Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.     

What is so important about completing lives? A critique of the modified youngest first principle of scarce resource allocation

Ruth Tallman has recently offered a defense of the modified youngest first principle of scarce resource allocation [1]. According to Tallman, this principle calls for prioritizing adolescents and young adults between 15–40 years of age. In this article, I argue that Tallman’s defense of the modified youngest first principle is vulnerable to important objections, and that it is thus unsuitable as a basis for allocating resources. Moreover, Tallman makes claims about the badness of death for individuals at different ages, but she lacks an account of the loss involved in dying to support her claims. To fill this gap in Tallman’s account, I propose a view on the badness of death that I call ‘Deprivationism’. I argue that this view explains why death is bad for those who die, and that it has some advantages over Tallman’s complete lives view in the context of scarce resource allocation. Finally, I consider some objections to the relevance of Deprivationism to resource allocation, and offer my responses.     

Egalitarianism and Responsibility

This essay examines several possible rationales for the egalitarian judgment that justice requires better-off individuals to help those who are worse off even in the absence of social interaction. These rationales include equality (everyone should enjoy the same level of benefits), moral meritocracy (each should get benefits according to her responsibility or deservingness), the threshold of sufficiency (each should be assured a minimally decent quality of life), prioritarianism (a function of benefits to individuals should be maximized that gives priority to the worse off), and mixed views. A case is made for adopting either prioritarianism or a mixed view that gives priority both to the worse off and to the more responsible and deserving.     

Age-Related Change in Shifting Attention Between Global and Local Levels of Hierarchical Stimuli

The focus of this study was the developmental pattern of the ability to shift attention between global and local levels of hierarchical stimuli. Children aged 7 years and 11 years and 21-year-old adults were administered a task (two experiments) that allowed for the examination of 1) the direction of attention to global or local stimulus levels; 2) the susceptibility to interference of the global or local stimulus levels; and 3) the flexibility in directing attention to global or local stimulus levels. The results revealed a global advantage effect that decreased with age when the task required level shifting from trial to trial. The abilities to resist interference and to flexibly shift attention also improved during childhood, but quickly leveled off during adolescence. The ability to shift attention was found to be unrelated to processes contributing to global advantage. The results suggest that the ability to flexibly shift attention to and away from local detail, to provide the most adaptive response, continues to develop during childhood into adulthood.     

不同分配情境下儿童公平行为的发展

为探究儿童在不同利益对比情境以及与己利益无关情境中的公平行为,研究呈现了自我任务的劣势博弈、优势博弈、冲突博弈以及第三方任务博弈四种分配情境。自我任务中儿童需要为自己与另一名匿名儿童迫选方案,第三方任务中则需为两名匿名儿童迫选方案。结果发现:(1)劣势博弈中所有年龄组均倾向于选择公平方案,而非劣势方案;(2)优势博弈中,8岁、10岁组选择公平方案的人显著多于优势方案,而4岁、6岁组均无显著差异;(3)冲突博弈中,4岁、6岁组选择优势方案的人显著多于劣势方案,而8岁、10岁组均无显著差异;(4)第三方博弈中, 8岁、10岁组选择公平方案的人显著多于不公平方案,而4岁、6岁组均无显著差异。这表明,4岁~6岁儿童尚未真正获得公平观念,且以获得个人利益为主;而8岁是真正获得公平观念的转折年龄,8~10岁儿童对人对己均坚持公平原则,且表现出利他倾向。     

Genetic enhancement and the fate of the worse off

When reflecting on arguments in the debate about genetic technologies, decision makers must try to be empathetic to those who are worse off. Disparities in health and health care in the U.S. pale when global facts are considered. Although U.S. citizens ought to be concerned about the worse off in the U.S., such concern ultimately must be balanced against the urgent imperative to address the plight of those in poor countries. It is a matter of fairness that care and concern be directed to those who are truly worse off in global terms.     

INEQUALITY,INCENTIVES AND THE INTERPERSONAL TEST

This article defends three claims: (1) even if Rawls' difference principle permits incentives to induce talented people to be more productive, it does not follow that it permits inequalities; (2) the difference principle, when adequately specified, may in some circumstances permit incentives and allow that the worst off are not made as well off as they could be; and (3) an argument for incentives might pass Cohen's interpersonal test even if it is unsound and might not pass it even if it is sound. 1     

