The medical and clinical promise of stem cell research is widely heralded, but moral judgments about it collide. This article takes general stock of such judgments and offers one specific resolution. It canvasses a spectrum of value judgments on sources, complicity, adult stem cells, and public and private contexts. It then examines how debates about abortion and stem cell research converge and...

This chapter examines economists’ indefensible attachment to the positive-normative distinction, and suggests a behavioral economics explanation of their behavior on the subject. It reviews the origins of the distinction in Hume’s guillotine and logical positivism, and shows how they form the basis for Robbins’ understanding of value neutrality. It connects philosophers’ rejection of logical po...

In this paper, we evaluate and critique ten principal claims made in recent debates on the estate tax, distinguishing five types of statements: facts, rhetoric, value judgments, economic reasoning, and informed speculation. Economics can not fully resolve the debate because economic knowledge is inconclusive and because value judgments help determine optimal choices. Nevertheless, economic anal...

It has been suggested that a common cognitive system is employed in magnitude judgments across multiple modalities (Walsh, 2003). To test this theory, we examined whether performance on magnitude judgments of number, surface area, duration, and loudness correlated with each other in both magnitude comparison (e.g., determine which is more), and magnitude estimation (e.g., if magnitude 1 value =...

to P(A ú B) and to P(B ú C), and a low value to P(A Fans of the National Basketball Association (NBA) ú C). Neither standard probability theory nor support assigned probability judgments to the outcomes of uptheory constrains the relationship among these three coming NBA games, and rated the strength of each estimates. Nevertheless, it is suggested that in many team involved. The probability ju...