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It is generally thought that all people should have equal opportunities and their social position should not be dictated by race, sex or heritage. This ideology of meritocracy has been embraced by the Dutch and other European societies. But is this something to strive for? This provocative book has a number of renowned philosophers and sociologists look at the downside of meritocracy. They show that meritocracy runs counter to other important ideals such as solidarity, respect and democracy. - Mensen moeten gelijke kansen hebben en hun maatschappelijk positie mag niet bepaald worden door afkomst, ras of sekse. Alleen hun eigen inzet en talent mogen tellen. Dit 'meritocratische ideaal' wordt in onze samenleving breed omarmd, Maar is dit ideaal wel zo aantrekkelijk? In deze bundel, die ongetwijfeld tot veel discussie zal leiden, buigt een aantal bekende filosofen en sociologen zich over de keerzijden van dit ideaal. Evelien Tonkens, Dick Pels, Pieter Pekelharing, Mark Bovens en Tsjalling Swierstra laten zien dat het meritocratische ideaal op gespannen voet staat met andere belangrijke idealen als onderling respect, solidariteit, democratie, onderhoud en een ontspannen samenleving.

While engineering ethics usually addresses the responsibility of engineers in rare cases of whistle blowing, the authors broach the question to what extent engineers can be held responsible in normal practice. For this purpose, they define the conditions under which individuals can be imputable as they prevail in ethics and common sense. From outcomes of science and technology studies research, the authors conclude that these conditions are seldom met in modern technoscientific research practice. By examining such practice in a case study and comparing the results with perceptions of engineers on social responsibility as expressed in interviews, the authors are able to demonstrate that (1) a change in structural characteristics of this practice, such as funding rules, stimulates engineers to attune the inner politics of science to wider societal policies and concerns, and (2) it helps them to overcome the shifting of social responsibility to others as a consequence of the lack of agency they usually perceive.

By now, the laboratory tradition, crafting transportable knowledge that allows for comparison, has been amply studied. However, other knowledge traditions, notably that of the clinic, deserve further articulation. The authors contribute to this by unraveling some specificities of rehabilitation practice. How do laboratory and clinical traditions in rehabilitation relate to independence? The first seeks to quantify people's independence; the latter attends to qualitatively different ways of being independent. While measuring independence is a matter of aggregating scores on a priori established dimensions, clinical rehabilitation concerns coordinating different ways of being independent. While independence scales map a linear development in time, rehabilitation participants juggle with time, including uncertain futures in their present. In clinical practice, then, independence is neither a single, coherent, fact nor a clear-cut, stable goal. Instead, professionals as well as patients work by creatively doctoring with the large variety of elements that are relevant to daily life with long-term disabilities.

Our technological culture has an extremely dynamic character: old ways of reproducing ourselves, managing nature and keeping animals are continually replaced by new ones; norms and values with respect to our bodies, food production, health care and environmental protection are regularly being put up for discussion. This constantly confronts us with new moral problems and dilemmas. In discussion with other approaches this book argues that pragmatism, with its strong emphasis on the interaction between technology and values, gives us both procedural help and stresses the importance of living and cooperating together in tackling these problems and dilemmas. The issues in this book include the interaction of technology and ethics, the status of pragmatism, the concept of practice, and discourse ethics and deliberative democracy. It has an interactive design, with original contributions alternating with critical comments. The book is of interest for students, scholars and policymakers in the fields of bioethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, pragmatist philosophy and science and technology studies

Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies (STS). They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain "technology blindness," the most influential approaches within STS show a "normative deficit" and display an agnostic or even antagonistic attitude toward ethics. To repair the blind spots of both applied ethics and STS,the authors sketch the contours of a pragmatist approach. They will explore the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics and pay special attention to the exploration of future worlds disclosed and shaped by technology and the management of deep value conflicts inherent to a pluralist society.