Risk and Consent: Philosophical Issues for Centralized Decisions

Centralized decisions that impose risks demand a justification. The most promising way to justify these decisions is in terms of consent of those people who will be affected by them. Attempts to determine how safe is safe enough in terms of justice, rights, or efficiency are unlikely to get us very far. The problem with consent, however, is that actual consent is impossible to obtain for decisions that affect large numbers of persons. For this reason, we need to explore other kinds of consent and the idea of what a reasonable person would agree to. Three models of consent are described, each one more powerful (but more controversial) in terms of its potential for justifying centralized decisions.     

Social Order and Plea Bargaining in the Courtroom*

The bureaucratic characteristics of the court process are examined as achievement-of face-to-face interactions in a courtroom where plea bargaining and other official and unofficial activities occur. Bargaining sessions are insulated from intrusion by standard practices which protect focused interactions. Defendants are “processed” not in any automatic way, but by carefully orchestrated lines of interaction, which render those defendants indistinguishable to judges and other observers. These features are due not to “overcrowding,” but to the way conduct is organized in the court. Defendants' contributions to the courtroom's social order are related to character assessment, a central activity in plea bargaining.     

Estimating birth stopping and spacing behavior

A decomposition of age-specific marital fertility rates into indices related to spacing and stopping is developed by using Coale and Trussell's indices and the first few parity progression ratios. This approach leads to estimates of the mean birth interval among low-parity births that can be used to address the issue of fertility control early in marriage. In this way the model addresses several of the most serious limitations of Coale and Trussell's approach. The usefulness of the proposed indices is demonstrated by applications to historical data from the United States and Europe.     

Blue laws: Impact on regional retail activity

Diametrically opposite conclusions about the impact of blue laws on regional retail activity can be found in both the popular press and the economics literature. Most of these conclusions are based either on anecdotal evidence or on data from particular types of retail stores in a very limited geographical area.This study is based on a nation-wide analysis of the retail sector as a whole and ten subsectors in all regions of the U.S. with and without blue laws. The results suggest that Sunday closing laws do not affect the overall level of retail activity in a region in a significant manner. However, blue laws are shown to significantly affect the distribution of retail activity among certain subsectors of retail trade in a region.     

URBANIZATION, SECULARIZATION, AND BIRTH SPACING: A CASE STUDY OF AN HISTORICAL FERTILITY TRANSITION

This article presents an analysis of the effect that urban secularization of religious pronatalism had upon established birth-spacing behavior over the course of the fertility transition in the population of nineteenth-century Utah. First, a model of variance in birth intervals attributable to age at marriage, age of childbearing termination, and completed family size over the duration of childbearing thus defined, is presented. Second, this model is elaborated by incorporating five specific hypotheses concerning the effects of urbanism, secularization, and their interaction, upon interbirth intervals. Although a pattern of urban secularization is found, the uniformity of social and behavioral changes suggests that relatively homogeneous demographic behavior was produced on the frontier by the largely external locus of secularizing influences in the mainstream eastern American community.