My main professional background is in the earth & life sciences, but I now also explore topics in the broad area of bioethics. That's about equality, fairness, justice, diversity and inclusivity. It's also about people's biases, the associated otherization and everything that this can result in. That includes poverty, homelessness and poor health, shabby looks and shrinking personal bubbles, exposure to chemical and noise pollution and lots more. It's also about law, philosophy, neuroscience, technology, forensic psychology, politics and public policy (governance). Diversity and inclusivity are much bigger challenges than I used to believe. I for example now think that society's lack of genuine acceptance and support for people whose brains work very differently can among other things result in destructive behaviours for which the forensic psychology terminology is sadistic stalking or resentful stalking. My own experiences on the receiving end of something like this caused me to start looking into personality disorders and neurodiversity. That is how I stumbled upon bioethics. Seeing the massive inequality and deep poverty in England had a lot to do with it too. No, I don't have all the answers. Do you?
Human rights – diversity – neurodiversity – equality – inclusivity – discrimination – otherisation – speciesism – planet – consumerism – bioethics sensu lato
In both lectures, Tasioulas addresses the fact that scientists and others tend to see ethics as opposed to their interests.
This is something that I have discussed a few times too, that ethics are often seen as something pesky that gets in the way of science while ethics considerations actually support science and are an integral part of it. Ethics should not be seen as an afterthought, as a box on a checklist, but as something that has the ability to enhance science and increase its value.
Second Van Hasselt lecture, Delft University of Technology, 2016: Big data and human rights
The actual lecture starts at 21:45.
Who bears the duties? 36:00
(This is about the distinction between legal rights and moral rights or what I call human rights versus humans’ rights. Do only states bear duties or also corporations and each and all of us?)
In places like Amsterdam – as opposed to for example the Sittard-Geleen area where the housing shortage is much lower or Schouwen-Duivenland where it’s negligible – it takes about TWO DECADES to find affordable housing.
Twenty years.
This housing shortage in Holland’s central area results in a great deal of homelessness, by definition. People may find alternative ways to house themselves but they still need the blasted “inschrijving” (registration) to be allowed to exist here officially. Rules have been loosened in recent years, by which I mean that municipalities can now allow you to use their office address, but in order to register without having an official residence you have to have ties.
(I have worked and lived in Amsterdam for most of my adult life in the Netherlands, with the exception of a mere few months elsewhere, but I don’t qualify. I have much stronger ties to England than to the Netherlands. I don’t quite qualify as a Dutch citizen any longer in all sorts of ways; I’m not sure how to explain, qualify or phrase it. And that’s apart from things such as that the Dutch are sometimes offended by for example my English understatements because they don’t want to know about my Englishness as I speak Dutch.)
Support for homeless people generally is not free in the Netherlands and often very limited. Just like for women who flee from domestic violence, it usually requires being registered as living locally (having local ties), which requires having a local home address.
(This latter mechanism also often pushes homeless people out of the mandatory Dutch healthcare system because it has the same address requirement. Are you surprised to learn that there’s a Dutch concept called “address fraud”?)
People are frequently forced to run all over town all day long, to several different locations to apply for access for 1 night, to be sent to a specific location for the night, to be sent to a different location in the morning, then back to the other location if they want to apply for another night and then perhaps back to the other location or to a different location if they want a meal.
Typing this is exhausting enough. Doing it is on another level.
All the while, it may be freezing cold and pouring and while these tired souls walk all over town, they get soaked and so do their belongings. Remember: They have no place where they can dry their things.
Support websites sometimes use language in which the organizations seek to distance themselves from the people they are supposed to serve. They speak of “these people” and create invisible walls between us and them.
Utterly deplorable.
It makes some people write or decide that it’s better to die under a bridge than to rest in a temporary bed. Not because they want to be miserable and die but because they want to live and be seen as human.
Poverty and homelessness can happen to anyone. It’s not unheard of after a divorce and it also happens to people returning from abroad to densely populated home countries with housing shortages and an abundance of regulatory restrictions. Those are just two examples.
Yet I reckon that common responses when a well-educated person claims to have no income are the following.
Has a drugs or alcohol problem or shopping addiction.
May be developing dementia and doesn’t know where her money is or how much comes in when.
Is trying to scam the system and is hiding income or savings.
The simple reality is that more often than not, yes, they have almost no income.
Increasingly often, people fall victim to a costly scam. Don’t judge them. It even happens to savvy investors!
Don’t use suspicion or negative expectations as your standard approach. Assume that people are telling the truth. The adage “Trust but verify” is a very good guideline for all sorts of situations.
This varies wildly… I know that, so I decided to risk erring on the cautious side in my new environment.
I’ve been overdoing it a little bit, I’m learning from observation of people using laptops around me, but I would rather overdo it a little bit than really piss people off who are usually working pretty hard and on their feet all day.
