Giving, 2023 Q2

I currently give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “topping off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (4/1 to 6/30 of 2023), my donations were as follows:

•50% to GiveDirectly (Africa Large Transfer Program)

•25% to StrongMinds

•25% to NAMI Massachussetts

These donations were in an amount totaling 9.96% of my net income from that period.

Giving, 2023 Q1

I currently give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “topping off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (1/1 to 3/31 of 2023), my donations were as follows:

•100% to Helen Keller International, Vitamin A Supplementation Program (via Givewell)

These donations were in an amount totaling 10.47% of my net income from that period.

Giving, 2022 Q4

I currently give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “topping off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (10/1 to 12/31 of 2022), my donations were as follows:

•38% to St. Francis House

•36% to GiveDirectly

•18% to the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health

•7% to Books for Africa

These donations were in an amount totaling 10.33% of my net income from that period.

Giving, 2022 Q3

I currently give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “topping off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (7/1 to 9/30 of 2022), my donations were as follows:

•79% to GiveWell All Grants Fund

•21% to Brother’s Brother (Ukraine Neurology Fund)

These donations were in an amount totaling 10.03% of my net income from that period.

Giving, 2022 Q2

I currently give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “topping off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (4/1 to 6/30 of 2022), my donations were as follows:

• 37% to GiveDirectly

• 37% to Health Foundation Nepal (earmarked for mental health)

• 7% to NAMI Massachussetts

• 7% to the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition

• 7% to St. Paul’s Parish (Cambridge, Mass.)

• 4% to St. Joseph’s Abbey (Spencer, Mass.)

These donations were in an amount totaling 10.02% of my net income from that period.

Giving, 2022 Q1

I have not taken the Giving What We Can pledge, but I do think it’s useful for individuals to publicly disclose their charitable giving, if only because it seems to provoke other people to give, maybe through some kind of mimetic desire.

Personally, when I was doing my taxes for last year I found that I had given significantly less than I thought I had, so I thought it would be useful to make a record of my giving here, if only to keep myself honest.

The strategy I’m currently trying is to give away appx. 10% of my net income (that is, income received after tax withholding etc.). I take a two-tiered approach: occasional giving throughout the quarter, and then “top off” my donations at the end of the quarter so it equals roughly 10% of my net income.

For the last quarter (1/1 to 3/31 of 2022), my donations were as follows:

• 80% to the Malaria Consortium Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (via Givewell)

• 20% to Knights of Columbus, Ukraine Solidarity Fund

These donations were in an amount totaling 9.45% of my net income from that period.

“Abilities” Updated

I recently made significant updates to my encyclopedia article on “Abilities” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Changes include a more extensive review of modal theories of ability, discussion of important work on “two-way powers,” and a brief discussion of David Lewis’s theory of ability, initially outlined in 2000 year but published only recently.

The SEP is a dynamically updated resource so I would welcome any observations of typos, minor errors, etc. so that I can correct these. (More substantive criticisms are very much welcome too, though it may take me longer to address these).

Treat Addiction? Begin with Teeth.

This is a short unpublished editorial on health policy in Massachusetts, though its main points are also applicable elsewhere.

When we think about addiction treatment, we think of hospitals, rehabs, and jails. But it turns out that if we want to promote recovery in Massachusetts, the place to do it may be in an unexpected one: the dentist’s chair.

The evidence comes from a remarkable project begun in Salt Lake City in 2015. Dentists at the University of Utah Dental School, and their students, provided free comprehensive dental care to residents at two local halfway houses.

That’s all. They simply provided all dental care that these residents needed: cleanings, root canals, restorations. The cost came to $1,236 per patient. (For comparison: the cost of a five-day drug or alcohol detox is typically several thousand dollars).

The results were almost miraculous. Patients receiving dental care were over three times as likely to complete addiction treatment than those who did not. They were over twice as likely to be employed after discharge from treatment. And they were over twice as likely to remain abstinent after the end of treatment.

These changes did not come from providing any additional therapy or medication. These patients received the same treatment as everyone else. All that they received, in addition, was adequate dental care.

Why did this work? There are probably a few reasons.

