The Fraud-on-the-Market Tort

Fraud on the market is at the core of contemporary securities law, permitting 10b-5 class actions to proceed without direct proof of investor reliance on a misrepresentation. Yet the ambiguities of this idea have fractured the Supreme Court from its initial recognition of the doctrine in Basic v. Levinson to its recent decision in Amgen, Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds. Amidst divergent views of the coherence and advisability of liability for fraud on the market a fundamental question lurks: is a suit for damages that invokes the fraud-on-the-market theory a claim for common law deceit, such that liability is properly limited by requirements such as scienter and loss causation, or is it an indirect regulatory enforcement action that should be unconstrained by these requirements so that liability can better serve its deterrent and compensatory purposes? Rejecting both of these options, we argue for a third way. Fraud-on-the-market claims are not private attorney general actions; they are genuine tort claims through which victims seek redress for having been wronged. Yet the wrong differs fundamentally in substance from the wrong of deceit. Building on a careful analysis of Dura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Broudo, Basic v. Levinson, and common law, we articulate the unique character of the fraud-on-the-market tort. Rooted not in deceit but instead in the Congressionally recognized right of investors to trust in the integrity of securities markets, it does not protect investors from being deceived, but rather protects them against economic loss caused by intentional distortions of market prices. This simultaneously explains why fraud-on-the-market plaintiffs are properly freed from having to prove reliance and why the Supreme Court was perhaps justified in imposing restrictions on liability that are foreign to the common law

Creationism and evolution

In Tower of Babel, Robert Pennock wrote that “defenders of evolution would help their case immeasurably if they would reassure their audience that morality, purpose, and meaning are not lost by accepting the truth of evolution.” We first consider the thesis that the creationists’ movement exploits moral concerns to spread its ideas against the theory of evolution. We analyze their arguments and possible reasons why they are easily accepted. Creationists usually employ two contradictive strategies to expose the purported moral degradation that comes with accepting the theory of evolution. On the one hand they claim that evolutionary theory is immoral. On the other hand creationists think of evolutionary theory as amoral. Both objections come naturally in a monotheistic view. But we can find similar conclusions about the supposed moral aspects of evolution in non-religiously inspired discussions. Meanwhile, the creationism-evolution debate mainly focuses — understandably — on what constitutes good science. We consider the need for moral reassurance and analyze reassuring arguments from philosophers. Philosophers may stress that science does not prescribe and is therefore not immoral, but this reaction opens the door for the objection of amorality that evolution — as a naturalistic world view at least — supposedly endorses. We consider that the topic of morality and its relation to the acceptance of evolution may need more empirical research

The Concept of Mechanism in Biology

The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of ‘mechanism’ in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in the philosophy of biology, situating the new ‘mechanismic program’ in this context. I argue that the leading advocates of the mechanismic program (i.e., Craver, Darden, Bechtel, etc.) inadvertently conflate the different senses of ‘mechanism’. Specifically, they all inappropriately endow causal mechanisms with the ontic status of machine mechanisms, and this invariably results in problematic accounts of the role played by mechanism-talk in scientific practice. I suggest that for effective analyses of the concept of mechanism, causal mechanisms need to be distinguished from machine mechanisms, and the new mechanismic program in the philosophy of biology needs to be demarcated from the traditional concerns of mechanistic biolog

Centrifugalno i centripetalno razmišljanje o biopsihosocijalnom modelu u psihijatriji

