Edited by Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, this volume features early work on the theory and measurement of consumer behaviour. Featuring contributions from leading economists such as Anthony Atkinson, Nicholas Stern, John Muellbauer and Deaton himself, the book offers papers on a wide range of topics. Topics covered range from theory to econometrics, from Engel curves to labour supply and fertility, and from consumer demand in England to consumer behaviour in (...) the USSR. These papers were written and collected for this volume to honour Sir Richard Stone on the occasion of his retirement from his chair at the University of Cambridge. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of the recent research on saving and consumption, a field in which substantial progress has been made over the last decade.Attempts by economists to understand saving and consumption patterns have generated some of the best science in economics. For more than fifty years, there has been serious empirical and theoretical activity, and data, theory, and policy have never been separated as has happened in many branches of economics. Research has drawn microeconomists interested in household behaviour, (...) as well as macroeconomists, for whom the behaviour of aggregate consumption has always occupied a central role in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Econometricians have also made distinguished contributions, and there has been a steady flow of new methodologies by those working on saving and consumption, in time-series econometrics, as well as in the study of micro and panel data.A coherent account of these developments is presented here, emphasizing the interplay between micro and the macro, between studies of cross-section and panels, and those using aggregate time series data. (shrink)

https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v60-laera.

Since the wife-husband team of Anne Case and Angus Deaton popularized the term deaths of despair, psychologists have become more interested in decoupling despair from clinical depression and anxiety. Despair’s central marker is the loss of hope. It is characterized by feelings of social and spiritual isolation, meaninglessness, hopelessness, helplessness, demoralization, and shame. Causes of despair are complex, ranging from individual (e.g., grief, bad health, addiction, abuse), to societal (e.g., social and cultural dislocation, unemployment, economic disaster, poverty), to (...) a combination of both. Sometimes, acknowledging and/or addressing despair’s material causes is enough. But the problem with despair is that it tends to generate a vicious cycle of self-defeat. Often, it manifests in self-perpetuating negative cognitive biases, self-defeating emotional reactions, and self-destructive behavior. To break free, the person must address the psychological and spiritual roots of her despair. Here, I offer insights from a Christian tradition grounded in the monastic spirituality of the Desert Fathers in the hopes that these might help a therapist seeking to do just that. After distinguishing between an emotion and a sin of despair, I locate the latter’s roots in the vices of acedia and pride. Finally, I point to the virtue of humility as a traditional cure for despair. (shrink)

Larry Temkin draws on the work of Angus Deaton to argue that countries with poor governance sometimes rely on charitable giving and foreign aid in ways that enable them to avoid relying on their own citizens; this can cause them to be unresponsive to their citizens’ needs and thus prevent the long-term alleviation of poverty and other social problems. I argue that the implications of this “lack of government responsiveness argument” (or LOGRA) are both broader and narrower than (...) they might first appear. I explore how LOGRA applies more broadly to certain types of charitable giving in developed countries, with a focus on medical crowdfunding. I then highlight how LOGRA does not apply to charitable giving aimed at alleviating the suffering of the absolutely politically marginalized, or those especially vulnerable people to whom governments are never responsive. (shrink)

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, this book calls for renewed political and policy commitment to “just work.” -/- Such a (...) commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. -/- Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. -/- A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. (shrink)

This paper expands on “An Ethics Framework for Making Resource Allocation Decisions within Clinical Care: Responding to COVID-19,” which is also published in this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. I first describe and explain the steps we took to develop this framework, drawing on previous experience and literature to explain what frameworks can and cannot do. I distinguish frameworks from other kinds of guidance and justify why our framework takes the form it does. Our key aim was (...) to help answer practical questions faced by frontline clinicians. I then explain some of the normative issues that shape the content of the framework itself. Here, I engage critically with the resource allocation literature and justify the particular positions that we take in the framework. Although we undertook this work to address resource allocation decisions anticipated during the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, it will also serve as an example for others who wish to design practical ethics frameworks for other bioethical issues that will emerge in the future. (shrink)

