Many philosophers have argued that prosthetic limbs are the subjects of some of the same rights as traditional body parts. This is a strong argument in favour of respecting the rights of users of prosthetics. I argue that all of the reasons to consider paradigm prosthetics the subjects of body-like rights apply to the relationship between some emotional support animals (ESAs) and their handlers. ESAs are integrated into the functioning of their handlers in ways that parallel the ways that paradigm (...) prosthetics are integrated into the functioning of their users. ESAs are also phenomenologically integrated into their handler’s lives in ways that parallel the phenomenological integration that prosthetic users experience. These parallels provide a strong reason to take the rights of ESA handlers much more seriously than we do now. I will highlight that the current treatment of ESA handlers presumes that they have no rights to ESAs at all. Even if ESAs are the subject of very minimal body-like rights, ESA handlers are having their rights violated. There are of course disanalogies between ESAs and paradigm prosthetics. Most notably, ESAs are alive and separate from their handlers. However, none of these disanalogies are relevant to the question of body-like rights. The differences between ESAs and paradigm prosthetics are in terms of what treatment is owed to them, not in terms of what rights their handlers and users should have. ESAs are not prosthetics, but they deserve some of the rights prosthetics do. (shrink)

Romance novels are primarily aimed at, written about, and written for women. They have been accused of being fantasies which feature sexually objectified heroines who are passive recipients of overwhelming masculine sexual energy. After shoring up these critiques of romance novels with A.W. Eaton’s account of how art can objectify its subjects, we examine a challenge to romance novels: does the sexual content in romance novels objectify its heroines? There is strong reason to think so. However, we argue that careful (...) attention to the ways art can objectify its subject reveals that romance novels are structured to make it impossible for their heroines to be objectified. In many cases, individual signs of objectification are raised as possible outcomes and dismissed as part of the plot of a romance novel. Satisfying sex in a romance novel does not appear until it is impossible for the romantic heroine to be objectified. Understood in this way, romance novels serve as a model for one way that objectification could be avoided. The fantasy of a romance novel is not objectifying sex. It is sex free of objectification. (shrink)

Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in part via the charity care that Catholic health care provides. The poor encounter another cost of pollution: the financial cost (...) of seeking health care, particularly in the US. The authors argue that Catholic health care institutions should take the moral harm of pollution seriously by reducing the financial burden on those sickened by pollution. As an example, they highlight the situation of those sickened by lead exposure in the US and outline how Catholic health care institutions could consider lessening the financial burden of treating this sickness. (shrink)

There are documented differences in the efficacy of medical treatment for pain for men and women. Women are less likely to have their pain controlled and receive less treatment than men. We are investigating one possible explanation for this gender pain gap: that there is a difference in how women and men report their pain to physicians, and so there is a difference in how physicians understand their pain. This paper describes an exploratory study into gendered attitudes towards reporting uncontrolled (...) pain to a physician. This exploratory study provided subjects with a vignette describing a situation in which their pain is not being treated adequately and asked them questions about their attitudes towards self-advocacy and the strategies they would likely use to express themselves. We found that women scored higher than men on measures of patient likelihood to self-advocate. Women also reported intending to use more varied self-advocacy strategies than men. This suggests it is unlikely that patient’s communication styles are to blame for the gender pain gap. (shrink)

Erik Schokkaert's note presents a very good summary of the theory of macrojustice and a very good list of the directions of research it points to. This is quite fitting since a research programme defines a paradigm, and he sees this proposal as a paradigm shift. This is also very appropriate since his own qualifications are the best for advancing fast in these research topics. I have only a very small number of qualifications to add to his presentation, but I (...) prefer to begin with emphasizing the most important issues. Two aspects can be seen as the most important: the de facto axiomatic derivation of the solution ELIE and its application on the one hand, and the present state of scholarly studies of the optimum or just distribution of income on the other hand. Let us enter by the second door (as opposed to what is done in the book Macrojustice). This will lead us to conclude with a more synthetic and broader view of the basic logic of the paradigms of justice and of the surprising recent history of their interpretations. (shrink)

The emergence of Covid‐19 in the United States has revealed a critical weakness in the health care system in the United States. The majority of people in the nation receive health care via employment‐based health insurance from providers in a competitive market. However, neither employment‐based health care nor a competitive health care market can adequately provide treatment during a global pandemic. Employment‐based health care will fail to provide care for a large number of people in any destabilizing economic event, including (...) a pandemic. Competitive for‐profit health care systems distribute limited goods based on markets rather than health care needs. If a global pandemic results in unusually high demand for specific medical supplies, then these will be distributed suboptimally. The combined risk of suboptimal distribution of needed goods and a significant drop in health care access in a global pandemic indicates that the U.S. health care system has serious vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. (shrink)