Cohen’s Rescue

G. A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality proposes that both concepts need rescuing from the work of John Rawls. Especially, it is concerned with Rawls’ famous second principle of justice according to which social primary goods should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to the benefit of the worst off. The question is why this would ever be necessary if all parties are just. Cohen and I agree that Rawls cannot really justify inequalities on the basis given. But he also thinks equality is the correct analysis of justice, though he provides no actual direct arguments for this. He does, however, provide a striking analytical argument claiming that fundamental principles of justice must be fact insensitive, and that Rawls’s view of justice violates this requirement. I argue that the requirement is itself misconceived and that principles of justice cannot possibly be fact insensitive in the sense developed by Cohen. Few philosophers share this view of Cohen’s—which I argue is due to several conceptual mistakes. With these ironed out, the contractarian view, broadly speaking, is seen to be plausible and powerful. Meanwhile Cohen appears to embrace intuitionism, a stance that cannot possibly be acceptable in social philosophy. In the end, Cohen is successful in arguing that Rawls cannot have what he wants, but neither is Cohen successful in claiming that justice is equality.     

The Flawed Person of the Analyst: Commentary on Paper by Lauren Levine

The way that the current conception of mutual enactment is understood, any analysis, in order to be ultimately successful must first go badly for some period of time. Any analysis that goes too smoothly is subject to the suspicion that some very difficult interactional material is being mutually unaddressed. In this context I see that Dr. Lauren Levine enacted the role of her abandoned patient (concordant countertransference) and as well, for a time, indeed, figuratively abandoned her patient (complementary countertransference). The author's central contribution in this paper is an illustration of how drawing on difficult and painful dimensions in one's own personal analysis, the analyst has the advantage of being able to withstand highly toxic material in both the transference and the countertransference. Dr. Levine is fortunate in having had a personal analysis that helped her integrate highly shameful aspects of her self, though it must be recognized that this is not always the case in all training analyses.     

Rational Moral Ignorance

What should a person do when, through no fault of her own, she ends up believing a false moral theory? Some suggest that she should act against what the false theory recommends; others argue that she should follow her rationally held moral beliefs. While the former view better accords with intuitions about cases, the latter one seems to enjoy a critical advantage: It seems better able to render moral requirements ‘followable’ or ‘action-guiding.’ But this tempting thought proves difficult to justify. Indeed, whether it can be justified turns out to depend importantly on the rational status of epistemic akrasia. Furthermore, it can be argued, from premises all parties to the moral ignorance debate should accept, that rational epistemic akrasia is possible. If the argument proves successful, it follows that a person should sometimes act against her rationally held moral convictions.     

Reflection and Disagreement

How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment (the manner in which she responds to her evidence), then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle—a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an epistemic peer, you should give her conclusions the same weight as your own. Denying that view—call it the “equal weight view”—leads to absurdity: the absurdity that you could reasonably come to believe yourself to be an epistemic superior to an advisor simply by noting cases of disagreement with her, and taking it that she made most of the mistakes. Accepting the view seems to lead to another absurdity: that one should suspend judgment about everything that one's smart and well‐informed friends disagree on, which means suspending judgment about almost everything interesting. But despite appearances, the equal weight view does not have this absurd consequence. Furthermore, the view can be generalized to handle cases involving not just epistemic peers, but also epistemic superiors and inferiors.     

我国公共卫生中的伦理学问题

在公共卫生研究中重点探讨了伦理审查、研究对象选择、知情同意、保护研究对象隐私、对研究对象的适当补偿等方面的伦理学问题;在公共卫生实践中重点探讨了传染病防治、疾病监测、计划免疫、疾病筛查及卫生资源配置领域中的伦理学问题。重视这些问题并参照一定的伦理学原则将有助于解决问题,更好地促进公共卫生事业的发展,促进人群健康。     

Restricting health worker migration in the name of solidarity

This paper explores and adds to Gillian Brock and Michael Blake’s debate on health worker migration. Brock argues for a limited right of states to restrict the migration of health workers beyond their borders. She offers a range of reasons to support this argument based broadly on her account of global justice. In the context of health worker migration, she supports her argument more specifically by linking health workers’ obligations to duties of reciprocity and not imposing costs on their compatriots. In this paper, I seek to support her argument by offering solidarity, as developed in the literature on public health ethics, as a ground for the obligations of health workers to their compatriots and a limited right of states to restrict their movements. On a narrow view of reciprocity, health workers are obligated to repay their communities for the benefits that they have received during their childhoods and training. Solidarity augments this view by arguing that all persons also have positive obligations to take public actions to address injustices. This complementary ground for restrictions on the movements of health workers helps to address Blake’s critiques of communitarianism and reciprocity as justifying state restrictions.     

