Matthew Lawrence

This commentary provides a legal analysis of the extent to which changes proposed by scholars to promote care for substance use disorder or other under-treated illnesses through risk adjustment could be implemented administratively, without legislation, in federal risk adjustment systems: Medicare's privatized component, Medicare's pharmaceutical component, and the individual and small group market. As the article explains, federal laws governing risk adjustment provide broad discretion to regulators and can reasonably be interpreted to permit full and final implementation through the administrative process of almost all of the changes that scholars have proposed.

While it is often thought that pluralism is best accommodated by a liberal state, John Kekes has recently argued that pluralism and liberalism involve inconsistent commitments. He maintains that liberalism is committed to the idea that one or more of the “liberal values” must override all other values, while pluralism is committed to the idea that there are no overriding values whatsoever. In this paper I challenge Kekes' position by arguing that ethical pluralism does not require an absence of overriding values, and that liberalism does not require that one or more of the liberal values must override all others.

In recent years an increasing number of moral theorists have come to embrace the term "moral pluralism" to describe a particular kind of moral theory. Unfortunately, there has been little consensus regarding what exactly constitutes a pluralistic theory, and what specific commitments such theories involve. My dissertation takes on the task of articulating the underlying schema of pluralist moral theory, and of analyzing the plausibility and implications of pluralism's fundamental commitments. I argue that the most thoroughgoing pluralist theories are shaped by two defining theses; the plurality of the good , and the plurality of the right , and that these are conceptually linked by two additional meta-ethical commitments. My analysis of the plausibility of these commitments is at times friendly to moral pluralism and at times critical of it. For instance, I develop an account of "value incommensurability," an idea upon which pluralism depends, that resists some of more the important attacks within the literature. Yet I also criticize the commitment to the plurality of the right, as held by Susan Wolf and several other pluralists. I argue that this view is less plausible than "limited pluralism"---a view that is pluralistic about the good but monistic about the right. In the final chapter I explore the relationship between moral pluralism and political liberalism, focusing on the role that overriding values play within each type of theory