This paper maps the different levels of the problem of healthcare resource allocation — micro, macro and international — with reference to three cases. It is argued that two standard approaches to the issue of distributive justice in healthcare, the QALY (quality-adjusted life year) approach and the social-contract approach developed by Norman Daniels, are fundamentally unsatisfactory for reasons identified by Alasdair MacIntyre. Although the virtue theory articulated by MacIntyre and others has been influential in many areas of healthcare ethics, (...) there seems to have been relatively little discussion of the difference it might make to the problems of resource allocation. The potential of such an approach is explored in the later sections of the paper. Two apparently promising ways of bringing virtue ethics to bear on resource allocation are examined and found wanting to greater or lesser extents. Firstly, Beauchamp and Childress’s account of the virtues as a supplement to their ‘Four Principles’ is found to have little or no substantive contribution to make to this issue. Secondly, the ‘liberal communitarian’ system of resource allocation proposed by Ezekiel Emanuel, while a considerable improvement on the account of Beauchamp and Childress, remains problematic in some respects. An alternative Christian account is developed by identifying significant influences that might shape the ‘political prudence’ which would enable Christian communities to form sound judgments about distributive justice in healthcare. The paper concludes with some remarks about the relationship between this tradition-constituted account and the wider public sphere of policy-making and practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is “Greater Need” for Health Care? Longevity Should the Health‐care System Maximize QALYs? QALYs and Equality The Evidence Base for QALY‐informed Decisions Choosing Between Claimants Allocation and Liberation Moral Evaluation of Persons Natural Justice Utility to Society Numbers of Dependents Age and Life Expectancy Fairness and Quality of Life Conclusion References.

:Robert Nozick allegedly introduced his liberal theory of private ownership as an objection to theories of end-state justice. Nevertheless, we show that, in a stylized framework for the allocation of goods in joint ventures, both approaches can be seen as complementary. More precisely, in such a context, self-ownership followed by voluntary transfer can lead to end-state fairness. Furthermore, under a certain solidarity condition, the only way to achieve end-state fairness, following Nozick’s procedure, is to endorse an egalitarian rule for (...) the initial assignment of rights. (shrink)

Deftly quilting themes of Latin American and feminist liberation theologies with those of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, Alastair V. Campbell displays our rich interconnectedness and our moral responsibilities to one another. Suggesting that many American citizens are oppressed by our current health-care system, he contends that prior to questions of health-care allocation are questions of what we mean as a society by the term health--and how that term is inextricably linked to personal and social (...) freedom and liberation. In the forceful final chapter of the book, Campbell articulates ethical standards for just health-care delivery in the United States--standards that, above all, take account of deep religious faith and concern for one's neighbor. Health as Liberation is a critical analysis of justice and modern health care, and of a society's moral obligations to its citizens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Catholic Social Teaching and the Allocation of Scarce ResourcesJohn Langan S.J. (bio)I shall approach the issue of justice in the allocation of scarce resources from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, as developed over the last century. This teaching is found primarily in the social encyclicals issued by popes from Leo XIII (1878–1903) to John Paul II (1978- ), but also in the pastoral letters of the (...) various bishops’ conferences, especially in the United States and in Latin America. These documents, which enjoy a high standing in Catholic teaching but which are not taken as binding in all their particulars, form part of a tradition of moral and social theorizing that a contemporary American would regard as “communitarian.” On social questions, this tradition also has shown itself to be historicist in that it is capable of modifying itself in significant ways in response to changing political and economic situations. It normally approaches issues from a universalist perspective, though it has shifted from a preoccupation with the concerns of the industrial societies of Europe to an advocacy of much of the reform agenda of the Third World.Rooted in classical and biblical sources and modified in the course of the last [End Page 401] century to include a principled acceptance of religious freedom, of human rights, and of democratic political institutions, the Catholic social tradition proposes a number of ideas that can serve as the basis for significant criticism of currently dominant liberal modes of organizing and interpreting advanced industrial societies. These ideas do not form a countertheory to liberalism so much as they indicate ways in which a religious organization that includes both hierarchical and egalitarian elements in its structure and that has both moral commitments and practical responsibilities with regard to health care can draw on its intellectual resources to develop alternative strategies for the reform of health care.I shall survey six ideas that figure prominently in Catholic social teaching and that are relevant to the allocation of scare resources in American health care. Space constraints require that I present them in a very condensed fashion, without tracing the complex development they have undergone in the internal Catholic debate or subjecting them to much criticism.First, Catholic social teaching, especially the great encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem In Terris (PT 1963), affirms the full range of human rights recognized in such modern documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949). In addition to the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights added to the original U.S. Constitution (1791), the Universal Declaration includes rights “to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services” (PT 11). Catholic social teaching has not committed itself to one particular way of institutionalizing these rights, but it effectively endorses the comprehensive West European welfare states that the Christian Democratic political parties helped to construct in the period after 1945.Second, Catholic social teaching has accorded a central organizing role to the notion of the common good, the realization of which “is the whole reason for the existence of civil authorities” (PT 54). The common good, however, is not to be understood as identical with the interest or the power of the state; rather, it “embraces the sum total of those conditions of social living whereby men are enabled to achieve their own integral perfection more fully and more easily” (PT 58; quoting Mater et Magistra). John XXIII is particularly anxious to affirm that the common good cannot be construed so as to exclude some groups or to violate the rights of individuals and that it must include both physical and spiritual goods (PT 55–61). The notion of the common good has both an inherent attractiveness and a vagueness that cries out for specification and clarification. But in the contemporary situation it serves to remind us that “individual citizens and intermediate groups are obliged to make their specific contributions to the common welfare” (PT 53).Third, while an insistence on the primacy of the common good and on the [End Page 402... (shrink)

