Rationing Health Care and the Role of the 'Acute Principle'

In several works, Hartmut Kliemt has developed an original account on the necessity of rationing health care and on how a rationing policy should be carried out. While I agree on several important points of that view, there is one important aspect of his account that I do not find plausible: his claim that the so-called 'acute principle' (a principle that gives absolute preeminence to rescuing identified lives from dying) should be one of the basic criteria to carry out a rationing policy in a liberal state. After explaining Kliemt's view on rationing health care and, more specifically, the foundations of the acute principle, I argue that the acute principle is not supported by our basic moral intuitions. I then apply the previous argument to the case of rationing, arguing for the necessity of a compromise among intuitions supporting the acute principle and other moral intuitions. Finally, I try to show that a feasible system of public health care services is conceivable. In doing so, I make use, with some relevant modifications, of Kliemt's own ideas.health care, health ethics, rationing in medicine, distributive justice, scarce resources, prioritization, acute principle

Supersymmetric classical cosmology

In this work a supersymmetric cosmological model is analyzed in which we consider a general superfield action of a homogeneous scalar field supermultiplet interacting with the scale factor in a supersymmetric FRW model. There appear fermionic superpartners associated with both the scale factor and the scalar field, and classical equations of motion are obtained from the super-Wheeler-DeWitt equation through the usual WKB method. The resulting supersymmetric Einstein-Klein-Gordon equations contain extra radiation and stiff matter terms, and we study their solutions in flat space for different scalar field potentials. The solutions are compared to the standard case, in particular those corresponding to the exponential potential, and their implications for the dynamics of the early Universe are discussed in turn.Comment: 9 pages, 4 eps figures, uses RevTe

Promises, Expectations, and Rights

I address the problem of why promises create obligations. First, I spell out and object the so-called expectational account according to which the duty to keep our promises arises from the fact that, when we promise to do something, we create an expectation in the promisee, which we have the duty not to disappoint. It has been claimed that this account is circular since we can only raise the expectation, in the appropriate sense, if we already have the moral duty to keep our promise. I argue, against Scanlon and others, that such circularity is unavoidable. In the second section, I develop an alternative approach. Based on some ideas by H. Hart, H. Steiner, E. Mack, and others, I hold that the normative force of promises should be explained by its connection to the normative force of rights. Promising to do X should be understood as an act of surrendering our liberty-right not to do X. The central question is, therefore, how we come to have the moral power to limit our liberty-rights. My suggestion is that such power is conceptually linked to the very idea of exercising rights

Promises, Expectations, and Rights

I address the problem of why promises create obligations. First, I spell out and object the so-called expectational account according to which the duty to keep our promises arises from the fact that, when we promise to do something, we create an expectation in the promisee, which we have the duty not to disappoint. It has been claimed that this account is circular since we can only raise the expectation, in the appropriate sense, if we already have the moral duty to keep our promise. I argue, against Scanlon and others, that such circularity is unavoidable. In the second section, I develop an alternative approach. Based on some ideas by H. Hart, H. Steiner, E. Mack, and others, I hold that the normative force of promises should be explained by its connection to the normative force of rights. Promising to do X should be understood as an act of surrendering our liberty-right not to do X. The central question is, therefore, how we come to have the moral power to limit our liberty-rights. My suggestion is that such power is conceptually linked to the very idea of exercising rights

Therapeutic Gardening For Addiction Recovery

Problem: The use of evidence-based alternative forms of therapy like horticulture therapy and therapeutic gardening is underutilized in substance use recovery programs in the United States. As the country continues to struggle with addiction, it is important that recovery programs look to and incorporate these alternative therapies into official curricula. Currently, 46.3 million individuals living in the United States are living with a substance use disorder (U.S Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2022). Context: The intervention was implemented at an all-male substance use treatment facility in San Jose, CA that houses up to thirty-two participants at any given time. Participants typically have some sort of history with the criminal justice system and are often ordered into treatment at this facility, although participation is completely voluntary. Interventions: After conducting a review of research, it was found that gardening has had beneficial and therapeutic effects on at-risk populations including veterans, the incarcerated, those living with mental health illnesses, and those living with substance use disorders (SUD). The intervention consisted of a therapeutic gardening project at a substance use recovery center in San Jose, California. Measures: Measures for this project are qualitative in nature and were captured via interviews and surveys developed and provided by the University of San Francisco nursing students implementing the project. Results: Many of the participants that were engaged in the gardening integration at this in-patient substance use treatment center reported that they enjoyed the experience and felt that it positively benefited them; this was obtained through surveys, interviews, and ethnographic observations from the University of San Francisco (USF) students. Conclusions: Results from this project fall in line with current research regarding the use of therapeutic gardening and support the use of this intervention in substance use disorder programming

Differential Evolution Algorithm in the Construction of Interpretable Classification Models

In this chapter, the application of a differential evolution-based approach to induce oblique decision trees (DTs) is described. This type of decision trees uses a linear combination of attributes to build oblique hyperplanes dividing the instance space. Oblique decision trees are more compact and accurate than the traditional univariate decision trees. On the other hand, as differential evolution (DE) is an efficient evolutionary algorithm (EA) designed to solve optimization problems with real-valued parameters, and since finding an optimal hyperplane is a hard computing task, this metaheuristic (MH) is chosen to conduct an intelligent search of a near-optimal solution. Two methods are described in this chapter: one implementing a recursive partitioning strategy to find the most suitable oblique hyperplane of each internal node of a decision tree, and the other conducting a global search of a near-optimal oblique decision tree. A statistical analysis of the experimental results suggests that these methods show better performance as decision tree induction procedures in comparison with other supervised learning approaches