The biopsychosocial model, which was deeply influential on psychiatry following its introduction by George L. Engel in 1977, has recently made a comeback. Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett have argued that Engel’s original formulation offered a promising general framework for thinking about health and disease, but that this promise requires new empirical and philosophical tools in order to be realized. In particular, Bolton and Gillett offer an original analysis of the ontological relations between Engel’s biological, social, and psychological levels of analysis. I argue that Bolton and Gillett’s updated model, while providing an intriguing new metaphysical framework for medicine, cannot resolve some of the most vexing problems facing psychiatry, which have to do with how to prioritize different sorts of research. These problems are fundamentally ethical, rather than ontological. Without the right prudential motivation, in other words, the unification of psychiatry under a single conceptual framework seems doubtful, no matter how compelling the model. An updated biopsychosocial model should include explicit normative commitments about the aims of medicine that can give guidance about the sorts of causal connections to be prioritized as research and clinical targets.Biopsihosocijalni model, koji je imao dubok utjecaj na psihijatriju nakon što ga je uveo George L. Engel 1977., nedavno se vratio. Derek Bolton i Grant Gillett tvrde da je Engelova izvorna formulacija ponudila obećavajući opći okvir za razmišljanje o zdravlju i bolesti, ali da to obećanje zahtijeva nove empirijske i filozofske alate kako bi se ostvarilo. Bolton i Gillett nude originalnu analizu ontoloških odnosa između Engelove biološke, društvene i psihološke razine analize. Argumentiram da Boltonov i Gillettov ažurirani model, iako pruža intrigantan novi metafizički okvir za medicinu, ne može riješiti neke od najzahtjevnijih problema s kojima se psihijatrija suočava, a koji se odnose na to kako dati prioritet različitim vrstama istraživanja. Ti su problemi u osnovi etički, a ne ontološki. Bez prave prudencijalne motivacije, drugim riječima, objedinjavanje psihijatrije pod jednim pojmovnim okvirom čini se upitnim, ma koliko uvjerljiv model. Ažurirani biopsihosocijalni model trebao bi uključivati ​​eksplicitne normativne obveze o ciljevima medicine koji mogu dati smjernice o vrstama uzročno-posljedičnih veza kojima se treba dati prioritet kao istraživačkim i kliničkim ciljevima

The Many Meanings of Wherefore in Legal History

This essay describes the strategies that sometimes allow me to make sense of the answers that people give to the question Why? when it comes up in scholarly accounts of legal outcomes from the past. The essay is constructive, not deconstructive; programmatic, not polemical. I mean to sketch and recommend a way of thinking about legal history that I call methodological self-consciousness. Methodological individualism would be both inaccurate and accurate as a label for the essay\u27s approach to questions of causality. The label is inaccurate, because it fails to express the heavy emphasis that I place on the dialectical relationship between individual legal actors and the social context in which they are embedded: People cause law, but law, in many interesting ways, also causes people. On the other hand, the label is accurate, because the methodology I advocate pays close attention to the ways in which an observer imagines that individual legal actors experienced the production of legal outcomes. As far as my wherefores are concerned, chipmunks, rocks, and sunbeams don\u27t make law: people do (although this does not mean that people aren\u27t constrained and shaped by the physical world they inhabit). By the same token, classes, ideologies, and institutions don\u27t sign decrees and judgments ordering people to pay money or go to jail: individual judges do (although this does not mean that a judge\u27s perceptions are not shaped-even determined-by his connections with one or more of these collectivities)

Richard Swinburne's arguments for substance dualism.

This dissertation is a contribution to debates in the philosophy of mind and of personal identity. It presents a critical account of arguments for substance dualism to be found in Richard Swinburne’s Mind, Brain, and Free Will (2013). Swinburne’s principal claim is that persons are essentially pure mental substances whose sameness over time is constituted by a unique ‘thisness’. A human being consists of two parts: a contingent part, the body (physical substance), and an essential part, the mind or soul (pure mental substance) which is characterised by ‘thisness’. It is, on this account, logically and metaphysically possible that a person can be disembodied. The dissertation analyses Swinburne’s relationship to other major theories in the philosophy of mind, especially his critical rejection of physicalism and materialism. Swinburne mounts a defence of substance dualism by building upon some key fundamental ideas and principles. The first area of discussion is Swinburne’s novel contention that any satisfactory account of the mental and physical lives of human beings must meet the requirements of a ‘metacriterion’ which supports his division of the world into physical and mental substances, properties, events and time. Swinburne underpins the metacriterion by proposing a canonical vocabulary based on a theory of informative designators. The main line of attack here is on the inadequacy of Swinburne’s theory of designation as a convincing theory of how language works and is used. Secondly, the metacriterion is complemented by a theory of privileged access of subjects to their mental events which is not available to others. Criticism of this doctrine is derived from the work of Austin, Ryle and Wittgenstein. Thirdly, Swinburne deploys the principles of credulity and testimony to defend the causal interaction of mental and physical substances. He claims the principles are fundamental, a priori, and epistemic. The argument of the dissertation is that they are none of these things. My conclusion is that Swinburne’s principal arguments for substance dualism and personal identity are unsound