What should and what should not be for sale in a society? This is the central question in the Moral Limits of Markets debate, which is conducted by a group of business ethicists and liberal egalitarian political theorists. These MLM theorists, which we will dub ‘market moralists,’ all put forward a specific version of the argument that while the market is well suited to allocate some categories of goods and services, it is undesirable for the allocation of other such (...) categories. We argue that the current MLM debate is too much framed in terms of a market/non-market dichotomy. Moreover, authors tend to distinguish insufficiently between values such as freedom, equality, and efficiency, and allocation methods such as the market, the queue, and rationing. We introduce a new conceptual scheme consisting of societal domains, values, and allocation methods to provide a better structure for this debate. The argument is illustrated from the education and healthcare domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Just Share: Justice and Fairness in Resource Allocation*Pat Milmoe Mccarrick (bio) and Martina Darragh (bio)Each of us has some basic sense of what the words “fair” or “just” or “fairness” or “justice” mean. Each of us probably also has an idea of what is “fair” in health care. The attempt by the state of Oregon in the mid-1980s to quantify this notion made a previously private exercise (...) a public one. This transition has been chronicled in the bioethics literature that focuses on resource allocation. These works examine both theories of justice and concepts of “health”; the fair distribution of health resources has been of continuing interest since the beginning of bioethics in the 1960s. Early writing on justice includes authors Tom L. Beauchamp, Robert H. Blank, James F. Childress, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Paul T. Menzel, Paul Ramsey, and Robert M. Veatch (VII).During the 1980s, bioethicists such as Daniel Callahan and Norman Daniels proposed thinking of health care decisions not as moments of personal crisis but as choices that span a lifetime, possibly involving tradeoffs in other areas of one’s life, e.g., education. The Oregon experience added another dimension to the discussion. The initial rank-ordering of health services by cost produced a skewed list—for example, surgery for life-threatening conditions ranked below minor, elective procedures. For the project to make sense, the ranking algorithm could not be based on cost alone, but rather on a combination of costs and benefits both to individuals and to the community—“concatenations of individual and group goods” (I, Jecker and Jonsen 1995). Various metaphors have been used in the literature to facilitate discussion of this shift from individual to individual/community trade-offs: medical services as a “commons” (I, Asch 1995, Jecker and Jonsen 1995, Michels 1994); resource allocation as a “lifeboat” (I, Campbell 1995; III, Kaveny 1994); medical care as “shares” in a community health (III, Nelson 1992, Ford and Kissick 1995; II, Anderson 1993); and rationing as traveling through the desert with one jug of water for two people (a story from the Halachah literature) (I, Zoloth-Dorfman 1995). [End Page 81]Such metaphors do not promote any one “theory of justice” but rather draw from the work of a number of bioethicists as well as from theological, sociological, economic, and business literature. The five major conceptions of justice that are referenced most frequently are: “(1) a libertarian conception, which takes liberty to be the ultimate political ideal; (2) a socialist conception, which takes equality to be the ultimate political ideal; (3) a welfare liberal conception, which takes contractual fairness or maximal utility to be the ultimate political ideal; (4) a communitarian conception, which takes the common good to be the ultimate political ideal; and (5) a feminist conception, which takes a gender-free society to be the ultimate political ideal” (I, Sterba 1995).The use of new metaphors also draws on expanded concepts of “health.” “As health care is currently practiced, the most powerful symbols for public and professional alike are those that promise the defeat of time” (I, Campbell 1995). When medical care is perceived as an unrelated series of individual cures, the fact that health care resources are finite cannot be addressed.Reflections concerning the difficulties in limiting the use of health care resources have an ancient lineage and reveal a tight bond with the obsession to postpone death at all costs. Plato in Book 3 of the Republic recognizes the quandary of infinite expectations and finite resources that characterizes the challenge of health care choices. (I, Engelhardt 1996)The proliferation of expensive medical technologies and the loss of autonomy by health care professionals further complicates perceptions of the crucial issues at hand. Some have said that Americans place too much emphasis on individualism to address these issues. Daniels et al. believe that this is too pessimistic a view and that the American commitment to protecting equal opportunity for all provides a firm basis for developing a public consensus on what is fair in health care (III, Daniels, Light, and Caplan 1996). Finally, several authors suggest that the nature of all four principles of medical ethics, not justice alone, must be... (shrink)

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of (...) Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

Healthcare counts as a morally relevant good whose distribution should neither be left to the free market nor be simply imposed by governmental decisions without further justification. This problem is particularly prevalent in the current boom of anti-ageing medicine. While the public demand for medical interventions which promise a longer, healthier and more active and attractive life has been increasing, public healthcare systems usually do not cover these products and services, thus leaving their allocation to the mechanisms of supply (...) and demand on the free market. This situation raises the question on which basis the underlying preferences for and claims to a longer, healthier life should be evaluated. What makes anti-ageing medicine eligible for public funding? In this article, we discuss the role of anti-ageing medicine with regard to the scope and limits of public healthcare. We will first briefly sketch the basic problem of justifying a particular healthcare scheme within the framework of a modern liberal democracy, focusing on the challenge anti-ageing interventions pose in this regard. In the next section, we will present and discuss three possible solutions to the problem, essentialistic, transcendental, and procedural strategies of defining the scope of public healthcare. We will suggest a procedural solution adopting essentialistic and transcendental elements and discuss its theoretical and practical implications with regard to anti-ageing medicine. (shrink)

Recent theoretical and empirical studies tend to highlight the prominent role that time plays in society, in a context of changing rhythms of work, the ageing of the European population and changing family structures. In this contribution I analyse the way time is used for leisure in Romania and situate it in the European context. I highlight the time use for creative and leisure activities in respect with gender, following the hypothesis that leisure is an important dimension of gender gap. (...) It was used factor analysis to observe the differences existing in time use for leisure in respect with occupational status, marital status and education. (shrink)

All our previous political experience, and especially, of course, the experience of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, offers little hope that democracy can coexist with the centralized allocation of economic resources. Indeed, simple observation suggests that a market economy with private property rights is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the existence of a democratic political regime. And this accords fully with the political theory of liberalism, which emphasizes that private rights, both civil and economic, be protected and (...) secure. At the same time, our previous experience also indicates that market economies are more successful than centrally planned economies not only in producing, but also in distributing, both private and collective goods. This economic experienee is supported by neoclassical economic theory, which treats clearly defined and secure rights to private property as essential to a market economy. (shrink)

Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology. Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve their reasoning by relying (...) on Statistical Prediction Rules. They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

