President Clinton, already facing formidable obstacles in reforming the health care system, denies that it will involve any rationing. This is politically understandable, but wrong. Infinite needs are rapidly overtaking finite resources. Most health providers recognize that the genius of modern medicine has outpaced our ability to pay. But the public still has unlimited expectations and a blind faith that everything can be provided to everyone by simply eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse." Rationing is inherent in any health care (...) system. As government undertakes to define what is "medically necessary or appropriate," it will unavoidably undertake a series of rationing decisions. Health care is being transformed from a private good to a public good. Government, when it reforms the health care system, must inevitably ask: How do we buy the most health for the public? Keywords: Clinton Health Plan, public good, rationing CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to explain a type of wrong that arises when agents obscure responsibility for their actions. Call it “agency laundering.” The second is to use the concept of agency laundering to understand the underlying moral issues in a number of recent cases involving algorithmic decision systems. From the Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, iConference 2019, Washington D.C., March 31-April 3, 2019.

For Erasmus, the two fountains streaming milky juice—a new mother’s breasts—represent powerful symbols of love and authority. Erasmus describes the mother’s breasts as fountains oozing love to the sucking child. Elizabeth Clinton extends the image of Mother to represent God, reminding the nursing mother that when she looks on her sucking child, she should remember that she is God’s new born babe, sucking His instruction and His word, even as the babe sucks her breast. Dorothy Leigh extends the image (...) of the nursing mother to an image of Christ himself. Mother’s love, especially a breast-feeding or “lying in” mother’s love, is one of the most authoritatively gendered representations of love. Issues of gender and authority converge often around the image of the breast-feeding mother. Drawing on the image of the nursing mother, Dorothy Leigh and other early modern writers actively engaged in the most contentious and public debates of their day, including the authority of men, preachers and kings. (shrink)

: President Clinton's charge to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments included the identification of ethical and legal standards for evaluating government-sponsored radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War. In this paper, we review the traditional account of the history of American research ethics, and then highlight and explain the significance of a number of the Committee's historical findings as they relate to this account. These findings include both the national defense establishment's struggles with legal and insurance issues (...) concerning human experiments, and the medical profession's perspective on human experimentation in the years following the Nuremberg Medical Trials. We conclude that the Committee's work both enriches the traditional view of the history of research ethics and opens important new areas for study. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analyse du procès Clinton en se penchant sur les différentes étapes de l’affaire, les stratégies des acteurs en jeu et les choix de l’opinion publique américaine. En nous révélant l’image d’une société américaine à la recherche d’un modèle politique s’appuyant tant sur le libéralisme interventionniste que sur le conservatisme, le procès Clinton a mis en lumière la dérive partisane dont il a été l’objet. L’auteur nous montre cependant à quel point l’opinion publique américaine a (...) su rester en dehors du débat politicien et préserver sa confiance au président. (shrink)

Alain Joxe entend quant à lui partir du champ stratégique (vs juridique, psychologique, politique, social, religieux), d’où sa proposition d’un examen d’« identités stratégiques » (identités préconstituées des forces en présence projetées dans un temps long d’avant le combat) pourvues elles-mêmes de « modules génétiques » de leurs représentations (par exemple Gilgamesh) et où comptent les échelles d’organisation de la protection (la fixation des échelles étant un moyen de donner un lieu aux mutations importantes qui rapprochent de la barbarisation). Il (...) s’interroge sur le fait que nous soyons ou non aujourd’hui à un moment de « rupture systémique ». Les États-Unis depuis la chute du mur constituent un nouvel empire dans la mesure où, pour la première fois, il peut apparaître comme « unique ». Sous Bill Clinton, cet empire d’abord économique n’était pas stratégiquement fondé sur l’existence de « barbares » dans un « ailleurs » quelconque et était donc dépourvu de limes, ce qui est en train de changer avec George W. Bush par la redéfinition d’un ennemi déterminé et présent. Le nouveau militarisme américain relève d’une régression vers une nouvelle territorialisation liée à la perte initiale de l’ennemi, d’où une contradiction du point de vue des échelles entre la conquête du monde par le capital et le maintien d’une présence militaire délimitée, sans pour autant que n’émerge une représentation claire de la sécurité des États-Unis ni une pensée claire de ce que peut être dans ce cas la fonction de protection de l’État. L’horizon est celui de la reconstitution d’une périphérie barbare dans un monde pourtant dépourvu de limes (cf. paradigme de la guerre de banlieue, la création d’un ennemi étant nécessaire pour réaffirmer le rôle protecteur de l’État). La logique de la nouvelle guerre asymétrique du fort au faible fait que la force des uns est tellement supérieure qu’elle les rend incapables de penser les éléments nouveaux et différents d’une situation. Voulant maîtriser toutes les échelles, l’hyperpuissance court le risque d’arriver ainsi à toutes les échelles de barbarie. (shrink)

