Omissions, causation, and responsibility - A reply to McLachlan and Coggon

In this paper I discuss a recent exchange of articles between Hugh McLachlan and John Coggon on the relationship between omissions, causation and moral responsibility. My aim is to contribute to their debate by isolating a presupposition I believe they both share, and by questioning that presupposition. The presupposition is that, at any given moment, there are countless things that I am omitting to do. This leads them both to give a distorted account of the relationship between causation and moral or (as the case may be) legal responsibility, and, in the case of Coggon, to claim that the law’s conception of causation is a fiction based on policy. Once it is seen that this presupposition is faulty, we can attain a more accurate view of the logical relationship between causation and moral responsibility in the case of omissions. This is important because it will enable us, in turn, to understand why the law continues to regard omissions as different, both logically and morally, from acts, and why the law seeks to track that logical and moral difference in the legal distinction it draws between withholding life-sustaining measures and euthanasia

Search, Effort, and Locus of Control

We test the hypothesis that locus of control – one's perception of control over events in life – influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one's efforts influence outcomes when subjects exert effort without knowing how effort influences the generation of offers but are unrelated to locus of control beliefs when subjects are informed about the relationship between effort and offers. These effects cannot be explained by locus of control's correlation with unmeasured human capital, personality traits, and the costs of search – alternative explanations for the relationships between locus of control and search behavior that cannot be ruled out using survey data – as the search task does not vary across treatments, which leads us to conclude that locus of control influences search through beliefs about the efficacy of search effort. Our findings provide evidence that locus of control measures can be used to identify job seekers at risk of becoming "discouraged" and abandoning search.locus of control, reservation wages, labor market search, experiment

Search, effort, and locus of control

We test the hypothesis that locus of control - one's perception of control over events in life - influences search by affecting beliefs about the efficacy of search effort in a laboratory experiment. We find that reservation offers and effort are increasing in the belief that one's efforts influence outcomes when subjects exert effort without knowing how effort influences the generation of offers but are unrelated to locus of control beliefs when subjects are informed about the relationship between effort and offers. These effects cannot be explained by locus of control's correlation with unmeasured human capital, personality traits, and the costs of search - alternative explanations for the relationships between locus of control and search behavior that cannot be ruled out using survey data - as the search task does not vary across treatments, which leads us to conclude that locus of control influences search through beliefs about the efficacy of search effort. Our findings provide evidence that locus of control measures can be used to identify job seekers at risk of becoming discouraged and abandoning search

After the Tournament: Outcomes and Effort Provision

Modeling the incentive effects of competitions among employees for promotions or financial rewards, economists have largely ignored the effects of competition on effort provision once the competition is finished. In a laboratory experiment, we examine how competition outcomes affect the provision of post-competition effort. We find that subjects who lose arbitrarily decided competitions choose lower subsequent effort levels than subjects who lose competitions decided by their effort choices. We explore the preferences underlying this behavior and show that subjects' reactions are related to their preferences for meritocratic outcomes

Me and my body: the relevance of the difference for the distinction between withdrawing life support and euthanasia

In this paper I discuss David Shaw’s claim that the body of a terminally ill person can be conceived as a kind of life-support, akin to an artificial ventilator. I claim that this position rests upon an untenable dualism between the mind and the body. Given that dualism continues to be attractive to some thinkers, I attempt to diagnose the reasons why it continues to be attractive, as well as to demonstrate its incoherence, drawing on some recent work in the philosophy of psychology. I conclude that, if my criticisms are sound, Shaw’s attempt to deny the distinction between withdrawal and euthanasia fails

Greener Synthesis of Chlorophosphazenes

This project will attempt to synthesize chlorophosphazene molecules in the absence of solvents by using mechanochemical techniques in order to create a more environmentally friendly synthesis route. In this pursuit, various parameters will be changed including the milling ball to reagent ratios, the molar ratios of the reactants, and the addition of different catalysts. The products of each reaction will be characterized in order to determine success. This work builds upon existing efforts to utilize mechanochemical techniques in main group chemistry. The output of this project will be a report in ACS style and a poster to be presented for an ACS undergraduate poster session at a national ACS meeting

Ending the life of the act/omission dispute: causation in withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining measures

My aim in this paper is to challenge the increasingly common view in the literature that the law on end of life decision making is in disarray and is in need of urgent reform. My argument is that this assessment of the law is based on assumptions about the relationship between the identity of the defendant and their conduct, and about the nature of causation, which, on examination, prove to be indefensible. I then provide a clarification of the relationship between causation and omissions which proves that the current legal position does not need modification, at least on the grounds that are commonly advanced for the converse view. This enables me, in conclusion, to clarify important conceptual and moral differences between withholding, refusing and withdrawing life-sustaining measures on the one hand, and assisted suicide and euthanasia, on the other

Performance Pay, Competitiveness, and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence from the United States

Evidence that women are less likely to opt into competitive compensation schemes in the laboratory has generated speculation that a gender difference in competitiveness contributes to the gender wage gap. Using data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97, we show that women are less likely to be employed in jobs using competitive compensation. The portion of the gender wage gap explained by gender segregation in compensation schemes is small in the NLSY79 but somewhat larger in the NLSY97 suggesting an increasing role for competitiveness in explaining the gender wage gap

Moving Up or Falling Behind? Gender, Promotions, and Wages in Canada

We estimate gender differences in internal promotion experiences for a representative sample of Canadian workers using linked employer-employee data. We find that women in Canada are 3 percentage points less likely to be promoted and have received fewer promotions than similar men, but these differences stem almost entirely from gender differences in industry and occupation. By contrast, women experience an estimated 2.9 percent less wage growth in the year of a promotion than similar men even after controlling for industry, occupation, and firm effects – though a significant "family gap" exists among women as single women and women without children experience essentially the same wage returns to promotion as men

Employer learning and the "importance" of skills

We ask whether the role of employer learning in the wage-setting process depends on skill type and skill importance to productivity. Combining data from the NLSY79 with O*NET data, we use Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery scores to measure seven distinct types of pre-market skills that employers cannot readily observe, and O*NET importance scores to measure the importance of each skill for the worker's current three-digit occupation. Before bringing importance measures into the analysis, we find evidence of employer learning for each skill type, for college and high school graduates, and for blue and white collar workers. Moreover, we find that the extent of employer learning - which we demonstrate to be directly identified by magnitudes of parameter estimates after simple manipulation of the data - does not vary significantly across skill type or worker type. Once we allow parameters identifying employer learning and screening to vary by skill importance, we find evidence of distinct tradeoffs between learning and screening, and considerable heterogeneity across skill type and skill importance. For some skills, increased importance leads to more screening and less learning; for others, the opposite is true. Our evidence points to heterogeneity in the degree of employer learning that is masked by disaggregation based on schooling attainment or broad occupational categories