More Training? No doubt general practitioners and mental welfare officers will play their part in coping; the fact remains that only a minority of either have had special training in the subject and must depend on their increasing experience. Some of them, and their patients alike, may suffer from their lack of training. Can we, the N.A.M.H., do anything more here? Courses have long been run, b...

Ambient Intelligence Systems are complex, knowledge providing systems. The group of intended users typically comprises both various kinds of professionals and of laymen. In this chapter we address responsibility issues associated with the use and design of AmISs. We explain the connection between knowledge and responsibility, and use that connection to show that the usage of Ambient Intelligenc...

Researchers should be made co-responsible for the wider consequences of their research focus and the application of their findings. This paper describes a meta-reflection procedure that can be used as a tool to enhance scientific responsibility and reflective practice. The point of departure is that scientific practice is situated in power relations, has direction and, consequently, power impli...

In summary, to characterize addiction as a disease is not necessarily morally incompatible with saying that addicts are responsible for yielding to it. This is admittedly a demanding approach to responsibility, but our criminal law has always set the bar pretty high. Holding addicts responsible is also strongly supported on utilitarian grounds because the threat of sanctions provides leverage t...

In previous chapters, we have discussed the ways in which we can model how responsibility can be assigned to agents and how responsibility models can facilitate discussions about the nature of responsibilities in organisations. These models document responsibilities in an organisation, provide insights into possible vulnerabilities due to responsibility misassignment and facilitate discussion a...

There are occasions in which an agent lengthens its own action through the implementation of a foreign activity for its own interests. We focus on the occasional dependence relation between a principal agent and a helper agent. In particular, we are interested in the helper’s harmful performance that has its origin in extra contractual situations e.g. factual and/or occasional situations based ...

T his year marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Whatever the historical circumstances at the time, the bombings were tragic experiences for the cities and for the many who sustained severe blast, heat, and radiation injuries. The horrifying consequences prompted efforts to control nuclear arms proliferation, an issue that still rem...

Science in the aggregate has not lived up to its promise to work for the benefit of society as a whole. This problem stems from the narrow perspectives that basic and applied researchers typically take to their work. Among the barriers to broadening those perspectives, the most tractable is the myth that the overriding purpose of science in human affairs is prediction; that such predictions are...

IAPB Standard List The IAPB Standard List provides information for eye health providers on a carefully evaluated range of eye care technologies, supplies, and training resources suitable for use in settings with limited resources. You can now register to use the new interactive, online IAPB standard list (http://IAPB.standardlist.org) which allows you to create a ‘basket’ of items that you can ...

WHAT role do a person’s opportunities to choose play in the justification of social arrangements? We need to answer this question in order to arrive at a theory of substantive responsibility, which tells us the way in which a person’s claims on others, others’ claims on her, and the quality of her situation should depend on the opportunities she has and the choices she makes. To get a handle on...