This paper is a clinical ethics case study which sheds light on several important dilemmas which arise in providing care to patients from cultures with non-individualistic conceptions of autonomy. Medical professionals face a difficult challenge in determining how to respond when families of patients ask that patients not be informed of bad medical news. These requests are often made for cultural reasons, by families seeking to protect patients. In these cases, the right that patients have to their own medical information (...) in order to make autonomous decisions is in tension with the possibility that patients could hold values that require limiting their autonomy with regard to medical information disclosure, often based on the idea that family should take on difficult decision-making as an act of care. We describe one such case, of an 83-year old Russian woman whose husband requested she not be informed of a new cancer diagnosis. The appropriate response to this request was to ask the patient about her values separately, without disclosing any medical information until her values were clear. This patient indicated she wanted the care team to uphold her husband’s request. This response makes the importance of determining a patient’s values before moving forward with disclosure clear: she would not have wanted to be informed of her cancer. We describe our conversation strategy, which allowed value exploration without disclosure and highlighted that the obligation to respect a patient’s autonomy sometimes includes an obligation to allow a patient to choose to limit their own autonomy. This case also highlights that this kind of conversation prioritizes the patient’s values rather than the family’s or care team’s, centering patients in the way that is ethically appropriate. (shrink)

This paper analyses the National Populist Challenges to Europe’s Center Right. It assesses the cases of the UK, Germany and France. It poses three questions for Europe: How will political integration be achieved and maintained? What policies will foster economic inclusion in the Eurozone? And, third, what are the best means to achieve economic solvency and growth. The paper make a case that neoliberal economic policies over the past decades have undermined some nations' public sector and have also contributed to (...) tensions between the geographical east and west of Europe. (shrink)

Welfarism, a position which for a long time enjoyed a hegemonic status in the field of normative economics, holds that the sole ethically relevant information for assessing social states of affairs pertains to individual utilities. Serge-Christophe Kolm presents the Equal-Labour Income Equalization model very explicitly and repeatedly as breaking with the still dominant tradition of welfarism. This paper explores the meaning of this distancing from welfarism found in the ELIE model. After having provided conceptual clarifications concerning both ELIE and (...) welfarism, we discuss various opposing aspects of this model of income redistribution to welfarism. We show that the refusal of welfarism by the ELIE model does not depend mainly on its axiomatic features, but on its deontological perspective. (shrink)

In this book Kristi A. Olson addresses the question of fair labor income distribution by proposing the solidarity solution, a new test she defines and defends. She takes as her starting point the envy test, discussed by the philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Philippe Van Parijs and by the economists Jan Tinbergen, Hal Varian, Marc Fleurbaey, Duncan Foley, and Serge-Christophe Kolm. According to the envy test, a distribution is fair when no one prefers someone else's circumstances to their own. After (...) rejecting the envy test, Olson distinguishes two types of envy: personal and impersonal. Impersonal envy makes a demand on others; personal envy, in contrast, does not. Using this distinction, Olson argues that fair labor-income bundles must be impersonal envy-free, but need not be personal envy-free. The book concludes by relating the solidarity solution to concrete problems such as the gender wage gap and taxation. (shrink)

Artikkel lähtub Hegeli filosoofilise süsteemi mittemetafüüsilisest tõlgendusest ja keskendub ühele aspektile Hegeli dialektilise meetodi juures, mille iseloomustamiseks oleks autori arvates kõige adekvaatsem kasutada narratiivi mõistet. Artikli tees on kokkuvõtlikult järgmine: Hegeli arvates ei ole filosoofiline tõde väljendatav ühe lause või propositsiooniga, vaid see nõuab tervet väidete jada, kusjuures mõistete määratlused selles väidete jadas peavad suutma teiseneda --- nii nagu kirjandusliku jutustuse käigus võivad teiseneda tegelaste iseloom ja arusaamine asjadest . Lisaks neile kahele omadusele on narratiivile iseloomulik talle omaste struktuurielementide abil (...) loodud terviklikkus, mis võimaldab tal anda edasi sellist mõtet, mis ei sisaldu üheski narratiivi moodustavas lauses üksikult võetuna. Need kolm omadust võimaldavad Hegeli "dialektilisele" meetodile narratiiviteooria vahenditega uut valgust heita ja spekulatiivse tõe loomust paremini mõista. The paper discusses the nature of Hegel's dialectical method and criticizes its wide-spread interpretation according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula. It is argued that there is no evidence of triadic structures in Hegel's works. Rather, the elements or "determinations" ) that make up the body of Hegel's texts, are organized as "series" that form circles, in which, as Hegel maintains, the last element leads us back to the first. If synthesis means creating something new by using the initial elements then it is problematic whether anything becomes synthesized in Hegel texts. The paper argues against interpreting the every third element of the series or the end-points of the series as synthetic unities. Instead, the paper proposes that Hegel's speculative method uses the form of narrative for creating a vessel that is able to express the "speculative truth" which is "fluid" and which requires a "plastic" form of presentation. Narrative can accomplish what a singular proposition and a deductive system cannot, because it consists of a series of claims that is able to express the movement of what is said in each claim, and because its ending creates a point at which the story as a whole obtains a meaning that is not expressed in any particular sentence constituting the story. (shrink)