1 In un tentativo d’autodifesa che all’epoca apparve ai più come disperato. Bill Clinton ebbe a dire che l’esistenza o meno del suo affaire con Monica Lewinsky dipendeva da quale significato si sarebbe dovuto attribuire alla semplice parola «è» Che il legame tra le parole e la realtà non sia esattamente come quello immaginato (o, meglio, sperato) da Clinton dovrebbe essere evidente a tutti: sappiamo con ragionevole certezza che l’esistenza di un gran numero di cose non dipende dal (...) significato... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Six Poems GEORGE KALOGERIS The Atomists To see what the matter is, in all of its dense, Teeming particulars, and not through the lens Of a microscope but by the most lucid, precise, Leap of imagination: the first was Leucíppus. But it was his student, Democritus, who stated That human understanding was truly futile, Given the random collisions of atoms. Still, He blinded himself to keep from being (...) distracted. When he broke the long-jump record by two whole feet, Bob Beamon dropped to his knees, buried his face In his hands, and wept in a pit of sand—the trace Of his human, Olympian flight still fresh as a heel-print. When the earthquake struck Kalamáta, and Uncle Sotíri Lost everything, he asked a taxi driver To take him to “a nice high place by the sea. And then come back for me in half an hour.” arion 28.3 winter 2021 58 six poems One Credit Seminar on the Odes of Horace We were sitting around a polished oak table, just getting to Those famous lines near the end of the Sestius Ode: Revenant whitefaced Death is walking not knowing whether He’s going to knock at a rich man’s door or a poor man’s When one of the students (Andrew) said it was “totally weird”— Which led us to look at the paleness of Death’s appearance, Whose pallor is what, when he comes, comes with him: the sickness and shock In his ghastly face. And that’s where we stopped. And then It was Jennifer’s email, saying “I’m sorry for missing class, But I’m having panic attacks. I keep flashing back To March 19th, when I entered my dorm-room and found my boyfriend Dead of an overdose... I can get you a note... What reading should I do to be prepared for next week?” O goodlooking fortunate Sestius, don’t put your hope in the future; The night is falling, the shades are gathering around; The walls of Pluto’s shadowy house are closing you in. There who will be lord of the feast? What will it matter, What will it matter there, whether you fell in love With Lycidas, this or that girl with him, or he With her? So David Ferry’s great translation goes, And its tone of tender, knowing, bemusement is Horace’s Pitying voice, but whose pity has come to speak to us Through the whitefaced mouth of revenant Death, still going From house to house, until he gets to Jennifer’s dorm-room. And what will it matter now if Andrew was drawn to the line About fishermen hauling their caulked boats to the water? It’s late September. We’re sitting around a polished oak table Whose wood is sacred to Jove, whose lightning-bolt Has already sounded deep in the heart of Indian summer. George Kalogeris 59 Greek School The very first poem I ever knew by heart: That sing-song forsaken one assigned to me. Recited on our other Independence Day. When some of the girls were dressed in peasant costumes, And some of the boys in kilts of the freedom fighters. And the timid rest of us in our Sunday best. In the church gym, where Father Mihos called us Up to the microphone, and one by one We showed the parents what we’d learned in Greek school. In Horace’s Ode to his Lyre, the poet prays That his song will serve as the medicine of sorrows, His stricken voice the trembling instrument— Schooled as he was in Sappho, who said the ancient Prescription left a bittersweet taste in her mouth: Glukopikron. For me it’s that first-grade poem I stammer to remember: Egwo tha geino Yiatrós... “I shall grow up to be a doctor...” Just saying that, my elders perk up their ears. And even if Poetry wasn’t the kind of calling Expected of me, and one by one they all Got sick and died, it’s still the medicine That keeps them leaning forward on their folding chairs. 60 six poems Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees But evergreen the... (shrink)

