Welcome at my personal website. The site is primarily meant to bring together projects, thoughts and products that I'm working on, on my own but more often together with others. Almost all on ethical issues in public health, or at least on practical philosophy. I will use both Dutch and English language, whatever suits best. Contributing to responsible policy making and the quality of argument in public debate on health issues is in my view an important goal of doing applied philosophy in public health. For my contributions, see the public debate section on this site.
Social media:
Bluesky : https://bsky.app/profile/marcelverweij.bsky.social
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcelverweij/
10 apr 2024
Vaccinatiebeleid is misschien wel meer dan ooit een onderwerp dat sterke meningsverschillen oproept. Het boek Inducing Immunity? ontwikkelt in dat gepolariseerde debat een normatieve visie op hoe een democratische overheid kan komen tot een betrouwbaar beleid. Om te voorkomen dat sommige nuances in de discussie al bij voorbaat sneuvelen, schreef ik een korte Q&A.
5 apr 2024
I'm really happy to see the book in print that Roland an I have been working on for years: Inducing Immunity? Justifying Immunization Policies in Times of Vaccine Hesitancy. The book has been published in the Basic Bioethics series of MITpress, edited by Art Caplan. Art and everyone at MITpress have been fantastic in their swift examination, review procedure and decisions. They also offered to make the book open access available!
13 jan 2024
On January 11, I had the honor to present my inaugural lecture as professor of Philosophical Ethics at Utrecht University. One of the reasons why this is such a honor is that it is the chair of my dissertation supervisor Robert Heeger, one of the founding editors of the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Robert Heeger has been key in the Netherlands to promote research on how practical ethics can reinforce ethical theory and vice versa. I can only hope to contribute a bit to that idea. In my talk I offer a critical assessment of the role of thought experiments in practical ethics (owing much to James Wilson's splendid work (see here), I offer examples of how practicing ethics might 'work' and end with dreaming about developing a radically pluralistic moral theory which could also bring different branches of 'applied' ethics together.On this page you'll find the official text and a quick-and-dirty autimated translation to English.
18 mrt 2023
Very proud to be appointed, from April 1st, 2023, professor of philosophical ethics at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. More specifically I will be based at the Ethics Institute - an organization I have worked for (and its predecessor already twice before. Compared to 2013, when I left Utrecht to take up the position of professor of philosophy at Wageningen University, the ethics group has changed and expanded significantly. It is a great honor to work together with scholars like Ingrid Robeyns, Joel Anderson, Hanno Sauer, Rutger Claassen, Jos Philips, Frans Brom, Lucie White, and many, many more.
28 sep 2022
Our book Inducing Immunity: Justifying Immunization Policies in Times of Vaccine Hesitancy, co-authored with Roland Pierik, will be published early 2024 by MIT Press, in Arthur Caplan’s Basic Bioethics series.
19 aug 2021
Should the Dutch government keep Covid19-tests that are meant for getting access to mass-events etc free of charge, or not, when everyone has had the opportunity to be vaccinated? Or should unvaccinated people pay for tests to participate in public life, like in Germany and Italy?
11 dec 2020
A few weeks ago, Roland Pierik and I wrote an op-ed, published in the Volkskrant, in which we argue for the possibility to give more freedom in lockdown, to persons who have been vaccinated. The argument builds on an earlier paper we wrote and a draft chapter of our book-in-progress. The key idea is two-fold. On the one hand, public health measures should not be more restrictive than necessary, and (assuming that being vaccinated prevents transmission of the virus to others) there seems to be little reason to uphold lockdown/quarantine restrictions also for vaccinated individuals – in other words: such restrictions should be lifted for them. On the other hand we argue that such a policy – fewer lockdown/quarantine measures for vaccinated – should not be considered as a form of compulsory immunization as many appear to think. Recently I was invited to make a short presentation for a webinar of the Swedish National Medical Ethics Council in which I present the arguments. The presentation is published on YouYube.
31 mrt 2020
For the Wageningen University "Spotlights" section I was filmed and interviewed on ethical issues in relation to the Corona crisis. Follow this link for the complete interview.
21 mrt 2020
Op het moment dat de corona-epidemie in ziekenhuizen in het zuiden van Nederland al tot bijna onhoudbare situaties ging leiden, publiceerde de Volkskrant een opiniestuk van Roland Pierik en mij. We stellen daarin dat nú maatschappelijke discussie en besluitvorming nodig is over de vraag hoe schaarse intensive-care bedden met beademingsapparatuur moeten worden verdeeld, als de behoefte daaraan straks het aanbod verre overschrijdt.
14 mrt 2020
Het komende nummer van Cahiers Biowetenschappen en Maatschappij is gewijd aan infectieziektebestrijding: "Help ik ben besmet!". Dat was in de eerste plaats ter gelegenheid van het 15-jarig bestaan van het RIVM Centrum voor Infectieziektebestrijding. Met de Covid19 pandemie is dit nummer actueler dan de redactie tot had kunnen denken. Ik schreef een stukje over emotie versus verstand, en het belang van solidaritei
25 sep 2019
Dit stukje was ik alweer vergeten, ik vond het terug in de bundel Houdt het dan nooit op? die werd uitgebracht ter gelegenheid van het 10-jarig bestaan van het Centrum voor Infectieziektebestrijding. Ik ben aan het woord, maar de tekst is het resultaat van een interview door Nicole Beaujean (N.B. tekst & advies, www.enbee.nl,) in 2015.
12 jul 2019
De vaccinatiegraad is in het afgelopen decennium geleidelijk gedaald en het vertrouwen van ouders in het vaccinatieprogramma, de instituties daarachter (RIVM) en zelfs de jeugdarts lijkt niet meer vanzelfsprekend. Deze ontwikkeling past binnen de individualiseringstrend van de laatste decennia: meer en meer ervaren ouders dat zij zelf verantwoordelijkheid dragen voor belangrijke keuzen voor hun kinderen, en niet zonder meer de gebaande paden binnen hun eigen zuil, gemeente of familiekring kunnen volgen. Er is voor hen ook veel meer informatie over vaccinatie beschikbaar, via de overheid, massamedia, kennissen, sociale media. Die informatie is zeker niet eensluidend en soms zelfs pertinent onwaar. Het is dan ook niet vreemd dat ouders onzeker worden over hun beslissing over vaccineren.