BackgroundIn 2009, Dr. Paolo Zamboni proposed chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) as a possible cause of multiple sclerosis (MS). Although his theory and the associated treatment (“liberation therapy”) received little more than passing interest in the international scientific and medical communities, his ideas became the source of tremendous public and political tension in Canada. The story moved rapidly from mainstream media to social networking sites. CCSVI and liberation therapy swiftly garnered support among patients and triggered remarkable and relentless (...) advocacy efforts. Policy makers have responded in a variety of ways to the public’s call for action.DiscussionWe present three different perspectives on this evolving story, that of a health journalist who played a key role in the media coverage of this issue, that of a health law and policy scholar who has closely observed the unfolding public policy developments across the country, and that of a medical ethicist who sits on an expert panel convened by the MS Society of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to assess the evidence as it emerges.SummaryThis story raises important questions about resource allocation and priority setting in scientific research and science policy. The growing power of social media represents a new level of citizen engagement and advocacy, and emphasizes the importance of open debate about the basis on which such policy choices are made. It also highlights the different ways evidence may be understood, valued and utilized by various stakeholders and further emphasizes calls to improve science communication so as to support balanced and informed decision-making. (shrink)

Liberalism and pluralism are seen as being in tension in liberal Western nation-states, while multiculturalism, as a policy of resource allocation to minority groups, has been the standard response to pluralization. This limits the pluralist potential of a constitutional liberalism. The fusion of a liberal theory of autonomous individuality with a pluralist theory of multiple belonging has to look beyond multicultural policy in order to enhance liberal commitments to citizens through pluralist provisions. An analysis of the Indian Constitution's Fundamental (...) Rights, as a normative document, shows that the citizen can be understood as an autonomous individual given identity through belonging to a plurality of groups. Consequently, rights are taken to accrue to all citizens equally as autonomous individuals, but also by virtue of their belonging to groups, with special provisions made available for vulnerable ones. Rights for a plurality of vulnerable groups should not be seen as illiberal additions but integral to the conception of liberalism. If such a view of citizenship were to be integrated into the liberal constitutions of irreversibly pluralizing Western democracies, then a pluralistic constitutional patriotism could be fostered amongst members of vulnerable groups, while demonstrating that standard liberal rights guarantee equal citizenship for all. (shrink)

The language of rights is increasingly used to regulate access to health care and allocation of resources in the health care field. The right to health has been grounded on different theories of justice. Scholars within the liberal tradition have grounded the right to health care on Rawls's two principles of justice. Thus, the right to health care has been justified as being one of the basic liberties, as enabling equality of opportunity, or as being justified by the maximin (...) principle. In this article, Filc analyzes—from a radical egalitarian standpoint—the limitations of the different attempts to ground an equal right to health on Rawls's theory of justice and offers a first approximation to a radical egalitarian formulation of the right to health. (shrink)

This book by one of America's preeminent legal theorists is concerned with the conflict between the goals of justice and economic efficiency in the allocation of risk, especially risk pertaining to safety. The author approaches his subject from the premise that the market is central to liberal political, moral, and legal theory. In the first part of the book, he rejects traditional "rational choice" liberalism in favor of the view that the market operates as a rational way of fostering (...) stable relationships and institutions within communities of individuals with broadly divergent conceptions of the good. However, markets are needed most where they are most difficult to create and sustain, and one way to understand contract law in liberal legal theory, according to Professor Coleman, is as an institution designed to reduce uncertainty and thereby make markets possible. Another target of this book is the prevalent view that tort law helps rectify market failures when transaction costs are too high to permit contracting. The author argues instead that tort law should be understood as a way of rectifying wrongful losses not inefficient exchanges. (shrink)

