NB

The classification of my publications on the next page is a mess (up to 2006). For years I have tried to get this rectified but for some inscrutable reason that seems impossible.

CV

I studied theology at the Theological University of Kampen (MA 1972) and philosophy at the University of Leiden (MA 1973) and spend a year (1973-1974) as a recognized student at the University of Oxford.

From 1974 to 2008 I have been employed by the University of Amsterdam. I began working as a student advisor in what was then the Central Interfaculty (Faculty of Philosophy), and worked from 1976 to 1989 as an assistant professor in that same faculty, section Ethics. During that time I also taught introductory courses in moral and political philosophy in the Subfaculty of Education. I received my PhD in philosophy in 1985 from the University of Amsterdam. My supervisor was Trudy  van Asperen.

From 1989 to 1995 I worked as an associate professor in the Faculties of Philosophy and Law, teaching moral, political and legal philosophy, and from 1991 on also as an extraordinary professor of medical ethics in the Faculty of Medicine, on behalf of the Dutch Humanistic Alliance (Socrates-Foundation). From 1995 I held the chair of moral philosophy in what would soon become the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of the Humanities, together with Frans Jacobs. I retired in 2008.

In 2002 I published "Mutual Expectations: a Conventionalist Theory of Law". The theory of the relation between ethics and the law that the book provides situates itself in the modern natural law tradition from Grotius to Hume. It can be downloaded from this page.

I spend two sabbathicals as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Wassenaar, 1987-1988 and 2000-2001. I was a visiting scholar at the Departments of Philosophy of the University of Toronto (1997) and New York University (2004).

In 1992 I took the initiative of founding the Netherlands School for Research in Practical Philosophy, together with Robert Heeger and Bert Musschenga, and functioned as the school's first director  from 1993-1998. From 2006-2010 I was president of the school's board. I have been the editor of the Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy of Kluwer, later Springer.

In 1995-1996 I participated in the work of the committee which prepared the fusion of the Faculties of Arts, Philosophy and Theology into the new Faculty of Humanities, and I was a member of the board of ASCA from 1997-2005. In 2008 I presided the QANU review committee that assessed most of the degree (MA and BA) programs in philosophy of the Dutch universities.

I served as a member of the Regional Review Committee for Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide Zuidholland/Zeeland from 1998-2010, and am still active as a member of the Health Council, consultation group for Health Ethics and Health Law.

Research interests

Present concerns

At present (2015) I am mainly working on a book in the domain of medical ethics. The provisional title is: When Death is Welcome. The ethics of decisions about the end of life.

The book will bring together two sets of topics that are normally discussed separately:

(a) Fundamental philosophical issues concerning death and killing: the value of survival (the Epicurean challenge), the right to life (does it protect one's interest in life or one's freedom to make choices as regards one's life?), impersonal aspects of the prohibition on killing (the "sanctity of life" and "human dignity"), the moral relevance of the distinction between killing and letting die, and between death as an intended and a merely foreseen effect of one'a action.

(b) Personal and medical decisions about the end of life. Personal decisions: is there a right to suicide, should it be illegal to assist a person in ending her life? Medical decisions:   abstaining from life-prolonging treatment, using palliative medicine with possible life-shortening effects, palliative sedation (combined with abstaining from the provision of food and drink), physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Some chapters will also deal with special categories of people: severely handicapped newborns, elderly people with a death-wish who have no fatal disease, demented patients with an advance directive.

The idea is to argue for defensible positions on all these issues that cohere with each other.

By now (1/2015) I have written drafts of most chapters, and published some of them as separate papers. The papers marked by an asterix (*) can be downloaded from this page.

*Death Wishes of the Elderly. In: Wim Pinxten, Maartje Schermer eds. Healthcare Ethics and Policy in an (Anti-)Aging Society. 2013

*The Authority of Advance Directives. In: Yvonne Denier, Chris Gastmans, Antoon Vandevelde eds. Justice, Luck and Responsibility in Health Care. 2013

Comforting the parents by administering neuromuscular blockers to the dying child.  A conflict between ethics and law? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 31 (2014), 91-103.

Sedation until Death: are the requirements laid down in the guidelines too restrictive? Forthcoming in: Kennnedy Institute of Ethics Journal

‘Gij zult niet doodslaan’, Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 101 (2009), 164-195. Focus-artikel, met commentaren van Inez de Beaufort, Marcus Düwell, John Griffiths, Martin van Hees, Liesbet Vanhaute, Henri Wijsbek, 196-217. Met repliek, 218-225.

See also:

*The Regulation of Euthanasia: How successful is the Dutch System? In:  Stuart J. Youngner, Gerrit K. Kimsma eds. Physician-Assisted Death in Perspective: Assessing the Dutch Experience. 2012

*Is Human Dignity the Ground of Human Rights? In: Marcus Düwell, Jens Braarvig, Roger Brownsword, Dietmar Mieth eds.The  Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014, 200-207. 

The Slippery Slope Argument. In: Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse eds., Companion to Bioethicsm sec. ed. 2009.

*De morele grondslagen van het gezondheidsrecht: de erfenis van Leenen. In: Ethiek en Gezondheidsrecht, Preadvies voor de Vereniging voor Gezondheidsrecht. Den Haag: SDU uitgevers 2014, p. 13-89. (Hfdst. 3 over  de menselijke waardigheid, hfdst. 4 over de analyse van grondrechten, hfdst. 5 over hulp van intimi bij zelfdoding.) 

In recent years ethical aspects of organ donation and transplantation have been a second focus of interest. In 2008 I published a report: Farewell to Non-commitment: decision systems for organ donation from an ethical viewpoint. See: www.ceg.nl/uploads/publicaties/Engelse_versie_Afscheid_van_de_vrijblijvendheid.pdf

Since then I have developed several chapters of this report into separate papers.

See also:

*Critical review of: T.M. Wilkinson, Ethics and the Acquisition of Organs; Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Ethics of Transplants: Why Careless Thought Costs Lives. Medical Law Review 2013

On March 12 2015 I will deliver the Hoffenberg lecture, When are you dead enough to be a donor? (Joint British Transplantation Society and Nederlandse Transplantatie Vereniging Congress in Bournemouth) The lecture will discuss whether any feasible protocol for the determination of death on circulatory criteria could possibly respect the Dead Donor Rule.

Unfinished business

If possible I hope in the future to complete the following papers on other subjects:

-Can existence be either a harm or a benefit?

-The principle of fairness as a basis of political obligations

-The proper game-theoretical analysis of Hobbes' description of the state of nature

-*Did Hobbes subscribe to egoism? 

-Desert as a principle of distributive justice

-Satiable and insatiable theories of distributive justice

-Do people have ownership rights to their pretax income? (See: *The reality of ownership)

-*Humanitarian intervention and the limits of sovereignty

-The incompatibility of legal conventionalism and legal positivism

-Why virtue ethics cannot be a complete ethical theory. (See: *Deugd en plicht)

• Farewell

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