When I was invited some months ago by Tomi Kushner to contribute my memories on how some of us early birds came into bioethics, I hesitated. At the end of 2013 I published a memoir of my life in bioethics over nearly 50 years: In Search of the Good: A Life in Bioethics (MIT Press). I felt I had said all I wanted to say in that book about my life and couldn’t imagine doing it again, even in a short article. I was terminally bored with the topic—me.

This article examines privacy threats arising from the use of data mining by private Australian health insurance companies. Qualitative interviews were conducted with key experts, and Australian governmental and nongovernmental websites relevant to private health insurance were searched. Using Rationale, a critical thinking tool, the themes and considerations elicited through this empirical approach were developed into an argument about the use of data mining by private health insurance companies. The argument is followed by an ethical analysis guided by classical philosophical theories—utilitarianism, Mill’s harm principle, Kant’s deontological theory, and Helen Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Both the argument and the ethical analysis find the use of data mining by private health insurance companies in Australia to be unethical. Although private health insurance companies in Australia cannot use data mining for risk rating to cherry-pick customers and cannot use customers’ personal information for unintended purposes, this article nonetheless concludes that the secondary use of customers’ personal information and the absence of customers’ consent still suggest that the use of data mining by private health insurance companies is wrong.

The problems of poor or biased information and of misleading health and well-being advice on the Internet have been extensively documented. The recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to authorize a large number of new generic, top-level domains, including some with a clear connection to health or healthcare, presents an opportunity to bring some order to this chaotic situation. In the case of the most general of these domains, “.health,” experts advance a compelling argument in favor of some degree of content oversight and control. On the opposing side, advocates for an unrestricted and open Internet counter that this taken-for-granted principle is too valuable to be compromised, and that, once lost, it may never be recovered. We advance and provide evidence for a proposal to bridge the credibility gap in online health information by providing provenance information for websites in the .health domain.

Sometimes, two unfair distributions cancel out in aggregate. Paradoxically, two distributions each of which is fair in isolation may give rise to aggregate unfairness. When assessing the fairness of distributions, it therefore matters whether we assess transactions piecemeal or focus only on the overall result. This piece illustrates these difficulties for two leading theories of fairness (proportionality and shortfall minimization) before offering a formal proof that no non-trivial theory guarantees aggregativity. This is not intended as a criticism of any particular theory, but as a datum that must be taken into account in constructing a theory of fairness.

Recent formulations of rule-consequentialism (RC) have attempted to select the ideal moral code based on realistic assumptions of imperfect acceptance. But this introduces further problems. What assumptions about acceptance would be realistic? And what criterion should we use to identify the ideal code? The solutions suggested in the recent literature – Fixed Rate RC, Variable Rate RC, Optimum Rate RC and Maximizing Expectation Rate RC – all calculate a code's value using formulas that stipulate some uniform rate(s) of acceptance. After pointing out a number of difficulties with these approaches, I introduce a formulation of RC on which non-uniform acceptance rates are calculated rather than stipulated. In addition to making more realistic assumptions about acceptance rates, Calculated Rates RC has several other advantages: it gives equal consideration to both acceptance and compliance rates and it brings RC more in line with our intuitive ways of thinking about rules and their consequences.

This article examines the relationship between police forces and Parisian society during the two final revolutions of nineteenth-century France in 1848 and 1871. The comparison between these two events reveals the existence of an alternative revolutionary project of ‘urban police’. It also shows, however, the relatively weak impact of these moments on long-term transformations of police organizations. This is all the more notable if we consider the Second Empire's municipal reform of 1854 that had a deep impact on the landscape of the Parisian police. Observing this general sequence helps thus to explore the modifications of police powers during revolutionary moments, and the dynamics of the non-linear transformation of police orders and urban societies in the nineteenth century.

This article examines the relationship between politically motivated murder, martyrdom, and the death penalty in Britain and Ireland in the period from 1939 to 1990. First, it investigates the nexus between historical experience and memory, political martyrdom, and capital punishment as it applied to Irish Republicans in Britain during the Second World War. Secondly, it examines the use of extraordinary legal powers to impose the death penalty in the Irish state during the “Emergency,” and charts the processes through which the threat of capital punishment continued to be perceived as an essential instrument of security in both Irish jurisdictions in the postwar period. Thirdly, it evaluates the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring politically motivated murder and explores the anomalous, paradoxical decision to abolish capital punishment at the height of subversive killing in Northern Ireland. The essay concludes that the national security issue and the potential martyrdom of Irish Republicans were pivotal factors in dissuading successive British governments from reintroducing the death penalty for politically motivated offenses in Britain and Northern Ireland.

This article is a contribution to comparative research between specific urban markets trajectories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and it aims to juxtapose southern European food market experiences, particularly the Barcelona case, with west European ones. Like other big cities in southern and central Europe, Barcelona consolidated a sturdy polycentric system of district markets between 1876 and 1936, just when such markets were beginning to decline in ‘first comers’ cities of Britain and France. In the inter-war period, the market halls of southern European cities played a prominent role in the everyday food trade and as functional and socializing centres in neighbourhoods. They were poles of dense residential and kinship relations for stall vendors, especially women vendors, and foci of a large part of the food retailing business in many neighbourhoods. Barcelona's particular historical circumstances made the public covered market system a fundamental element of neighbourhood commerce and a long-term urban asset.

This article contributes to discussions about the spatial organization of urban food retail on empirical and theoretical grounds. As a case-study, it presents new analysis of New York City's public market system between 1790 and 1860, documenting its expansion and geography relative to urban growth, and how the deregulation of the meat trade by the 1840s reshaped this vital infrastructure. More broadly, it theorizes the municipal market system's geographic principles, emphasizing its countervailing dynamics of agglomeration and dispersal. Exploiting the city's transition from a public to a free market model, it further demonstrates how distinct political economies produced profoundly different geographies of retail food distribution.