Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We present (...) a case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group for permission to access medical records without written permission. We present (...) a case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case £560 000 of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG’s responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing “opt-out” consent for many public health research projects. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Originally published in 1958. A study in the logical foundations of modern theoretical semantics, this book is concerned with notions of designation and consistency as well as denotation and truth. It presents several semantical theories, each of which with what were new concepts or treatments from the author. Talking at a time when semantical theory was gained great ground, this book also looks at the methodology of the sciences and the semantics of scientific language alongside analysis of meaning and expression. (...) It is influenced by the writings of Carnap, Church, Frege, Goodman, Quine, Russell and Tarski. (shrink)

By forming the intersections of the parity and time reversal equivalence classes of physical entities that are represented by differential forms and differential form densities, a number of subsets of discrete symmetry classes for electromagnetic systems can be generated. Only one of these subsets is consistent with elementary thermodynamic arguments for dissipative systems and at the same time yields the notion that both charge and mass are spacetime scalars. This subset is not in correspondence with the two self-consistent presentations that (...) now are implied in the literature. (shrink)

Arrian's enthusiasm for Ptolemy's account of Alexander has often been echoed in modern times. With much justification it is generally agreed that Arrian's account of Alexander, through its reliance on the works of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, is our best and, on the whole, most reliable account of Alexander. Recent work, however, has illuminated Ptolemy's weaknesses, and we can no longer regard Ptolemy as utterly reliable in every important respect. His version of the Alexander story is centred on Alexander, therefore Alexander (...) is depicted out of the close context of the Macedonian court. It is only through the information preserved in other writers—traditionally, but undiscriminatingly, considered unreliable—that, for instance, the picture of Alexander's struggle with his Macedonian nobles has begun to emerge. And in matters of this kind Ptolemy's version is so much the court ‘official’ version that it cannot be regarded as trustworthy. (shrink)

This paper presents a unifying framework for the study of artificial life, intelIigence and reality. By providing this framework we can give a clear and concise introduction to the fundamental arguments of all three artificial sciences and facilitate the translation of arguments from any one domain to the other two. The framework is based on a variant of functionalism that does not exclude the role of the observer.

ABSTRACT This paper deals in the main with the problem of delimiting the classes of beings to which we have moral duties when making environmental decisions, and of how to balance their interests fairly. The relation between having interests, having desires and having value (intrinsic or other) is discussed, and a distinction made between entities which can themselves value and those which can have value. Its conclusion is that duties are owed directly to, and only to, sentient beings, and that (...) these duties can be ascertained by weighing their interests impartially strength for strength. It ends with some suggestions about procedures for doing this. Examples are taken from proposals to develop a beach commercially, and to construct a new road in an environmentally sensitive area [1]. (shrink)

Plato can claim a preeminent place in the philosophy of education, for two reasons at least. The first is that he started the subject; the second is that he expressed with a force which has not since been surpassed a particular, seemingly authoritarian, view about it. Any liberal has to come to grips with this view, for which ‘Platonism’ is still the most appropriate name; and the first step is to determine more exactly what, in essence, the view is. This (...) paper will not be concerned with the close examination of Plato’s text; that must be left for a book about his moral philosophy that I am working on. I shall say nothing about the quaint details of the educational curriculum in the Republic or the Laws, which have distracted the attention of some commentators from more fundamental problems. What I aim to discuss is the question ‘Can virtue be taught?’, with which Plato introduces the subject in the Meno—the question which more than any other provides the incentive for his entire philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Torture does need to be defined if we are to know exactly what we are seeking to ban; but no single definition will do, because there are many possible ones, and we may want to treat different practices that might be called torture differently. Compare the case of homicide; we do not want to punish manslaughter as severely as murder, and may not want to punish killing in self-defence at all. There are degrees of torture as of murder. Unclarities simply (...) play into the hands of would-be torturers. Downie is unsuccessful in deriving the duty of doctors not to be involved in torture from an analysis of the word `doctor'. It may be contrary to the role-duty of doctors to participate in torture; but there might be other duties which overrode this role-duty. The right approach is to ask what principles for the conduct of doctors have the highest acceptance-utility, or, as Kant might have equivalently put it, what the impartial furtherance of everyone's ends demands. This approach yields the result that torture (suitably defined) should be banned absolutely. It also yields prescriptions for the conduct of doctors where, in spite of them, torture is taking place. (shrink)

Points of agreement and disagreement with Post's remarks on the author's discussion of the criteria to be used for reducing the eight parity and time reversal symmetry choices that the formally possible for electromagnetic quantities are noted.

The problem of the theoretical reconstruction of the process of scientific paradigm change is by no means a new one in the philosophy and sociology of science. Nevertheless, one cannot say that its investigation has reached the point at which an overwhelming majority of specialists would agree at least about exactly how and in what directions it is necessary to move forward. Notwithstanding this circumstance, one can specify a certain set of basic questions that are recognized as such by the (...) scholarly community of specialists in the field of the sociology and philosophy of science. This set includes such problems as the interaction of the empirical and the theoretical, of the rational and the irrational, of the individual and the social and, of course, the problem of the interaction of cognitive and social factors in the process of paradigm change. The last problem is a kind of focus, at which various approaches converge in order to engage in harsh criticism of one another. Despite the fact that everyone agreed long ago that the logico-empiricistic model of the development of scientific knowledge is inadequate and one-sided, the approaches proposed during the last ten to fifteen years-especially those belonging to the "strong program of the sociology of science"-are also subject to serious criticism. The observer cannot but form the impression that researchers, disillusioned with the extremes of the logicist approach, have turned to a no less one-sided and extreme sociocultural approach that leads to a boundless relativism that is extremely vulnerable in respect of methodology . In particular, the latter approach relies on the well-known Kuhn-Feyerabend thesis concerning the incommensurability of successive paradigms, which presents in a provocatively irrational light the behavior of specialists in the mathematically most developed and rationally most elaborated fields of scientific knowledge. (shrink)