Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number

Articl

Skepticism about Saving the Greater Number

Articl

How to guard against the risk of living too long: the case for collective pensions

This chapter provides a defense of a type of occupational pension, known as “collective defined contribution” (CDC), which is based on the idea that it is possible to limit the employer’s liability to nothing more than a set contribution (a “defined contribution”) while retaining many of the benefits of the collectivization (pooling) of risks of a traditional defined benefit (DB) pension. CDC can be defended against a freedom-based objection from the right via an appeal to the following Hobbesian voluntarist justification: CDC constitutes a “Leviathan of Leviathans” into which it is rational for workers to choose to associate in order to tame longevity and investment risks. CDC pensions that arise from and mirror existing income inequalities can also be defended against an egalitarian objection from the left, by demonstration that they can be grounded in Rawlsian principles of reciprocity and property-owning democracy

Why Left-Libertarianism Isn't Incoherent, Indeterminate, or Irrelevant: A Reply to Fried

http://klinechair.missouri.edu/on-line%20papers/fried-reply%20to%20her%20review.docOver the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in left-libertarianism, which holds (roughly) that agents fully own themselves and that natural resources (land, minerals, air, etc.) belong to everyone in some egalitarian sense. Left-libertarianism agrees with the more familiar right-libertarianism about self-ownership, but radically disagrees with it about the power to acquire ownership of natural resources. Merely being the first person to claim, discover, or mix labor with an unappropriated natural resource does not—left-libertarianism insists—generate a full private property right in that natural resource. Left-libertarianism seems promising because it recognizes both strong individual rights of liberty and security and also grounds a strong demand for some kind of material equality. It seems, that is, to be a plausible a form of liberal egalitarianism. In a recent review essay of a two volume anthology on left-libertarianism (edited by two of us), Barbara Fried has insightfully laid out most of the core issues that confront left-libertarianism. We are each left-libertarians, and we would like to take this opportunity to address some of the general issues that she raises. We shall focus, as Fried does much of the time, on the question of whether left-libertarianism is a well-defined and distinct alternative to existing forms of liberal egalitarianism. More specifically, we shall address the following fundamental issues raised by Fried (and others): (1) Does the notion self-ownership have any determinate content? (2) What is the relation between self-ownership and world ownership? (3) How is left-libertarianism different from other forms of liberal egalitarianism (e.g., those of Rawls and Dworkin)

El incompatibilismo y la evitabilidad de la culpa

En este artículo, analizo una cuestión fundamental de la filosofía moral: las condiciones que deben satisfacerse para que los seres humanos sean culpables por sus actos incorrectos. Mi ambición es ofrecer parte de la explicación de por qué nadie sería culpable si el universo estuviera causalmente determinado

Fair Terms of Social Cooperation Among Equals

Rawlsian justice as fairness is neither fundamentally luck egalitarian nor relational egalitarian. Rather, the most fundamental idea is that of society as a fair system of cooperation. Collective pensions provide a case study which illustrates the fruitfulness of conceiving justice in these latter terms. Those who have recently reached the age of majority do not now know how long they will live in retirement or how well any investments they try to save up for their retirement would fare. From the perspective of the beginning of their working lives, it is therefore rational for each to enter into an agreement with others, who also do not yet know their fates, that, if one turns out to be among the unfortunate whose private pension pots would not have yielded enough for one’s retirement, one will receive much more in retirement, whereas those whose pension pots would have overflowed their retirements will receive somewhat less. These terms are to each person’s expected advantage, which is made possible by a fair sharing of the fruits of social cooperation which arise through the efficiencies reaped by the pooling of the risk of outliving what one could save for one’s retirement on one’s own. It is rational for each to agree to share one another’s fates by pooling risks across both space and time, on fair terms of social cooperation for mutual advantage. Even when collective pensions arise from, and are proportional to, a baseline of unequal income, they can be defended on grounds of reciprocity involving regard for one another as equals

Thirty years of SN 1980K: Evidence for light echoes

We report optical and mid-infrared photometry of SN 1980K between 2004 and 2010, which show slow monotonic fading consistent with previous spectroscopic and photometric observations made 8 to 17 years after outburst. The slow rate-of-change over two decades suggests that this evolution may result from scattered and thermal light echoes off of extended circumstellar material. We present a semi- analytic dust radiative-transfer model that uses an empirically corrected effective optical depth to provide a fast and robust alternative to full Monte-Carlo radiative transfer modeling for homogenous dust at low to intermediate optical depths. We find that unresolved echoes from a thin circumstellar shell 14-15 lt-yr from the progenitor, and containing about 0.02 Msun of carbon-rich dust, can explain the broadband spectral and temporal evolution. The size, mass and dust composition are in good agreement with the contact discontinuity observed in scattered echoes around SN 1987A. The origin of slowly-changing high-velocity [O I] and Halpha lines is also considered. We propose an origin in shocked high-velocity metal-rich clumps of ejecta, rather than arising in the impact of ejecta on slowly-moving circumstellar material, as is the case with hot spots in SN 1987A.Comment: Accepted 2/14/12 to be published in ApJ. 15 pages, 10 figure

Activity-Dependent mRNA Splicing Controls ER Export and Synaptic Delivery of NMDA Receptors

AbstractActivity-dependent targeting of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) is a key feature of synapse formation and plasticity. Although mechanisms for rapid trafficking of glutamate receptors have been identified, the molecular events underlying chronic accumulation or loss of synaptic NMDARs have remained unclear. Here we demonstrate that activity controls NMDAR synaptic accumulation by regulating forward trafficking at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). ER export is accelerated by the alternatively spliced C2′ domain of the NR1 subunit and slowed by the C2 splice cassette. This mRNA splicing event at the C2/C2′ site is activity dependent, with C2′ variants predominating upon activity blockade and C2 variants abundant with increased activity. The switch to C2′ accelerates NMDAR forward trafficking by enhancing recruitment of nascent NMDARs to ER exit sites via binding of a divaline motif within C2′ to COPII coats. These results define a novel pathway underlying activity-dependent targeting of glutamate receptors, providing an unexpected mechanistic link between activity, mRNA splicing, and membrane trafficking during excitatory synapse modification