I t would be rather unusual for someone to argue publicly that the world's rich have no obligations at all with respect to the global poor. Many, however, claim that the obligations of the affluent countries are both fairly weak and minimal. This claim is typically arrived at via two premises: one is normative, the other factual. The normative premise asserts that while we are under a strict ob...

In this essay I examine the formal structure of the concept of futility, enabling identification of the appropriate roles played by patient, professional, and society. I argue that the concept of futility does not justify unilateral decisions to forego life-sustaining medical treatment over patient or legitimate surrogate objection, even when futility is determined by a process or subject to et...

This paper creates a synthetic pension data set through the use of regression and statistical matching procedures, and as a by-product, updates income replacement rates from defined benefit plans. This new data set contains detailed socioeconomic variables along with in-depth, employer-provided pension data. Through the use of data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form W-2, two earnings-...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due. However, almost no firm has chosen to fund its plan in this manner. We study the optimal funding choice ...

We consider a continuous time dynamic pension funding model in a defined benefit plan of an employment system. The benefits liabilities are random, given by a geometric Brownian process. Three different situations are studied regarding the investment decisions taken by the sponsoring employer: in the first, the fund is invested at a constant, risk-free rate of interest; in the second, the promo...

This paper analyzes optimal investment policies for pension funds of a defined benefit (DB) type. The nature of a DB fund induces a natural modeling of preferences being of the mean-downside risk type. With compensation for inflation as an explicit goal of a pension fund, a natural reference point for the risk measure is the future (indexed) value of the liabilities. Results are presented for d...

This paper responds to the question: Do physicians have an ethical obligation to care for patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)? First, the social and political milieu in which this question arises is sampled. Here physicians as well as other members of the community are found declaring an unwillingness to be exposed to people with AIDS. Next, laws, regulations, ethical codes ...

concern for the protection of the weak party is a characteristic of contemporary french contract law. in the area of the obligation to provide information, the question arises as to what criterion should be applied to distinguish the weak party from the one placed in a position of power: on what basis is the party in the inferior position protected by jurisprudence and by the legislator in the ...

This paper is about control mechanisms for virtual organizations. As a case study, we discuss the Renewables Obligation (RO), a control mechanism that was introduced in the United Kingdom to stimulate the production of renewable energy. We apply a conceptual model based on normative multiagent systems (NMAS). We propose to model both the participants and the normative system as autonomous agent...