One cannot really speak of a school of personalistic economists. Moreover, there is a wide gulf between the economic philosophy of the personalists and the mathematical context of economic science. Since the thirties, philosophers such as Alexandre Marc, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and many others have been searching, on the basis of a personalistic view of man, for a `third way' between individualistic capitalism and statist socialism , but there was seldom interest from the side of the scientific economists.Fortunately, there (...) are some notable exceptions. François Perroux, Kenneth Boulding, Ernst Schumacher, Serge Christophe Kolm, and Amartya Sen are economists who, in various ways, have attempted to bridge the gulf between the personalistic view of man and economic rationality. By carrying out an immanent critique of some of the standard economic assumptions, they opened a path for a normative economics that was clearly distinct from a purely positive economics as well as from Pareto's welfare economics. One can affix various labels to these attempts: humanistic economics , socio-economics , moral economics . In what follows, I shall interpret these attempts as initiatives in the direction of a personalistic economics. I would also situate the current research in `economics and ethics', which is becoming part of the mainstream of economic thought, and which has received official recognition with the recent Nobel prize award to Sen, within this tendency towards a more personalistic economics.Attention to moral feelings, human rights, altruistic motives, justice and solidarity, non-profit organizations, etc., contribute to situating the economic problem in a field where economics, politics and ethics no longer function as three distinct domains but where their interaction is central.Yet does this interactive economics fit into a personalistic way of thinking? Is a generalized system theory not more attractive? System theory has a different focus than personalistic economics. System theory considers the axioms of system equilibrium and sustainable growth as the ultimate horizon, whereas a personalist sees them as merely important conditions for a good society and economy. However refined it may be, system theory views the person from an external point of view, while the personalist refers to the internal experience of human freedom and meaning as something that transcends and regulates the system's functionality.One could object that neo-classical economists do not use system theory as their point of departure. In their eyes, system equilibrium is the result of the utility-maximizing behaviour of individuals. These individuals subjectively determine what their preferences are and then act accordingly. Is this openness for a free, utility-maximizing actor — where there is room for both material and immaterial, egoistic and altruistic preferences — not sufficient to speak of a personalistic economics ? If this were true, then the discourse of personalism would be more or less superfluous.I take the term `personalistic economics' to refer to a normative economics that does not simply reconstruct the problem of efficient allocation as an individual or social problem of utility, but in the first instance as a problem of human dignity and social justice. To reduce the problem of human choice to a problem of subjective utility is in itself a far-reaching normative standpoint. As soon as one realizes this, there is no reason to exclude other normative assumptions, such as personalistic ones. (shrink)

Two essential intuitions about the concept of multidimensional inequality have been highlighted in the emerging body of literature on this subject: first, multidimensional inequality should be a function of the uniform inequality of a multivariate distribution of goods or attributes across people (Kolm, 1977); and, second, it should also be a function of the cross-correlation between distributions of goods or attributes in different dimensions (Atkinson and Bourguignon, 1982; Walzer, 1983). While the first intuition has played a major role in (...) the design of fully-fledged multidimensional inequality indices, the second one has only recently received attention (Tsui, 1999); and, so far, multidimensional generalized entropy measures are the only inequality measures known to respect both intuitions. The present paper proposes a general method of designing a wider range of multidimensional inequality indices that also respect both intuitions, and illustrates this method by defining two classes of such indices: a generalization of the Gini coefficient, and a generalization of Atkinson's onedimensional measure of inequality. (shrink)