The discussion about freedom of speech often revolves around our legal right to express ourselves. This is understandable and necessary, especially in times when Capitols are being stormed and politicians, Dutch ones anyway, ask the crowd whether they’d like more or fewer Moroccans and smiling complacently when the crowd chants…

Early summer. We all sit around the table, my family and I. My brother-in-law is chatting away, passes me the newspaper and points out that A.L. Snijders has died. I say “Oh dear, oh no”, which I never actually say, but I don’t know how else to express that his…

A lecture on COVID-19 tragies, on code black triage and fair innings, doing ‘fast philosophy’, on what distinguishes a tragedy from a F*up, on how a pandemic can force clinicians and applied ethicists to have harmful thoughts, how that in itself may be inevitable hence tragic; on Wolf, Wittgenstein, and Williams. Video recording of the lecture (given on June 16th). Slides. Please get in touch if you have any comments 🙏

(Spoiler: no.) In the Netherlands, there’s now a triage script, formulated by medical/IC specialists consulted by medical ethicists, about how to make decisions in “code black” cases: that is, cases in which there are no medical grounds on which to make priority choices, and clinicians or triage teams would have…

By Fleur Jongepier (Assistant Professor of (Digital) Ethics at Radboud University Nijmegen) and Karin Jongsma (Assistant Professor of Bioethics at University Medical Center Utrecht). This article is loosely based on a Dutch article which previously appeared on the philosophy weblog Bij Nader Inzien. Translation by Radboud Recharge and the authors…

Or: why you should read Eleanor Gordon-Smith’s new book — NB. This is a (mostly) Google-translated — hence here and there somewhat clumsily translated — version of a Dutch review I wrote that appeared in the newspaper Trouw. Stop met redelijk zijn: Het leven is geen debat Eleanor Gordon-Smith (vertaling Huub Stegeman) Uitgeverij Ten Have, 192 blz., …