Nozick

The permissibility of actions depends upon facts about the flourishing and separateness of persons. Persons differ from other creatures in having the task of discovering for themselves, by conjecture and refutation, what sort of life will fulfil them. Compulsory slavery impermissibly prevents some persons from pursuing this task. However, many people may conjecture that they are natural slaves. Some of these conjectures may turn out to be correct. In consequence, voluntary slavery, in which one person welcomes the duty to fulfil all the commands of another, is permissible. Life-long voluntary slavery contracts are impermissible because of human fallibility; but fixed-term slavery contracts should be legally enforceable. Each person has the temporarily alienable moral right to direct her own life.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant held the idea of ‘duty’ to be of utmost importance when it came to ethics. This duty-centered approach to ethics is known as a “deontological” one, as opposed to an end-result based ethics known as being “teleological.” This essay will define Kant’s use of ‘duty,’ ‘oughts,’ ‘obligations,’ ‘merit,’ and ‘partiality,’ and the application of these terms to such examples as saving a child from drowning and saving a child on the other side of the world by donating to a charitable organization. In each of these two cases, Kant’s concept of ‘merit’ will be considered. Any contentions I have with Kant’s ethical approach with the given examples will be provided respectively.

Multimedia computing is rapidly emerging as the next generation standard for human-computer interaction. One class of multimedia applications that has been gaining much attention is the real-time display of continuous media data such as video and audio, commonly known as Video-On-Demand (VOD) service. Although advances in computer and network technologies have made VOD service feasible, providing guaranteed quality, real-time video delivery still poses many technical challenges. One such challenge involves the transmission of continuous media traffic over high-speed networks. In this paper, we present an algorithm for determining the minimum buffer requirement for avoiding overflow or underflow at the client video display process, allowing the network scheduler at the VOD server to enforce a constant bit rate delivery of variable bit rate encoded continuous media. This strategy results in reduced congestion and cell loss at the network switch, and in simplified admission control parameters. Initial results indicate that buffer requirements for typical video streams range from 3.7 to 14.6 Megabytes, which is acceptable by today's multimedia PC standards. Further, we show that this approach increases the number of streams that can be multiplexed by a factor of 4.6 to 9.9 times when compared to peak and 90%-of-peak bandwidth allocation strategies.

This chapter looks at moral justifications for funding welfare benefits through general taxation rather than seeking to support it through charitable giving. That is, the parties to the debate are assumed to accept the moral imperative to support the destitute, and the political question is whether there is any requirement to do so through taxation. Through exploring parallels between begging and the raising of charitable donations, we offer a justification for using taxation which has echoes, but contrasts with, a famous proposal by Thomas Nagel.

KEYWORDS; Taxation, charity, needs, reasonable rejection, Nagel, Nozick, Scanlon

A significant strain of libertarian thinking is hostile to the idea that distributions of wealth and/or income (economic outcomes) can be judged according to antecedently determined normative standards. The general conceptual argument can be seen in the works of F. A. Hayek and Robert Nozick, both of whom argued that when governments step in to adjust outcomes, they coercively and intentionally distort the terms on which individuals make their individual decisions. By contrast, the coercion that comes with market exchanges, in that it is beyond the intentions of market actors, is not an affront to freedom, rightly understood. The proper role of government is thus to protect these exchanges (economic procedures) and leave outcomes – whatever they are – unaltered. I argue here that this critique of distributive justice turns on a false distinction between economic procedures and economic outcomes, and that reconceptualizing this distinction allows us not only to overcome objections to outcome-based distributive justice, but also to reconsider how the legitimacy of a system of ownership is determined.

Nozick’s version of libertarianism is incoherent, even if one accepts the doubtful assumption that all ethical issues can be reduced to property rights. Nozickian libertarianism requires 1) Unconditional property rights, established by 2) a lineage of just transfers traceable to 3) a just original acquisition. The purpose of this paper is to discredit all three of those criteria for determining property rights. No government, not even a night watchman libertarian state, can function if it makes property rights unconditional. No one in the real world can justify their property rights by citing a lineage of just acquisitions. Finally, the
concept of a unilaterally declared original acquisition, which supposedly supplies the foundation for all other property rights, is incoherent and unjust. A more moderate form of libertarianism would require institutions that strive to create approximate equality of opportunity. Those who took advantage of those opportunities would have a right to keep most of the wealth they created, and an obligation to create similar opportunities for others

El objetivo del libro es hacer un análisis del pensamiento ético-político de Charles Larmore, con el fin de valorar la propuesta esencial de su proyecto. La pregunta central que intento responder es si es posible instaurar en nuestra sociedad pluralista un «modus vivendi» de la neutralidad, como el que propone Larmore; o, en cambio, tal proyecto está destinado a fracasar. En otros términos, la cuestión propuesta es si Larmore logra que su proyecto de «modus vivendi» sea realmente independiente de cualquier presupuesto filosófico, o acaso se trata de otra forma de «expresivismo político» que depende de una determinada antropología y filosofía moral no compartida por todos. Al inicio, el foco se centra en la interesante controversia entre Larmore y Alasdair MacIntyre acerca de los fundamentos de la moral.

Multimedia computing is rapidly emerging as the next generation standard for human-computer interaction. One class of multimedia applications that has been gaining much attention is the real-time display of continuous media data such as video and audio, commonly known as Video-On-Demand (VOD) service. Although advances in computer and network technologies have made VOD service feasible, providing guaranteed quality, real-time video delivery still poses many technical challenges. One such challenge involves the transmission of continuous media traffic over high-speed networks. In this paper, we present an algorithm for determining the minimum buffer requirement for avoiding overflow or underflow at the client video display process, allowing the network scheduler at the VOD server to enforce a constant bit rate delivery of variable bit rate encoded continuous media. This strategy results in reduced congestion and cell loss at the network switch, and in simplified admission control parameters. Initial results indicate that buffer requirements for typical video streams range from 3.7 to 14.6 Megabytes, which is acceptable by today's multimedia PC standards. Further, we show that this approach increases the number of streams that can be multiplexed by a factor of 4.6 to 9.9 times when compared to peak and 90%-of-peak bandwidth allocation strategies.

The subjective theory of value is acclaimed as a major advance in economics. That theory is nowadays usually taken to imply value subjectivism. I suggest instead that the theory be viewed as an evolution of thought with four stages: the substitution of relational for intrinsic theories of objective value; the recognition that social-scientific explanations refer to the theories about value that agents accept; the rejection of objective values; the substitution of preferences or evaluations for theories of value. I explain that the first two developments were progressive, the latter two regressive.