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15Preferences of Individual Mental Health Service Users Are Essential in Determining the Least Restrictive Type of RestraintAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 15 (1): 19-22. 2024.Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose that the use of a chemical restraint that affects only a particular conscious state is ethically permissible if, and only if, (1) it is the least restrictive...
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48According to the “discrimination argument,” it would be discriminatory and hence impermissible to categorically exclude people with mental illness (PMI) from access to assisted suicide (AS) if AS is accessible to people with somatic illnesses. In objection to this, it could be argued that excluding PMI is not discriminatory, but rather based on their inability to meet certain eligibility criteria for AS. Which criteria are deemed necessary depends on the approach taken to justifying AS. In this …Read more
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19This study explores how qualitative health researchers navigate the demands of medical research ethics committees in Germany where qualitative research is subject to approval only when it is conducted in medical contexts. We present the results of a grounded theory study to investigate qualitative health researchers’ experiences with procedural ethics and the strategies they adopt to navigate its demands. Our analysis revealed six dimensions of experience and three strategies adopted by research…Read more
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13Research ethics in practice: An analysis of ethical issues encountered in qualitative health research with mental health service users and relativesMedicine, Health Care and Philosophy 26 (4): 517-527. 2023.The ethics review of qualitative health research poses various challenges that are due to a mismatch between the current practice of ethics review and the nature of qualitative methodology. The process of obtaining ethics approval for a study by a research ethics committee before the start of a research study has been described as “procedural ethics” and the identification and handling of ethical issues by researchers during the research process as “ethics in practice.” While some authors disput…Read more
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20When Treatment Pressures Become Coercive: A Context-Sensitive Model of Informal Coercion in Mental HealthcareAmerican Journal of Bioethics 1-13. forthcoming.Treatment pressures are communicative strategies that mental health professionals use to influence the decision-making of mental health service users and improve their adherence to recommended treatment. Szmukler and Appelbaum describe a spectrum of treatment pressures, which encompasses persuasion, interpersonal leverage, offers and threats, arguing that only a particular type of threat amounts to informal coercion. We contend that this account of informal coercion is insufficiently sensitive t…Read more
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20Opportunities and challenges of self-binding directives: an interview study with mental health service users and professionals in the NetherlandsBMC Medical Ethics 24 (1): 1-11. 2023.Background Self-binding directives (SBDs) are psychiatric advance directives that include the possibility for service users to consent in advance to compulsory care in future mental health crises. Legal provisions for SBDs exist in the Netherlands since 2008 and were updated in 2020. While ethicists and legal scholars have identified several benefits and risks of SBDs, few data on stakeholder perspectives on SBDs are available. Aims The aim of the study was to identify opportunities and challeng…Read more
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17Soll die UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention in der psychiatrischen Praxis umgesetzt werden? Eine aktuelle Debatte in GroßbritannienEthik in der Medizin 33 (1): 113-116. 2021.
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63Kant’s Reply to the Consequence ArgumentInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (2): 135-158. 2021.In this paper, I show that Kant’s solution to the third antinomy is a reply sui generis to the consequence argument. If sound, the consequence argument yields that we are not morally responsible for our actions because our actions are not up to us. After expounding the modal version of the consequence argument advanced by Peter van Inwagen, I show that Kant accepts a key inference rule of the argument as well as a requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. Kant must therefore reject…Read more
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27Equality in the Informed Consent Process: Competence to Consent, Substitute Decision-Making, and Discrimination of Persons with Mental DisordersJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (1): 108-136. 2021.According to what we propose to call “the competence model,” competence is a necessary condition for valid informed consent. If a person is not competent to make a treatment decision, the decision must be made by a substitute decision-maker on her behalf. Recent reports of various United Nations human rights bodies claim that article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities involves a wholesale rejection of this model, regardless of whether the model is based on a status, …Read more
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472Ought implies can, asymmetrical freedom, and the practical irrelevance of transcendental freedomEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 25-42. 2021.In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blamewort…Read more
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17The understanding of well-being in German guardianship law – an analysis on the occasion of the term’s removal from the reformed lawEthik in der Medizin 34 (4): 515-528. 2022.Definition of the problem The reform of German guardianship law coming into force in 2023 will remove the term “well-being” from the law. This is intended to emphasise that the legal guardian should be guided by the subjective wishes of the person rather than by an objective understanding of well-being. This article analyses the understanding of well-being underlying the reformed guardianship law in comparison to common conceptions of well-being in philosophy and medical ethics, aiming to promot…Read more
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18The understanding of well-being in German guardianship law – an analysis on the occasion of the term’s removal from the reformed lawEthik in der Medizin 34 (4): 515-528. 2022.Definition of the problem The reform of German guardianship law coming into force in 2023 will remove the term “well-being” from the law. This is intended to emphasise that the legal guardian should be guided by the subjective wishes of the person rather than by an objective understanding of well-being. This article analyses the understanding of well-being underlying the reformed guardianship law in comparison to common conceptions of well-being in philosophy and medical ethics, aiming to promot…Read more
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37An Autonomy-Based Approach to Justifying Physician-Assisted Death: A Recent Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional CourtAmerican Journal of Bioethics 22 (2): 71-73. 2022.Florijn’s analysis of the Dutch Supreme Court ruling on the Albert Heringa case demonstrates that the Dutch approach to justifying physician-assisted death is based primarily on the physician...
