Interview with Abe Melden

Founding faculty member of the Department of Philosophy, 1964-1977Digitized 2013 by Avant Productions, Inc

Guarding against the High Risk of High-Deductible Health Plans: A Proposal for Regulatory Protections

High deductible health plans are a cornerstone of consumer-driven health care. This article explores a number of myths promoted by proponents of such plans and challenges these myths to discuss the various ways such plans pose risks to consumers both individually and generally. While most articles on this topic explore the arguments for and against such plans, this article, unlike others, proposes specific regulatory protections with model language. In fact, this article already has been used as the basis for testimony before the California State Assembly which, for the first time, has introduced legislation aimed at regulating such plans and adopts some of the protections advanced in this article

Evolution ethics

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston Universityhttps://archive.org/details/evolutionethics00mel

Economics, Agency, and Causal Explanation

The paper considers three questions. First, what is the connection between economics and agency? It is argued that causation and explanation in economics fundamentally depend on agency. So a philosophical understanding of economic explanation must be sensitive to an understanding of agency. Second, what is the connection between agency and causation? A causal view of agency-involving explanation is defended against a number of arguments from the resurgent noncausalist tradition in the literature on agency and action-explanation. If agency is fundamental to economic explanation, it is argued, then so is causation. Third, what is the connection between causal explanation and the natural sciences? It is argued that, though the explanations given in economics and other social sciences are causal explanations, they are different in kind from the causal explanations of the natural sciences. On the one hand, then, the causal explanations of the social sciences are irreducible to those found in the natural sciences. On the other hand, the causal relations described by the social sciences are not completely autonomous; they do not float free of, or operate independently from, the causal relations charted by the natural sciences

Correspondence between T. Melden, George C. Stokes, and John Shary

Correspondence regarding lot 282, Shary Subdivision between November 1, 1930 and October 15, 1942 between T. Melden, George C. Stokes, John Shary, Pearl Stokes, and attorneys for the United Irrigation Company.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/johnshary/1024/thumbnail.jp

Constitutivism

A brief explanation and overview of constitutivism

The twilight of the Liberal Social Contract? On the Reception of Rawlsian Political Liberalism

This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states