Freedom and impact, designer babies and ethics

What were you like as a student?

It was an incredibly fun time. I made friends for life and looked around very broadly - both in friendships and intellectually. I grew up in a village near Utrecht and studied in Leiden. The transition to living as a student is huge. I wanted to discover the other side of life, but at the same time, I always studied very seriously. I started studying theology, and in the second year, I added studying political science. It started as hobby but quickly got out of hand and lead to an interest in modern political philosophy; at the time I read a lot of Arendt, Nussbaum and Rawls. To supplement my programmes, I took various courses, including broad perspectives on migration, which was then taught by Ahmed Aboutaleb. At the time he was not yet a mayor at the, but the director of an advisory institute. Because of my broad interest, I was active in different departments and faculties. In the end, I studied for over five years and finished theology and political science.

You mostly talk about your studies in political science, but what about theology?

I thought the first two years of studying theology were incredibly hard and a lot of searching. At a frantic pace, you must learn Hebrew to be able to read the original sources of the Old Testament. Distracted as I was with other things, I had a difficult time. In addition, you also had to know Greek and Latin - these languages suited me, since I had these subjects in high school. As a theologian, you learn to look critically at fundamental questions. How can I reconstruct what happened during the period that the Bible speaks about? Which parts are written on historical grounds, and which are stories and myths that have been passed down from generation to generation for centuries?

Being able to quickly extract information from large texts and being able to look at them in different ways is something I learned there. I have a lot of use for those skills now as an executive, but it also eases my work in the Senate. There were also courses of whose necessity I doubted. Courses, that in my opinion were too strongly based on Christianity. I had a much broader interest. I took courses in ethics, philosophy, intellectual history, those were marvelous!

There is a video on Twitter in which you confront the FVD chairman, Paul Frentrop, in the Senate with Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative freedom. You describe negative freedom as the right to be left alone and positive freedom as freedom in affiliation.

This was in a debate in the Senate, where Frentrop was making a total caricature of liberalism and, in my view, was proclaiming a "freedom to rot" as the only interpretation of liberalism, whereas that is a very minimalist view of negative freedom. Indeed, I wanted to make that distinction at the time. During an interruption, of course, you are limited in the length of interruptions - and you can say a lot more about it, but there are many different accents in liberalism, and I wanted to point that out.

...Berlin's statement is often linked to a political context, but I was wondering if you also apply that distinction when it comes to academic freedom?

Yes, in fact, I was involved in last year's KNAW advisory report on academic freedom. We tried to clarify what academic freedom means, what responsibilities it entails and what obligations. Incidentally, in my work, I have also become captivated by Joel Feinberg who divides freedom into four categories. He shows that it is possible to order the concept of freedom.

How do the conversations surrounding social impact and academic freedom relate to one another? And is social relevance the effect of a scientist’s intention, or is academic freedom rather a necessary condition for producing meaningful research which may, later, be qualified as impact?

Let's state up front that there are no absolute freedoms, this also applies to science. We are a public institution and are funded as such. Part of our legitimacy comes from contributing to society. In education, demonstrating impact is a no-brainer; we are delivering students in the prime of their lives, who will then have added value in the job market. 

I would like to emphasize that not all research has to have an immediate impact. There are, for example in philosophy more fundamental analytical pursuits where the insights are more indirectly relevant. We remain a university - we do not do consultancy work. On the other hand, I do think it is right that our research programmes are influenced by society. We are facing a transformative time with many challenges. When we then pose the big question - why is there a university, it's not just self-development, it also needs to relate to our unique knowledge insights, that can contribute to problem-solving.

This is the discussion we are having right now, in our transition to an impact university. What is impact, how do you measure it, what indicators are relevant? In addition, it is also normatively charged, what I think is important - for example, that more people should enjoy self-determination - does not have to be so for everyone.

During the Dies, you asked the audience how they feel about technology. Neutral, reason for fear or optimism. How do you feel about it yourself?

I frequently ask that in lectures, because we are the only tools with which we can judge that. There are those who feel almost naturally alienated by new technology, a kind of Heideggerian intuition. I am more of a tech-optimist. In the context of health care, technology can be emancipating. Think about people who cannot have kids, here modern reproductive and genetic technology can help, but also AI may bring capacity and computing power with which we can overcome problems. It's good to be aware of your initial position, in my case to keep in mind the negative side effects of technology and to continue the conversation with people who have less optimistic views.

Can we intervene in the constant flow of innovations of technology? Are we not always reacting after the facts? 

I am personally fond of the post-phenomenological theory of mediation. Technology is never neutral, it mediates. In doing so, both things you mention are true. We design technologies and instill values in the design, at the same time this itself has an impact on how we communicate, perceive, and what we consider important.

During the colloquium, I will also try to show that an important part of my research is about awareness of the role that technology plays. What does technology do between people? It is not something that is outside of us. There is an ongoing interaction between technology and humans. So, when we are aware of that, we can engage in co-designing. There are choices that are made in programming algorithms that are not technical, but ethical. Everyone suffers from implicit normativity. What I want to do with Ethics Parallel Research is not just a study, but an activity. We sat in laboratories and brainstormed quite often - in that sense, we are a design team.

As an introduction and welcome to the Erasmus School of Philosophy, you will host a lecture on March 16. Can you tell us a little more about what you will be lecturing on?

Medical ethics, as we know it today, is a modern science. It developed under the influence of emerging technologies in the 1960s. Many people left philosophy and theology to engage in the developments in that field. Traditionally, the field was conceived of as a purely philosophical pursuit, where after the so-called empirical turn, novel methodologies could make their appearance. Nowadays, you see a further influence in bioethics from fields like the philosophy of technology, resulting in more participative methods of research. Together with my research group at the University of Utrecht, we have tried to bring that together under what we’ve coined Ethical Parallel Research. It’s an approach for the early ethical evaluation of biomedical technologies, such as genome editing. On March 16, I will address the question of how we can conduct new technologies from an early stage with a diverse toolkit of ethics.