All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including development, testing, and manufacturing; fair distribution; sustainability; and accountability. All parties' obligations should be coordinated and mutually consistent. For (...) instance, companies should not be obligated to provide host countries with additional booster shots at the expense of fulfilling bilateral contracts with countries in which there are surges. Finally, any satisfactory approach should include mechanisms for assurance that all parties are honouring their obligations. This assurance enables countries, pharmaceutical companies, global organisations, and others to verify compliance with the chosen approach and protect ethically compliant stakeholders from being unfairly exploited by unethical behaviour of others. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be scarce for years to come. Many countries, from India to the U.K., have demonstrated vaccine nationalism. What are the ethical limits to this vaccine nationalism? Neither extreme nationalism nor extreme cosmopolitanism is ethically justifiable. Instead, we propose the fair priority for residents framework, in which governments can retain COVID-19 vaccine doses for their residents only to the extent that they are needed to maintain a noncrisis level of mortality while they are implementing reasonable public (...) health interventions. Practically, a noncrisis level of mortality is that experienced during a bad influenza season, which society considers an acceptable background risk. Governments take action to limit mortality from influenza, but there is no emergency that includes severe lockdowns. This “flu-risk standard” is a nonarbitrary and generally accepted heuristic. Mortality above the flu-risk standard justifies greater governmental interventions, including retaining vaccines for a country's own citizens over global need. The precise level of vaccination needed to meet the flu-risk standard will depend upon empirical factors related to the pandemic. This links the ethical principles to the scientific data emerging from the emergency. Thus, the FPR framework recognizes that governments should prioritize procuring vaccines for their country when doing so is necessary to reduce mortality to noncrisis flu-like levels. But after that, a government is obligated to do its part to share vaccines to reduce risks of mortality for people in other countries. We consider and reject objections to the FPR framework based on a country: having developed a vaccine, raising taxes to pay for vaccine research and purchase, wanting to eliminate economic and social burdens, and being ineffective in combating COVID-19 through public health interventions. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

Fichte’s Ethical Thought follows a format familiar to those who have read Allen Wood’s books on the ethical thought of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel: Wood integrates Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s work into topical chapters, each discussing an important component of Fichte’s ethical system. The text he focuses on, of course, is Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics, but Fichte scholars will likely be pleased to find that Wood discusses a wide range of Fichte’s Jena-era writings. Wood makes use of (...) Addresses to the German Nation, The Closed Commercial State, and earlier works such as Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation, especially in the final two chapters, which cover Fichte’s thought on public life, the... (shrink)

This essay selectively reviews, from an historical and philosophical perspective, the dopamine (DA) hypothesis of schizophrenia (DHS; Table 1 lists the abbreviations used in this essay). Our goal is not to adjudicate the validity of the theory—although we arrive at a generally skeptical conclusion—but to focus on the process whereby the DHS has evolved over time and been evaluated. Since its inception, the DHS has been the most prominent etiologic theory in psychiatry and is still referred to widely in current (...) textbooks (e.g., Buchanan and Carpenter, Jr. 2005, 1336; Cohen 2003, 225; Gazzaniga 2004, 1257;Kandel et al. 2000, 1200). Understanding its origins and evolution should help to clarify the nature of modern .. (shrink)

In his treatise, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), F. A. Hayek emphasized the central role of the generality principle, as embodied in the rule of law, for the maintenance of a free society. This book extends Hayek's argument by applying the generality principle to politics. Several important policy implications emerge. There are no direct implications to suggest how much governments should do. The argument suggests strongly however, that, whatever is done politically, must be done generally rather than discriminatorily.

History, Geography and Civics provides an in-depth and engaging introduction to teaching and learning socio-environmental education from F-6 in Australia and New Zealand. It explores the centrality of socio-environmental issues to all aspects of life and education and makes explicit links between pedagogical theories and classroom activities. Part I introduces readers to teaching and learning history, geography and environmental studies, and civics and citizenship, as well as issues in intercultural and global education. Part II explores the use of media and (...) sources, values and attitudes, assessment and creative teaching. Each chapter provides links to the Australian Curriculum, including cross-curriculum priorities: sustainability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, and Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia. History, Geography and Civics encourages the reader to consider their own beliefs, values and attitudes in relation to their teaching and includes provocations and reflective questions to foster discussion and engagement. (shrink)

This slender volume is the twentieth member of a series entitled “Toward Ecological Civilization,” organized under the leadership of distinguished process philosopher and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. It grew directly from the 10th Whitehead International Conference, held in Claremont, California, in June 2015, and more particularly from a single conference track (out of the more than 80 making up the program) devoted specifically to various kinds of “extraordinary experiences” (especially, parapsychological and transpersonal experiences) that directly challenge the materialist/physicalist (...) worldview which arose in the 17th century and still dominates the contemporary scientific, educational, and cultural mainstream. The central premises of the series as a whole, the 2015 conference, and the present volume are that postmodern civilization faces life-threatening crises rooted in that impoverished physicalist worldview, that we desperately need a more commodious, life-affirming, and ecologically sound alternative to it, and that Whitehead’s metaphysical vision can help take us in the needed direction. Like Stanley Krippner in the book’s brief Foreword, I am strongly sympathetic to these views. (shrink)

