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1Third-Party Risks in Research: Should IRBs Address Them?IRB: Ethics & Human Research 29 (3). 2007.The risks to groups posed by research involving human beings—including genetics research—should be conceived of as a species of third-party risks. The important task of protecting third parties from the risks posed by the conduct and the findings of research should not be assigned to IRBs because they are not designed or equipped to handle such a broad responsibility. The serious problems raised by third-party risks require an integration of policy-making and regulation that is beyond the scope …Read more
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238Motives and Markets in Health CareJournal of Practical Ethics 1 (2): 64-84. 2013.The truth about health care policy lies between two exaggerated views: a market view in which individuals purchase their own health care from profit maximizing health-care firms and a control view in which costs are controlled by regulations limiting which treatments health insurance will pay for. This essay suggests a way to avoid on the one hand the suffering, unfairness, and abandonment of solidarity entailed by the market view and, on the other hand, to diminish the inflexibility and ineffic…Read more
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1A review of two books by Kevin D. Hoover: Causality in Macroeconomics and The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics (review)Journal of Economic Methodology 10 (2): 259-270. 2003.
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20Experimenting on Models and in the World (review)Journal of Economic Methodology 15 (2): 209-216. 2008.
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24Racionalidad, bienestar y economía normativaRevista Internacional de Filosofía Política 12 45-55. 1998.
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53Constructive empiricism contestedPacific Philosophical Quarterly 63 (1): 21-28. 1982.Constructive empiricism, Bas van fraassen's new variety of anti-Realism, Maintains that science aims at empirically adequate, Rather than true theories and that, In fully accepting a theory, One should believe only that it is empirically adequate. A theory is empirically adequate just in case it has a model in which all observable phenomena may be embedded. I challenge van fraassen's main arguments and argue that the observable/unobservable distinction will not bear the weight that van fraassen …Read more
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9Why Look Under the Hood?In Daniel M. Hausman (ed.), Essays on Philosophy and Economic Methodology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 70-73. 1992.
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25Price Huw, Corry Richard (Eds.), Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited. Oxford University Press (2007), pp. 403+ix, $35, 978-0-19-927819- (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (1): 231-233. 2008.
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13Price Huw, Corry Richard (eds.), Causation, physics, and the constitution of reality: Russell's republic revisited. Oxford university press (2007), pp. 403+IX, $35, 978-0-19-927819- (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. 2007.
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123Discussion. The impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons - a replyMind 106 (421): 99-100. 1997.
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132Fairness and social normsPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 850-860. 2008.This essay comments on the theory of social norms developed by Cristina Bicchieri in The Grammar of Society. It applauds her theory of norms but argues that it cannot account for the experimental results concerning ultimatum games. A theory of fairness is also needed. It develops a number of specific criticisms of her way of incorporating the influence of norms into preferences. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5197 Helen C. Whit…Read more
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44Paradox postponedJournal of Economic Methodology 20 (3). 2013.This comment argues that there is an explanation paradox in economics, as Julian Reiss maintains, only if models in economics succeed in explaining even though they are not approximately true, fail to identify the causes of what they purport to explain, and misdescribe the mechanism by which the causes lead to the effects to be explained. Reiss provides no reason to believe that models that do not describe the causes and mechanisms at work are nevertheless explanatory
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65Beware of economists bearing advice. Though some of it is valuable, the framework of theoretical welfare economics from which economic advice usually issues has serious normative limitations and distortions. When economists go beyond identifying consequences of policies to making recommendations, they typically rely on a theory whose only normative concern is welfare and its distribution and that mistakenly identifies welfare with the satisfaction of preferences. Their advice about how to increa…Read more
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246Polling and public policyKennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14 (3): 241-247. 2004.: This commentary distinguishes five reasons why one might want to conduct a survey concerning people's beliefs about death and the permissibility of harvesting organs: (1) simply to learn what people know and want; (2) to determine if current law and practice conform to the wishes of the population; (3) to determine the level of popular support for or opposition to policy changes; (4) to ascertain the causes and effects of popular beliefs and attitudes; and (5) to provide guidance in determinin…Read more
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67The Handbook of Economic Methodology, John Davis, D. Wade Hands, and Uskali Mäki . Edward Elgar, 1998, xviii + 572 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 15 (2): 289. 1999.
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150Modularity and the causal Markov condition: A restatementBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (1): 147-161. 2004.expose some gaps and difficulties in the argument for the causal Markov condition in our essay ‘Independence, Invariance and the Causal Markov Condition’ ([1999]), and we are grateful for the opportunity to reformulate our position. In particular, Cartwright disagrees vigorously with many of the theses we advance about the connection between causation and manipulation. Although we are not persuaded by some of her criticisms, we shall confine ourselves to showing how our central argument can be r…Read more
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884Systems without a graphical causal representationSynthese 191 (8): 1925-1930. 2014.There are simple mechanical systems that elude causal representation. We describe one that cannot be represented in a single directed acyclic graph. Our case suggests limitations on the use of causal graphs for causal inference and makes salient the point that causal relations among variables depend upon details of causal setups, including values of variables.
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51Linking causal and explanatory asymmetryPhilosophy of Science 60 (3): 435-451. 1993.This essay defends two theses that jointly establish a link between causal and explanatory asymmetry. The first thesis is that statements specifying facts about effects, unlike statements specifying facts about causes, are not "independently variable". The second thesis is that independent variability among purportedly explanatory factors is a necessary condition on scientific explanations
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13Health, Luck, and Justice, Shlomi Segall. Princeton University Press, 2010. x + 239 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 27 (2): 190-198. 2011.
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25Cost-value analysis in health care: Making sense out of QALYs, Erik Nord (review)Economics and Philosophy 16 (2): 333-378. 2000.
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69Many questions concerning health involve values. How well is a health system performing? How should resources be allocated between the health system and other uses or among competing healthrelated uses? How should the costs of health services be distributed among members of a population? Who among those in need of transplants should receive scarce organs? What is the best way to treat particular patients? Although many kinds of expertise bear on these questions, values play a large role in answe…Read more
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95Hedonism and welfare economicsEconomics and Philosophy 26 (3): 321-344. 2010.This essay criticizes the proposal recently defended by a number of prominent economists that welfare economics be redirected away from the satisfaction of people's preferences and toward making people happy instead. Although information about happiness may sometimes be of use, the notion of happiness is sufficiently ambiguous and the objections to identifying welfare with happiness are sufficiently serious that welfare economists are better off using preference satisfaction as a measure of welf…Read more
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52Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis want to redirect egalitarianism away from redistribution of income and toward redistribution of assets, particularly productive assets. <1> Their main reason, apart from the fact that income redistribution is so obviously dead in the political waters, is that income redistribution lowers productivity and competitiveness, while asset redistribution raises these, and in the long run the welfare of the worst-off depends more on increasing productivity than it does o…Read more
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1Evaluating social policyIn Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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London School of EconomicsDepartment of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific MethodProfessor (Part-time)
Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |