Category: Ethics
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Mark D. White An upcoming article in Bioethics (apparently open access for the time being) asks the question… SHOULD WE ALLOW ORGAN DONATION EUTHANASIA? ALTERNATIVES FOR MAXIMIZING THE NUMBER AND QUALITY OF ORGANS FOR TRANSPLANTATION Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu ABSTRACT There are not enough solid organs available to meet the needs of patients with…
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Mark D. White A minisymposium in the most recent issue of Journal of Economic Metholodogy (December 2010) asks that very question–it seems to be that reflection on methodology is always justified, and it is unfortunate that it took a crisis of this magnitude to spur it. After a brief introduction from Kevin Hoover, the following…
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Mark D. White I just came across a fascinating paper titled "Is Health (Really) Special? Health Policy Between Rawlsian and Luck Egalitarian Justice" by Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. From the abstract: In recent work, Norman Daniels extends the application of Rawls's principle of "fair equality of opportunity"…
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Mark D. White As you may have heard, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled Monday that the part of the Affordable Care Act (the health care reform bill passed earlier this year) dependant on the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. From his ruling (as reported by The Wall Street Journal): "At…
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Mark D. White I usually try to ignore Paul Krugman, but sometimes I can't. (Sorry.) Thanks to Steve Horwitz (here and here), I lit upon Krugman's September 28 New York Times blog post, "Economics Is Not a Morality Play," in which he writes: The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good…
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Mark D. White In today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens has a piece arguing why the GOP should let "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) lapse in the 2011 Defense Bill, and in it he happens to cover the three mainstream approaches to ethics: consequentialism (DADT forces the expulsion or rejection of qualified, eager men and…
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Mark D. White Since the nomination of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently making headlines (though not as much as if she were a disgruntled flight attendent), I thought it was a good time to share a recent paper of mine, "We've Been Nudged: The Effects of the…
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Mark D. White Yesterday, Judge Vaughn R. Walker overturned Proposition 8, the voter-enacted amendment to the California Constitution that declares marriage to be exclusively between a man and a woman. This case will undoubtedly move up through the court system, but for now this is undeniably a huge step. I especially appreciated this passage in Judge…
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Mark D. White Thanks to Orly Lobel at Prawfsblawg for pointing out this New York Times Magazine piece on new ideas. The one he points out in particular involves "ethical robots" (scroll down in the piece a few items), which will be programmed with basic ethical tenets and will perform more reliably (according to this programming) on…
Mark D. White 