Do We Know Where We Stand? Neighborhood Relative Income,Subjective Social Status,and Health

Bridging research on relative income and subjective social status (SSS), this study examines how neighborhood relative income is related to ones' SSS, and in turn, physical and mental health. Using a survey sample of 1807 U.S. adults, we find that neighborhood median income significantly moderates the relationship between household income and self‐reported physical and mental health. Low‐income individuals living in high‐income neighborhoods (i.e., relative disadvantage) report better physical and mental health than low‐income individuals living in low‐income neighborhoods. In addition, high‐income individuals living in low‐income neighborhoods (i.e., relative advantage) report higher SSS (relative to neighbors), whereas low‐income individuals living in high‐income neighborhoods (i.e., relative disadvantage) also report higher SSS. We draw from social comparison theory to interpret these results positing that downward comparisons may serve an evaluative function while upward comparisons may result in affiliation with better‐off others. Finally, we demonstrate that SSS explains the relationship between neighborhood relative income and health outcomes, providing empirical support for the underlying influence of perceived social position.     

The New Holism: The Grand Prospect for Science and Society

As we enter the 21st century and the new millennium, our collective evolution reaches a critical threshold. We cannot go on as we did before: our world has become unsustainable. Sooner or later many local ecosystems would collapse, the climate would change adversely for agriculture and habitation, species incompatible with a large and dense human population would profilerate, and resources critical for human health and survival would become scarce, or at least beyond the reach of a critical segment of humanity. We need to shift gears, moving from the kind of evolution that characterized our scientific-technological civilization, to the kind that is compatible with the human condition as it evolves on this planet. This shift requires a corresponding shift in our concept of the world. The dominant mechanistic and atomistic paradigm no longer serves us: it is not only factually incorrect in view of the latest discoveries of the sciences, it also inspires dangerously misguided behaviors. We need to find a deeper and better view of the human condition. We must no longer just see the trees: we must also see the forest. That is, we must learn to see the planetary socio-ecosystem with all its subsystems, diversities, and also its actual and potential unities. What we need is a holistic view, a view of the human being as part of her or his community, which is part of its local environment, which is part of its society and culture, which is part of the system of cultures and societies in the human family-which is part of the global environment: of the biosphere.     

Natality and mortality: rethinking death with Cavarero

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.     

Harming future people

Hanser examines Derek Parfit's contention in his treatise on rationalism, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press; 1984) that acts that are not reproductive in nature can nonetheless predictably affect the identities of future people, and that this fact has unexpected and important consequences for ethical theory. Hanser argues tht this fact is not as significant as Parfit believes it to be. The arguments of both scholars concern the morality of choices that, while causing future persons to be badly off, do not make them worse off than they would have been if the choices had not been made. Hanser concludes his essay with a discussion of responsibility for acts that will affect the health of future offspring.     

The response to injustice: Effects of varying levels of social support and position of advantage or disadvantage

This study investigated the effects of varying levels of social support as well as position of advantage or disadvantage on subjects' response to injustice. Conditions of advantage and disadvantage were established by randomly assigning one member of each experimental dyad to a method of working which prevented him/her from earning points for prizes. Three levels of social support (“none,” “peer,” “authoritative”) were created. Advantaged and disadvantaged subjects receiving authoritative support for the possibility of change and disadvantaged subjects receiving peer support in the form of divided opinion statements rated the system as less fair than either group in the absence of support or the advantaged receiving only peer support. Disadvantaged subjects evidenced a tendency to assume personal responsibility for their lower outcomes. Social support reduced this tendency but did not eliminate it.     

Against Global Egalitarianism

This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world.I am very grateful to Gillian Brock and Kok-Chor Tan for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

The moral significance of the genetic relation

Our ordinary moral attitudes give a prominent place to the principle that each person ought specially to care for any child who is his or her genetic offspring. From this principle of genetic-parental responsibility and other plausible premises, we can derive the principle that each person has the right to control the genetic use of his or her own genes. But there are competing principles of parental responsibility that require consideration. Principles of nurture are among the important competitors. Also, the view that a woman has the right to control her own body for reproductive purposes may be based on a principle that denies the genetic-parental principle. An analysis is developed of the relations that constitute the criteria for the various possible principles of parental responsibility. Causality, temporality, spatiality, and resemblance are considered. The genetic relation is not any one of these relations, but it includes some of them. The justification of any principle of parental responsibility requires a detailed consideration of the principle from the viewpoint of a deontological or consequentialist moral theory. This examination is beyond the scope of this paper, but consideration is given to some issues and problems of justification, and difficult or unusual cases are discussed. There remain, then, complexities that require further study.