BackgroundEthics consultation is recognized as an opportunity to share responsibility for difficult decisions in prenatal medicine, where moral intuitions are often unable to lead to a settled decision. It remains unclear, however, if the general standards of ethics consultation are applicable to the very particular setting of pregnancy.Main textWe sought to analyze the special nature of disagreements, conflicts and value uncertainties in prenatal medicine as well as the ways in which an ethics consultation service (ECS) could possibly respond to them (...) and illustrated our results with a case example. Ethics facilitation and conflict mediation, currently, have no broadly consented normative framework encompassing prenatal diagnosis and therapy as well as reproductive choice to draw on. Even so, they can still be helpful instruments for ethically challenging decision-making in prenatal medicine provided two additional rules are respected: For the time being, ECSs should (a) refrain from issuing content-heavy recommendations in prenatal medicine and (b) should not initiate conflict mediations that would involve the pregnant woman or couple as a conflict party.ConclusionIt seems to be vital that ethics consultants as well as health care professionals acknowledge the current limitations and pitfalls of ethics consultation in prenatal medicine and together engage in the advancement of standards for this particularly complex setting. (shrink)

This original, contemporary synthesis between phenomenology and Marx’s late work begins from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology to chart a new program for Socratic phenomenology in the current confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.

Despite its central position in the history of European and Christian thought on the protection of human dignity, the virtue of mercy is currently a problematic and under-developed concept in business ethics, compared to related ideas of care, compassion or philanthropy. The aim of this article is to argue for its revival as a core principle of ethical business practice. The article is conceptual in method. An overview is provided of the scope of contemporary business ethics research on related topics (...) and clarifies some of the similarities and differences between mercy and popular terms, such as compassion and prosocial behaviour. The question is then explored as to why mercy has so little traction in business ethics. Some of the history of the idea of mercy in European and Anglophone philosophy is discussed, from Anselm and Aquinas to the present day, showing how discourse on mercy came to be split into a wider concept of the prevention and alleviation of suffering (_misericordia_) and a narrower one of clemency or leniency. Aquinas’s wide concept of the virtue of _misericordia_ is developed as the basis for a principle of mercy, which is applicable directly to corporations. The practical implications of this for standards of corporate behaviour towards employees and other stakeholders are then considered through the introduction of a ‘vulnerability grid’. The grid offers a critical contrast to other analysis tools, such as stakeholder power-interest matrices. Cases drawn from empirical studies are used to illustrate application of the grid and to challenge some common assumptions of stakeholder theory. (shrink)

Although Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès remains amongst the most studied thinkers of the French Revolution, his views on international politics remain largely unexplored, despite his significant role in shaping the foreign policy of the French republic after 1794. This article provides a new account of Sieyès as an international political thinker and actor, drawing on published and archival materials to reconstruct Sieyès' diplomatic programme and its intellectual roots. In so doing, it challenges both the notion that Sieyès was a committed practitioner of (...) an unideological realopolitik and the common assertion that Sieyès was a follower of Immanuel Kant's famous project for perpetual peace. Instead, this article shows that Sieyès charted a distinct course, based on a plan for the ‘republicanisation’ of Europe and its reorganisation into a league of militarily and economically linked states under French hegemony, oriented towards the preservation of republicanism in a hostile world. On this basis it re-evaluates the relationship between Sieyès' and Kant's conceptions of a confederation of republican states, presenting a new account of Kant's Perpetual Peace as a curtailment of his earlier cosmopolitan and pacifist idealism in response to the international situation of the 1790s and the foreign policy pursued by Sieyès and his allies. (shrink)

It is shown that the theory of fields with an automorphism has a decidable model companion. Quantifier-elimination is established in a natural language. The theory is intimately connected to Ax's theory of pseudofinite fields, and analogues are obtained for most of Ax's classical results. Some indication is given of the connection to nonstandard Frobenius maps.

This chapter contains sections titled: Information Management: Confidentiality, Autonomy and Non‐Directiveness Predictive Genetic Testing Childhood Genetic Testing Genetic Screening Informed Consent to Screening Newborn Screening Carrier Screening Prenatal Screening Susceptibility Screening Further Information Management Goals of Genetic Screening: Public Health vs Individual Choice Conclusion References Further reading.

