145 research outputs found
Properly Proleptic Blame
Crucially, blame can be addressed to its targets, as an implicit demand for recognition. But when we ask whether offenders would actually appreciate this demand, via a sound deliberative route from their existing motivations, we face a puzzle. If they would, their offense reflects a deliberative mistake, and blame’s hostility seems unnecessary. If they wouldn’t, addressing them is futile, and blame’s emotional engagement seems unwarranted. To resolve this puzzle, I develop an account of blame as a proleptic response to indeterminacy in its target’s reasons, yielding attractive accounts of blame’s relation both to internal reasons claims and to free will
(The Varieties of) Love in Contemporary Anglophone Philosophy
This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a particular individual, there are multiple ways of doing this, corresponding to multiple kinds of love
Improvisational agency
Consider three puzzles in ethics. * Love should affirm something special about you, and so be a selective response to certain of your qualities. But it should also appreciate you as a particular individual, not as a member of the class of people with the qualities in question. * A central species of blame is essentially addressed to the agent of a bad action. Yet while it is not aptly directed toward agents who cannot be reasoned into acting better (who can only be written off), it is not plausibly limited to merely procedural failings, like ignorance, confusion, or weakness of will. * There seems something right about the incompatibilist thought that real freedom requires a radical ability to create yourself, by making choices undetermined by your given past. But, as Hume and many others have argued, choices must be explained by facts about who you are to be meaningfully attributed to you. Overwhelmingly, philosophers have responded to each puzzle by rejecting one of the propositions that generate it. This, I argue, is a mistake. It reflects an unduly narrow conception of rational agency. Drawing on the phenomenology of improvisation, I show how it is possible to act according to norms you make up as you go, whose content depends both epistemically and ontologically on the particular actions they govern. This enables new solutions to all three puzzles, each a substantial improvement over its predecessors.Doctor of Philosoph
The Orphan Drug Act at 35: Observations and an Outlook for the Twenty-First Century
On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA), we describe the enormous changes in the markets for therapies for rare diseases that have emerged over recent decades. The most prominent example is the fact that the profit-maximizing price of new orphan drugs appears to be greater today than it was in 1983. All else equal, this should reduce the threshold for research and development (R&D) investment in an economically viable product. Further, the small size of patient populations for orphan drugs, together with the increasing prevalence of biologics among orphan drugs, have created a set of natural monopoly-like markets in which firms face little competition, even after the end of formal periods of patent protection and market exclusivity. Additionally, the evolving technologies of drug development—in particular, the increasingly common use of auxiliary endpoints in clinical trials and the use of biomarkers for patient selection for treatment—now allow manufacturers to target smaller populations. Taken together, these changes raise doubts about whether the ODA encourages the development of products that otherwise would not have been brought to market—or whether, instead, it simply rewards the producers of inframarginal products. After presenting empirical support for our claims of an evolving marketplace, we discuss the tradeoffs associated with reshaping the ODA for the twenty-first century
N-body simulations in reconstruction of the kinematics of young stars in the Galaxy
We try to determine the Galactic structure by comparing the observed and
modeled velocities of OB-associations in the 3 kpc solar neighborhood. We made
N-body simulations with a rotating stellar bar. The galactic disk in our model
includes gas and stellar subsystems. The velocities of gas particles averaged
over large time intervals ( bar rotation periods) are compared with the
observed velocities of the OB-associations. Our models reproduce the directions
of the radial and azimuthal components of the observed residual velocities in
the Perseus and Sagittarius regions and in the Local system. The mean
difference between the model and observed velocities is km
s. The optimal value of the solar position angle providing
the best agreement between the model and observed velocities is
, in good accordance with several recent estimates. The
self-gravitating stellar subsystem forms a bar, an outer ring of subclass
, and slower spiral modes. Their combined gravitational perturbation leads
to time-dependent morphology in the gas subsystem, which forms outer rings with
elements of the - and -morphology. The success of N-body simulations
in the Local System is likely due to the gravity of the stellar -ring,
which is omitted in models with analytical bars.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysic
CEERS: Spatially Resolved UV and mid-IR Star Formation in Galaxies at 0.2 < z < 2.5: The Picture from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes
We present the mid-IR (MIR) morphologies for 64 star-forming galaxies at
0.210^{9}~M_\odot} using JWST MIRI
observations from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science survey (CEERS).
The MIRI bands span the MIR (7.7--21~m), enabling us to measure the
effective radii () and S\'{e}rsic indexes of these SFGs at
rest-frame 6.2 and 7.7 m, which contains strong emission from Polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features, a well-established tracer of star
formation in galaxies. We define a ``PAH-band'' as the MIRI bandpass that
contains these features at the redshift of the galaxy. We then compare the
galaxy morphologies in the PAH-bands to those in rest-frame Near-UV (NUV) using
HST ACS/F435W or ACS/F606W and optical/near-IR using HST WFC3/F160W imaging
from UVCANDELS and CANDELS, where the NUV-band and F160W trace the profile of
(unobscured) massive stars and the stellar continuum, respectively. The
of galaxies in the PAH-band are slightly smaller (10\%)
than those in F160W for galaxies with at
, but the PAH-band and F160W have a similar fractions of light within
1 kpc. In contrast, the of galaxies in the NUV-band are larger,
with lower fractions of light within 1 kpc compared to F160W for galaxies at
. Using the MIRI data to estimate the surface
density, we find the correlation between the surface
density and stellar mass has a steeper slope than that of the
surface density and stellar mass, suggesting more massive
galaxies having increasing amounts of obscured fraction of star formation in
their inner regions. This paper demonstrates how the high-angular resolution
data from JWST/MIRI can reveal new information about the morphology of
obscured-star formation.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, Accepted by Ap
CEERS: 7.7 m PAH Star Formation Rate Calibration with JWST MIRI
We test the relationship between UV-derived star formation rates (SFRs) and
the 7.7 m polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) luminosities from the
integrated emission of galaxies at z ~ 0 - 2. We utilize multi-band photometry
covering 0.2 - 160 m from HST, CFHT, JWST, Spitzer, and Herschel for
galaxies in the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. We
perform spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling of these data to measure
dust-corrected far-UV (FUV) luminosities, , and UV-derived SFRs. We
then fit SED models to the JWST/MIRI 7.7 - 21 m CEERS data to derive
rest-frame 7.7 m luminosities, , using the average flux density
in the rest-frame MIRI F770W bandpass. We observe a correlation between
and , where log is proportional to (1.27+/-0.04)
log . diverges from this relation for galaxies at lower
metallicities, lower dust obscuration, and for galaxies dominated by evolved
stellar populations. We derive a "single-wavelength" SFR calibration for
which has a scatter from model estimated SFRs
() of 0.24 dex. We derive a "multi-wavelength"
calibration for the linear combination of the observed FUV luminosity
(uncorrected for dust) and the rest-frame 7.7 m luminosity, which has a
scatter of = 0.21 dex. The relatively small decrease
in suggests this is near the systematic accuracy of the total SFRs
using either calibration. These results demonstrate that the rest-frame 7.7
m emission constrained by JWST/MIRI is a tracer of the SFR for distant
galaxies to this accuracy, provided the galaxies are dominated by
star-formation with moderate-to-high levels of attenuation and metallicity.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Ap
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