The debate over the host of moral issues that genetic enhancement technology (GET) raises has been significant. One argument that has been advanced to impugn its moral legitimacy is the ‘unfair advantage argument’ (UAA), which states: allowing access to GET to be determined by socio-economic status would lead to unjust outcomes, namely, create a genetic caste system, and with it the exacerbation and perpetuation of existing socio-economic inequalities. Fritz Allhoff has recently objected to the argument, the kernel of which is (...) that it conflates the use of the technology with its distribution. GET, he argues, would generate unjust outcomes only if it is distributed according to principles of an unjust pattern of distribution; for if we can determine what constitutes a ‘just’ distributive scheme, then the technology can be allocated according to the principles of that scheme. In this paper I argue the following cluster of related claims: (1) both UAA and Allhoff's proposed distributive schemes ignore the importance of non-genetic factors in the development of an individual's characteristics and capacities; (2) if we accept the view that it is good to prevent unjust outcomes that arise because some have exclusive access to GET, then we have to accept wide-ranging distributive schemes; (3) by tracking genetic and non-genetic factors wide-ranging schemes do violate in some sense the widely shared value of neutrality in liberal democracies. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that stability is one of the enabling conditions for epistocratic arrangements to function well and justify their claim right to rule. Against this backdrop, I demonstrate that advocates of strategies to allocate exclusive decision-making power to knowledgeable citizens fail to demonstrate that in a context marked by the fact of pluralism, liberal epistocracies will be stable. They could argue that liberal epistocracies will be stable because epistocratic arrangements are better equipped than democratic decision-making bodies to (...) produce outcomes that approximate the common good. They could argue that liberal epistocracies will be stable because there is a shared meritocratic set of values and ideas. Furthermore, they could opt for two standard liberal strategies, such as overlapping consensus and modus vivendi. Yet, in all cases, the argument for the stability of liberal epistocracies is not persuasive. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Moral Duty to Assist Others in Their Health Care Health Care Should Be Provided by the Government The Duty to Provide Truly Universal Health Care Rejecting the Liberal Model.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Principles and Theory in BioethicsPat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)The following citations were selected from BIOETHICSLINE, the online database prepared at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics for the National Library of Medicine's MEDLARS system. Searching the keywords autonomy, beneficence, casuistry, justice, and virtues, as well as the text word principlism produced more than 400 citations. Only the citations concerned with theory and principle in the practice of bioethics are included here—e.g., (...) works about justice in resource allocation have been deleted.Arkes, Hadley V. When Bungling Practice Is Joined to Absurd Theory: Doctors, Philosophers, and the Right to Die. In Set No Limits: A Rebuttal to Daniel Callahan's Proposal to Limit Health Care for the Elderly, ed. Robert L. Barry and Gerard V. Bradley, pp. 31-44. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.Arnason, Vilhjalmur. Towards Authentic Conversations: Authenticity in the Patient-Professional Relationship. Theoretical Medicine 15 (3): 227-42, September 1994.Arras, John D. Getting Down to Cases: The Revival of Casuistry in Bioethics. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16 (1): 29-51, February 1991.Arras, John D. Principles and Particularity: The Role of Cases in Bioethics. Indiana Law Journal 69 (4): 983-1014, Fall 1994.Beauchamp, Tom L. Principles and Other Emerging Paradigms in Bioethics. Indiana Law Journal 69 (4): 955-71, Fall 1994.Beauchamp, Tom L. The Principles Approach. Hastings Center Report 23 (6): S9, November-December 1993.Beauchamp, Tom L., and Childress, [End Page 279] James F. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 752 p.Beauchamp, Tom L., and Walters, LeRoy. Ethical Theory and Bioethics. In their Contemporary Issues in Bioethics. 4th ed., pp. 1-38. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994.Beldecos, Athena, and Arnold, Robert M. Gathering Information and Casuistic Analysis. [Commentary]. Journal of Clinical Ethics 4 (3): 241-45, Fall 1993.Bole, Thomas J. The Rhetoric of Rights and Justice in Health Care. In Rights to Health Care, ed. Thomas J. Bole and William B. Bondeson, pp. 1-19. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991.Broome, John. Fairness Versus Doing the Most Good. [Commentary]. Hastings Center Report 24 (4): 36-39, July-August 1994.Campbell, Courtney S. Gifts and Caring Duties in Medicine. In Duties to Others, ed. Courtney S. Campbell and B. Andrew Lustig, pp. 181-97. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994.Carson, Ronald A.; Callahan, Sidney; Ross, Judith Wilson; and May, William F. Spirit, Emotion, and Meaning: The Many Voices of Bioethics. Hastings Center Report 24 (3): 26-27, May-June 1994.Charlesworth, Max. Bioethics in a Liberal Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 172 p.Cherbas, Peter. Paradigms and Our Shrinking Bioethics. Indiana Law Journal 69 (4): 1105-13, Fall 1994.Childress, James F. Ethical Theories, Principles, and Casuistry in Bioethics: An Interpretation and Defense of Principlism. In Religious Methods and Resources in Bioethics, ed. Paul F. Camenisch, pp. 181-201. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994.Childress, James F., and Fletcher, John C. Individualism and Community: The Contested Terrain of Respect for Autonomy. Hastings Center Report 24 (3): 34-35, May-June 1994.Clouser, K. Danner, and Gert, Bernard. A Critique of Principlism. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15 (2): 219-36, April 1990.Devettere, Raymond J. Clinical Ethics and Happiness. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 18 (1): 71-89, February 1993.DeGrazia, David. Moving Forward in Bioethical Theory: Theories, Cases, and Specified Principlism. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 17 (5): 511-39, October 1992.Donnelly, William J. From Principles to Principals: The New Direction in Medical Ethics. [Commentary]. Theoretical Medicine 15 (2): 141-48, June 1994.Downie, Robin. Health Care Ethics and Casuistry. [Editorial]. Journal of Medical Ethics 18 (2): 61-62, 66, June 1992. [End Page 280]DuBose, Edwin R.; Hamel, Ronald P.; and O'Connell, Laurence J., eds. A Matter of Principles? Ferment in U.S. Bioethics. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994. 381 p.Fox, Renée C. The Entry of U.S. Bioethics into the 1990s: A Sociological Analysis, pp. 21-71.Gudorf, Christine E. A Feminist Critique of Biomedical Principlism, pp.164-81.Campbell, Courtney S. Principlism and Religion: The Law and the Prophets, pp. 182-208.Charon, Rita. Narrative Contributions to Medical Ethics: Recognition, Formulation, Interpretation, and Validation... (shrink)

The allocation of self-determination rights to minority groups is a highly charged issue around the world, but the difficulties are particularly acute in the case of indigenous peoples within the white settler states. While liberal multiculturalism offers a 'solution' to this 'problem of diversity' through a system of differentiated citizenship rights, this comes only at the expense of excluding dissenting voices from the intercultural dialogue. Through an engagement with the multi-faceted critique of liberal multiculturalism advanced by Native American political (...) theory, the limits of the recognition paradigm are identified, and the possibilities offered by a reconstructed Proudhonian federalism are described. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of literature that engages both Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach, little has been done to explore what these two traditions of thought might offer to a reassessment of the project of global democracy promotion. This essay brings Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach into conversation for this purpose. What emerges is a framework for thinking about and engaging in what the author calls democratic democracy promotion (DDP). DDP is based on a broadened conception (...) of democracy and avoids a dogmatic commitment to the promotion of Western liberal democracy; it takes a needs-based approach to the allocation of externally driven democracy assistance; and it prioritizes education initiatives as central components of democracy promotion. Refashioned as such, democracy promotion has the potential to bring about more participatory democratic processes, a more inclusive global democracy, and a critical and caring mass of global democrats. (shrink)

As part of a special issue on the intersection between bioethics and political philosophy, I argue that strong intuitions about how the state ought to allocate healthcare are incompatible with quite influential autonomy-centric and neutral strains of liberal political theory. Specifically, I maintain that it is uncontroversial that we should routinely distribute medical treatments in public hospitals in ways that have little to no bearing on patients’ ability to pursue a wide array of ends and further that we cannot easily (...) avoid making judgments of which ways of life are good (or bad) when making such distributions. These intuitions tell against the principles that the state in general should aim merely to protect individuals’ rights to choose their own ways of life and should not take sides on which lives are good (or bad) when adopting policy or law. I show that this tension, which has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature, manifests in at least three types of healthcare decisions, viz., which types of treatments should be offered to patients, how to prioritize among types of treatments, and who should receive a certain type of treatment. I do not prescribe how to resolve the tension, that is, whether to reject autonomy-centric and neutral forms of liberalism or revise judgments about how public medical facilities should allocate healthcare, but instead establish the point that one must choose between them. (shrink)

