: Widespread collection and use of identifiable information can promote social goods while, at the same time, infringing on personal privacy. Information systems are developing within the context of a fundamental transformation in the organization, delivery, and financing of health care. Changes in the health care system include rapid development of employer-sponsored health coverage, managed care organizations, and integrated delivery systems. These complex, multifaceted arrangements for delivering and paying for health care require ever-more-sophisticated information systems that facilitate extensive sharing of (...) personal data. Systemic flows of sensitive health information occur both vertically and horizontally among employers, hospitals, insurers, laboratories, and suppliers. Beyond this complex web of vertical and horizontal sharing are the multiple demands for information management, quality assurance, research, governmental regulation, and public health. Theoretical problems exist with the law and ethics of informational privacy. The traditional method of exercising control over personal health information is through informed consent. Informed consent, however, within a modern health information infrastructure becomes highly complex. In this kind of environment, the doctrine of informed consent is flawed and does not provide sufficient control over personal information to assure adequate protection of privacy. (shrink)

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...) realism. (shrink)

The vision of global health with justice which Larry Gostin articulates in his book Global Health Law envisages a switch to ‘upstream’ priority-setting for expenditure on health, with a focus upon social determinants and a goal of redressing health inequalities. This article explores what is meant by this proposal and offers a critical evaluation of it. It is argued that difficulties arise in respect of the ethical and evidential bases for such an approach to the setting of priorities, (...) while significant challenges may also arise in the necessary modification of structures of governance. (shrink)

Scholarship on international health law is currently pushing the boundaries while taking stock of achievements made over the past few decades. However despite the forward thinking approach of scholars working in the field of global health one area remains a stumbling block in the path to achieving the right to health universally: the financing of heath. This paper uses the book Global Health Law by Larry Gostin to reflect and take stock of the fiscal support provided to the (...) right to health from both a global and an African perspective. It then sets out the key fiscal challenges facing global and African health and proposes an innovative solution for consideration: use of the domestic principles of tax to design the global health financing system. (shrink)

Normative naturalism is a view about the status of epistemology and philosophy of science; it is a meta-epistemology. It maintains that epistemology can both discharge its traditional normative role and nonetheless claim a sensitivity to empirical evidence. The first sections of this essay set out the central tenets of normative naturalism, both in its epistemic and its axiological dimensions; later sections respond to criticisms of that species of naturalism from Gerald Doppelt, Jarrett Leplin and Alex Rosenberg.

This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in (...) both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy. (shrink)

This paper aims to illuminate some issues in the equality, priority, or what debate. I characterize egalitarianism and prioritarianism, respond to the view that we should care about sufficiency or compassion rather than equality or priority, discuss the levelling down objection, and illustrate the significance of the distinction between prioritarianism and egalitarianism, establishing that the former is no substitute for the latter. In addition, I respond to Bertil Tungodden's views regarding the Slogan, the levelling down objection, the Pareto Principle, leximin, (...) the principle of personal good, strict moderate egalitarianism, the Hammond Equity Condition, the intersection approach, and non-aggregative reasoning. (shrink)

This anthology presents recent philosophical analyses of the moral, political, and legal responsibility of groups and their members. Motivated by reflection on such events as the Holocaust, the exploding Ford Pintos, the May Lai massacre, and apartheid in South Africa, the essays consider two questions - what collective efforts could have prevented these large-scale social harms? and is some group to blame and, if so, how is blame to be apportioned? The essays in the first half consider the concept of (...) collective responsibility in light of the debate between individualists and collectivists. In the second half these theoretical discussions are applied to cases involving harms in professional and business contexts, health care, wartime, and racial relations. Collective Responsibility represents the first comprehensive collection on the subject, bringing together a wide diversity of philosophical perspectives. Its theoretical and applied essays should make this collection of interest to both scholars and students interested in ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

Book Reviews in This Article:William J. curran Larry Gostin, and Mary Clark, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Legal and Regulatory Policy.

This paper argues that it has been widely assumed by philosophers of science that the cumulative retention of explanatory success is a "sine qua non" for making judgements about the progress or rational preferability of one theory over another. It has also been assumed that it is impossible to make objective, Comparative judgements of the acceptability of rival theories unless all the statements of both theories could be translated into a common language. This paper seeks to show that both these (...) dogmas are mistaken; that progress without cumulativity and comparability without commensurability are both viable. (shrink)