Cet article réagit à l’affaire Clinton. Le « Monicagate » apparaît comme une bataille autour de la dérive partisane d’un mécanisme régulateur des rapports du privé et du public. Ces rapports ne s’établissent pas selon une frontière unique, entre l’individu et la famille d’une part et l’État d’autre part. L’expression des subjectivités ne se satisfait plus de l’oralité familiale, mais elle investit l’écriture et, maintenant, tous les médias. La construction en cours d’une société mondiale de la communication entraînera d’immenses (...) conséquences relatives aux fonctions du privé et du public. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 267-296 [Access article in PDF] Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era Robert Hariman The man lies on the hotel bed, clad only in his underwear, as he watches the TV screen just beyond his feet. His right hand holds the remote control, which he uses to scan through the cable channels. To his left sits Abraham Lincoln, clothed in long-sleeved white (...) shirt and black pants and reading a book. Lincoln's long, angular frame is just a bit stooped, and his brow is slightly furrowed, as if long accustomed to thinking on the edge of melancholy. Lincoln is mulling over a statement by Walter Benjamin: "Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin 1977, 178). 1Seated to the man's right is a woman wearing the terry cloth bathrobe provided by the hotel. She leans slightly forward, legs crossed, as she reads the New York Times Magazine cover story about President Clinton. "Listen to this," she says with a bemused smile. "In the clutter around his desk in the Oval Office stands not a single bust of a favorite predecessor, but five: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman and two of F.D.R., plus a statuette of Will Rogers for good measure. If governing is choosing, this collection is a metaphor for this President's trouble with choices, and he himself allows, 'That's the story of my Presidency, that desk'" (Purdum 1996, 36).The man says nothing as he continues to watch the succession of images on the screen: a lizard flicks its tongue in the desert heat; a child in a stroller laughs as she holds a strawberry ice cream cone; a congressman in blue suit, white shirt, and red tie jabs his finger into the air as he talks earnestly; cars plastered with automotive product logos curl around a race track; Fred and Ginger swirl around the dance floor; soldiers wade ashore at Omaha Beach; the Space Shuttle lifts off; Groucho lifts his eyebrows; Regis smiles; mushrooms and peppers simmer in a pan.The succession of images could go on indefinitely. The tableau remains static. The composition is an allegory: a figural presentation that organizes multiple interpretations regarding collective experience. It also contains and comments on other forms of itself: Clinton's desk is an example [End Page 267] of the figural anecdote that has been a staple of American public address. The manifold of televisual images exemplifies the allegorical encoding that operates within postmodern art forms, including fragmentary appropriation, paratactic association, encyclopedic range, and non-linear temporality. The statement by Benjamin illuminates the nature of allegory in a specific genre and historical period, and as it is a general mode of representation, and perhaps as it is a model for all textual interpretation.The composition also evokes a set of dialectical tensions that are characteristic of both allegory in general and fundamental anxieties in the contemporary period. Past and present sit side by side, but incongruously, as if by artifice alone. So it is also with the print and visual media, which are held together by mutual competencies but otherwise in figural isolation that perhaps represents different destinies. Likewise, one might wonder about the peculiar relationship between public affairs and private life: the succession of images on the screen adhere to no hierarchy of values, no principle of loyalty or sacrifice, no basis for discerning obligations or maintaining rights, yet they are replete with the paraphernalia of these concerns, and the arrangement of figures in the room likewise is at once suggestive yet inconclusive. If this tableau contains familiar features of the mass-mediated experience that now saturates American politics, one might wonder: Is the democratic tradition in ruins?Allegories give us dynamic juxtapositions in a static frame. This principle of composition seems particularly suited to periods of cultural change. To the extent that the genre of allegory has a history, it is one of eternal recurrence at periods of loss and fragmentation produced by the expansion of a new, somewhat... (shrink)

D. Barton Johnson traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the modernist (...) Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived only months after the 1994 U.S. elections brought to power conservative Republican congressional majorities determined to reverse key legacies of Roosevelt's New Deal. At this juncture of special poignancy for many of those assembled at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1995, President Bill Clinton offered remarks on “Remembering Franklin D. Roosevelt.” “Like our greatest presidents,” Clinton eulogized, Roosevelt “showed us how (...) to be a nation in time of great stress” and “taught us again and again that our government could be an instrument of democratic destiny.”. (shrink)

