The Dignity of Human Life: Sketching Out an 'Equal Worth' Approach

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life

Goldsmith's cosmopolitanism

[First Paragraph] Although imaginary travelers and voyages date back at least as far as the work of Lucian, the figure of the fictional oriental traveler seems to belong primarily to the eighteenth century. Following the great success of Giovanni Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, first published in Paris in 1684, a wide range of European writers sought to exploit the various satiric and comic possibilities that were offered by Eastern spies and observers. While a work such as George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England (1734) was clearly informed by a specific anti-Walpole agenda, fictional orientals in early-eighteenth-century British writing, especially, seem above all to have offered another means of addressing the experience of modernity: figures such as the Indian in Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1702) or the Ambassadors of Bantam in Spectator 557 (1712) are presented as newcomers to London, and shown to be both fascinated and perplexed by the workings of commercial society. In many ways, then, the oriental traveler performs more or less the same function as a range of other eighteenthcentury spies and observers, by offering positions — albeit provisional and ironic — from which to view the customs and manners of modern Britain. Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, stands out from the crowd of such fictional informants, however, both because he is made to play a larger role than this, and because he serves as more than just an estranging device. Although Lien Chi frequently misreads situations and gets things wrong, he describes himself as one who seeks “to know the men of every country,” and he advances the claims of a “cosmopolitan” orientation that Goldsmith’s other writings of the late 1750s and early 1760s take very seriously. But while The Citizen of the World attempts to hold on to a utopian sense of global community, it offers a number of interrogative and even antagonistic perspectives on the idea of the cosmopolitan, too, often rehearsing the terms of current debates. Although Goldsmith arguably took the fiction of the oriental traveler further than any of his contemporaries, therefore, his work might also be seen to offer a critical reflection on such figures, and to anticipate the slow demise of this genre in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Continues.

MSTW PDFs and impact of PDFs on cross sections at Tevatron and LHC

We briefly summarise the "MSTW 2008" determination of parton distribution functions (PDFs), and subsequent follow-up studies, before reviewing some topical issues concerning the PDF dependence of cross sections at the Tevatron and LHC. We update a recently published study of benchmark Standard Model total cross sections (W, Z, gg->H and t-tbar production) at the 7 TeV LHC, where we account for all publicly available PDF sets and we compare to LHC data for W, Z, and t-tbar production. We show the sensitivity of the Higgs cross sections to the gluon distribution, then we demonstrate the ability of the Tevatron jet data, and also the LHC t-tbar data, to discriminate between PDF sets with different high-x gluon distributions. We discuss the related problem of attempts to extract the strong coupling alpha_S from only deep-inelastic scattering data, and we conclude that a direct data constraint on the high-x gluon distribution is required to obtain a meaningful result. We therefore discourage the use of PDF sets obtained from "non-global" fits where the high-x gluon distribution is not directly constrained by data.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the Ringberg Workshop on "New Trends in HERA Physics 2011", Ringberg Castle, Tegernsee, Germany, 25-28 September 201

Parton distribution function dependence of benchmark Standard Model total cross sections at the 7 TeV LHC

We compare predictions for the W, Z, gg->H and t-tbar total cross sections at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, using the most recent publicly available next-to-leading order and next-to-next-to-leading order parton distribution functions (PDFs) from all PDF fitting groups. In particular, we focus on the dependence on the different values of the strong coupling, alpha_S(M_Z^2), used by each group. We also perform a comparison of the relevant quark-antiquark and gluon-gluon luminosity functions. We make some comments on the recent PDF4LHC recommendations. Finally, we discuss the comparison of data and theory for W and Z cross sections at the LHC.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures. v2: version published in JHE

Diffractive parton density functions

We discuss the perturbative QCD description of diffractive deep-inelastic scattering, and extract diffractive parton distributions from recent HERA data. The asymptotic collinear factorisation theorem has important modifications in the sub-asymptotic HERA regime. In addition to the usual resolved Pomeron contribution, the direct interaction of the Pomeron must also be accounted for. The diffractive parton distributions are shown to satisfy an inhomogeneous evolution equation, analogous to the parton distributions of the photon.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the Ringberg Workshop on "New Trends in HERA Physics 2005", Ringberg Castle, Tegernsee, Germany, 2-7 October 200