Sven Ove Hansson

In order to shorten queues to healthcare, the Swedish government has introduced a yearly “queue billion” that is paid out to the county councils in proportion to how successful they are in reducing queues. However, only the queues for first visits are covered. Evidence has accumulated that queues for return visits have become longer. This affects the chronically and severely ill. Swedish physicians, and the Swedish Medical Association, have strongly criticized the queue billion and have claimed that it conflicts with medical ethics. Instead they demand that their professional judgments on priority setting and medical urgency be respected. This discussion provides an interesting illustration of some of the limitations of new public management and also more generally of the complicated relationships between medical ethics and public policy

We prove that four theses commonly associated with coherentism are incompatible with the representation of a belief state as a logically closed set of sentences. The result is applied to the conventional coherence interpretation of the AGM theory of belief revision, which appears not to be tenable. Our argument also counts against the coherentistic acceptability of a certain form of propositional holism. We argue that the problems arise as an effect of ignoring the distinction between derived and non-derived beliefs, and we suggest that the kind of coherence relevant to epistemic justification is the coherence of non-derived beliefs.

J.S. Mill’s advocacy of liberty was based only in part on his harm principle. He also endorsed two other principles that considerably extend the scope of liberty: first, a principle of individual liberty that is based on the value of positive freedom and of developing individuality, and second, a principle of free trade or economic freedom that is based on the value of economic efficiency. An analysis is offered of how these three principles are combined in Mill’s account of liberty and how they connect with his antipaternalism. It is proposed that his appeal in On Liberty to positive freedom and the development of individuality provides a uniting principle that makes his view on liberty cohere with his utilitarianism.

Two types of measures of probabilistic uncertainty are introduced and investigated. Dispersion measures report how diffused the agent’s second-order probability distribution is over the range of first-order probabilities. Robustness measures reflect the extent to which the agent’s assessment of the prior (objective) probability of an event is perturbed by information about whether or not the event actually took place. The properties of both types of measures are investigated. The most obvious type of robustness measure is shown to coincide with one of the major candidates for a dispersion measure, the mean square deviation measure.

An agent can usually hold a very large number of beliefs. However, only a small part of these beliefs is used at a time. Efficient operations for belief change should affect the beliefs of the agent locally, that is, the changes should be performed only in the relevant part of the belief state. In this paper we define a local consequence operator that only considers the relevant part of a belief base. This operator is used to define local versions of the operations for belief change. Representation theorems are given for the local operators.

Generalizations of partial meet contraction are introduced that start out from the observation that only some of the logically closed subsets of the original belief set are at all viable as contraction outcomes. Belief contraction should proceed by selection among these viable options. Several contraction operators that are based on such selection mechanisms are introduced and then axiomatically characterized. These constructions are more general than the belief base approach. It is shown that partial meet contraction is exactly characterized by adding to one of these constructions the condition that all logically closed subsets of the belief set can be obtained as the outcome of a single (multiple) contraction. Examples are provided showing the counter-intuitive consequences of that condition, thus confirming the credibility of the proposed generalization of the AGM framework

The ideal world semantics of standard deontic logic identifies our obligations with how we would act in an ideal world. However, to act as if one lived in an ideal world is bad moral advice, associated with wishful thinking rather than well-considered moral deliberation. Ideal world semantics gives rise to implausible logical principles, and the metaphysical arguments that have been put forward in its favour turn out to be based on a too limited view of truth-functional representation. It is argued that ideal world semantics should be given up in favour of other, more plausible uses of possible worlds for modelling normative subject-matter.

Full meet contraction, that was devised by Carlos Alchourrón and David Makinson in the early 1980' s, has often been overlooked since it is not in itself a plausible contraction operator. However, it is a highly useful building-block in the construction of composite contraction operators. In particular, all plausible contraction operators can be reconstructed so that the outcome of contracting a belief set K by a sentence p is defined as K ∼ f, where ∼ is full meet contraction and f a sentential selector, i.e. a function to and from sentences. This paper investigates the logic of full meet contraction. Seven properties of this operation are presented that contribute to making it useful as a building-block: Full meet contraction is a purely logical operation. It retains finitebasedness of the belief set. It is the inclusion-maximal contraction that removes all sentences that can contribute to implying the input sentence. It is the inclusion-maximal contraction that removes all non-tautologous consequences of the input sentence. Almost all contractions can be reconstructed as full meet contraction. Full meet contraction allows for recovery of the input sentence. Full meet contraction provides a unified account of multiple and singleton contraction. La llamada full meet contraction, creada por Carlos Alchourrón y David Makinson en los comienzos de los ' 80, ha sido a menudo desestimada puesto que ella no constituye un operador de contracción plausible. De todas formas ella es altamente útil en la construcción de operadores de contracción compuestos. En particular, todos los operadores de contracción plausibles pueden ser reconstruidos de forma tal que la contracción de un conjunto de creencias K por una sentencia p sea definida como K ∼ f, donde ∼ es una full meet contraction y f un selector de sentencias, i.e., una función de sentencias a sentencias. En este trabajo investigamos la lógica de la full meet contraction. Se presentan siete propiedades de esta operación que contribuyen a hacerla útil como building-block: Full meet contraction es una operación puramente lógica. Ella retiene la finit- basednes del conjunto de creencias. Ella es la máxima-inclusiva de las contracciones que elimina todas las sentencias que pueden contribuir a implicar la input-sentence. Es la contracción maximal inclusiva que elimina todas las consecuencias no tautológicas de la input-sentence. Casi todas las contracciones pueden ser reconstruidas como full-meet contractions. Full meet contraction permite la recuperación de la input-sentence. Full meet contracción da cuenta en forma unificada de las contracciones múltiples y singulares