Independent practical reasoners

In Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre (1999) takes these facts about human life as the starting point for an exploration of what a flourishing community is. He concludes that to provide the care individuals need, such communities must consist of networks of relationships in which there is unconditional giving and receiving — unconditional in the sense of not being conditional on the qualities and aptitudes of the receiving person, or on what they have contributed in the past, but only on their needs. Such networks foster and are sustained by people who are independent practical reasoners . 

While the hallmark of the autonomous person is self-creation through choicemaking, that of the independent practical reasoner is accountability — for conclusions and their practical consequences. This accountability follows from the fact that the individual evaluates the reasons for such conclusions and is prepared to give an account of them to others to answer for them and their practical consequences. The individual acts she recognizes herself, rather than her circumstances, as the cause of her actions, and therefore can be held responsible for them. Accountability implies there are others to be accountable to in acting as well as in reasoning the individual is always embedded in a network of relationships with others. 

What is of value here — what is generally called freedom — is thus not a matter of unconstrained choice. Rather it is an achieved ability to be who one is within a network of relationships, a network that affords opportunities to, even while it constrains, the individual. Such networks are located in the world of things indeed, as I argued above, they are often formed around such things. Arendt talks of the web of human relationships as being bound to the objective world of things (Arendt, 1958, pi 83). Without this bond, human relationships lack solidity and are liable to wither away. To preserve networks of relationships that foster and sustain people as independent practical reasoners, the world must be a place for such networks. The creation and preservation of such a world in turn needs people who are independent practical reasoners — people who think and act for themselves and who take responsibility for their actions. 

I suggested above that it is the duty of a government to use its powers to ensure that the public world is a good for its citizens, and that the world provides a place for networks that foster the development of individuals as independent practical reasoners. The ethical and political theories that dominate current thinking on public policy do not acknowledge the existence of such a public world distinct from the individuals within it. 

In classical republicanism only a small proportion of the population were considered to have the independence required to be citizens. The economic independence that went with the ownership of land was often a key criterion. Ownership of a certain amount of land is now untenable as a criterion for citizenship rather, we give political rights and responsibilities to those who have the capacity to be independent in the sense of being independent practical reasoners (so children are excluded). However, it is not enough merely that citizens have the capacity to be independent practical reasoners, they have to be independent practical reasoners. This is not something for which there can be an objective test, and any attempt to carry out such a test would be contrary to the need to show respect for fellow citizens.11... 

What the world inhabited by citizens is like is an important influence on whether citizens are independent practical reasoners and are able and willing to discharge their responsibilities for the world. To have political power, and therefore the ability to change the world, citizens must be able to act together. This is more likely in a world built so that people have to meet and interact with each other than in one where it is possible for the individual to be isolated from others. As I will explain in the next chapter, power is a precondition of responsibility if citizens feel that they have no power to change the world, they will not feel that they have any responsibility for it. 

The workhorses in national monitoring programs are multi-residue methods. Any official method collection of any EU Member State contains at least one multi-residue method. For multi-analyte and/or multi-matrix methods, it is likely to be impractical to validate a method for all possible combinations of analyte, concentration and type of sample matrix that may be encountered in subsequent use of the method. Therefore, initial validation should incorporate as many of the target analytes and matrices as practicable. For practical reasons this validation and the evaluation of other methods with limited scope often cannot be conducted in inter-laboratory studies. Other concepts based on independent laboratory validation or validation in a single laboratory have been developed and can provide a practical and cost-effective alternative (or intermediate) approach. 

An alternative method has been used by Morton (73, 74) which involves an independent measurement of the degree of association of polyisoprenyllithium. Measurements were made of the concentrated solution viscosity of active and terminated polymer solutions. An approximately ten-fold decrease in viscosity was observed on discharging the ion-pair. This corresponds to two-fold association for polyisoprenyllithium in hexane, since in concentrated solutions v) = KMffl. A careful study established that the association numbers were slightly less than two and decreased with temperature. From the data, K2 can be calculated and hence k . In this way it was found that in hexane kp — 3.4 X 103 exp. (— 4100/RT) at 30°, kp = 4.7 litre/mole sec. For practical reasons,... 