I do set myself a limit. On days when I don’t use public transport, I can afford to be slightly more generous if I want to.
I am so glad that I am where I am now. A much healthier environment. I definitely made the right decision. I feel so much more… human? The opposite of otherized. Singled out. That’s really what I needed.
I’m basically just like everyone else now. I’ve always liked having a nice mix of people around me. I don’t like being surrounded by people who are all poor or all rich or all miserable or all of the same nationality and ethnicity. Particularly being surrounded by misery affects me. You somehow end up absorbing that misery. That’s possibly or partly because I want to solve it. And I rarely can.
The weather is supposed to be miserable tomorrow. I may stay in. I have plans for Wednesday and I am so looking forward to that!
Well, okay, I didn’t dwell on what it means to be human, but I did address everything else. I’ve noticed before that she and I seem to think similarly. A warm homecoming for me. 🙏🏻
Today’s Hastings Center’s email
Changing Life as We Know It
Event will explore the role of genetic modification and our understanding of humanity.
Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky will be a keynote speaker for the FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) Symposium, a public event on November 16 in Manhattan. What are the ethical issues surrounding genetic modification? How do we define – and regulate – the line between benefit and harm? In what ways do these possibilities force us to make decisions about the value of life and impose judgments about what makes a life worth living – or even what is considered “normal”?
There appears to have been some deepfake porn video with my face in it too, at the end of 2022, but there was no massive harassment and I mostly shrugged about it. I’ve been through a lot worse within the past 16 years. This was around the time that possession of deepfake porn also became a crime in England, in addition to creation.
I just read that, in connection with Liam Payne’s demise.
But it’s okay to do this to another human being in Europe, in the UK and in the US?
Letting refugees drown comes to mind first.
The phrase “crimes of abandonment” makes me wonder how it’s defined, though.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had a legal duty of care for each other’s wellbeing? In real life, most humans act like predators – and it’s getting worse, certainly now that Trump has been reelected. We are living in scary times.
I’m utterly exhausted today. Physically. I also had that a week ago or so. There must be a virus going around. That’s the kind of thing that can cause this.
This is enabled by the profound otherization of the residents by the rest of society.
I’ve recently “escaped” from what I have started referring to as a penal colony for people aged 55 and over. Many of its tenants there have physical impairments; most were much older than I.
They aren’t like naughty five-year-olds, but that is how they often get treated, and/or as if they all have dementia.
Most older adults do not have dementia.
(Off the top of my head, I think it’s 1 in 8 if you are over 60. It means that 7 out of 8 people my age do not have dementia at all.)
I mistakenly thought that this was essentially a regular apartment, just with an age restriction. There are similar restrictions, for example for families with children for some housing. I was number 1 on a waiting list of 2600. I needed a place to live (and the other place that I looked at had a major issue that would take an indeterminate amount of time to resolve).
The level of contempt that I was exposed to on account of living there – my address – still brings tears to my eyes. This came mostly from staff at the real estate outfit that owns and operates the building and staff at the local municipality.
When staff belittles and scolds tenants as a matter of habit, and tenants are supposed to keep their mouths shut at all times, this opens up the way for criminals to move in.
Who’s going to believe anyone who dares speak up? Who dares speak up if residents are taught to keep their mouths shut? What use is speaking up if anything you say gets ascribed to your “dementia” anyway?
The other day, as I was walking through Amsterdam Central Station, I was behind a young woman, probably a law student, who was discussing what sounded like a classroom exercise in which she had needed to take on the role of prosecutor. I think the case concerned a hijacking. Of what, I don’t know. The point was about distinguishing between the law and morality.
I’d have liked to go for a coffee and hear a little more about it.
She sounded like she was really into it. Eager to learn and explore. I like that. The world needs that.
She may not have been a law (or perhaps political philosophy) student at all. No idea. I didn’t get to see her face.
It may sound strange but few things are so nourishing and encouraging and motivating as seeing students grow. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to have my own research group. I loved that aspect of it, including sometimes helping someone over a little hump. I can’t quite find the words to describe this, but I find it wonderful. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by wonderful, motivated people. Maybe it’s that, but I think it’s more than that.
On 24 October 2024, Tom Whipple wrote an article in the Times about whether you need to be attractive to get ahead. (Yes, but this isn’t news.)
Old is ugly too.
Many people assume that I think and do all other work with my skin and that my wrinkles impede my functioning.
Now I understand where all those “plastic” faces come from. Scary.
(The good thing? It ain’t much fun anyway, interacting with people who have nothing but contempt for you. So, good riddance to anyone who doesn’t want to work with me on account of my wrinkles.)
I have had several weird experiences. You get the feeling that something is off or even that someone is pulling a prank on you. Because sometimes you can see that things aren’t adding up. But you don’t quite know what to make of it.
