Republicanism and the Paradox of Public Health Preconditions Comments on Steve Latham
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Steve Latham’s paper in this special issue raises an important criticism against the political theory of civic republicanism as applied to public health. Proponents of the role of republican ideas in public health ethics, law and policy, such as Bruce Jennings (2007) , argue republican thinking has the necessary resources to legitimate public health interventions. Latham disagrees, however, because ‘Civic Republicanism’s concern with non-dominance will lead any Civic Republic to expend all its citizens’ energies merely in maintaining themselves as free’ ( Latham, 2016 ). On the republican view, the pursuit of health requires a constant intensive engagement of each citizen in political life, leaving little or no time to employ their healthy body to further their respective life plans. Latham substantiates his argument with the assistance of Nicolai Hartmann’s (2003) hierarchical theory of value. In particular, Latham is interested in ‘Hartmann’s distinction between “high” values and “strong” values, and his claim that height and strength of values are in inverse proportion to one another’ ( Latham, 2016 ). Following Hartman’s theory, a value is ‘high’ if its achievement confers great merit, and a value is ‘strong’ if being deprived of it is considered a great wrong. High and strong values are both important, but they nevertheless stand in a particular hierarchical relation, with strong values being the conditions upon which to exercise the high values ( Latham, 2016 ). Latham applies the distinction between high and strong values directly to public health. ‘Life and health are, for most of us, quintessential strong values. One who deprives another of his life, or who injures his health, has greatly wronged that other. But no person deserves much praise merely for being alive and healthy. Being alive and healthy is merely the baseline from which a person can hope to build toward higher achievements’ ( Latham, 2016 ).
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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 | 0.009 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.006 |
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".