I just finished reading Daniel Carpenter’s book, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA. I won’t say that it was fascinating all the way through, but for a 700 page book about the history of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, it was pretty good. I picked it up because, over the space of about 3 months last fall, two people recommended it to me. I thought to myself, what are the chances that two people would independently come up to me and say “you must to read this 700 page book about the FDA” unless it was a really amazing book?

The reason they were recommending it to me was that I’ve been interested in administrative discretion and the way that it is dealt with by public servants (see here). This is part of a more general interest that I’ve developed in the executive branch of government, along with the view that the executive is seriously undertheorized in normative political philosophy.… Continue reading

The New York Times ran a piece in the Saturday edition by psychology prof Eli J. Finkel on the “trauma of parenthood.” He stresses that postpartum depression and the drop in well-being are not only a hormone-induced phenomenon. “The circumstances parents face,” he writes, “are often demonstrably miserable.” Perhaps insisting on purely biological changes helps us cope better with postpartum ordeals, but life-conditions and other environmental factors also play a large role in what is considered the poorer quality of life of parents. We all know how hard it can be for the new mothers, but he also points out “that men on average experienced significant increases in depressive symptomatology across the first five years of fatherhood (if and only if they lived with their child).”

The “trauma” of parenting? “Bleak” and “miserable” circumstances? As a dear friend—a working mother of two—replied when I emailed her the piece: “Dude, really? Read the paper.… Continue reading

I did an enjoyable interview about Enlightenment 2.0 with Michael Enright for CBC’s Sunday Edition, which aired this past weekend (here).

Contrary to most of the publicity I’ve been doing, this one seems to have actually moved some product. As a result, Amazon is now selling the book at a deep discount. So if you’ve been sitting on the fence for a while, now’s the time to make your move!

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Catherine recently posted a reminder that the Harper’s government’s scandalous and wholly unfounded attack on the Chief Justice of Supreme Court has faded from public view without any satisfactory resolution of the matter. On May 1 2014, Harper impugned the integrity of the Chief Justice by falsely suggesting that the Chief Justice had wrongly tried to contact him to discuss possible problems with his proposed appointment to the Supreme Court. Despite being pressed by hundreds legal academics and lawyers to set the record straight, Harper has steadfastly refused to even acknowledge that his remarks were inappropriate, let alone apologize for them. Regrettably, Harper’s decision to stubbornly carry on as though he has done nothing wrong is a reflection of some cynical but probably accurate calculations about the half-life of this kind of political scandal. My guess is that Harper and his political advisors have calculated that the controversy about disrespecting the Chief Justice will be forgotten before it has the chance to do any real political damage.… Continue reading

Quebec’s National Assembly passed legislation today that would enable competent adults in the throes of intolerable suffering caused by a terminal illness to request aid in dying from their physicians, and that would allow physicians to accede to that wish under a fairly strenuous set of conditions. It also requires of all health-care institutions that they provide themselves with a palliative care plan. Rather than viewing physician-assisted death as an isolated question, the law places it at the end of a continuum of end-of-life medical care.

In my view, this is a very good law. It is the result of a 4 ½ year non-partisan process of consultation and deliberation that heard from specialists, ordinary citizens, and organized groups. This process gave rise to countless modifications to the original draft bill, designed not only to allay the fears of those not ready to take the step of decriminalizing physician-assisted death, but also genuinely to incorporate some of their concerns into the body of the law.… Continue reading