It is argued that reliance on the testimony of others cannot be viewed as reliance on a kind of evidence. Speech being essentially voluntary, the speaker cannot see his own choice of words as evidence of their truth, and so cannot honestly offer them to others as such. Rather, in taking responsibility for the truth of what he says, the speaker offers a guarantee or assurance of its truth, and in believing him the hearer accepts this assurance. I argue that, (...) contrary to appearances, this account is compatible with the hearer acquiring knowledge, and in fact throws interesting light on the idea of knowledge. -/- . (shrink)

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

Research ethics is an integral part of research, especially that involving human subjects. However, concerns have been expressed that research ethics has come to be seen as a procedural concern focused on a few well-established ethical issues that researchers need to address to obtain ethical approval to begin their research. While such prospective review of research is important, we argue that it is not sufficient to address all aspects of research ethics. We propose retrospective review as an important complement to (...) prospective review. We offer two arguments to support our claim that prospective review is insufficient. First, as currently practiced, research ethics has become for some a ‘tick box’ exercise to get over the ‘hurdle’ of ethics approval. This fails to capture much of what is important in ethics and does not promote careful reflection on the ethical issues involved. Second, the current approach tends to be rules-based and we argue that research ethics should go beyond this to develop people’s capacity to be sensitive to the relevant moral features of their research, their ethical decision-making skills and their integrity. Retrospective review of a project’s ethical issues, and how they were addressed, could help to achieve those aims better. We believe that a broad range of stakeholders should be involved in such retrospective review, including representatives of ethics committees, participating communities and those involved in the research. All stakeholders could then learn from others’ perspectives and experiences. An open and transparent assessment of research could help to promote trust and understanding between stakeholders, as well as identifying areas of agreement and disagreement and how these can be built upon or addressed. Retrospective review also has the potential to promote critical reflection on ethics and help to develop ethical sensitivity and integrity within the research team. Demonstrating this would take empirical evidence and we suggest that any such initiatives should be accompanied by research into their effectiveness. Our article concludes with a discussion of some possible objections to our proposal, and an invitation to further debate and discussion. (shrink)

Proposes a new theory of communication called "comparative media theory.".

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin’s discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin’s discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the (...) basis of progressive life. (shrink)

Part I: The 'explanatory gap'. 1. Why take morality to be objective? -- 2. The gap opens: evolution and our capacity for moral knowledge -- Part II: Secular responses. 3. Alternatives to realism: Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard -- 4. Procedures and reasons: Tim Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard -- 5. Natural goodness: Philippa Foot's moral objectivism -- 6. Natural goodness and 'second nature': John McDowell and David Wiggin -- Part III: Theism. 7. From goodness to God: closing the explanatory gap (...) -- 8. Purpose without theism? Axiarchism and Neoplatonism. (shrink)

Clinical genetics encompasses a wider range of activities than discussion of reproductive risks and options. Hence, it is possible for a clinical geneticist to reduce suffering associated with genetic disease without aiming to reduce the birth incidence of such diseases. Simple cost-benefit analyses of genetic-screening programmes are unacceptable; more sophisticated analyses of this type have been devised but entail internal inconsistencies and do not seem to result in changed clinical practice. The secondary effects of screening programmes must be assessed before (...) they can be properly evaluated, including the inadvertent diagnosis of unsought conditions, and the wider social effects of the programmes on those with mental handicap. This has implications for the range of prenatal tests that should be made available. While autonomy must be fully respected, it cannot itself constitute a goal of clinical genetics. The evaluation of these services requires interdepartmental comparisons of workload, and quality judgements of clients and peers. (shrink)

The present work develops the concept of instrumental reason in order to elaborate the implications of the connection of formalistic theory and technical action. Through a critique of this concept it establishes the limitations of instrumental reason and the necessity for a deeper conception o.

