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479Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach …Read more
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168Parental Responsibility: A Moving TargetIn Kristien Hens, Daniela Cutas & Dorothee Horstkötter (eds.), Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics, Springer International Publishing. 2016.Beliefs about the moral status of children have changed significantly in recent decades in the Western world. At the same time, knowledge about likely consequences for children of individual, parental, and societal choices has grown, as has the array of choices that (prospective) parents may have at their disposal. The intersection between these beliefs, this new knowledge, and these new choices has created a minefield of expectations from parents and a seemingly ever-expanding responsibility to…Read more
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153Going Beyond the Catch-22 of Autism Diagnosis and Research. The Moral Implications of (Not) Asking “What Is Autism?”Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.Psychiatric diagnoses such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are primarily attributed on the basis of behavioral criteria. The aim of most of the biomedical research on ASD is to uncover the underlying mechanisms that lead to or even cause pathological behavior. However, in the philosophical and sociological literature, it has been suggested that autism is also to some extent a ‘social construct’ that cannot merely be reduced to its biological explanation. We show that a one-sided adherence to e…Read more
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105Ethical responsibilities towards dogs: An inquiry into the dog–human relationship (review)Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 22 (1): 3-14. 2009.The conditions of life of many companion animals and the rate at which they are surrendered to shelters raise many ethical issues. What duties do we have towards the dogs that live in our society? To suggest answers to these questions, I first give four possible ways of looking at the relationship between man and dog: master–slave, employer–worker, parent–child, and friend–friend. I argue that the morally acceptable relationships are of a different kind but bears family resemblances to the latte…Read more
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74Paper: The return of individual research findings in paediatric genetic researchJournal of Medical Ethics 37 (3): 179-183. 2011.The combination of the issue of return of individual genetic results/incidental findings and paediatric biobanks is not much discussed in ethical literature. The traditional arguments pro and con return of such findings focus on principles such as respect for persons, autonomy and solidarity. Two dimensions have been distilled from the discussion on return of individual results in a genetic research context: the respect for a participant’s autonomy and the duty of the researcher. Concepts such a…Read more
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61Parental Choices and the Prospect of Regret: An Alternative AccountInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (5): 586-607. 2017.ABSTRACTIs the question ‘will you regret it if you do this?’ helpful when people face difficult life decisions, such as terminating a pregnancy if a disability is detected or deciding to become a parent? Despite the commonness of the question in daily life, several philosophers have argued lately against its usefulness. We reconstruct four arguments from recent literature on regret, transformative experience and the use of imagination in deliberation. After analysis of these arguments we conclud…Read more
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44Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics (edited book)Springer International Publishing. 2016.Should parents aim to make their children as normal as possible to increase their chances to “fit in”? Are neurological and mental health conditions a part of children’s identity and if so, should parents aim to remove or treat these? Should they aim to instill self-control in their children? Should prospective parents take steps to insure that, of all the children they could have, they choose the ones with the best likely start in life? This volume explores all of these questions and more. Agai…Read more
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40Ethical issues surrounding the provider initiated opt – Out prenatal HIV screening practice in Sub – Saharan Africa: a literature reviewBMC Medical Ethics 16 (1): 1-12. 2015.BackgroundPrevention of mother to child transmission of HIV remains a key public health priority in most developing countries. The provider Initiated Opt – Out Prenatal HIV Screening Approach, recommended by the World Health Organization lately has been adopted and translated into policy in most Sub – Saharan African countries. To better ascertain the ethical reasons for or against the use of this approach, we carried out a literature review of the ethics literature.MethodsPapers published in En…Read more
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36Pandemic Risk and Standpoint Epistemology: A Matter of SolidarityHealth Care Analysis 30 (2): 146-162. 2022.Current and past pandemics have several aspects in common. It is expected that all members of society contribute to beat it. But it is also clear that the risks associated with the pandemic are different for different groups. This makes that appeals to solidarity based on technocratic risk calculations are only partially successful. Objective ‘risks of transmission’ may, for example, be trumped by risks of letting down people in need of help or by missing out certain opportunities in life. In th…Read more
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36Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in AutismTopoi 39 (3): 611-622. 2020.Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach …Read more
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35Autisme als meerduidig en dynamisch fenomeenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 110 (4): 421-451. 2018.Autism as a polysemic and dynamic phenomenonIn this paper we demonstrate how the dominant discourse about autism, that stresses biological explanations, has certain ethical implications. On the one hand, such discourse is exculpating. In autism’s history, genetic explanations helped removing the blame from so-called refrigerator mothers. In present-day diagnostic practice, the idea of having a biological diagnosis helps people and their parents see beyond blame and guilt. On the other hand, a si…Read more
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32Exculpation and Stigma in Tourette Syndrome: An Experimental Philosophy StudyNeuroethics 15 (1): 1-16. 2022.Purpose: There is a widespread recognition that biomedical explanations offer benefits to those diagnosed with a mental disorder. Recent research points out that such explanations may nevertheless have stigmatizing effects. In this study, this ‘mixed blessing’ account of biomedical explanations is investigated in a case of philosophical interest: Tourette Syndrome. Method: We conducted a vignette survey with 221 participants in which we first assessed quantitative attributions of blame as well a…Read more
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32The Ethics of Postponed FatherhoodInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 10 (1): 103-118. 2017.In this paper, I review some of the discussions on procreative beneficence and procreative autonomy in the context of postponed motherhood and compare the considerations to the context of advanced paternal age. In doing so, I will give an overview of the main scientific findings with regard to how older age in men affects the health of future offspring. I shall demonstrate how the discrepancy between the media coverage and policies on postponed motherhood and postponed fatherhood mistakenly sugg…Read more
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31Book review: Nel Noddings, The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (review)Ethical Perspectives. forthcoming.
