Eliminativism about derivative prima facie duties

Ross divides prima facie duties into derivative and foundational ones, but seems to understand the notion of a derivative prima facie duty in two very different ways. Sometimes he understands them in a non-eliminativist way. According to this understanding, basic prima facie duties ground distinct derivative ones. According to the eliminativist understanding, basic duties do not ground distinct derivative duties, but replace (eliminate) them. On the eliminativist view, discovering that a prima facie duty is derivative is discovering that it is not genuine. The genuine one is the basic one. I argue that Ross is best understood as an eliminativist.

(How) Do research and administrative duties affect university professors’ teaching?

We analyze the interaction between university professors’ teaching quality and their research and administrative activities. Our sample is a high-quality individual panel data set from a medium size public Spanish university that allows us to avoid several types of biases frequently encountered in the literature. Although researchers teach roughly 20% more than non-researchers, their teaching quality is also 20% higher. Instructors with no research are 5 times more likely than the rest to be among the worst teachers. Over much of the relevant range, we find a nonlinear and positive relationship between research output and teaching quantity on teaching quality. Our conclusions may be useful for decision makers in universities and governments.

Access, equity and the role of rights in health care

Modern health care rhetoric promotes choice and individual patient rights as dominant values. Yet we also accept that in any regime constrained by finite resources, difficult choices between patients are inevitable. How can we balance rights to liberty, on the one hand, with equity in the allocation of scarce resources on the other? For example, the duty of health authorities to allocate resources is a duty owed to the community as a whole, rather than to specific individuals. Macro-duties of this nature are founded on the notion of equity and fairness amongst individuals rather than personal liberty. They presume that if hard choices have to be made, they will be resolved according to fair and consistent principles which treat equal cases equally, and unequal cases unequally. In this paper, we argue for greater clarity and candour in the health care rights debate. With this in mind, we discuss (1) private and public rights, (2) negative and positive rights, (3) procedural and substantive rights, (4) sustainable health care rights and (5) the New Zealand booking system for prioritising access to elective services. This system aims to consider: individual need and ability to benefit alongside the resources made available to elective health services in an attempt to give the principles of equity practical effect. We describe a continuum on which the merits of those, sometimes competing, values-liberty and equity-can be evaluated and assessed.

Entre moralité et politique: l’éducation de Louis XV et la question de l’instruction financière du prince sous l’Ancien Régime

Studies on princely education rarely focus on the training received by future kings to perform one of their key functions – supervising the finances of the monarchy. Failure to address this issue is all the more surprising than one of the major consequences of Louis XIV’s coronation was to grant the king the direction of finances until the French Revolution, thus raising the issue of the financial education of the prince. Based on a largely unpublished body of primary sources, especially several manuscripts specifically written for the financial education of Louis XV and princes in the XVIIIth century, this article explores the teaching approaches and programme of a highly technical nature that the king’s tutors considered essential to the monarch’s duties.

Recalcitrant pluralism

Here I argue that the best form of deontology is an ethic of prima facie duties, and that this form of deontology is especially resistant to any form of reduction to a single principle.

The ethics of carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting can be loosely characterized as a mechanism by which an organization or individual contributes to a scheme that is projected either to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or to deliver carbon dioxide emission reductions on the part of other organizations or individuals. An activity that has been offset therefore purports to make no long-term net contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The ethical basis for using carbon offsetting as an approach to tackling climate change is very much contested. We seek to expose some of the underlying reasons for these ethical disagreements. We show that they relate both to empirical disagreements about what the likely benefits of offsetting are and, more fundamentally, to principled disagreements about the right way to discharge duties to deliver carbon reductions.

Supporting schools in identifying and safeguarding the needs of disabled children: the challenges for data collection

Conceptualisations of disability that emphasise the contextual and cultural nature of disability and the embodiment of these within a national system of data collection present a number of challenges especially where this process is devolved to schools. The requirement for measures based on contextual and subjective experiences gives rise to particular difficulties in achieving parity in the way data is analysed and reported. This paper presents an account of the testing of a tool intended for use by schools as they collect data from parents to identify children who meet the criteria of disability established in Disability Discrimination Acts (DDAs). Data were validated through interviews with parents and teachers and observations of children and highlighted the pivotal role of the criterion of impact. The findings are set in the context of schools meeting their legal duties to identify disabled children and their support needs in a way that captures the complexity of disabled children’s school lives and provides useful and useable data.

Missing out? Challenges to hearing the views of all children on the barriers and supports to learning

Children's views are essential to enabling schools to fulfil their duties under the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 and create inclusive learning environments. Arguably children are the best source of information about the ways in which schools support their learning and what barriers they encounter. Accessing this requires a deeper level of reflection than simply asking what children find difficult. It is also a challenge to ensure that the views of all children contribute including those who find communication difficult. Development work in five schools is drawn on to analyse the ways in which teachers used suggestions for three interview activities. The data reveals the strengths and limitations of different ways of supporting the communication process.