The overall chemical rate may be written in terms of the partial pressures of A, B and P by equating the rates 9t, 0iAa and and eliminating the surface concentrations CA, CB and Cr from equations 3.68 (or 3.69 as the case may be), 3.71 and 3.72. The final equation so obtained is cumbersome and unwieldy and contains several constants which, for practical reasons, cannot be determined independently. For this reason it is convenient to consider limiting cases in which one parameter, adsorption surface reaction or desorption is rate determining. 

You may ask, Why bother to include dependent claims in the first place If someone is infringing a dependent claim she will also be infringing the independent claim from which it is derived. There are at least a few practical reasons. First, it is often easier for someone in the future to try to have your broadest claims declared invalid for a lack of novelty or for being obvious broader claims are more likely to read on the prior art because they occupy more turf. Second, it is generally harder to enable one to make and use a broader claim because a patent claim needs to be enabled throughout its... 

For practical reasons, all independent variables must have physical limits as represented by the following equation. 

This problem contains 31 variables and 29 equality constraints (or governing equations) including the objective function. This gives rise to 2 variables as independent (or decision) variables. For a practical reason, the saturation pressure for steam, P, and the fraction of steam generated in the evaporator, which is reused for heating, a.., are selected as the independent variables. A random search technique (26) is adopted to locate the optimal point for each given e. The results are tabulated in Table I, and the trade-off curve is plotted in Figure 3. The relationship between these two objectives is obtained by the least square method as... 

Yet another important development in the area of Pd-catalyzed carbonylation is the development of acylpalladation and related carbonyl-Pd bond addition reactions. Acylpal-ladation may be defined as a process of acyl-Pd bond addition to alkenes and alkynes. Clearly, it is a kind of carbopalladation reaction. For practical reasons, however, it is discussed in Part VI together with other carbonylation reactions mentioned above. Tsuji and Hosaka " reported in 1965 what appears to be the first example of the perfectly alternating alkene-CO copolymerization (Scheme 8). Independently, Brewis and Hughes reported also in 1965 a Pd-catalyzed cyclic carbonylation of dienes with CO and methanol (Scheme 9). Although the exact mechanism of the initiation is unclear, these reactions... 

As mentioned previously (Sect. 3.3) in connection with the rate of heat transport, the reaction enthalpy AH or AH is given in units of [kcal/gX] or [kcal/gS] for practical reasons. Table 5.3 summarizes AH for fermentations (Bronn, 1971). A systematic treatment is possible using classifications of aerobic and anaerobic processing versus substrate the numerical values are independent of the strain of microorganism. 

If the Hartree-Fock equations associated with the valence pseudo-Hamiltonian (167) are solved with extended basis sets, then all the above F are almost basis-set-independent. At the present time, and for practical reasons, most of the ab initio valence-only molecular calculations use coreless pseudo-orbitals. The reliability of this approach is still a matter of discussion. Obviously the nodal structure is important for computing observable quantities such as the diamagnetic susceptibility which implies an operator proportional to 1/r. From the computational point of view, it is always easy to recover the nodal structure of coreless valence pseudo-orbitals by orthogonalizing the valence molecular orbitals to the core orbitals. This procedure has led to very accurate results for several internal observables in comparison with all-electron results. The problem of the shape of the pseudoorbitals in the core region is also important in relativity. For heavy atoms, the valence electrons possess high instantaneous velocities near the nuclei. Schwarz has recently investigated the compatibility between the internal structure of valence orbitals and the representations of operators such as the spin-orbit which vary as 1/r near the nucleus. ... 

Multi-employer worksites should receive special attention, such as employment agencies, personnel services, home health services, independent contractors, and dentist and physicians in independent practice. The purpose of the regulation is to limit occupational exposure to blood and other potentially infectious materials, as any exposure can result in the transmission of bloodborne pathogens and can lead to disease or death. It covers all employees who can be reasonably anticipated, as the result of performing their job duties, to face contact with blood and other potentially infectious materials or body fluids. OSHA has not attempted to list all occupations where exposures could occur. Good Samaritan acts, such as assisting a co-worker with a nosebleed, would not be considered occupational exposure. 

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