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30Double Trouble: Preventive Genomic Sequencing and the Case of MinorsAmerican Journal of Bioethics 15 (7): 30-31. 2015.
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30Chromosome Screening Using Noninvasive Prenatal Testing Beyond Trisomy-21: What to Screen for and Why It MattersJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (1): 8-21. 2018.With the new and highly accurate noninvasive prenatal test, new options for screening become available. I contend that the current state of the art of NIPT is already in need of a thorough ethical investigation and that there are different points to consider before any chromosomal or subchromosomal condition is added to the screening panel of a publicly funded screening program. Moreover, the application of certain ethical principles makes the inclusion of some conditions unethical in a privatel…Read more
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29Preserving children’s fertility: two tales about children’s right to an open future and the margins of parental obligationsMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 18 (2): 253-260. 2015.The sources, extent and margins of parental obligations in taking decisions regarding their children’s medical care are subjects of ongoing debates. Balancing children’s immediate welfare with keeping their future open is a delicate task. In this paper, we briefly present two examples of situations in which parents may be confronted with the choice of whether to authorise or demand non-therapeutic interventions on their children for the purpose of fertility preservation. The first example is tha…Read more
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28The history of the concept of pain: how the experts came to be out of touch with the folkIn Richard Samuels & Daniel A. Wilkenfeld (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science, Bloomsbury. pp. 173-190. 2019.In this chapter we consider the tension between how pain researchers today typically define pains and the dominant, ordinary conception of pain. While both philosophers and pain scientists define pains as experiences, taking this to correspond with the ordinary understanding, recent empirical evidence indicates that laypeople tend to think of pains as qualities of bodily states. How did this divide come about? To answer, we sketch the historical origins of the concept of pain in Western medicine…Read more
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27A plea for an experimental philosophy of medicineTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3): 81-89. 2021.
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26Editorial: Dis/Abling Gender in Crisis TimesTijdschrift Voor Genderstudies 25 (1). 2022.The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit what many of us already knew and some of us are constantly made to feel: good health and the abilities of our bodies & minds1 are fluid and uncertain. We can only ever hold them precariously (Butler, 2004; Scully, 2014). In the end, we are all vulnerable beings. And, yet, vulnerability, perhaps especially in times of crisis, can never be fully universalised, nor is it distributed equally: the value and definition of what our bodies & minds can do, …Read more
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26Book Review: Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zolder-The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (review)Ethical Perspectives 16 (4): 398-399. 2009.
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25To Transfer or Not to Transfer: The Case of Comprehensive Chromosome Screening of the In Vitro Embryo (review)Health Care Analysis 23 (2): 197-206. 2015.The screening of in vitro embryos resulting from in vitro fertilization treatment for chromosomal abnormalities has as a primary aim to help patients achieve a successful pregnancy. Most IVF centers will not transfer aneuploid embryos, as they have an enhanced risk of leading to implantation failure and miscarriage. However, some aneuploidies, such as trisomy-21, can lead to viable pregnancies and to children with a variable health prognosis, and some prospective parents may request transfer of …Read more
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23Whole Genome Sequencing of Children’s DNA for Research: Points to ConsiderJournal of Clinical Research and Bioethics 2 (7). 2011.This report is grounded in several social concepts: First, the primary goal of genetic testing should be to promote the well-being of the child. Second, the recognition that children are part of a network of family relationships supports an approach to potential conflicts that is not adversarial but, rather, emphasizes a deliberative process that seeks to promote the child's well-being within this context. Third, as children grow through successive stages of cognitive and moral development, pare…Read more
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23Advances in experimental philosophy of medicine (edited book)Bloomsbury Academic. 2023.This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, socio…Read more
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22Philosophy of Science Can Prevent ManslaughterJournal of Bioethical Inquiry 19 (4): 537-543. 2022.In September 2020, the surgeon Paulo Macchiarini, who used stem cell technology to enable the transplants of artificial and donor trachea, was charged with aggravated assault in Sweden. In this comment, we argue that the Ethics Council of the Karolinska Institute should have considered issues from philosophy of science when they were brought to their attention, rather than dismiss them as irrelevant to research ethics. We demonstrate how conceptual issues of a philosophy-of-science-kind about cl…Read more
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19Book Review: Grant Gillett-Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics (review)Ethical Perspectives 16 (3): 397. 2009.
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19Cognitive Enhancement: Toward a Rational Public ConsensusAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4): 263-265. 2020.
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18Kinderen krijgen in apocalyptische tijdenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 111 (4): 621-641. 2019.Procreation in the face of an apocalypse: Some ethical considerations In the field of procreation ethics both Kantian and consequentialist arguments have been developed purporting to show the moral impermissibility of having (more than two) children. A survey of the most important arguments leaves us wondering whether one could derive general obligations or prohibitions from abstract principles and apply them to deeply personal decisions about whether or not to have children (and how many). At t…Read more
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18Ethics is everywhere: Human Geography, Bioethics and the value of interdisciplinary collaborationBioethics 37 (7): 615-616. 2023.
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KU LeuvenResearcher
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Leuven, Belgium