Strands Of Argument Research Articles

House of Lords Rules DHSS Guidance on Contraception Lawful

By a 3-2 majority, the House of Lords has ruled that parental rights are not infringed if physicians provide contraceptive advice and treatment to female minors without their parents' knowledge or consent, thereby reversing the Court of Appeal's decision in Gillick v. West Norfolk and Wisbech AHA. Speaking for the majority, Lord Fraser maintained that a doctor would be justified in offering treatment without parental consent when he or she is satisfied that the minor is capable of understanding the advice given, that the minor cannot be persuaded to inform the parents, that sexual activity is likely to begin or to continue, and that the minor's physical or mental health is likely to suffer if contraceptive treatment is denied. Brahams finds the ruling to be pragmatically "sensible" but "inconsistent with the criminal law."The House of Lords has reversed an earlier decision of the Court of Appeals that pronounced the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) guideline on family planning services for girls under 16 years of age unlawful. The DHSS guideline permitted girls under age 16 years to receive advice on contraception and termination of pregnancy without parental consent. The appeal focused on 3 strands of argument: 1) if a girl under age 16 years has the legal capacity to give valid consent to contraceptive advice and treatment, 2) if the giving of such advice without parental consent infringes on parents' rights, and 3) if a doctor who gives such advice or treatment to a girl under 16 years without parental consent incurs criminal liability. It was stressed that girls should have sufficient maturity to understand what is involved in contraception and pregnancy termination. The DHSS guideline urges physicians to attempt to persuade young female adolescents to bring their parents into consultation. On the other hand, parental consent or knowledge can be justifiably sidestepped in cases where the girl refuses to involve her parents but is likely to understand the physician's advice and to begin or continue to have sexual intercourse with or without contraception. Age 14-15 years is generally considered the minimum age at which boys and girls have the necessary intelligence and maturity to give valid consent to a medical treatment. This latest decision is expected to please the British Medical Association and family planning clinics.

The choice of governing instrument

In contemporary debates over the reform of regulation, two related strands of argument stress the efficiency losses from misdirected regulation. The first strand of argument emphasizes that the objectives of many regulatory regimes necessarily create, rather than correct for, allocative inefficiencies and thus are not welfare maximizing. The second strand of argument stresses that irrespective of whether the objective of a regulatory regime is consistent with the promotion of allocative efficiency, failure to adopt the most efficient means of achieving that objective often generates independent efficiency losses. That in most policy contexts decision-makers have available to them a range of alternative instruments which can technically be deployed in the promotion of given policy objectives seems an uncontroversial fact. If a government wishes to control a monopoly, it can apply antitrust law to it (e.g., require divestiture or order cessation of monopolistic practices), it can tax away monopoly profits, it can regulate price and output through a statutory regulatory agency or other agency of government, it can (in the case of natural monopolies) auction off monopolistic entitlements; it can take over and publicly own the resource in question; in the latter event, it can rely on public ownership alone, or subject the publicly-owned firm to regulation by a statutory regulatory agency or other agency of government. If a government wishes to enhance farmers' incomes, it can send farmers cheques, impose price floors and production quotas, provide special tax concessions, impose import quotas, etc. Across the entire landscape of government activities, we note the fact that these kinds of alternatives are almost always available. What factors enter a policymaker 's calculus in choosing among them? Resolving this puzzle is central to many aspects of regulatory reform. Two very large issues are bound up in its resolution. First, assuming, as we should, that the process of instrument choice is not random

Studies on Magneto-Hydrodynamic Waves and other Anisotropic wave motions

There are two separate but closely interwoven strands of argument in this paper; one mainly mathematical, and one mainly physical. The mathematical strand begins with a method of asymptotically evaluating Fourier integrals in many dimensions, for large values of their arguments. This is used to investigate partial differential equations in four variables, x, y, z and t , which are linear with constant coefficients, but which may be of any order and represent wave motions that are anisotropic or dispersive or both. It gives the asymptotic behaviour (at large distances) of solutions of these equations, representing waves generated by a source of finite or infinitesimal spatial extent. The paper concentrates particularly on sources of fixed frequency, and solutions satisfying the radiation condition; but an Appendix is devoted to waves generated by a source of finite duration in an initially quiescent medium, and to unstable systems. The mathematical results are given a partial physical interpretation by arguments determining the velocity of energy propagation in a plane wave traversing an anisotropic medium. These show, among other facts not generally realized, that even for non-dispersive (e.g. elastic) waves, the energy propagation velocity is not in general normal to the wave fronts, although its component normal to them is the phase velocity. The second, mainly physical, strand of argument starts from the important and striking property of magneto-hydrodynamic waves in an incompressible, inviscid and perfectly conducting medium, of propagation in one direction only—a given disturbance propagates only along the magnetic lines of force which pass through it, and therefore suffers no attenuation with distance. There are cases of astrophysical importance where densities are so low that attenuation due to collisional effects—for example, electrical resistivity—should be negligible over relevant length scales. We therefore ask how far the effects of a non-collisional nature which are neglected in the simple theory, particularly compressibility and Hall current, would alter the unidirectional, attenuation-less propagation of the waves. These effects have been included previously in magneto-hydrodynamic wave theory, but the directional distribution of waves from a local source was not obtained. This problem explains the need for the mathematical theory just described, and gives a comprehensive illustration of its application.

The ‘Comparison of Lives’ in Plato's Philebus

The Republic represents the good life as some sort of harmony or composition between the different interests of which the threefold nature of the soul makes it capable. The rational factor, τ λολιστικν, not only chooses which impulses shall be satisfied and which rejected but is credited also with impulses of its own, such as the desire for knowledge, to the importance of which the Republic testifies by various strands of argument. But in Plato's attempt to prove the goodness of this mixed life he may be thought to have relied too much on arguments about its pleasantness. If he had really meant from the first to prove against Thrasymachus that the just life is more prolific in pleasure1 than the unjust, he would have had to undertake the task of proving a necessary connection between just activities and pleasant states of feeling which could scarcely exist unless feelings were under the control of the will. If this had been his intention, the whole weight of the argument would rest on the two comparatively short passages in Book IX (581–3, 583–6) in which he makes first a dubious appeal to experience and then, by an equally dubious piece of metaphysics, attempts to reinforce his ethical conclusion by denying the reality of such pleasures as might tend to throw doubt on it.