Much recent work exploring a liberal theory of equality focuses on the questions of distributive justice and is thus relevant to a narrow range of legal questions. Equality, Responsibility, and the Law redresses this imbalance, reserving a single final chapter to questions of resource allocation and spending the other seven chapters on questions of equality relating to tort and crime. The book addresses a huge set of questions and—like some of the best work in philosophy—it gives the same answer (...) to all of them at an abstract level. It thus provides a coherent interpretive scheme for some of the most vexed terrain in the philosophy of law. The aim is to provide a way of looking at questions of responsibility in relation to both civil and criminal law and then explore the implications of this theory for the distribution of scarce resources. This is a Herculean task—and it is useful to think of the author as playing the role of a Dworkinian judge attempting to find a theory that gives integrity to the legal systems of Britain and North America. The dust jacket’s emphasis on legal luck hits an important theme of the book, but also obscures the extent to which this work concerns the justification of virtually every decision within common-law systems. (shrink)

Many of the benefits and burdens we might experience in our lives — from bank loans to bail terms — are increasingly decided by institutions relying on algorithms. In a sense, this is nothing new: algorithms — instructions whose steps can, in principle, be mechanically executed to solve a decision problem — are at least as old as allocative social institutions themselves. Algorithms, after all, help decision-makers to navigate the complexity and variation of whatever domains they are designed for. In (...) another sense, however, this development is startlingly new: not only are algorithms being deployed in ever more social contexts, they are being mechanically executed not merely in principle, but pervasively in practice. Due to recent advances in computing technology, the benefits and burdens we experience in our lives are now increasingly decided by automata, rather than each other. How are we to morally assess these technologies? In this chapter, I propose a preliminary conceptual schema for identifying and locating the various injustices of automated, algorithmic social decision systems, from a broadly liberal perspective. (shrink)

Realities of the formed information society made actual for inclusive education a problem of formation of professionals of the new directions capable to apply information technologies to improvement of interaction between participants of process of distance learning. Until recent time the institute of distance learning had no analogs in our educational system. It has to become one of the most important elements of the organization of remote education. Inclusive education becomes the new strategic direction of modern education in Russia, its (...) program of development to 2020 is designated by the Federal law ‘About the education in the Russian Federation‘ which has come into force on September 1, 2013. Ideas of inclusive training were born from a pressing need of society to help children to be integrated with features of development into society. Without it a creation of a new civilized society, the education system that meets the requirements of the humanistic principles is not possible. In this connection, creation of a substantial and technological basis of the organization of inclusive education of children in the mode of distance learning is an extremely important for today social, moral and pedagogical problem. In its center are the development of the subject, granting equal opportunities to each pupil to build the individual educational trajectory, culturological cultivation of the person capable to take an independent position in relation to external conditions. Distance learning serves as strong and active technology of socialization of such children. However, in the theory and a technique of training, the problem of distance learning of children with disabilities is insufficiently solved that is caused by unavailability of most of teachers to apply these technologies. There is a contradiction between objective practical need of distance learning for children with disabilities and insufficient readiness of a theoretical and technological basis. This is a main problem discussed in the study. In theoretical plan, it is a problem of development of the practical-focused theoretical and technological basis of distance learning of children with disabilities. On the practical level, it is a problem of formation of the subject information and education environment, designing of the contents, definition of methods, pedagogical technologies, the conditions of formation promoting achievement of the planned educational results and development of cognitive independent activity without prejudice to health of children on the basis of the accounting of their individual abilities. Technological effectiveness of the purposes is provided with prediction of educational results, their expression through requirements to actions of pupils. Recent time, children only start studying and mastering remote technologies therefore, first of all, they have to seize rational ways of educational activity and learn to work with information, i.e. priority value has to be allocated for formation of informative and logical and informative and information universal educational actions. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans argue that the account of human rights and distributive justice in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is incompatible with his argument for liberal justice. Rawls should extend his account of liberal basic liberties and the guarantees of distributive justice to apply to the world at large. This essay defends Rawls's grounding of political justice in social cooperation. The Law of Peoples is drawn up to provide principles of foreign policy for liberal peoples. Human rights are among the necessary (...) conditions for social cooperation, and so long as a decent people respect human rights, a common good, and the Law of Peoples, it is not the role of liberal peoples to impose upon well-ordered decent peoples liberal liberties they cannot endorse. Moreover, the difference principle is not an allocative or alleviatory principle, but applies to design property and other basic social institutions necessary to economic production, exchange and consumption. It presupposes political cooperation—a legislative body to actively apply it, and a legal system to apply it to. There is no feasible global state or global legal system that could serve these roles. Finally, the difference principle embodies a conception of democratic reciprocity that is only appropriate to cooperation among free and equal citizens who are socially productive and politically autonomous. a Footnotesa I am grateful to K. C. Tan for many helpful discussions and criticisms of this essay. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their comments, and to Ellen Paul for her many helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of this essay. (shrink)

The philosophical discussion of emergence is often focused on properties of ‘wholes’ that are evaluated as emergent with respect to the properties of ‘parts’. Downward causation is, consequently, evaluated as some kind of causal influence of whole properties over parts properties. Yet, several important cases in scientific practice seem to be pursuing hypotheses of parts properties emerging from wholes properties, inverting the instinctive association of emergence with wholes. Furthermore, some areas of reflection which are very important for emergence, e.g., the (...) philosophy of consciousness, do not allow mapping properties onto part-whole organizations. The conceptual puzzle is solved by constructing a framework that disentangles the mereological dimension from the superventional dimension. By liberalizing the spatio-temporal allocation of emergent properties, the proposed dual framework could better capture the way in which emergence and downward causation are addressed in scientific practice. (shrink)

On what bases should childrearing rights and resources be allocated to different individuals? Criticising child-centred responses to this question, this chapter sets out a dual interest conception that takes into account the interests of parents as well as children. First, it offers a liberal defence of accommodating the interests of parents when deciding who should rear children. Dworkin’s hypothetical insurance scheme is extended to defend a conception of justice in childrearing in which resources are diverted to those who lack valuable (...) parenting assets, or to parents whose children are difficult or costly to raise. The use of hypothetical insurance to theorize childrearing issues is defended against several objections. Finally, more detail is provided with respect to the nature of the rights that issue from the particular dual interest conception of childrearing that is defended. (shrink)

