Why It's Time to Stop Worrying About Paternalism in Health Policy

Why It’s Time to Stop Worrying About Paternalism in Public Health Policy

Public health policies which involve active intervention to improve the health of the population are often criticised as paternalistic. This paper argues that it is a mistake to frame our discussions of public health policies in terms of paternalism. First, it is deeply problematic to pick out which policies should count as paternalistic; at best we can talk about paternalistic justifications f...

Ontotherapy, or how to stop worrying about what there is

The paper argues that Guarino is right that ontologies are different from thesauri and similar objects, but not in the ways he believes: they are distinguished from essentially linguistic objects like thesauri and hierarchies of conceptual relations because they unpack, ultimately, in terms of sets of objects and individuals. However this is a lonely status, and without much application outside...

Doing the right thing: stop worrying about cholesterol.

Stop worrying; start growing

Ever since the Asilomar Conference on ‘Recombinant DNA’ in February 1975, regulatory policies relating to recombinant DNA technology have focused on the idea that this technology implies threats to human health and the environment [1]. As a consequence, the explicit goal of these policies is to protect society and nature from an assumed hazard, or, if protection is not possible, at least to del...

Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bohr

To celebrate the 60th birthday of Charles H. Bennett I (1) publicly announce my referee reports for the original dense coding and telepor-tation papers, (2) present a very economical solution to the Bernstein-Vazirani problem that does not even hint at interference between multiple universes, and (3) describe how I inadvertently reinvented the Copen-hagen interpretation in the course of constru...