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Affirmative Action: Bad Arguments and Some Good OnesIn Russ Shafer Landau (ed.), The Ethical Life, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press. 2014.
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4Markets and Medical DecisionsCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society. forthcoming.This essay argues for two conclusions. First, clinical decision-making is not best thought of as analogous to the purchase of other services, such as car repair. Health-care decision-making is far more difficult, collaborative, emotionally fraught, and subject to cognitive distortions. Second, the provision of health care should not be delegated to unregulated markets. Unlike other markets, there is no reason to expect health-care market outcomes to be efficient or fair or to promote individual …Read more
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E. Roy Weintraub. How Economics Became a Mathematical SciencePhilosophia Mathematica 11 (3): 354-357. 2003.
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5The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1984.This is a comprehensive anthology of works concerning the nature of economics as a science, including classic texts and essays exploring specific branches and schools of economics. Apart from the classics, most of the selections in the third edition are new, as are the introduction and bibliography. No other anthology spans the whole field and offers a comprehensive introduction to questions about economic methodology
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38Explanation, prediction, and conceptual explorationJournal of Economic Methodology 1-9. forthcoming..
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1094Cómo tomar decisiones justas en el camino hacia la cobertura universal de saludPan-American Health Organization (PAHO). 2015.La cobertura universal de salud está en el centro de la acción actual para fortalecer los sistemas de salud y mejorar el nivel y la distribución de la salud y los servicios de salud. Este documento es el informe fi nal del Grupo Consultivo de la OMS sobre la Equidad y Cobertura Universal de Salud. Aquí se abordan los temas clave de la justicia (fairness) y la equidad que surgen en el camino hacia la cobertura universal de salud. Por lo tanto, el informe es pertinente para cada agente que infl uy…Read more
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1347Faire Des Choix Justes Pour Une Couverture Sanitaire UniverselleWorld Health Organization. 2015.This report from the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage offers advice on how to make progress fairly towards universal health coverage.
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5Comparability of health statesPhilosophical Studies 1-13. forthcoming.Measuring an individual’s health states presupposes the ability to compare them. I maintain that our ability to compare quantities or magnitudes of health are severely limited. It is easier to compare values of health states, but those values are context dependent and often unreliable.
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1552Making Fair Choices on the Path to Universal Health CoverageWorld Health Organisation. 2014.This report by the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage addresses how countries can make fair progress towards the goal of universal coverage. It explains the relevant tradeoffs between different desirable ends and offers guidance on how to make these tradeoffs.
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141Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public PolicyCambridge University Press. 2006.This book shows through argument and numerous policy-related examples how understanding moral philosophy can improve economic analysis, how moral philosophy can benefit from economists' analytical tools, and how economic analysis and moral philosophy together can inform public policy. Part I explores the idea of rationality and its connections to ethics, arguing that when they defend their formal model of rationality, most economists implicitly espouse contestable moral principles. Part II addre…Read more
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10Philosophy of EconomicsIn Fritz Allhoff (ed.), Philosophies of the Sciences, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-01-04.This chapter contains sections titled: Economics and Philosophy of Economics Six Central Methodological Problems Inexactness, Ceteris Paribus Clauses, and “Unrealistic Assumptions” Contemporary Directions in Economic Methodology Conclusion References.
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2The Paradoxes of Respectful Guidance: A Comment on Kenneth V. Iserson, “Do You Believe in Magic? Shove, Don’t Nudge: Advising Patients at the Bedside”Journal of Clinical Ethics 31 (1): 83-85. 2020.This commentary argues that the problems identified in Kenneth V. Iserson’s Essay, “Do you Believe in Magic? Shove, Don’t Nudge: Advising Patients at the Bedside,” are perennial difficulties to which there is no single simple solution. In particular, recent work in psychology offers little help to caregivers, who are in the difficult position of guiding the decisions of their patients while respecting them and ultimately deferring to their wishes.
