasonably expect from a theory of the power of judgment from a Kantian approach to ethics. We reconstruct practical (prudential and moral) judgments on basis of the self-reflexive capacities of human beings, and argue that for the subject to see himself as committed to prudential goods it is necessarily implied that he understands himself as committed to moral judgment. However, to understand the normativity of understanding oneself as a being with practical commitments at all, the aesthetic judgment is introduced: the power of judgment in its pure form of selfreflexivity. We claim that aesthetic reflection and judgment is conditional on the possibility for human beings to enter the space of reasons, and therewith for practical self-understanding as such. The paper concludes with a preliminary sketch of different conceptual possibilities in fleshing out the role of the power of judgment in its aesthetic employment in developing mixed judgments.

The recent student and staff protests in Amsterdam and at other Dutch universities have brought to light fundamental disagreements about the future of the Dutch university. Many students and staff members of Dutch universities have argued that the level of democratic decisionmaking about central policy issues in universities should be increased. But what can democracy mean in the context of the contemporary university system? In this contribution we will first briefly sketch the public role of the university. Then we will put forward our main claim, that the Dutch university currently suffers from a triple democratic deficit: in the relation between society and the university, in the relation between university administration and the academic community, and in the relation between the academic community and society. We can only make progress by considering these three problems of democratic legitimation in their mutual relations.

The ethical discussion around PGD opened a discussion about the use of human embryos and foetuses in the context of abortion and genetic diagnosis. The first point of discussion is the moral status of human embryos and foetuses. The article argues for a moral protection of the human embryo as a potential person. But at the same time is the moral status of the embryo a different one than the moral protection we owe against persons. But the ethical discussion is not only concerned with the question of the moral status. It is as well relevant which moral goods are part of the moral evaluation. While in the question round abortion the right and interests of the pregnant woman are in conflict with the protection of the embryo the situation is different in the case of PGD where the embryo is created in order to control his genetic design. The moral evaluation can insofar not refer to the right of the pregnant woman on her own body but must refer to specific objective characteristics of the embryo in order to legitimate the decision about the selection. For the ethical evaluation that difference is morally from significant importance.

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This paper is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the basic idea of the capability approach. Our aim is to compare Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice with Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, on two points: the selection and the justification of a list of central capabilities. On both counts, we contend that Nussbaum’s theory suffers from flaws that Gewirth’s theory may help to remedy. First, we argue that her notion of a (dignified) human life cannot fulfill the role of a normative criterion that Nussbaum wants it to play in selecting capabilities for her list. Second, we question whether Nussbaum’s method of justification is adequate, discussing both her earlier self-validating argumentative strategy and her more recent adherence to the device of an overlapping consensus. We conclude that both strategies fail to provide the capabilities theory with the firm foundation it requires. Next, we turn to Gewirth’s normative theory and discuss how it can repair these flaws. We show how his theory starts from a fundamental moral principle according to which all agents have rights to the protection of the necessary preconditions of their agency. Gewirth’s justification of this principle is then presented, using a version of a transcendental argument. Finally, we explicitly compare Nussbaum and Gewirth and briefly demonstrate what it would mean for Nussbaum to incorporate Gewirthian elements into her capabilities theory of justice.