In comments on YouTube and other online venues but also in real life, people often talk about being alone.
For most of us, the only time when we are not alone is until some point after our birth. Anything else is usually merely an illusion. Spouses and children, friends and siblings can commit suicide (such as my brother in law), get killed in a crime or accident, divorce you, succumb to a disease or simply disappear.
None of this is permanent. Nothing is, except aloneness.
I became first aware of the illusion that the lack of aloneness is when I was working on my master’s. To test this, I hid from all my contacts for a while. Nobody noticed. Nobody called to ask where I was, how I was doing.
A little later, I got admonished while on geological fieldwork in Spain for not letting the others know where I was going. Just in case something happened. A few days later, I accidentally walked off my map and “got lost”. When I finally made it to the village where I was staying, after 10 pm, I saw people with flashlights.
I was touched! They had been right! People were looking for me!
Except, they were not.
The people with flashlights were strangers.
Nobody had noticed that I hadn’t gotten back yet.
That’s life.
It’s an illusion to think different.
(The hackers in my equipment are too often just messing with me and abusive by definition, because hacking is such a massive boundary violation. They may create a dependency, an illusion of company or support, but it’s based on a massive power imbalance and on the anonymity of the hacker. The hacker knows who you are. You don’t know who he is. You have no idea of his intentions or his level of information or intelligence. But there isn’t anyone else. That’s the big tragedy at the moment.)
For those of you who don’t know this, I recently ended up in the middle of an actual care home. I suppose that this was very hard for me also because I watched my mother suffer for years and then die when I was 14. But that’s an aside.
The huge housing shortage in the Netherlands made me click on a place for which I was placed first on a waiting list of 2600 people in the housing allocation system. I clicked on another one – max 2 allowed – and visited that too, in Amsterdam, but it was being renovated and should have been ready. It wasn’t. I needed a place to live. (How bad could it be?) My apartment was supposed to be a pretty normal apartment. At least, that’s what I expected. It wasn’t. It was anything but. Things were pretty bad from the beginning and were getting worse and worse and worse. It’s not the people who live there who are the problem. The other wing on my floor had dementia patients, but they were not the problem either.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted my life back. I want my life back.
A man and a woman are living somewhere nice. They are both elderly. He’s fine mentally, but weak physically. She needs a lot more care.
Their physician recommends that they move into a place where care is easier to access. Their daughter asks if they can move into a home in her town because she can’t do much right now because of the distance, she says.
The two listen and move.
Now they are stuck in an apartment (and place) that they don’t like at all and their daughter still doesn’t visit. They can’t get out any longer.
I could and I did, and I really needed to, to save myself. Easy? Hell no, but all sorts of things were really getting out of hand, as you may have noticed.
This story is part of the misery that I was seeing, or sensing.
The creation of ghettos for older adults often constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for being of a certain age. Look up the definition of the word “ghetto”.
I had to get out. I really had to.
I so wish that I had never moved in there and that I had insisted on waiting for a home in Amsterdam. (It would not have come with all the craziness that goes with living in such a place, apparently.) I’d felt I had no choice. I guess I was wrong again.
(When will I ever learn?)
I was increasingly shuddering with misery and revolt, but doing my best to keep it at bay. I had to get out. I really had to get out. Staying would have been a big mistake.
So there’s that.
I’m so pleased that I got out. Things are already looking up, and even though I am physically tired, I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I was about to wither away and die there. I deserve better.
I’d already had fifteen years that were a lot like this behind me. Ugh. No more!
I know a woman who just like me had a small business for approximately as many years. We’ve cooperated a few times, I know her from a network for women in science and technology. She has a PhD.
She too is getting some kind of benefits now. She’s in the Netherlands, but not in Purmerend. She has a very well managed bipolar disorder. She gets to talk about what she would like to do in terms of work. In a normal relaxed atmosphere.
No people are climbing onto her balcony either.
No people are suggesting that she has dementia or whatever. She’s slightly older than I am. She’s divorced these days, living on her own.
I feel HOUNDED and HARASSED, by contrast. HATED. I’ve never before felt this hated. Not even in Portsmouth.
I think that that’s because this is supposed to be my home country. This is where I should be able to expect to be treated like an equal. To discover that my civil rights get violated just as easily here is very painful.
The Dutch say that they want to treat people equally in equal circumstances. This last bit holds the clue to inequality.
I want to feel safe again. I have not been able/allowed to feel safe in a long time, I think. The first two or three weeks after I moved from Southampton to Portsmouth, perhaps. That was at the start of 2009.
Besides that I’ve been dealing with completely bonkers and often pretty aggressive and extremely biased behaviors from people at the local municipality (civic offices, council), there is also a trend here to use EXPLOSIVES when people aren’t getting along.
Portsmouth is pretty tame by comparison. It’s hard to believe that I really just wrote that.*
