Rawls and Health Care

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

Where did all these books come from? The Publishing Industry and American Intellectual Life

The American book publishing industry shapes the character of American intellectual life. While the newspaper and television industries have been accused of and investigated for bias and lowering America’s intellectual standards, book publishing has gone largely unexamined by scholars. The existing studies of the publishing industry have focused on finance, procedure and history. “There are few ‘theories’ of publishing – efforts to understand the ‘whys’ as well as the ‘hows.’ Few scholarly scientists have devoted significant scholarly attention to publishing” (Altbach and Hoshino, xiii). There are many possible reasons for this lacuna. First, there is a perception that books have always been around, that they are an “old” technology and therefore they don’t appear to have had as much of an impact on our society as television and other media (which were developed quickly and suddenly) seem to have had (Altbach and Hoshino, xiv). Also, despite books’ present and past popularity, television, radio, and now the internet reach more people more easily, and are therefore more topical points of study and observation. In studying the effects of mass media on everyday American life, television and the internet may be the most logical points of study. Regarding public intellectual life however, books play a much more important role. Public intellectual life has always been associated with independent thinkers publishing their work for the masses. For this reason, this I focus on trade publishing. Trade publishing produces fiction and non-fiction works for the general reading public, as opposed to technical manuals, textbooks, and other fiction and nonfiction books targeted to small and specific audiences. Although, quantitatively speaking, “the largest part of book publishing business is embodied in that great complex of companies and activities producing educational, business, scientific, technical, and reference books and materials,” (Tebbel 1987, 439) the trade industry publishes most of the books that most people read. It is the most public segment of the industry, and the most likely place to find public intellectualism. Trade publishing is not only the most public segment of the industry, but it is also the most susceptible to corruption and lowered intellectual standards. Unlike specialty publishing, which caters to a specific, known segment of society, trade publishers must compete with countless other publications, as well as with other forms of media, for the patronage of the general public. As John Tebbel (author of a widely referenced history of the publishing industry) puts it, “The textbook, scientific, or technical book is subjected to much more rigorous scrutiny by buyers and users, and in an intensively competitive market inferior products are quickly lost" (Tebbel 1987, xiv). Since the standards for trade publishing are not nearly as specific – trade books simply need to catch the attention of a significant number of readers, they don’t have to measure up to a given level of quality – the quality of trade books is much more variable. And yet, a successful trade publication can have a much greater impact on society than the most rigorously researched and edited textbook or scholarly study.

Grotesque in Dickens

Dickens's use of the grotesque in his novels undergoes a variety of changes. For convenience sake, and to better illustrate the developments of the grotesque, I divide the novels into three separate groups. The first group, the period of experiment, included the novels from Pickwick Papers through Barnaby Rudge; the second group, the period of transition, includes the novels from Martin Chuzzlewit through David Copperfield; and the third, the period of a new vision. included the novels from Bleak House through Edwin Drood. Basically, I see the development of the grotesque involving a change in Dickens's conceptions of society, as well as responding to complex changes in society itself; Dickens's vision loses much of its humor in the end, yet it also reflects a definite maturity.

A Catalyst for Culture: Early Child Development and Education in Japan

A popular Western perception of Japan is that it is an eminently homogeneous and conformist society. However, both conformity and homogeneity, recognized even by the Japanese themselves, coexist with the concept of individuality, which is valued in a manner unique to its culture. In order to come to a deeper understanding of that dynamic, it is important to comprehend the specifics of child rearing and education within Japanese society. Based in part on the author's observational fieldwork conducted while in Japan in 1994, the thesis explicates the manner in which various core relationships exhibit the socialization of an individual that occurs within the home during a child's first few years. Furthermore, the text incorporates research in both primary and secondary historical materials. The author displays the manner in which educational issues such as the development of the Japanese education system and the dynamics of the elementary years serve to demonstrate the importance of functioning within a group. This is further clarified through an examination of elementary school texts, which also reveal underlying moral messages of profound importance in Japanese society. The seemingly contradictory issues of becoming an individual yet performing as a member of a group are pulled together by the idea that culture provides the guidance by which an individual becomes an active member of society. In Japan, individuality and group conformity are not mutually exclusive. Within the context of Japanese society, individuality is inextricably linked to group orientation.

Dwelling in possibility: aestheticizing identity in African American women's fiction

African American women writers define aesthetics through their negotiation of identity in the politicized loci of space, place and voice. In the balkanization of such issues of voice and space, we can see the ways that the emergent selfis embodied and aestheticized in literature. To do so creates a more tactile and "artfull" representation of the self rather than a representation of identity as a mere abstract concept. To use written language to express the self is to carry processes of selfdefinition for black women into the realm of creative production. For women, especially black women, who are a politically and socially compromised element of society, the written word is a way of expressing the politically and the socially critical voice that is suppressed in other forums of expression. Using theories on "writing in difference" as a skeleton key, this project seeks to outline some of the ways that black women writers use aesthetic elements in their art to express the potential for self-examination, discovery, and emancipation.