The ACA shifted U.S. health policy from centering on principles of actuarial fairness toward social solidarity. Yet four legal fixtures of the health care system have prevented the achievement of social solidarity: federalism, fiscal pluralism, privatization, and individualism. Future reforms must confront these fixtures to realize social solidarity in health care, American-style.

Leveraging perspectives from social cognitive theory, the attention-based view, and social networks literatures, we tested the relationship between unethical choice and network unethicality, which we define as respondents’ perceptions of their peer advisors’ unethical choices. Although social cognitive theory predicts that perceptions of peer advisor unethical choice are positively associated with unethical choice, we theorize that the nature of this relationship depends on the personality of the actor and the situation. Results from a lagged study suggest that individual and situational (...) variables may act as key buffers to the adverse impact of unethical social influence on ethical choice. Strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another thing might count as a good (...) life, none of them can plausibly be identified with the good life, or the best life. Given the long history of that impasse, it seems futile to offer yet another candidate for the genus “good life” as if that candidate might be new, or philosophically defensible. And given the weariness, irony, and self-deprecation expected of a philosopher in such an impasse, it is difficult for any substantive proposal on this topic to avoid seeming pretentious. (shrink)

When philosophers speak of the inconclusiveness of arguments for the existence of God, they often do so as if they were talking about a matter of principle—as if it were in principle impossible to prove God's existence, that every proof was in principle inconclusive. Of course, rebutals of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments are usually designed to show that these types of arguments are in principle inconclusive. But one supposes that religious experience arguments are not all in such difficulties. (...) That is, one supposes, for example, that an encounter with the deity would provide a proof of his existence which is at least as conclusive as proofs for the existence of an ‘external world’. And thus it would be false to maintain in an unqualified way that ‘Reason cannot prove the existence of God’. The most one would be able to say would be that at present , or in terms of the currently available evidence, no one can prove God's existence. Further, whether or not sufficient evidence has ever been available in the past would be seen as an historical question— a matter of contingencies, not logical possibilities. (shrink)

The tendency to reciprocate – to return good for good and evil for evil – is a potent force in human life, and the concept of reciprocity is closely connected to fundamental notions of ‘justice’, ‘obligation’ or ‘duty’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘equality’. In _Reciprocity_, first published in 1986,_ _Lawrence Becker presents a sustained argument about reciprocity, beginning with the strategy for developing a moral theory of the virtues. He considers the concept of reciprocity in detail, contending that it is a basic (...) virtue that provides the basis for parental authority, obligations to future generations, and obedience to law. Throughout the first two parts of the book, Becker intersperses short pieces of his own narrative fiction to enrich reflection on the philosophical arguments. The final part is devoted to extensive bibliographical essays, ranging over anthropology, psychology, political theory and law, as well as the relevant ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

_Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue and inequality, and the belief that justice in distribution must take precedence over (...) private ownership. Lawrence Becker goes on to contend that there are four sound lines of argument for private property that, together with what is sound in the anti-property arguments, must be co-ordinated to form the foundations of a new theory. He therefore expounds a concise but sophisticated theory of property that is relevant to the modern world, and concludes by indicating some of the implications of his theory. (shrink)

The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.

Philosopher Lawrence Becker applies modern knowledge and psychology to the ancient stoic ethic system. In keeping with the ancients, Becker argues that virtue, not happiness, is the proper end of all activity. Moreover, he rejects the popular caricature of the stoic as a grave and emotionally detached figure, proposing instead, that stoic discipline is the very foundation not only of strength, but also of joy.

This brief, elegantly written book puts forward a view of normative reasoning--a view White calls "corporatism"--based upon an analogy with certain views about reasoning in the empirical sciences. Duhem and Quine have argued that an empirical statement is not tested, accepted, or rejected in isolation from other beliefs. Rather, it is seen in the context of a web of related beliefs, assumptions, and sense experiences--even relevant laws of logic--and the testing process is essentially the process of deciding which, of all (...) those items, "must" or "ought to be" accepted or rejected. Moral reasoning, White thinks, is similar. Moral judgments are always assessed in a context which includes moral feelings of sentiments and empirical beliefs. Their assessment is essentially the process of deciding which, of all of those items, must be accepted, revised, or rejected. One of White's examples concerns abortion. The relevant normative judgments include the prohibition of homicides of certain sorts, the relevant empirical beliefs have to do with developmental biology, medicine, intention, and the like; the relevant moral feelings include a sense of obligation. Moral judgments drawn from the conjunction of such "premises" may set up conflicting feelings, or the premises themselves may be inconsistent. In such cases something must give: deciding just what must give is analogous to deciding what beliefs to give up when scientific experiments yield anomalous results. (shrink)

The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded, and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Aristotelian Ethics * Avicenna * Bad Faith * Beneficence * Categorical (...) and Hypothetical Imperatives * Cheating * Civil Liberty * Conventions * Dirty hands * Evolution * Fiduciary Relationships * Gay ethics * Genetic Engineering * Holocaust * Journalism * Killing/Letting Die * Moral Imagination * Narrative Ethics * Political correctness * Population Ethics * Public and 0rivate Morality * Racism, concepts of * and many more. (shrink)

