Just Social Policy on Life Issues: Ethical Considerations

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." These words from the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed a conviction and announced a challenge for our newly formed nation. Today, they either stir the American heart with pride or generate nostalgia for a time when any truth was self-evident and the right to life was deemed inalienable.     

Economics and distributive ethics

This essay, adapted from his Inaugural Lecture as the Simon Professor at Lafayette, was dedicated to the memory of Aaron Wildavsky.     

The fragile politics of addiction

Suppose the optimizing consumer only has local information, then what? Obviously, there will be a random element of consumption. The link between the frequency distribution of consumption by person and preference surface is worked out. Under convex preferences there will be a unimodal distribution and conversely. A local optimizing theory of addictive behavior is developed from nonconvex preferences. The resulting bimodal distribution of consumption implies a nonrobust outcome for median voter politics. Such a local optimizing model of addiction is compared with globally optimizing models of addiction.     

SYMPOSIUM: RESURGENT ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The following is an edited version of the proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Middle East Policy Council on May 26, 1994, in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. Former Senator George McGovern, President of the Council, introduced the panel; Thomas R. Mattair, the Councis Director of Research and Policy Analysis, was the organizer and moderator; Michael Collins Dunn, Senior Analyst of The International Estimate, Inc., and editor of its biweekly newsletter, The Estimate, was the discussant.     

Adoptees' portrayal of the development of family structure

Young adult adoptees and nonadoptees provided retrospective accounts of family relationships from infancy to young adulthood. Adoptive families were portrayed as more cohesive and adaptable than nonadoptive families. Adoptive fathers were recalled as being closer to their children then were nonadoptive fathers in the years preceding adolescence. Within the same time frame, adoptive mothers were drawn in a less hierarchical relation to their children than were other parents. Also, while adoptive males saw themselves as presently unconnected to their adoptive parents, adopted females perceived themselves as more connected to their parents in the present than any other period of time. Openness of communication and acknowledgment of difference in adoptive family formation varied with graphic retrospective accounts. Results were considered in terms of discontinuities between reported observations of adoptive families and adoptees' personal reflections on family developmental history.Received PhD in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Book. Research interests: adoptive family relations, social attributions of children and their parents.Received M.A. from the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1. Research interests: development of identity, adoption.Received Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Toronto. Research interests: attribution, jealousy, parents' theories of child psychology.