Biomedical subjects
Daniel M Hausman
Publications and source records attributed to Daniel M Hausman.
Polling and public policy.
This commentary distinguishes five reasons why one might want to conduct a survey concerning people's beliefs about death and the permissibility of harvesting organs: (1) simply to learn what people know and want; (2) to determine if current law and practice conform to the wishes of the population; (3) to determine the level of popular support for or opposition to policy changes; (4) to ascertain the causes and effects of popular beliefs and attitudes; and (5) to provide guidance in determining which law and practices are ethical. The commentary expresses qualms about how well surveys in general can perform with respect to the fifth objective, and it provides specific reasons to doubt whether this survey is informative from the perspective of a moral philosopher concerned with the nature of death and the contours of a permissible system of organ procurement.
Health inequalities and why they matter.
Health inequalities are of concern both because studying them may help one learn how to improve health and because health inequalities may be unjust. This paper argues that attending to these reasons why health inequalities may be important undercuts the claims of researchers at the World Health Organization in favor of focusing on individual health variation rather than on social group health differences. Inequalities in individual health are of little interest unless one goes on to study how they are related to other factors.