Sanskrit text with commentaries on the theories of error in Mīmāṃsa school in Hindu philosophy by Maṇḍanamiśra, 7th century philosopher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fallout from Government-Sponsored Radiation ResearchCarol Mason Spicer (bio)On December 28, 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary publicly appealed to both the executive and legislative branches of the United States Government to consider compensation for individuals who were harmed by their exposure to ionizing radiation while enrolled in government-sponsored studies conducted between 1940 and the early 1970s.1 The call for compensation was issued three weeks after Secretary O'Leary disclosed that (...) radiation experiments involving humans, sometimes without their consent, had occurred under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a forerunner of the Department of Energy (DOE). Secretary O'Leary directed her department to investigate the nature and extent of the experiments, report on their medical and ethical acceptability, and locate the research subjects or their families.Background to the Federal Advisory CommitteeDespite the fact that the existence of many government-sponsored radiation experiments was not a secret—much of the research was reported at the time in scientific journals, and in 1986, Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) conducted congressional hearings on such radiation research—Secretary O'Leary's disclosure of the AEC experiments and her call for compensation made the experiments common knowledge and sparked a swift and complex governmental response involving both the executive and legislative branches.It is curious that the "radiation experiments" have garnered so much attention now, since they were virtually ignored in the wake of the 1986 hearings. Secretary O'Leary's disclosure of the radiation studies grew out of a general reassessment of secrecy in government. In April 1993, the Clinton administration set out to review the system of government secrecy that evolved during the Cold War, and in May 1993, DOE began reviewing and declassifying files pertaining to nuclear weapons research. When Dan Reicher, a top aide to Secretary O'Leary, informed her in November of the impending publication of an Albuquerque Tribune investigative report (Welsome 1993) on an experiment conducted between 1945 and 1947 in which 18 subjects were injected with plutonium, [End Page 147] the topic of questionable research involving the exposure of human subjects to radiation was added to the DOE list of information to be disclosed. At the time, it was thought to be but one small part of a massive quantity of DOE information to be made public.As part of its effort to investigate the radiation experiments, DOE established a toll-free telephone hot line for individuals who thought they might have been the subjects of radiation exposure experiments. The hot line, originally staffed by three people to handle the anticipated few dozen calls per day, received more than 2,000 calls in the first week. By early January the hot line was flooded with 6,000 to 10,000 calls daily, and its staff had increased more than ten-fold. Although many of the calls were deemed not to be candidates for further investigation, the extent of the radiation-related experiments, sponsored not only by AEC, but also by the military and other government departments and agencies, took officials by surprise.On December 30, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration all announced that they were initiating thorough reviews of their files to determine the extent and nature of any radiation experiments conducted under their auspices.2 In January, the CIA and the Department of Health and Human Services, including the National Institutes of Health, followed suit.The White House publicly entered the arena in late December announcing that it would hold a meeting on January 3, 1994, to help coordinate the government's investigative effort. At the same time, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) called for a mid-January congressional hearing to investigate experiments conducted between 1946 and 1956 in which mentally retarded boys at the Fernald State School in Massachusetts were fed radioactive iron supplements or milk containing radioactive calcium to enable researchers to trace the absorption of those nutrients. Senator Kennedy's hearing, conducted by the Subcommittee on Health of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, was the first of a number of congressional hearings held earlier this year to investigate the... (shrink)

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

Liberty; Islamic philosophy; religious aspects; Islam.

Electronic communication and commerce facilitate the collection of information about individual use of the Internet. Focusing on the case of Comet Systems Inc. and its data gathering practices, this paper explores the technical details of gathering personal information in databases in general and the special character of the privacy issue raised by 'anonymous' information about individual behavior on the Internet. The case analysis suggests new insights for our understanding of privacy and frames a discussion of policy alternatives with respect to (...) the privacy of Internet communication. (shrink)

In the last decades of the XXth century we have witnessed a still growing interest in applied ethics, among them also bioethics, which in Slovak ethical literature was paid only a little attention as yet. The paper tries to examine the needs that led to the rise of bioethics, analyzing at the same time the concept of bioethics, its substance and subject. It deals also with its sources, putting stress on utilitarist and deontological ethics.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems and its Criticisms” by Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnold. Upshot: Autopoiesis based on meaning is a rich conceptual tool. It would be a pity to reduce it to a few general statements on self-reference in social systems.