It would seem possible in principle … to reconstruct the ordinary sentential calculus in terms of phrastics only, and then apply it to indicatives and imperatives alike simply by adding the appropriate neustics.… It might be asked how we are to know, given two premisses in different moods, in what mood the conclusion is to be. The problem of the effect upon inferences of the moods of premisses and conclusion has been ignored by logicians who have not looked beyond the (...) indicative mood, … But if, as I do, we regard the entailment-relations of ordinary logic as relations between the phrastics of sentences, the problem becomes pressing. (R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, pp. 26–28.). (shrink)

If the conceptions of belief, desire, and action resemble phlogiston in their scientific standing, how is it that so many true, singular, causal claims about human behavior are made using these concepts? Alexander Rosenberg appeals to the distinction between attributive and referential uses of language to handle this objection. It is argued that this does not work, and that the truth of our singular, causal explanations of human behavior is little short of miraculous given his account of the nomological situation.

In this paper I prove a theorem which is similar to Arrow's famous impossibility theorem. I show that no social welfare function can be both minimally majoritarian and also independent of irrelevant alternatives. My condition of minimal majoritarianism is substantially weaker than simple majority rule.

Despite governmental and private antismoking initiatives, tobacco smoking remains a significant public health and economic challenge. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that for each year between 1997 and 2001, cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke caused approximately 438,000 U.S. residents to die prematurely, resulting in 5.5 million years of potential life lost, and in $92 billion dollars of lost productivity. Also, despite convincing scientific data that laws against indoor smoking protect people from the negative health effects (...) of cigarette smoke, not all states have afforded their residents this protection. As of July 2007, 16 states neither restricted nor banned indoor smoking in restaurants, private worksites, or government worksites, and many state statutes only required separate rooms for smokers rather than eliminating all smoking inside buildings. In several states, local governments have attempted to fill this gap by adopting their own antismoking measures. (shrink)

Elimination of state laws that preempt local antismoking ordinances is a national health objective. However, the tobacco industry and its supporters have continued to pursue statelevel preemption of local tobacco control ordinances as part of an apparent strategy to avoid the difusion of grassroots antismoking initiatives. And, an increasing number of challenges to local ordinances by the tobacco industry and persons supported by the tobacco industry are being decided in state supreme courts and courts of appeals. The outcomes of seemingly (...) similar cases about the validity of local smoke-free air ordinances vary signifcantly by state. This paper examines the common and unique aspects of the decisions and the potential implications of court rulings on preemption for future state tobacco control eforts and achievement of national health objectives around the elimination of preemption. Using a search strategy developed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation System, cases where a state or federal appellate level court made a fnding on the validity of a local smoke-free air ordinance or regulation were identifed in 19 states. In contrast to previous studies, we found that cases in approximately half of states were decided for local governments. We also found that across the states, courts were considering similar factors in their decisions including the extent to which: the local government possessed the authority to pass the ordinance, the ordinance conficted with the state constitution, and state statutes preempt the ordinance. (shrink)