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Contains fulltext : 172884.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) 1. Introduction 1. The Gist of the Thesis: Atomism versus Holism Do you have self-knowledge of your intention to be at work on time tomorrow if you’ve had a few drinks too many? Do you know that you want a divorce if you express your desire during a fit of anger? Do you know your own desires, hopes and beliefs if you’re depressed, insecure, or got out of bed on the wrong side of the bed? Do you have self-knowledge of your desire to buy a healthy quinoa salad rather than fish-and-chips for lunch, if it’s evident that you’ve been ‘nudged’? Do you have self-knowledge of your belief that having a baby boy is better than having a baby girl, if you’ve been manipulated by state propaganda? These are fundamental and difficult questions about self-knowledge; about what it means to know your own beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions and other attitudes. The answers to these questions are by no means obvious. The aim of this thesis is not to provide a concrete answer to such questions, but rather to ask what is required in order to answer them. More specifically, the aim is to explore whether contemporary philosophical theories of self-knowledge have the materials to handle such questions in a satisfactory manner, i.e. in a way that respects their subtleties and intricacies. The current philosophical debate on self-knowledge is mostly concerned with the question of whether self-knowledge is a matter of looking into our minds (introspectionism), interpreting our minds (interpretivism), speaking our minds (expressivism) or making up our minds (rationalism). Hence, when working on self-knowledge, one of the first questions one is confronted with is whether one is an ‘introspectionist’, ‘interpretationist’, ‘expressivist’, ‘rationalist’, or perhaps a ‘pluralist’ of some sort. In other words, much of the current self-knowledge debate focuses on the methods or procedures of self-knowledge, their differences, similarities and (in)compatibilities. The focus of this thesis will instead be on what appears to be a widely shared though implicit assumption, which I’ll refer to as the assumption of atomism about self-knowledge. This is an assumption about what is required for someone to acquire knowledge of her attitudes. The atomist assumption comes down to this: following the theorist’s preferred procedure or method (such as speaking or making up one’s mind) is sufficient for a subject to acquire knowledge of her attitudes. The alternative ‘holist’ approach can be understood negatively as the reverse of atomism: the mere following of any of these standard methods or procedures by itself does not guarantee that they will yield self-knowledge. The plan is to articulate and problematize the atomist approach to the question of self-knowledge. More specifically, my aim is to address the preconditions of self-knowledge, which I will address by asking under what circumstances following some particular method is actually knowledge-conducive. In so doing I will concentrate, specifically, on the expressivist and rationalist accounts. Radboud University, 23 mei 2017 Promotores : Slors, M.V.P., Bransen, J.A.M., Cassam, Q. Co-promotores : Geurts, B., Schwitzgebel, E., Düwell, M. 261 p.

Corruption is considered to be predominantly a problem in ‘developing’ countries, for which a more neutral notion is: ‘hybrid political order’ (HPO). According to the Western view, corruption is a breach of the trustworthiness of public, or private, institutions that have a legal status. The view that corruption can be best prevented and combated by establishing a ‘Western’ type of state -referred to as ‘Weberian rule of law’ (WRL) - is contra productive, however, for countries that function differently. The high prevalence of corruption in HPOs could be seen as a consequence of tensions that are grounded in the HPO concept as such. Although the formal set-up of HPOs is based on the WRL frame of reference, the practice of daily life expresses a different, mostly (neo)traditional, outlook on society. HPOs do not have a functional watershed between the public and private domain and have an ambiguous nature. A watershed between the public and private domain is presupposed in the WRL and also in the corruption, and even stronger in the conflict of interest, concept. The latter is the guiding concept in the most recent corruption legislation, and this shift contributes to an even stronger focus on an institutional set-up according to the WRL frame of reference. This recent legislation contributes to the confusion for local inhabitants of HPOs who operate on the crossroads of colliding frames of normative assessment, and therefore to behaviour that from a legal perspective is qualified as corrupt. In order to address this problem and disambiguate the situation in HPOs, in this multi-disciplinary research in the fields of ethics and law, the WRL is deconstructed in two ways. First the motivation for the need for public institutions in the WRL is separated from the nature of these institutions. Second the underlying principles of the WRL are separated from the nation state. These exercises - conducted on the basis of a Kantian, universalist, view on the relationship between morality and law – offer the possibility of institutional reform according to which legal status is not a requirement for the applicability of corruption. A requirement is that institutions are considered to matter publicly and meet the normative standards of trustworthiness. On normative grounds respect for human dignity, self-binding and impartiality should establish trustworthy institutions that are entitled to legitimacy. In practice it means that these institutions also should in fact be legitimate. Building a rule of law does not necessarily require nation states in this reasoning. This proposal to institutional reform enables disambiguation of HPOs, which serves to prevent corruption. It enables establishing bottom-up processes to realise the rule of law in a context sensitive way, without being moral relativist (i.e. expecting HPOs to develop into a WRL). This proposal for institutional reform applies to countries that consider themselves functioning according to the WRL-model as well. Especially because these societies increasingly are subject to hybridisation, and are becoming more sensitive to corruption and/or integrity breaches.