This study addresses the question of justice in health care. Increasing numbers of Americans are uninsured, the cost of health care is escalating, and is projected to continue doing so. In response to these and other concerns, Americans have looked to their neighbor to the north, Canada, for possible help in treating the ills of America's health care system. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of the Canadian and American health care systems, we have sought to identify the facts (...) that motivate concerns on both sides of the border. It is within this larger context, we argued, that the question of justice in health care must be answered. ;We consider two alternative answers that have been advanced in response to the question of justice in health care, Norman Daniels' fair equality of opportunity argument and Allen Buchanan's enforced beneficence arguments for a right to a decent minimum of health care. After subjecting these arguments to critical scrutiny, we found that they could not bear the moral weight that the authors thought they could. ;We then considered an alternative account that might be used to address the question of justice in health care, David Gauthier's theory of justice. We concluded, among other things, that under his theory people would have a right to a just minimum of health care. In addition, we argued that a just minimum of health care would resolve the theory-dependent version of the bottomless pit problem. (shrink)

American adults currently enjoy a widely accepted and legally well-settled right to refuse health care, including life sustaining treatment. Joel Feinberg provides a moral foundation for this right in liberal political theory. Feinberg's theory grounds the right to refuse in a broad right to self-determination, and it implements the right through a variable conception of voluntariness. This theory provides a plausible account that comports with the widely accepted right to refuse, commonsense, and ordinary practice. -/- Allen Buchanan and Dan (...) Brock contend, however, that Feinberg's priority for the right to self-determination is inconsistent with his variable scale of voluntariness. Although Feinberg presents his theory as one that grants categorical priority to self-determination over individual well-being, Buchanan and Brock argue that Feinberg's variable scale of voluntariness involves a balancing of self-determination and well-being. This balancing approach, which Buchanan and Brock endorse, seems to undermine the competent patient's right to refuse care because it allows concern for the patient's well-being to override that person's right to self-determination in some circumstances. Taken together, these arguments seem to suggest that we must give up either the competent patient's right to refuse treatment or the intuitively sensible variable scale. -/- In this paper, I argue that one can reconcile a categorical priority for self-determination with legal rules that incorporate a variable scale of competence. This integration requires careful examination of the practical and expressive functions of legal rules as well as of the manner in which these rules embody moral priorities. This analysis pursues specific and general projects. Specifically, it addresses the moral foundations of the legal right to refuse treatment, identifying a substantive difference between the balancing approach and the priority for self-determination that characterizes Feinberg's liberalism. Generally, it examines the types of priorities embodied by legal rules as practical decision guides and as expressions of the conventional morality represented by the law. This general project extends beyond the right to refuse treatment to the analysis of the manner in which legal rules express and apply moral priorities. (shrink)

We report on the simultaneous determination of complementary wave and particle aspects of light in a double-slit type “welcher-weg” experiment beyond the limitations set by Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity. Applying classical logic, we verify the presence of sharp interference in the single photon regime, while reliably maintaining the information about the particular pinhole through which each individual photon had passed. This experiment poses interesting questions on the validity of Complementarity in cases where measurements techniques that avoid Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and (...) quantum entanglement are employed. We further argue that the application of classical concepts of waves and particles as embodied in Complementarity leads to a logical inconsistency in the interpretation of this experiment. (shrink)

Nicholas Vriend asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his ideas about the distribution and use of knowledge in society. All the same, Vriend explained convincingly that Hayek could have made good use of the agent-based platform had it been available in the 1930s. To similar effect, (...) we argue in this paper that James Buchanan could have made good use of agent-based modeling to carry forward his ideas about the value of taking an emergent approach to the explanation of economic processes. (shrink)

In recent writing on the theory of knowledge a distinction has been drawn between ‘the language of appearing’ and ‘the sense-datum language’. The aim of this paper is to suggest that consideration of that distinction and of what Kant’s attitude toward it would have been can shed light on two otherwise-puzzling aspects of his doctrine in the Critique of Pure Reason: his adamant conviction that there are things-in-themselves, and his confidence that the Antinomies are resolved once we admit the transcendental (...) ideality of space and time. (shrink)

This essay by S. F. Davenport won the Norrisian Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge in 1924 and was published the next year. In it, Davenport examines the idea of 'immanence', which he defines as 'indicating the rapport between God and His creatures', and the possible application of the concept to the Incarnation of Christ. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Christology or Christian theology more generally.