Abstract Soda taxes are controversial. While proponents point to their potential health benefits and the public projects that could be funded with revenue, critics argue they paternalistic regressive. In this paper, we explore prospects for designing a just soda tax, one appropriately balances often-competing ethical considerations of promoting social welfare, respecting people’s autonomy ensur...

Though patriotism has traditionally been considered a virtue, in many countries of the world today, status as virtue challenged. Philosopher John Hare recently defended virtue. Kierkegaard, with his suspicion “the crowd” and attack on “Christendom” sometimes thought to be one critics patriotism. This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s view is actually close Hare’s. Kierkegaard does believe can tho...

Adaptive Interfaces: Do People Want Them? Automatic adaptation of user interfaces is a contentious area. Proponents (e.g., [1]) argue that it offers the potential to optimize interactions for a user’s tasks and style while critics (e.g., [4]) maintain that the inherent unpredictability of adaptive interfaces may disorient the user, causing more harm than good. Surprisingly, however, there is ve...

In medicine, along with the other domains of our life, the myth of Sisyphus is frequently evoked upon confronting a task conceived as laborious, endless and for some futile or even purposeless and meaningless. In this paper, we explore the origin of the myth of Sisyphus so that its connotations and symbolizations will hopefully emerge clearer. It is suggested that the natural background of the ...

Until a few decades ago, the police were mainly a reactive bureaucratic organization that moved from one criminal event to the next, according to the degree to which the outside world required its services. Since then the police have abandoned the emphasis on law enforcement with regards to petty crime and public order. More recently the police have developed community policing as an important ...