Bibliographic record
Abstract
This collection comprises 10 essays, authored (seven) or co-authored (three)1 by Allen Buchanan between 1984 and 2006. They concern issues that are currently (and will continue to be) of great importance: public and private health care, the problem of rationing and the existence and scope of the right to health care, among many others. In general, Buchanan is a clear and careful analyst. He is a pluralist, not an apologist for a specific normative theory, such as utilitarianism or the Rawlsian theory of justice. He defends and practises the art of producing considered judgements from a plurality of intuitively plausible normative bases, proceeding in a way that is informed by the economic context in which health care decisions arise. I will focus on a problem of central importance to the whole set of essays. Is there a right to health care? In a world of scarce resources, this soon becomes the question of ‘the right to a decent minimum of health care’ (the title of Ch. 1). To deal with it, properly we need to realize that health depends on factors such as clean air and water, nutrition, shelter, etc., which go beyond ‘health care’ as we normally conceive it. Thus, even within our concern with health (and there’s obviously a lot more outside (education, transportation, etc.), health care competes with other costs. Rationing is thus a central concern and one that most theorists have not dealt with adequately in defending a right to health care. We also need clarity about ‘rights’, since rights are not just ought claims; they are entitlements. People are wronged when rights are ignored or violated – and we must specify who carries responsibility. Moreover, rights exist only where enforcement is justified; and so we are deeply into the problems of political legitimacy – often without knowing it – when we speak of the right to health care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".