What would stoic ethics be like today if stoicism had survived as a systematic approach to ethical theory, if it had coped successfully with the challenges of modern philosophy and experimental science? A New Stoicism proposes an answer to that question, offered from within the stoic tradition but without the metaphysical and psychological assumptions that modern philosophy and science have abandoned. Lawrence Becker argues that a secular version of the stoic ethical project, based on contemporary cosmology and developmental psychology, (...) provides the basis for a sophisticated form of ethical naturalism, in which virtually all the hard doctrines of the ancient Stoics can be clearly restated and defended. Becker argues, in keeping with the ancients, that virtue is one thing, not many; that it, and not happiness, is the proper end of all activity; that it alone is good, all other things being merely rank-ordered relative to each other for the sake of the good; and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Moreover, he rejects the popular caricature of the stoic as a grave figure, emotionally detached and capable mainly of endurance, resignation, and coping with pain. To the contrary, he holds that while stoic sages are able to endure the extremes of human suffering, they do not have to sacrifice joy to have that ability, and he seeks to turn our attention from the familiar, therapeutic part of stoic moral training to a reconsideration of its theoretical foundations. (shrink)

This symposium paper for the APA analyzes Locke's labor theory of property acquisition as a formal argument – or set of alternative arguments – and shows how several of them are indeed sound, if appropriately limited by what amounts to a social welfare proviso. That proviso is, however, strong enough to limit the acquisition of private property in a significant way. The argument here anticipates fuller and more decisive ones in later work by the same author.

This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely theory-independent (...) respect to standard normative theories. (shrink)

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN MOḤAMMAD b. Aḥmad (362/973- after 442/1050), scholar and polymath of the period of the late Samanids and early Ghaznavids and one of the two greatest intellectual figures of his time in the eastern lands of the Muslim world, the other being Ebn Sīnā.

The Tree of Life hypothesis frames the evolutionary process as a series of events whereby lineages diverge from one another, thus creating the diversity of life as descendent lineages modify properties from their ancestors. This hypothesis is under scrutiny due to the strong evidence for lateral gene transfer between distantly related bacterial taxa, thereby providing extant taxa with more than one parent. As a result, one argues, the Tree of Life becomes confounded as the original branching structure is gradually superseded (...) by reticulation, ultimately losing its ability to serve as a model for bacterial evolution. Here we address a more fundamental issue: is there a Tree of Life that results from bacterial evolution without considering such lateral gene transfers? Unlike eukaryotic speciation events, lineage separation in bacteria is a gradual process that occurs over tens of millions of years, whereby genetic isolation is established on a gene-by-gene basis. As a result, groups of closely related bacteria, while showing robust genetic isolation as extant lineages, were not created by an unambiguous series of lineage-splitting events. Rather, a temporal fragmentation of the speciation process results in cognate genes showing different genetic relationships. We argue that lineage divergence in bacteria does not produce a tree-like framework, and inferences drawn from such a framework have the potential to be incorrect and misleading. Therefore, the Tree of Life is an inappropriate paradigm for bacterial evolution regardless of the extent of gene transfer between distantly related taxa. (shrink)

The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Cheating * Dirty hands * Gay ethics * Holocaust * Journalism (...) * Political correctness * and many more. (shrink)

The Healer's Art curriculum is one of the best-known educational strategies to support medical student professional identity formation. HART has been widely used as an elective curriculum. We evaluated students’ experience with HART when the curriculum was required. All one hundred eleven members of the class of 2019 University of New Mexico School of Medicine students were required to enroll in HART. We surveyed the students before and after the course to assess its self-reported impact on key elements of professional (...) identity formation such as empathy towards patients and peers, commitment to service, and burnout. A majority of students reported positive effects of the course on their empathy towards other students. This finding was significantly associated with self-reported willingness to have elected the course had it not been required. One-half of respondents reported positive effects on their empathy towards future patients. At least one-quarter to one-third of respondents reported positive influences on commitment to service, conceptions about being a physician, and self-perceived burnout. Students report benefits on their professional identity formation after participating in a required course on humanism. Empathy-building among peers is one valuable outcome of such curricula. (shrink)

Logic and Computation is concerned with techniques for formal theorem-proving, with particular reference to Cambridge LCF (Logic for Computable Functions). Cambridge LCF is a computer program for reasoning about computation. It combines methods of mathematical logic with domain theory, the basis of the denotational approach to specifying the meaning of statements in a programming language. This book consists of two parts. Part I outlines the mathematical preliminaries: elementary logic and domain theory. They are explained at an intuitive level, giving references (...) to more advanced reading. Part II provides enough detail to serve as a reference manual for Cambridge LCF. It will also be a useful guide for implementors of other programs based on the LCF approach. (shrink)