Inequality, avoidability, and healthcare

This review article of Shlomi Segall's Health, Luck, and Justice (Princeton University Press, 2010) addresses three issues: first, Segall’s claim that luck egalitarianism, properly construed, does not object to brute luck equality; second, Segall’s claim that brute luck is properly construed as the outcome of actions that it would have been unreasonable to expect the agent to avoid; and third, Segall’s account of healthcare and criticism of rival views. On the first two issues, a more conventional form of luck egalitarianism – that is, one which objects to brute luck even if it creates equality, and which construes brute luck as the inverse of agent responsibility – is defended. On the third issue, strengths and weaknesses in Segall’s criticism of Rawlsian, democratic egalitarian, and all-luck egalitarian approaches to healthcare, and in his own luck egalitarian approach, are identified

Luck as Risk

The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that luck is a risk-involving phenomenon. I start by explaining why this hypothesis is prima facie plausible in view of the parallelisms between luck and risk. I then distinguish three ways to spell it out: in probabilistic terms, in modal terms, and in terms of lack of control. Before evaluating the resulting accounts, I explain how the idea that luck involves risk is compatible with the fact that risk concerns unwanted events whereas luck can concern both wanted and unwanted events. I turn to evaluating the modal and probabilistic views and argue, firstly, that they fail to account for the connection between risk and bad luck; secondly, that they also fail to account for the connection between risk and good luck. Finally, I defend the lack of control view. In particular, I argue that it can handle the objections to the probabilistic and modal accounts and that it can explain how degrees of luck and risk covary

The Isaqueena - 1922, November

Contributors include: Frances Luck, Elizabeth Bates, Jack Jones, Annie Mary Timmons, Lois Ballenger, Mrs. W. J. Langston, Reba Smithhttps://scholarexchange.furman.edu/isaqueena/1082/thumbnail.jp

Stressed and Strapped: Caregivers in California

Profiles the demographics and self-reported physical and mental health status of informal caregivers caring for a family member or friend, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease; psychological distress; and unhealthy behaviors

Book review: saving the ‘Celtic Tiger’ from extinction.

Steve Coulter finds optimism in the latest book by David J Lynch which looks carefully at Ireland’s troubled political and economic history.

In defence of modest anti-luck epistemology

ANTI-LUCK EPISTEMOLOGY Most epistemologists would accept that knowledge excludes luck in the specific sense that if one knows then it is not a matter of luck that one’s belief is true. Call this the anti-luck intuition. There is a certain kind of epistemological project – which I have christened anti-luck epistemology – which takes this intuition as central to our understanding of knowledge. Essentially, the idea is that once we identify which epistemic condition can satisfy the anti-luck intuition (call this the anti-luck condition), then we will have thereby identified a key component in a theory of knowledge. Central to this enterprise, as I explain below, is to gain a proper understanding of the nature of luck itself. We can distinguish between two forms of anti-luck epistemology. According to robust anti-luck epistemology, knowledge is nothing more than true belief that satisfies the anti-luck condition. According to modest anti-luck epistemology, in contrast, the anti-luck condition is merely a key necessary condition for knowledge, but it is not sufficient (with true belief) for knowledge. In what follows I will be offering a defence of modest anti-luck epistemology. SAFETY VERSUS SENSITIVITY There are two competing ways of understanding the anti-luck condition in the contemporary literature