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149Causal Relata: Tokens, Types, or Variables?Erkenntnis 63 (1): 33-54. 2005.The literature on causation distinguishes between causal claims relating properties or types and causal claims relating individuals or tokens. Many authors maintain that corresponding to these two kinds of causal claims are two different kinds of causal relations. Whether to regard causal relations among variables as yet another variety of causation is also controversial. This essay maintains that causal relations obtain among tokens and that type causal claims are generalizations concerning cau…Read more
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49Measuring or Valuing Population Health: Some Conceptual ProblemsPublic Health Ethics 5 (3): 229-239. 2012.There is no way literally to measure health, because health is multi-dimensional, and there is no metric whereby one person who is healthier than a second with respect to one dimension but less healthy with respect to another counts as healthier, less healthy or equally healthy overall. Health analysts instead measure how good or bad health states are in some regard. If these values are measures of health states, then identical health states must have identical values. But in different circumsta…Read more
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6Economic analysis and moral philosophyCambridge University Press. 1996.Understanding moral philosophy can help one to do economics better, and philosophers can learn by drawing on economic insights and analytical tools. This book argues that standard views of rationality lead economists to espouse questionable moral principles, and discusses methods of economic evaluation in terms of welfare and other moral criteria. It also contains a brief discussion of the relevance of social choice and game theory to philosophy. There is a glossary and at the end of each chapte…Read more
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45Subjective total comparative evaluationsEconomics and Philosophy 40 (1): 212-225. 2024.In Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essa…Read more
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21What Is and What Ought to be Done: An Essay on Ethics and EpistemologyJournal of Philosophy 80 (5): 312-315. 1983.
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1Health and well-beingIn Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
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36Is there a human right to essential health care?Developing World Bioethics 24 (1): 6-9. 2024.In Global Health Impact, Nicole Hassoun joins the ranks of those defending a right to health. Unlike the World Health Organization, which views this right expansively, Hassoun would limit the right to the health needed to enjoy a minimally good life. This essay argues that this right is difficult to specify and insufficient to support the policies Hassoun defends. The essay sketches an alternative view of the obligations of institutions to address health problems that derives from imperfect indi…Read more
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14Constrained Fairness in DistributionJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 22 (1). 2022.In “Weighing Up Weighted Lotteries: Scarcity, Overlap Cases, and Fair Inequalities of Chance”, Gerard Vong addresses intriguing problems in which it is impossible to give an equal chance of receiving a good to a set of equal claimants, because goods can be distributed only via groups which have overlapping membership. Vong proposes a rule for distributing chances that he argues is sensitive to both comparative and absolute fairness. This comment discusses some formal difficulties with Vong’s pro…Read more
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18Philosophy of Economics: A Retrospective ReflectionRevue de Philosophie Économique 18 (2): 185-202. 2018.
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43Ordeals, inequalities, moral hazard and non-monetary incentives in health careEconomics and Philosophy 37 (1): 23-36. 2021.This essay begins by summarizing the reasons why unregulated health-care markets are inefficient. The inefficiencies stem from the asymmetries of information among providers, patients and payers, which give rise to moral hazard and adverse selection. Attempts to ameliorate these inefficiencies by means of risk-adjusted insurance and monetary incentives such as co-pays and deductibles lessen the inefficiencies at the cost of increasing inequalities. Another possibility is to rely on non-monetary …Read more
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80Consequentialism and Preference Formation in Economics and Game TheoryRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 59 111-130. 2006.When students first study expected utility, they are inclined to interpret it as a theory that explains preferences for lotteries in terms of preferences for outcomes. Knowing U($100) and U($0), the agent can calculate that the utility of a gamble of $100 on a fair coin coming up heads is U($100)/2 + U($0)/2. Utilities are indices representing preferences, so in calculating the utility of the gamble, one is apparently giving a causal explanation for the agent’s preference for the gamble.
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113Philosophy of economics: past and futureJournal of Economic Methodology 28 (1): 14-22. 2021.This essay offers a history of the development of philosophy of economics from the 1830s until today, with a personal perspective on the developments of the last four decades. It argues that change...
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122Is an Overdose of Paracetamol Bad for One’s Health?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3): 657-668. 2011.1 Overview of the problem2 Situationally Specific Normal Functioning and Capacities3 Kingma’s Criticism4 How Normal Responses can be Pathological5 Too Many Pathologies?6 Conclusions
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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 |