State borders allocate access to basic goods, opportunities, rights, and protections along lines of nationality, race, and gender. However, the discriminatory effects of state borders rarely appear as an issue in the self-understanding of liberal-democratic societies and their political theorizing. In this paper, I explore how the category of nationality has been and continues to be used to exclude people who have been negatively racialized by European colonialism. I draw on a number of studies that reconstruct the colonial history of (...) states' claims to authority over people's movements and over the composition of their populations. The idea of territorial nationalities allowed nation-states, in particular those emerging from the settler colonies and metropoles of European empires, to continue practices of racial ordering without using explicit racial categories. With the help of these studies, I criticize liberal nationalists such as David Miller for appealing to the value of national identities to support a right of states to exclude would-be immigrants. I suggest that using genealogical and phenomenological methods allows us to undermine the default authority that is often accorded to the category of nationality. (shrink)

This article offers three reflections on the nature of the metaphysical ‘wall’ erected between the ‘Included’ and the ‘Excluded/Other’ by the concept of private property and its implementation in a state’s legal apparatus. The first reflection explores the reality of the concept of private property, using Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, in order to demonstrate that the liberal conception of private property masks power operating on two levels: the formal, repressive state apparatus, and the deeper, the personal, the real, the (...) actual level, which allows the Included to act upon ego in ways that negatively affect the Excluded/Other found in the ideological state apparatus. The second argues that the masked power that is private property permits war to be waged by the Included as against the Excluded/Other at two levels: intra-state and inter-state. This reveals a paradox in the distinction between Included and Excluded/Other: while the distinction demonstrates the allocation of power over resources, the reality is that every individual on earth is both Included and Excluded/Other. The final reflection briefly considers what could replace private property as a means of allocating goods and resources within a society. (shrink)

The female body whether it be child or woman has in the past and in the present struggled for human equality on multiple levels. There have of course been changes but the socio-political boundaries still shift this way and that under the weight of unequal power relations between genders within the ever unfolding fields of patriarchy. Sometimes it seems there are moments of clarity of achieved equality but more often than not the reality is hidden under a pseudo agenda of (...) token offerings. This is a battle that continues within the fields of economics, politics and the language that defines the status quo of the feminine. Feminist liberation theologies as we know begin with the experience of women and as women expand their experience and education through the worlds of politics, economics in academia, the church and other institutions so does the awareness of their subjugation to heteronormative values both past and present. Art has a way of expressing something that the word cannot, this is the language of feeling and emotion. Emotions and feelings have been historically allocated materially to women as a chaotic assemblage that does not fit into the rational world of men. I argue that feminist art describes powerfully the effect patriarchal power has had over female bodies through both personal and collective experiences and that is without doubt a political matter. (shrink)

The members of any functioning modern society live their lives amid complex networks of overlapping institutions. Apart from the major political institutions of law and government, however, much normative political theory seems to regard this institutional fabric as largely a pragmatic convenience. This paper contests this assumption by reflecting on how institutions both constrain and enable spheres of effective action and responsibility. In this way a society’s institutional fabric constitutes, in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase, an infrastructure of responsibility. The paper discusses (...) three key normative aspects of this infrastructure. First, institutions define roles and rules, alongside forms of sanction and encouragement, so as to realise limited forms of practical, normative agreement. Second, institutions allocate and adjudicate distinct responsibilities. This creates separate spheres of initiative, ensuring responsibilities are fulfilled and providing for structured disagreement and change. Third, because we move through a plurality of institutions and associations, we experience varying responsibilities and forms of recognition. Individual identities thus depend on several different forms of recognition, and are well placed to resist totalising or fundamentalist temptations. In sum, the paper argues that a liberal institutional fabric provides essential moral stability, though not an undesirable fixity. By containing the fragility and dangers of individual moral judgment, our institutional fabric allows such judgment to play a valuable role in human affairs. (shrink)

Myriad contemporary public-policy issues--including physician-assisted suicide, medical marijuana, abortion, surrogate motherhood, gay rights, conscription, and markets in human organs--raise the following important question: what rights should individuals have over their own bodies? The concept of self-ownership offers one way to answer this question. Just as ownership of an external object involves having rights, liberties, powers, immunities, etc., with respect to it, so self-ownership involves having these incidents of ownership with respect to one's own body and labor power. Much of the (...) contemporary debate over self-ownership has been about which of these incidents should be included in its definition. This dissertation endorses a particular configuration of incidents called Control Self-Ownership, consisting of permanent rights in rem of use, exclusion, and transfer over one's own body and labor power. As I show, this conception of self-ownership is coherent--two of its incidents can be either directly or indirectly derived from the third--but it creates difficulties for the political theorists who use it. For example, liberal egalitarians' tentative adoption of CSO forces them to be not only more liberal but also less egalitarian than they would otherwise be, whereas libertarians' efforts to adopt CSO but also extend it to include a right to labor income are unsuccessful, leaving their opposition to redistributive labor taxation ungrounded. The dissertation also shows that CSO can act as a mediating concept between the abstract political value of autonomy and a variety of concrete policy prescriptions, including the decriminalization of victimless crimes and the abolition of forced labor. More specifically, I demonstrate that CSO is tightly linked to autonomy by developing two distinct but interrelated Kantian defenses of it. I also argue that CSO is highly inconsistent with several existing and proposed nonmarket institutions to allocate transplantable human organs but that it can provide moral support for markets in human organs. The dissertation concludes with a critical examination of anticommodificationist and social-contract critiques of self-ownership. (shrink)

A MAJOR THESIS OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL PHILOSOPHY is that its theory of justice, which incorporates strong rights to negative liberty, must be prior to and independent of a theory of the good. This priority is necessary, according to liberal theorists, in view of the requirement that any adequate theory accommodate a plurality of contending views of the good, no one of which is capable of eliciting public assent to it. Recent critics of liberalism have disputed this thesis, maintaining instead that (...) there is indeed an objective good, rather than a plurality of contending goods, which at least seriously compromises and possibly undermines the negative liberty with which liberals traditionally associated their theories. Variously called communitarians, virtue theorists, or republicans, these critics have presented an important challenge to contemporary liberalism whether of the individualist or welfare state variety. (shrink)