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16Combining Supported Decision-Making with Competence Assessment: A Way to Protect Persons with Impaired Decision-Making Capacity against Undue InfluenceAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (11): 45-47. 2021.In a compelling article, Peterson, Karlawish and Largent argue that supported decision-making is preferable to substitute decision-making for people with dynamic impairments. We fully...
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45Blaming friendsPhilosophical Studies 179 (5): 1545-1562. 2022.The aim of this paper is to shed light on the complex relations between friendship and blame. In the first part, I show that to be friends is to have certain evaluative, emotional and behavioral dispositions toward each other, and distinguish between two kinds of norms of friendship, namely friendship-based obligations and friendship-constituting rules. Friendship-based obligations tag actions of friends as obligatory, permissible or wrong, whereas friendship-constituting rules specify condition…Read more
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75Kant is a soft deterministEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 79-95. 2022.The aim of this paper is to situate Kant in the debate on free will. Whereas Kantians often assume that Kant's views on free will cannot be brought under any of the headings of this debate, contemporary free will theorists commonly assume that Kant is an incompatibilist of the libertarian type. I argue against both assumptions: Kant can and should be characterized as a compatibilist and more specifically as a soft determinist. After removing some persistent misconceptions about Kant's position i…Read more
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46Moral Worth and Moral ResponsibilityIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 2165-2172. 2018.
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61A Kantian Quality of Will Account of ExcusesInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-27. forthcoming.It is a common picture that Kant is committed to an uncompromising account of moral responsibility that leaves no room for excuses. I argue that this picture is mistaken. More specifically, I reconstruct a Kantian quality of will account of excuses according to which an agent is excused for performing a morally wrong (or omitting a morally obligatory) action if and only if the action (or omission) does not manifest a lack of good will on the part of the agent. Based on this Kantian quality of wi…Read more
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113Kantian constructivism and the Reinhold–Sidgwick objectionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 364-379. 2020.In this paper, I give a reconstruction of the so‐called Reinhold–Sidgwick objection and show that Korsgaard‐style Kantian constructivists are committed to two key premises of the underlying argument. According to the Reinhold–Sidgwick objection, the Kantian conception of autonomy entails the absurd conclusion that no one is ever morally responsible for a morally wrong action. My reconstruction of the underlying argument reveals that the objection depends on a third premise, which says that freed…Read more
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32Feelings and Desires Are Not the Same as Treatment Preferences: Why the Health Care Decision-Making Framework Applied to Adolescents Should Not Be Applied to Persons in the Minimally Conscious StateAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (1): 69-71. 2018.
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270Advance Research Directives in Germany: A Proposal for a Disclosure StandardGeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry 31 (2): 77-86. 2018.The fourth amendment to the German Medicinal Products Act (Arzneimittelgesetz) states that nontherapeutic research in incompetent populations is permissible under the condition that potential research participants expressly declare their wish to participate in scientific research in an advance research directive. This article explores the implementation of advance research directives in Germany against the background of the international legal and ethical framework for biomedical research. In pa…Read more
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438Adverse consequences of article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for persons with mental disabilities and an alternative way forwardJournal of Medical Ethics 44 (4): 226-233. 2018.It is widely accepted among medical ethicists that competence is a necessary condition for informed consent. In this view, if a patient is incompetent to make a particular treatment decision, the decision must be based on an advance directive or made by a substitute decision-maker on behalf of the patient. We call this the competence model. According to a recent report of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Dis…Read more
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142Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A Kantian EssayPhilosophia 44 (1): 205-225. 2016.In this paper, I give a Kantian answer to the question whether and why it would be inappropriate to blame people suffering from mental disorders that fall within the schizophrenia spectrum. I answer this question by reconstructing Kant’s account of mental disorder, in particular his explanation of psychotic symptoms. Kant explains these symptoms in terms of various types of cognitive impairment. I show that this explanation is plausible and discuss Kant’s claim that the unifying feature of the s…Read more
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30Geen verwijt zonder fout: een kantiaans-strawsoniaanse visie op morele uitkomstenverantwoordelijkheidAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 105 (4): 249-253. 2013.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.
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Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Kantian Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Moral Responsibility |
Biomedical Ethics |
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Applied Ethics |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Responsibility |
Normative Ethics |
Kantian Ethics |
Biomedical Ethics |