In 2011 members of the School of Philosophy and Theology at The University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA) Sydney campus, designed two standards rubrics as part of a project aimed at undertaking research within the area of assuring graduate attributes and capabilities in Australian universities. The standards rubrics designed were oriented towards developing particular graduate attributes intrinsic to the Core Curriculum programme in philosophy, ethics, and theology; all students at UNDA are required to undertake this programme, which reflects a ‘liberal (...) arts’ or ‘liberal education’ approach to university education. In this paper, we engage in an institutional case study of this project, discussing the advantages and challenges of developing and using these standards rubrics with a specific focus on: how they have already been used, how we plan to use them in the continuing development of our Core Curriculum programme, and the particular challenges we face in developing standards rubrics within a ‘liberal arts’ or ‘liberal education’ environment. In doing so, we will attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of developing standards rubrics as a basis for careful and systematic review of our pedagogical approach, and curriculum and assessment design so as to assure the achievement of graduate attributes and capabilities. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; Introduction Angus Dawson; Part I. Concepts: 1. Resetting the parameters: public health as the foundation for public health ethics Angus Dawson; 2. Health, disease and the goal of public health Bengt Brülde; 3. Selective reproduction, eugenics and public health Stephen Wilkinson; 4. Risk and precaution Stephen John; Part II. Issues: 5. Smoking, health and ethics Richard Ashcroft; 6. Infectious disease control Marcel Verweij; 7. Population screening Ainsley Newson; 8. Vaccination ethics Angus Dawson; (...) 9. Environment, ethics and public health: the climate change dilemma Anthony Kessel and Carolyn Stephens; 10. Public health research ethics: is non-exploitation the new principle for population-based research ethics? John McMillan; 11. Equity and population health: toward a broader bioethics agenda Norman Daniels; 12. Health inequities James Wilson; Index. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to critically review a traditional objection to preventive medicine (which I call here the ‘prevention problem’). The prevention problem is a concern about the supposedly inequitable distribution of benefits and risks of harm resulting from preventive medicine's focus on population‐based interventions. This objection is potentially applicable to preventive vaccination programmes and could be used to argue that such programmes are unethical. I explore the structure of the prevention problem by focusing upon two different types of vaccination (...) (therapeutic vaccination and preventive vaccination). I argue that the ‘prevention problem’ cannot be fairly applied to the case of preventive vaccination because such programmes do not just focus upon benefits at the level of populations (as is claimed by the prevention problem). Most such preventive vaccination programmes explicitly seek to create and maintain herd protection. I argue that herd protection is an important public good which is a benefit shared by all individuals in the relevant population. This fact can then be used to block the ‘prevention problem’ argument in relation to preventive vaccination programmes. I conclude by suggesting that whilst the future development and use of therapeutic vaccines does raise some interesting ethical issues, any ethical objections to prophylactic vaccination on the basis of the ‘prevention problem’ will not be overcome through the substitution of therapeutic vaccines for preventive vaccines; indeed, the ‘prevention problem’ fails on its own terms in relation to preventive vaccination programmes. (shrink)

The resent paper reviews three phases in the literature on cognition and colour, and also Luria's (1976) observations of the effects that literacy and/or schooling have on colour naming and colour categorization. It is argued that Luria's own interpretation of his findings is partiafly flawed by inconsistency, and by ethnocentric presuppositions concerning mediation and abstraction. A revised interpretation is proposed that draws on Gibson's (1950, 1966) contrast between direct and indirect perceptions. It is suggested that language usage and cultural practices (...) come to exert a joint effect upon the experience of colour by selectively directing attention towards or away from the various perceptible aspects of coloured objects. (shrink)

Contributions to this study are drawn both from health professionals engaged in genetic counselling and from observers and critics with backgrounds in law, philosophy, biology, and the social sciences. This diversity will enable health professonals to examine their activities with a fresh eye, and will help the observer-critic to understand the ethical problems that arise in genetic counselling practice, rather than in imaginary encounters. Most examinations of the ethical issues raised by genetics are concerned in a broad sense with the (...) application of new technology to human reproduction. This volume focuses on genetic counselling and screening as such, providing valuable insights for the health professional, social scientist, philosopher, lawyer, and bioethicist. (shrink)

Since Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theorisation around the beginning of the twentieth-century, the concept of the unconscious has exerted an enormous influence upon psychoanalysis and psychology, literary, critical and social theory. Yet prior to Freud, the concept of the unconscious already possessed a complex genealogy in nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, beginning with the aftermath of Kant's Critical Philosophy and the origins of German Idealism, and extending into the discourses of Romanticism and beyond. Despite the many key thinkers who contributed to (...) the Germanic discourses on the unconscious, the English speaking world remains comparatively unaware of this heritage and its influence upon the origins of psychoanalysis. Bringing together a collection of experts in the fields of German Studies, Continental Philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Psychoanalysis, this volume examines the various theorisations, representations and transformations undergone by the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

A biblical approach to reconciling God’s sovereignty with creaturely responsibility should avoid the extremes of global occasionalism and completely autonomous creatures. This paper evaluates the standard intermediary solutions offered by conservationists and concurrentists. It argues that while each contributes insights which a satisfactory account should retain, none is fully adequate. Even Leibniz’s sophisticated response, which accounts for providence, miracles, and moral responsibility, unacceptably abridges creaturely power to implement decisions. My alternative proposal seeks to explain how creatures can retain full responsibility (...) for their actions even though God reserves the right to override creaturely power with His greater power. (shrink)

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.