The main characteristics of the elections of 13th October 1985 seem to be the following.The turnout, as appears from the number of laid down ballot papers in relation to the number of registered voters, is slightly declining compared with 1981. It indeed amounted to 93.59 % against 94.56 % four years before. This rate of participation averages those of previous elections.The number of blank and spoilt ballot papers is rising very slightly. It totalled 7.45 % for the House of Representatives, (...) against 7.37 % in 1981. This is again an average percentage compared with the previous general elections. It is considerably lower than the number of blank and spoilt ballot papers at the European elections of both 1979 and 1984.The extent of the shifts in votes is much lower than in 1981 and also averages those of the last year's elections.The votes are moving in a very similar way in the three regions of the country, although with one notable exception : the loss suffered by the PVV in Flanders. Apart from that, the Christian Democrats are registering a gain in the northern and southern parts of the country as well as in Brussels as far as the CVP is concerned ; the extent of the Socialist advance is the same in the three regions ; the loss suffered by the nationalist parties is general and the «green» lists are reinforcing their breakthrough everywhere.The parties of the outgoing coalition are improving their result, which very seldom happens at Belgian elections: Christian Democrats and Liberals are indeed progressing by 2.26 %. Another noteworthy element, however, is the fact that the ahead movement of the main oppositionparties is even more important than the majority's as the Socialists obtained 3.25 % more of the valid votes. Of course this double success took place at the expense of the nationalist parties, the Communists and some smaller lists.The shift in seats does not exactly reflect the shift in votes, because of a different distribution of the seats between the provinces, on the one hand, due to the variations in the number of inhabitants, and because of the concentration on certain lists of the allocation of the last seat, on the other. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on an experiment undertaken during a Medical Ethics lecture delivered to a group of medical students in the UK as part of a project for a programme in Higher Education Practice. The aim of the project, following Paulo Freire’s idea of ‘liberating education,’ was to identify students’ ethical assumptions and biases in relation to a problem of resource allocation in healthcare, and their role in decision-making. The experiment showed the importance placed by medical students (...) on disputed values such as free will, desert, social worth and body image, and highlighted the difficulty and importance of bringing students’ process of moral decision-making to awareness in ethics teaching, in order to a) decrease the role of implicit bias in students’ decision making and b) allow students to decide whether they in fact agree with assumed values and ethical frameworks that influence their thinking. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the conflicts between autonomy and justice. The problem of justice in healthcare concerns both micro-allocation and macro-allocation. The latter has to do with distributive justice: who should get what healthcare resources at whose expense. The current debate about healthcare reform brings up two competing models of distributive justice from political philosophy. The libertarian theory holds to the ideal of individual responsibility and choice, viewing taxation for the purpose of providing goods to those who (...) cannot afford them as a form of unjustified coercion. The liberal theory holds that society should ensure that all members are provided with basic goods that correct for inequalities that deprive them of human dignity. Even though both theories value individual choice, these theories provide opposing answers to the question of whether taxes should be collected and used for the purpose of ensuring universal access to healthcare. In my paper, I show that neither theory can respect patient choice in healthcare and achieve distributive justice. Libertarians ignore the realities of the healthcare system and why a free market where patients choose and pay for what they want cannot exist. Liberals face the problem that the choices that patients make can lead to over-consumption of healthcare at the expense of other goods important to society. (shrink)

This article introduces a symposium on Daniel Hausman’s Valuing Health: Well-Being, Suffering and Freedom. The symposium contains papers by Elselijn Kingma, Adam Oliver, Anna Alexandrova, Erik Nord, Alex Voorhoeve and James Wilson, with replies by Daniel Hausman. In Valuing Health, Hausman argues that, despite apparently measuring health, projects such as the Global Burden of Disease Study in fact measure judgments about the value of health. Once this has been clarified, the key question is how the value of health should be (...) measured. Hausman argues that existing instruments measure the private value of health, that is, health’s ‘contribution to whatever the individual cares about or should care about’, whereas what should be measured for resource allocation purposes is the public value of health, that is, the value health should be accorded from the perspective of the liberal state. Hausman argues that the public value of health should be measured by the extent to which suffering and activity limitations are relieved. Each commentator engages with a different aspect of Hausman’s argument. (shrink)

In contemporary positive law there are legal institutions, such as conscientious objection in the context of military service or “conscience clauses” in medical law, which for the sake of respect for judgments of conscience aim at restricting legal obligations. Such restrictions are postulated to protect human freedom in general. On the basis of Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy, it shall be argued that human dignity, understood as the existential perfection of a human being based on special unity, provides a foundation for imposing (...) limitations on the scope of legal obligations in general. Human freedom plays a crucial role in understanding dignity as perfection based on the special individuality of a personal being, which in turn is based on the free choice to pursue a unique way of life. Therefore, Aquinas’ argumentation is, at its core, liberal – the perfection rather than the imperfection of a human being underlies the requirement to limit legal obligations. Dignity understood as the special unity of a person also provides the basis for limiting obligations in the case of conscientious objection; however, in that case, such limitations aim at safeguarding internal integrity rather than the individualisation of a given way of life. _This project was financed with funds from the National Science Centre allocated on the basis of the decision number DEC-2013/09/B/HS5/04232._. (shrink)

Religion and medicine -- Theology and medical ethics -- The profession and its integrity -- Life and its sanctity -- Health and healing -- Death and its (in)dignity -- Nature and its mastery -- Care of patients and their suffering -- Respect for persons and their agency -- Contraception -- Technological reproduction -- Genetic control -- Abortion -- Choosing death and letting die -- Care of neonates -- The physician-patient relationship: advise and consent -- Psychiatric care: professional commitments and social (...) responsibilities -- Research and experimentation -- Allocation and distribution.; This collection includes a wide range of contemporary theological essays dealing with medicine ethics, as well as some material from Scripture and from classical theologians. It contains the work of Catholics and Protestants, "liberals" and "evangelicals," as well as some contemporary essays not written by Christian theologians but of great importance for theological reflection. Together the essays provide a rich introduction to theological reflection on medical ethics and a convincing demonstration of the contribution theology can make to the consideration of issues in medical ethics. (shrink)

