Paul Ramsey's medical ethics is built from a philosophical antinomy: Premise, the human being is a creature of will; Proposition, the human will is a free will; Contrary Proposition, the human will is a not-free will. General, exceptionless rules of conduct function in Ramsey's thought as moral restraint to human freedom. The moral agent ought always to act in accord with the demands of agape; and not only once but as often as the same features of a decision/action arise. General rules guide and restrain human free will in a necessary way to assure an ordered and moral society. This antinomy-interpretation helps locate Ramsey in the theatre of ethical debate; it also is the key to criticism of Ramsey's rigid rules in medical ethics.

In this thesis, we present a new viewpoint of the universal minimal flow in the language of near ultrafilters. We apply this viewpoint to generalize results of Kechris, Pestov and Todorcevic about a connection between groups of automorphisms of structures and structural Ramsey theory from countable to uncountable structures. This allows us to provide new examples of explicit descriptions of universal minimal flows as well as of extremely amenable groups. We identify new classes of finite structures satisfying the Ramsey property and apply the result to the computation of the universal minimal flow of the group of automorphisms of $\P(\omega_1)/\fin$ as well as of certain closed subgroups of groups of homeomorphisms of Cantor cubes. We furthermore apply our theory to groups of isometries of metric spaces and the problem of unique amenability of topological groups. The theory combines tools from set theory, model theory, Ramsey theory, topological dynamics and ergodic theory, and homogeneous structures.

Thesis (M.A.)--Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary, 1997. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary, 1997. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62).

Thesis (M.A.)--Colgate Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer Theological Seminary, 1997. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-62).

Thèse (Ph.D.) - Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 2006. / Comprend des réf. bibliogr. : f. 269-306. Également disponible en format microfiche.

of doctoral thesis Problems in discrete geometry Zuzana Patáková This thesis studies three different questions from discrete geometry. A common theme for these problems is that their solution is based on algebraic methods. First part is devoted to the polynomial partitioning method, which par- titions a given finite point set using the zero set of a suitable polynomial. However, there is a natural limitation of this method, namely, what should be done with the points lying in the zero set? Here we present a general version dealing with the situation and as an application, we provide a new algorithm for the semialgebraic range searching problem. In the second part we study Ramsey functions of semialgebraic predi- cates. Conlon, Fox, Pach, Sudakov, and Suk constructed the first examples of semialgebraic predicates with the Ramsey function bounded from below by a tower function. We reduce the dimension of the ambient space in their construction and as a consequence, we provide a new geometric Ramsey-type theorem with a large Ramsey function. Last part is devoted to reptile simplices. A simplex S is k-reptile if it can be tiled by k simplices with disjoint interiors that are all mutually congruent and similar to S. We show that four-dimensional k-reptile simplices can exist only for k = m2 , where m ≥ 1...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The problem of this dissertation is two-fold: (1) A study of the ethical theories of Jacques Maritain, Walter Terence Stace, and Paul Ramsey, and (2) an attempt to classify moral theories in the light of three basic types of relation between man, moral standards, and reality. The analysis, comparison, and critical study of the three representative moral theorists are correlated with a view to illustrating the kinds of issues involved in the reduction of the moral standards to three foci, as a novel and useful classification. Hence, the field of moral theory has been divided into three foci designated as Imposed Ethics, represented by Maritain, Immanent Ethics, represented by Stace, and Imparted Ethics, represented by Ramsey. It is believed that when properly defined most, if not all, ethical ideals will fall within one of these three classifications or a combination of them. [TRUNCATED]

Made available in DSpace on 2008-05-13T13:15:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2007-08-08 / This dissertation is review of the most important results from the recent field of New Dynamic Public Finance, built on the introduction of dynamic incentive problem in taxation environment. We also contrast these results with previous versions, based on different frameworks, such as Ramsey (linear taxes) dynamics and static incentive problems. / Esta dissertação consiste de uma revisão dos principais resultados no campo recente de Finanças Públicas Dinâmicas, construído pela introdução de problemas dinâmicos de incentivos em um ambiente de tributação. Também realizado contraste com resultados anteriores, baseados em arcabouços distintos, tais como dinâmicas de Ramsey, baseadas em tributos lineares, problemas de incentivos estáticos.

Social discounting aims to compare the respective future consequences of differing courses of action for human well-being, and so to help decide on policies for matters as varied as climate change, transport and criminal justice. Social discounting is widely used, though some decisions are too trivial, or too urgent, for it to be justified. Even so, its pervasive use is at variance with scepticism about its moral foundations, and about whether the comparisons that it claims to make can be made at all. Debate has, however, concentrated on how, rather than on whether, social discounting should be done and the conditions upon which it must be based seem never to have been set out systematically. This thesis aims to fill that gap, by explaining the moral and practical conditions that must be met for social discounting to be justified. The conditions are demanding. It behoves policy makers to satisfy themselves more carefully than is now done that the conditions are met in respect of the decisions where use of social discounting is proposed, and to consider alternatives where one or more conditions is not met. The thesis takes for granted that human well-being counts morally. But social discounting requires that well-being is capable of being described through an objective list of desiderata and that some aspect of well-being is measurable, at least on a cardinal scale and inter-personally, implying commensurabilities amongst some of the things comprising or contributing to well-being. Some moral theories incorporate priorities, such as property rights or the interests of poor people. Priorities range from easy to meet to very difficult. Priorities of the latter type are inconsistent with social discounting, and are the basis for theories as varied as those of Nozick and Nussbaum. This thesis suggests that the theories consistent with social discounting may collectively be called ‘moderate welfarism’. Moderate welfarism allows room for priorities and other moral considerations provided only that the monetisable aspect of social well-being is morally important. Moderate welfarism is necessary but not sufficient for social discounting to be justifiable. Practical difficulties may make it incapable of implementation. One such difficulty is the well-known epistemic problem, but the thesis sets out nine such difficulties, each implying a condition that must be met if social discounting is to be capable of practical use. The thesis concludes that the moral and practical conditions that must be met for social discounting to be justified are demanding and, more speculatively, that some of the conditions are not widely understood leading to inappropriate use of the technique by governments.