Atheists sometimes use Bertrand Russell’s teapot argument, and its variants with other objects in place of the teapot, to argue for the rationality of atheism. In this paper I show that this use of the teapot argument and its variants is unacceptably circular. The circularity arises because there is indirect evidence against the objects invoked in the arguments.

health, as a public good, and equity in health, as a moral concept are considered as human right. equity in health is defined as lack of systematic discrepancies in health or social determinants of health among different groups of a community. social justice is considered as a matter of life and death. it is believe that inappropriate distribution of health services is one of the major determin...

The overall reduction in caries prevalence and severity in the United States over recent decades is largely due to widespread exposure to fluoride, most notably from the fluoridation of drinking waters. Despite this overall reduction, however, caries distribution today remains skewed, with the poor and deprived carrying a disproportionate share of the disease burden. Dental caries, like many ot...

This paper aims at articulating a conceptual framework for monitoring equity in health and healthcare. The focus is on four main questions: What is health equity? What is monitoring? What are the essential components of a system for monitoring health equity? and Why monitor health equity? Monitoring equity in health and healthcare requires comparing indicators of health and its social determina...

Economics has been a most puzzling science, namely since the neoclassical revolution defined the legitimate procedures for theorisation and quantification. Its epistemology has based on farce: decisive tests are not applied on dare predictions. As a consequence, estimation has finally been replaced by simulation, and empirical tests have been substituted by non-disciplined exercises of comparis...

This paper aims at proving that social interactions can easily be rationalized by individual preferences as de…ned in standard microeconomic theory. For that purpose, we show individual choice rationality to be logically equivalent to social consistency, when individual rationality means that individual preferences are completely ordered and social consistency that there is a one-to-one mapping...

In this paper, I challenge a well-known argument for the view that “Why be moral?” is a pseudo-question. I do so by refuting a component of that argument, a component that is not only crucial to the argument but important in its own right. That component concerns the status ofmoral reasons in replies to “Why bemoral?”; consequently, this paper concerns reasons and rationality no less than it co...

Arrow’s impossibility theorem states that if a collective choice rule satisfies unrestricted domain, weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and collective rationality, then there exists a dictator. Among others, Arrow’s postulate of collective rationality is controversial. We propose a new axiom for a collective choice rule, decisiveness coherence, which is weaker than collective...

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 551 I. EQUITY METRICS: AN OVERVIEW .......................................................... 559 A. Inequality Metrics .................................................................... 560 B. Social Welfare Functions ......................................................... 566 C. Poverty...