Inequalities in Health and Intergenerational Equity

In the popular folklore three-score-years-and-ten is treated as a fair innings for people, and thereby serves as an informal reference point for judgements about distributive justice within a community. But length of life alone is an insufficient basis for such judgements - a person's health-related quality-of-life also needs to be taken into account. If one of the objectives of public policy is to reduce inequalities in lifetime health, it will be demonstrated that this is very likely to require systematic discrimination against the older members of a community. The notion of community solidatity will also be tested, because a decision will need to be made as to whether the same fair innings applies to all members of the community, or whether some are entitled to more than others. The strength of the fair innings principle is that it brings these issues to the fore in a systematic way which should ais their resolition in a practical context.     

PLACING PREMENSTRUAL SYNDROME IN PERSPECTIVE

In a longitudinal prospective study, mood fluctuations were assessed for evidence of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) as well as other menstrual, day of week, and lunar cyclicity. Volunteer participants from the community (60 women and 10 men) provided daily data for 12 to 18 weeks. Significant mood fluctuation was determined by a new nonparametric method using each individual's own standard deviation as a measure of marked change. Cyclicity was the norm; two thirds of both the women and men had one or more menstrual or lunar phases or days of the week that were markedly positive and/or negative, relative to their own range, but few experienced stereotypical cyclicity (PMS, Monday blues, full moon). About half the women whose prospective data met conservative criteria for PMS, met liberal criteria, or met neither criteria said they had PMS, and half in each group said they did not.     

Logic and Existence: Timothy Williams

The paper defends the intelligibility of unrestricted quantification. For any natural number n , 'There are at least n individuals' is logically true, when the quantifier is unrestricted. In response to the objection that such sentences should not count as logically true because existence is contingent, it is argued by consideration of cross-world counting principles that in the relevant sense of 'exist' existence is not contingent. A tentative extension of the upward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem to proper classes is used to argue that a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic of unrestricted universal quantification results from adding all sentences of the form 'There are at least n individuals' as axioms to a standard axiomatization of the first-order predicate calculus.
Of the many questions on which logic is neutral, one is usually supposed to be this: 'How many individuals are there?' On the alternative view defended below, truths about the number of individuals are logically true. They are not contingent logical truths, for it is not contingent what individuals there are.