October 27, 2008
Episode 4. Larry May on Habeas Corpus
Are habeas corpus petitions, as Barack Obama put it, “the foundation of Anglo-American law”? Or are they just nuisance lawsuits, “whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material,” that will just slow down the legal system and leave us “bollixed up,” as John McCain claims? On this episode of Public Ethics Radio, we discuss these issues with Larry May.
October 7, 2008
Episode 3. Leif Wenar on the Resource Curse
When we talk about theft in international trade, we usually mean piracy, smuggling, or copyright infringement. Professor Leif Wenar, of King’s College London, thinks that we might be missing the forest for the trees. Illegal transactions across borders are going on every day on an enourmous scale. Consumers cannot help buying stolen goods when they buy gasoline and magazines, clothing and cosmetics, cell phones and laptops, perfume and jewelry. Worse, the money consumers spend at the mall and the filling station ends up in the hands of some of the most brutal rebels and repressive regimes in the world.
October 4, 2008
Tables Turned: PER Interviewed
Christian and I were interviewed the other day by Tyson Chaney over at the Politics 2000 blog. Read all about it here. Thanks, Tyson!
September 15, 2008
Episode 2. Jessica Wolfendale on Torture Lite
It’s been three years since George Bush announced that the United States does not engage in torture. Since then, a continuous stream of information has indicated that, although Jack Bauer–style brutality is officially prohibited, the U.S. officially sanctions and regularly employs interrogation tactics that push legal and moral boundaries. In today’s episode, Jessica Wolfendale sits down with Christian Barry to determine where those boundaries lie.
September 14, 2008
Schedule Change
Due to some technical problems, we’re making a small change to the schedule of upcoming episodes. We’re swapping Leif Wenar and Jessica Wolfendale. This means that the Wolfendale episode on torture lite is coming out tomorrow, 9/15, and Wenar’s on 10/6. Sorry to all you Leif Wenar fans out there, but I promise you won’t be disappointed once you’ve heard the good Dr. Wolfendale.
September 10, 2008
The Health Impact Fund as Philosophy
What does a practical political idea like the Health Impact Fund have to do with academic philosophy? Or, as the question is often posed, why is the Health Impact Fund being run by Thomas Pogge, a philosopher? I’m a (marginal) member of the HIF project, and I find myself confronted by this question on a regular basis. As a follow-up to our episode with Pogge, I’ll try to sketch out some answers.
August 28, 2008
Episode 1 Transcript
We had a couple of requests for a transcript of Episode 1. Here it is. Download (PDF, 132 kb)
August 23, 2008
Upcoming Episodes
To whet your appetite, here’s the release schedule for our next few episodes.
- 9/15: Leif Wenar (Kings College London) on the Resource Curse
- 10/6: Jessica Wolfendale (University of Melbourne) on Torture Lite
- 10/27: Larry Temkin (Rutgers) on Extending Human Lifespans
We’ve got lots more in the works, and we’ll let you know about those as they materialize. In the gaps between shows, I’ll be posting here with discussions of our past episodes, previews of future ones, and lots more.
August 22, 2008
Episode 1. Thomas Pogge on Pharmaceutical Innovation
In our first episode, Thomas Pogge explains his proposal for dealing with the thorny intersection of public health, property rights, and poverty. As he sees it, the patent system doesn’t work as well for medicines as it does for, say, consumer electronics. Allowing an inventor a monopoly over her invention works well enough when that invention isn’t a life necessity. Sony and its collaborators can sink enormous funds into researching Blu-Ray discs because they expect consumers will pay for them. And Pfizer can spend a fortune creating Viagra, because it expects, rightly, that there’s a huge demand for that product.
But this kind of economic demand can deviate from social value when it comes to life-saving medications. An affliction like Chagas’ disease that is widespread in Central and South America, but relatively rare in North America, doesn’t generate the kind of worldwide economic demand that erectile dysfunction does, simply because its sufferers don’t have as much ability to pay. The aggregate economic demand for drugs to fight Chagas’ disease, or tuberculosis or malaria, isn’t sufficient to motivate firms to splash out on R&D.
Pogge is working feverishly to rectify this situation. He proposes a Health Impact Fund, which would allow anyone to register a drug for an effectiveness-based award in exchange for giving up monopoly profits. I’ll let him explain the details. You can listen to the show directly by clicking on the at the bottom of this post, or by subscribing to our podcast, which is linked to in the right-hand column.
Thomas Pogge is Professorial Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE); Professor, Yale University Philosophy Department; and Research Director, Oslo Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN). You can find more details about the Health Impact Fund at www.healthimpactfund.org. More information about Thomas Pogge is available at his Yale website: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tp4/.
Click here to download (29:01, 29 mb, mp3), or click on the online media player below.
