Pieter Bonte

Coercion, Incarceration, and Chemical Castration: An Argument From Autonomy

In several jurisdictions, sex offenders may be offered chemical castration as an alternative to further incarceration. In some, agreement to chemical castration may be made a formal condition of parole or release. In others, refusal to undergo chemical castration can increase the likelihood of further incarceration though no formal link is made between the two. Offering chemical castration as an alternative to further incarceration is often said to be partially coercive, thus rendering the offender’s consent invalid. The dominant response to this objection has been to argue that any coercion present in such cases is compatible with valid consent. In this article, we take a different tack, arguing that, even if consent would not be valid, offering chemical castration will often be supported by the very considerations that underpin concerns about consent: considerations of autonomy. This is because offering chemical castration will often increase the offender’s autonomy, both at the time the offer is made and in the future.

Towards a social and context-aware multi-sensor fall detection and risk assessment platform

For elderly people fall incidents are life-changing events that lead to degradation or even loss of autonomy. Current fall detection systems are not integrated and often associated with undetected falls and/or false alarms. In this paper, a social- and context-aware multi-sensor platform is presented, which integrates information gathered by a plethora of fall detection systems and sensors at the home of the elderly, by using a cloud-based solution, making use of an ontology. Within the ontology, both static and dynamic information is captured to model the situation of a specific patient and his/her (in)formal caregivers. This integrated contextual information allows to automatically and continuously assess the fall risk of the elderly, to more accurately detect falls and identify false alarms and to automatically notify the appropriate caregiver, e.g., based on location or their current task. The main advantage of the proposed platform is that multiple fall detection systems and sensors can be integrated, as they can be easily plugged in, this can be done based on the specific needs of the patient. The combination of several systems and sensors leads to a more reliable system, with better accuracy. The proof of concept was tested with the use of the visualizer, which enables a better way to analyze the data flow within the back-end and with the use of the portable testbed, which is equipped with several different sensors.

Is there a moral obligation to conceive children under the best possible conditions? A preliminary framework for identifying the preconception responsibilities of potential parents.

BackgroundThe preventative paradigm of preconception care is receiving increasing attention, yet its boundaries remain vague in three respects: temporally; agentially; and instrumentally. Crucially, it remains unclear just who is to be considered a ‘potential parent’, how soon they should take up preconception responsibilities, and how weighty their responsibilities should be.DiscussionIn this paper, we argue that a normal potential parent of reasonable prudence has a moral duty to adequately optimize the conditions under which she or his reproductive partner will conceive, though a proportionality calculus calls for toleration of several forms of preconception behaviour that are non-ideal from the perspective of reproductive risk. We distinguish between five categories of potential parents to which different duties of preconception care should be ascribed. This framework is advanced to assign preconception care responsibilities with more precision than is often done in the current debate on preconception care. We conclude by applying our theoretical framework to three types of preconception care interventions: consumption of folic acid; keeping one’s weight under control; and engaging in preconception genetic screening. Our analysis shows that the literature on preconception care often glosses over crucial distinctions between different types of potential parents and uses a notion of preconception beneficence that may be overly demanding. Nevertheless, preconception moral duties will often be weighty and reluctance to accept such duties on account of the burden they impose do not warrant preconception insouciance.SummaryTo avoid misplaced responsibility ascriptions in the growing field of preconception care, distinctions must be made between different types of potential parents to whom different degrees of preconception responsibility apply. We present such a preliminary framework and bring it to bear on the cases of folic acid consumption, obesity and genetic testing.

SENSdesc: Connect Sensor Queries and Context

Modern developments confront us with an ever increasing amount of streaming data: different sensors in environments like hospitals or factories communicate their measurements to other applications. Having this data at disposal faces us with a new challenge: the data needs to be integrated to existing frameworks. As the availability of sensors can rapidly change, these need to be flexible enough to easily incorporate new systems without having to be explicitly configured. Semantic Web applications offer a solution for that enabling computers to ‘understand’ data. But for them the pure amount of data and different possible queries which can be performed on it can form an obstacle. This paper tackles this problem: we present a formalism to describe stream queries in the ontology context in which they might become relevant. These descriptions enable us to automatically decide based on the actual setting and the problem to be solved which and how sensors should be monitored further. This helps us to limit the streaming data taken into account for reasoning tasks and make stream reasoning more performant. We illustrate our approach on a health-care use case where different sensors are used to measure data on patients and their surrounding in a hospital.

Introduction: human nature as a promising concept to make sense of the spirit of sport

Should sport revolve around natural talent or should athletes be allowed to enhance their bodies with biotech? As many commentators have noted, it seems that the contemporary doping debate is in urgent need of more in-depth investigations of these issues. Ultimately, the most vexing problems posed by doping do not seem to be about health or fair play – although doping clearly does pose momentous problems on those fronts too. But if some forms of doping would be made available in an adequately healthy and fair way, they would probably still cause much concern – concern about doping itself would persist, no matter how much its circumstances would be tidied up.

Dignified Doping: Truly Unthinkable? An Existentialist Critique of ‘Talentocracy’ in Sports

As the activity of sporting has become deeply ensnared in cultures of hyper-competition and industries of shallow spectacle, many are unable or unwilling to consider how in healed sports (sub) cultures, doping may be done in dignity. To investigate this, I suspend all circumstantial issues surrounding doping, to see whether doping, in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, would remain problematic. Analysing the required origins, processes and outcomes of a proper athletic accomplishment, I conclude that doping need not be debasing, mechanistic nor dehumanizing. The deep integration of artifice in one’s body may even signify a courageous acceptance of the human condition of being ‘foundationlessly free and ruthlessly responsible’. As such, doping would be deeply dignified. In this light, I critique the deep attachment to natural talent in the justifications of anti-doping as attempts to sustain the comfortable but deceptive self-image of man as a creature which should follow the cues of its nature – develop its talents – to find purpose and meaning in life. Ironically, where ‘talentocrats’ cultivate natural forms, transhumanists cultivate a natural formula: evolution, thus becoming strange bedfellows in trying to connect human existence to the comforts of a ‘naturally given purpose’. To be human, however, is to be denied such an existential cradle. Intriguingly, sport is claimed both as a deceitful dreamland of soothing purposefulness and as a testimony to our troubling but true purposelessness. A truly virtuous spirit of sport should insist it is the latter.