Populations, values, and health

This chapter explores some of the philosophical and ethical presuppositions of population healthcare; it investigates the implications for how we should understand the jurisdiction, aims, and evaluation of population healthcare. The jurisdiction of population healthcare is primarily within the healthcare system but necessarily extends beyond the walls of clinics and hospitals, given the need for social coordination to bring about healthcare access at the population level. The dual aims of population healthcare in maximizing population benefits of healthcare and reducing health inequalities are clearly moral in nature, but they can give rise to conflicting goals that the ethics of population healthcare should seek to resolve. While population healthcare’s aim is to advance a value-based approach to healthcare, which seeks to promote what is called technical, allocative, and personalized value, there are a number of questions that remain unanswered: in particular, the justification and evaluation of personalized value, and why the satisfaction of individual preferences in relation to health outcomes should be a population-level concern alongside promoting health and health equity.

Meta-ethics: A Quest for an Epistemological Basis of Morality in Classical Islamic Thought

The aim of this article is to critique the meta-ethical foundation of the purposes of law theory (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa). It starts by introducing the Ashʿarite meta-ethics, and in two sub-sections briefly elucidates the perceived relation between meta-ethics and normative ethics and the relation between ethics, Islamic jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh) and speculative theology (ʿilm al-kalām). The article examines the meta-ethical presuppositions of the Qurʾan, arguing that Qurʾanic ethics allows for rethinking the meta-ethical foundation of themaqāṣid,since it accepts objective moral values and allows for moral epistemology that is based on reason. The last and the longest section of the article develops arguments that would admit human reason in formulating themaqāṣidand suggests that this requires a different ethical foundation, one that is closer to the Muʿtazilite conception of morality. The arguments are based on the work of some classical and contemporary scholars who have noted the contradiction in the traditionalmaqāṣidtheory, and on the views of those scholars whose ethical views and principles expressed an understanding of morality that contradicts with ethical voluntarism or ‘divine command theory’ in ethics. The theory ofmaqāṣidis here clearly presumed to be a normative one rather than simply descriptive.

Uncertainty, Probability, Ethics: J. m. Keynes, l. mises, and f. Knight

The paper aims at tracing the connections between the ideas of Keynes, Knight and Mises on uncertainty and probability. It also studies the links between their economic ideas, ethical presuppositions, and practical implications they drew from their respective theories. Both similarities and differences are found, influenced for the large part by the context of dealing with the problems discussed.