Douglas Lackey

Life insurance settlements, or life settlements, are life insurance policies owned by investor-beneficiaries on the lives of unrelated individuals. With life settlements, investors make substantial payments to the insured individuals upon purchasing such policies, pay any remaining premius, and collect the death benefits upon the demise of the insured individuals. Transactions involving life settlements seem poised to become a major source of profits for investment banks, comparable in dollar amount to subprime mortgages. With life settlements, the insured individuals suffer no immediate harm, and the sale of a policy an individual owns is permissible under current law. Nevertheless, moral questions can be posed about the social values expressed by these practices, the effect of these practices on the virtue of charity, and the overall loss of social utility that will result from life settlements. We consider life settlements from utilitarian and libertarian perspectives, and then consider the effects of life settlements on social values and on individual character. On balance, we favor legislative changes in insurance and tax laws to discourage life settlements, and argue that certain forms of life settlements should be banned outright

Since the atomic era began in 1945, there have been three waves of moral criticism directed at American nuclear weapons policies. The first wave, which began around 1957 and ended in 1962 with McNamara’s announcement of Flexible Response, focused on Dulles’s policy of Massive Retaliation. The second wave, which began in the early 70’s and ended in 1974 with Schlesinger’s announcement of Countervailing Response, focused on the Assured Destruction policy developed in McNamara’s later reports to Congress. The third wave began in the 80’s with Weinberger’s remarks about “prevailing” in nuclear conflicts and may or may not end with the next MX vote or next strategic arms agreement.

This paper argues that there is a conflict between divine omniscience and the human right to privacy. The right to privacy derives from the right to moral autonomy, which human persons possess even against a divine being. It follows that if God exists and persists in knowing all things, his knowledge is a non-justifiable violation of a human right. On the other hand, if God exists and restricts his knowing in deference to human privacy, it follows that he cannot fulfill the traditional function of being the perfect and final judge of all things.

Nuclear War, edited by Fox and Groarke, is one of five recent anthologies containing new essays by philosophers on the subject of nuclear war. The Blake and Pole volumes, containing essays mainly by British philosophers, are distinguished by unrelenting and comprehensive opposition to British and American policy, and by the fame of the contributors, which include Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Bernard Williams. The Chicago volume contains a number of excellent papers by philosophers and the added bonus of nine papers by established specialists in national security issues; it attempts, with partial success, to cover the full range of strategic nuclear options. The Cohen and Lee and the Fox and Groarke volumes consist largely of papers by strategic outsiders far from the centres of political power; the debate in these volumes is not between the principal versions of nuclear deterrence but between nuclear deterrence in any form and some scheme that transcends the present arrangement of mutually deterring superpowers. Of these last two books, Cohen and Lee contains relatively longer and more detailed essays.