This article examines perceptions of military and defense expenditure as held by Asian students. By using quantitative data from the Asian Student Survey1 of 2008 it addresses the following questions: to which areas would Asian students like to see their government allocate more or less resources and, specifically, how supportive of defense and military spending are Asian students. This study finds that data concerning one country have appeared deviant. While designating the strongest will to increase defense and military spending among (...) all countries sampled in the survey, Chinese students from leading universities also exhibit the lowest levels of perceived military threats. The rest of the paper explores the of Chinese students by generating and testing a null hypothesis. In it, Chinese students' high demand for military spending is associated with an aggressive design, whereby anti-foreign, unilateral, and nationalist sentiments coincide. After refuting the null hypothesis, the paper advances an alternative explanation that links students' inclination with the call to modernize the People's Liberation Army. (shrink)

In public reason liberalism, equal respect requires that conceptions of justice be publicly justifiable to relevant people in a manner that allocates to each an equal say. But all liberal public justification also excludes: e.g., it accords no say, or a lesser say, to people it deems unreasonable. Can liberal public justification be aligned with the equal respect that allegedly grounds it, if the latter calls for discursive equality? The chapter explores this challenge with a focus on Rawls-type political liberalism. (...) I suggest that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect can cohere with the standing of the unreasonable in public justification if that standing is not impermissibly unequal in discursive purchase. I then consider one candidate view of the permissibility of purchase inequality. On this broadly sufficientarian view, purchase inequality is permissible provided relevant people have standing of enough purchase to be able to avoid relevant bads. A plausible variant of this view suggests that political liberalism’s commitment to equal respect does not cohere with the discursive standing of the unreasonable. It emerges that where liberal public justification accords actual people discursive respect but relevantly idealizes at least around its fringes, the permissibility of purchase inequality must be a central concern. (shrink)

Written from the perspective of philosophy of liberation, this essay holds that the reform of basic human relationships and their cultural instantiation(s) is central to all serious societal change. The essay analyzes naive, mythological, and critical consciousness. It examines how these modes of consciousness are embodied in the health delivery system and then describes areas where practitioners and patients of critical consciousness might work for greater humanization of health care.

Driven by interests in workforce planning and patient safety, a growing body of literature has begun to identify the reality and the prevalence of missed nursing care, also specified as care left undone, rationed care or unfinished care. Empirical studies and conceptual considerations have focused on structural issues such as staffing, as well as on outcome issues – missed care/unfinished care. Philosophical and ethical aspects of unfinished care are largely unexplored. Thus, while internationally studies highlight instances of covert rationing/missed care/care (...) left undone – suggesting that nurses, in certain contexts, are actively engaged in rationing care – in terms of the nursing and nursing ethics literature, there appears to be a dearth of explicit decision-making frameworks within which to consider rationing of nursing care. In reality, the assumption of policy makers and health service managers is that nurses will continue to provide full care – despite reducing staffing levels and increased patient turnover, dependency and complexity of care. Often, it would appear that rationing/missed care/nursing care left undone is a direct response to overwhelming demands on the nursing resource in specific contexts. A discussion of resource allocation and rationing in nursing therefore seems timely. The aim of this discussion paper is to consider the ethical dimension of issues of resource allocation and rationing as they relate to nursing care and the distribution of the nursing resource. (shrink)

After biologist Deborah Gordon made a series of experimental discoveries in the 1980s, she argued that a change in terminology regarding the division of labor among castes of specialists was needed. Gordon’s investigations of the interactive effects of ants in colonies led her to believe that the established approach Edward O. Wilson had pioneered was biased in a way that made some alternative candidate adaptive explanations invisible. Gordon argued that this was because the term “division of labor” implied a division (...) among specialists that was unwarranted, and proposed “task allocation” as a better description that did not bias research against the alternative causes she had discovered. Gordon’s empirical findings and theoretical proposals also vindicate the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology who have been dismissed as political radicals, but her proposals have been widely misunderstood by many contemporary behavioral ecologists. The terminological and methodological confusions rampant in contemporary discourse can be clarified by applying a framework developed by Elisabeth Lloyd involving an analysis of the constraints imposed by different research questions. Applying this framework will show how the methodological problems involving description raised by the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology extended to his analysis of ants, indicating that they were not challenging Wilson’s naturalistic approach to the study of human evolution, but rather his methods. It will also show how confusion over how Gordon’s proposed research questions have been conflated with the possible answers she has argued ought to be investigated. This in turn will clarify contemporary disputes over her proposal to abandon the term “division of labor.”. (shrink)

This book is about the liberation of the concept of life from the bondage fashioned by the interpreters of life ever since biology began, and about the liberation of the life of humans and non-humans alike from the bondage of social structures and behaviour, which now threatens the fullness of life's possibilities if not survival itself. It falls into a tradition of writings about human problems from a perspective informed by biology. It rejects the mechanistic model of life (...) dominant in the Western world and develops an alternative 'ecological model' which is applicable to the life of the cell and the life of the human community. For the first time it brings together in one work the insights of modern biology with those of a modern holistic philosophy and a liberal theology in a way which challenges conventional approaches to science, agriculture, sociology, politics, economics, development and liberation movements. (shrink)

We analyze the comparative static effects of changes in the means, the standard deviations and the covariance of asset returns in a standard portfolio selection problem when investors have mean variance preferences. Simple and intuitive characterizations in terms of the elasticity of risk aversion are provided.

High cultures and the inter-regional system: beyond Hellenocentrism -- The material moment of the ethics, practical truth -- Formal morality, intersubjective validity -- Ethical feasibility and the "goodness claim" -- The ethical critique of the prevailing system : from the perspective of the negativity of the victims -- The anti-hegemonic validity of the community of victims -- The liberation principle -- Appendix I. some theses in the order of their appearance in the text -- Appendix II. Sais: capital of (...) Egypt. (shrink)