We are often told that we are morally obligated to produce equal opportunity for all. Therefore, it seems we should examine what power we have to produce that desirable state. For it would be nonsense to say we are required to provide what is beyond our power to provide. When we examine this question, we find our power limited by two sets of constraints. One set comprises formal constraints upon the idea itself of equal opportunity. We cannot do the logically (...) impossible. The other set comprises limits upon our ability to produce the directed socio-economic change, getting known outputs for known inputs. I illustrate the formal constraints by outlining the work of Douglas Rae. The constraints upon our abilities I illustrate with evidence from sociology and politics. At the end, we shall discover that our power to make opportunities equal is sharply though not unbearably limited. A critical but unbaised survey will reveal that in the past fifty years we have gone remarkably far towards doing all that we are presently capable of doing to equalize opportunities. Perhaps we shall go even farther when we learn how. The word ‘real’ in the title is opposed to ‘ideal’ or even ‘chimerical'. It may seem an interesting question what equality of opportunity should consist in were we able to produce directed socio-economic change at will. But we are not. Therefore, a more interesting and more important question is what equality of opportunity consists in given the very large number of constraints within which we must work to achieve it. (shrink)

Pain is undertreated in the American health-care system at all levels: physician offices, hospitals, long-term care facilities. The result is needless suffering for patients, complications that cause further injury or death, and added costs in treatment overall. The health-care system's failure to respond to patient pain needs corrective action. Excuses for such shortcomings are simply not acceptable any longer.Physicians have long been accused of poor pain management for their patient. The term “opiophobia” has been coined to describe this remarkable clinical (...) aversion to the proper use of opioids to control pain. If the professional mandate of the health-care professional is to relieve suffering, then physicians are falling far short of their obligations by accepting myths about the use of opioids in the face of evidence to the contrary. (shrink)

The use of effective field theory, in situations wherein the energy-momentum of light particles is much lower than the rest mass of heavy degrees of freedom, has become an important one in contemporary physics. Herein we examine various means by which this effective action can be evaluated, using the effective photon–photon interaction—the Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian—as a pedagogical example.

Physicians and institutional providers face expanding liability exposure today, in spite of state tort reform legislation and public awareness of the costs of malpractice for providers. Standards of practice are evolving rapidly; new medical technologies are being introduced at a rapid rate; information is proliferating as to treatment efficacy, patient risk, and diseases generally. Tort standards mirror this change. As medical standards of care evolve, they provide a benchmark against which to measure provider failure. The liability exposure of physicians is (...) affected by the generation of data, including outcomes data usable to profile physician practice, and statistical data that allows for predictions as to treatment efficacy, and patient prognosis; obligations to inform patients and third parties of risk created by contagious disease and other sources of harm; obligations of physicians to disclose risks that the provider creates for the patient; obligations to disclose conflicts of interest arising out of the practice setting; and duties arising from new epidemiological knowledge. (shrink)

Scientific discovery and scientific progress are made by scientists, not philosophers. Philosophers sometimes overlook this fact. It appears to be completely ignored by those who call themselves feminist philosophers of science. A favored claim among them is that the production of a feminist epistemology, or of a feminist society, or of both together, will produce something called ‘feminist science’. Feminist science will be different, they say, from the science we now have. One leading proponent of this view, Sandra Harding, writes: (...) “[t]he sciences that gain world ascendancy in the future are unlikely to be so distinctively Western and androcentric as are the dominant tendencies today.” But just how will they differ? Like all utopians these feminists are short on specifics and we are never told what such a science as science would look like, even in outline, much less in detail, nor how it is likely to differ as science from swnh. (shrink)

The application of ontology has thus far [in 1998] been confined almost exclusively to the field of knowledge representation. Ontology has been applied, for example, in the design of medical databases and in the construction of geographical information systems. One area which is naturally suited to ontological analysis is that of the law and of social institutions in general. -/- Legal systems are composed of legal entities, such as laws, contracts, obligations, and rights. Their application yields new categories of entities (...) such as: corporations, trademarks, marriages, and parcels of real estate. The categorization of these entities by different legal systems has not, by-and-large, been conducted in ways which exploit the tools of modern ontology. Consequently, contradictions and inconsistencies often arise in the law when, for instance, one type of entity is forced into two mutually exclusive categories (e.g., when software is considered both patentable and copyrightable). Papers are invited which consider these and related issues from a philosophical point of view. (shrink)

We live in an anxious world, riddled with unpredictable threats to our safety and unexpected hatreds directed toward us. It is easy to obsess on the terrors around us, about which we can do little, and lose perspective on the real and sometimes devastating risks that we encounter in our daily lives. These everyday risks need to be regularly revisited — to remind ourselves that they can be reduced with the application of sharp minds, careful scholarship, and political will.Medical errors (...) in the American health-care system are just such a problem. The risk of death or serious injury at the hands of the American health-care system is not trivial, as we have learned over the past few years as the health-care establishment has acknowledged the level of iatrogenic injury in the system. If, as the Institute of Medicine reported in To Err Is Human, as many as 100,000 people every year are dying in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices as the result of actions or omissions that could have been avoided, then this is a social problem of great magnitude and one that the law must try to correct. (shrink)

This article proposes ethical — and legal — accountability for lawyers representing clients such as private equity (PE) firms who create ownership structures for nursing home systems. Using PE ownership as a case study, I will show that nursing home residents are often harmed and Medicaid costs inflated. I propose private law provides tools to compel such accountability, through (1) aiding and abetting doctrines and (2) fiduciary doctrines that require that the fiduciary be responsible for its vulnerable beneficiaries, not just (...) ethically but for damages and equitable relief. I further propose that the teaching of Professional Responsibility needs to be changed to force law students to consider the effect of legal practice on third parties in situations like health care financing. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 m Defining Factors: Generic and Individual What is time? as long as no one asks me, I know what it is; but if I wish to explain it to an enquirer, ...

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Medicine is still largely a pre-Darwin, pre-Newton enterprise…. We do not yet understand the underlying mechanisms of the major illnesses which plague humanity, and therefore much of what is done in the treatment of illness must still be empirical, trial and error therapy. We are compelled by our limitations to resort to shoring things up, applying halfway technology, trying to fix things after the fact.