First, inadequate dental care has a familiar and predictable result: pain. Tooth decay hurts. Lacking adequate dental care, people in early recovery naturally turn to a reliable and available pain-killers: heroin and other opiates. Providing dental care takes away one reason for relapse.

Second, inadequate dental care has another result: visibly poor teeth. If someone is in early recovery and is interviewing for a job, applying for an apartment, or just going on a date, their teeth are a visible reminder of their past. Providing comprehensive dental care lets people move forward with their lives.

Third, people in recovery from addiction need the same things that everyone needs: stable housing, groceries, and social supports. This is what experts call “recovery capital” – the material resources that promote recovery. And part of recovery capital is simply adequate dental care.

Therefore, if we want a cost-effective and innovative way to treat addiction and promote recovery, we should think about teeth. And we should think about what kind of dental care people in early recovery are actually getting.

The people in the Utah study were fortunate to be participants in a program that provided most of the dental care they needed, at no cost. Most people in early recovery are not so fortunate. What does dental care look like for them?

In Massachusetts, it could be much better. Many people in early recovery lack private dental insurance and receive their dental benefits through MassHealth. This poses three problems.

First, there is the problem of actually finding a dentist: the most recent statewide oral health report indicates that only one-third of licensed dentists accept MassHealth. This problem is compounded by the current closings and restrictions due to COVID-19.

Second, MassHealth dental benefits are not always well-publicized, and many MassHealth patients fail to take advantage of the services that are available to them – such as two cleanings per year.

Third, even for patients who do find a MassHealth dentist and aware of the benefits available to them, the services actually provided fall well short of comprehensive care. MassHealth covers fillings and extractions (tooth-pullings), but it covers few of the more expensive methods that modern dentistry uses to restore teeth to their natural appearance, such as crowns. It even fails to cover treatments that most of us would consider basic, such as root canals.

This austere approach to oral health is short-sighted. A slight expansion in MassHealth benefits – to include, at a minimum, root canals and crowns – along with psycho-education on the benefits and availability of oral health care, could have a real impact on the treatment of addiction in Massachusetts.

This is the surprising significance of teeth. A modest expansion of state dental benefits is certainly one of the more surprising ways to promote recovery in Massachusetts – but it may turn out to be one of best.

Mental Health and Oral Health

In the 2019-2020 academic year, I had the opportunity to train in behavioral health at an academic dental school. It was a fascinating experience. But I often had difficulty explaining to people what, exactly, I was doing in a dental school. This post is an attempt to answer that question, drawing on some of the varied literature on this topic.

Problems in mental health tend to give rise to problems in oral health. The most well-known of these effects, perhaps, is dental anxiety, a well-documented phenomenon (indeed there are several scales that may be used to measure it). Anxiety in turn leads to the postponement of dental care, which in turn leads to poor oral health. There are also more indirect, but equally pernicious, connections between mental health and oral health.

Substance use disorders are perhaps the clearest case. The effects of methamphetamine use on oral health are well known (in fact it is not the drug itself but the associated “lifestyle” of high sugar consumption and poor self-care that leads to the dental health effects), but substance use disorders generally give rise to oral health problems.

Severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia have similarly devastating effects. A “DMFT score” measures how many Decayed, Missing, or Filled Teeth a person has. A typical person with severe mental illness has a DMFT score of more than 20 – that is, 20 Decayed Missing or Filled Teeth. Again, the mechanism of action here is indirect: severe mental illness is associated with avoidance of dental care (either directly through dental anxiety or indirectly through poverty and associated outcomes) and poor self-care.

One lesson of these sobering statistics is that mental health care and oral health care should be “integrative,” in the sense that the one should be provided alongside the other. This is done more and more often in (medical) primary care, but it remains non-standard in dental care. In one way, this is precisely the opposite of how things should be. Since dental care can be so urgent, it often brings individuals into the health care system who would otherwise avoid it. Thus, dentistry is a first “point of contact” for individuals who are otherwise adrift from health care generally and mental health care specifically.

There have been a few efforts in this direction that bear mentioning:

“Dental as Anything.” A collaborative program between mental health and oral health services in Melbourne, Australia, focusing on assertive outreach to hard-to-reach populations in Melbourne.

Project FLOSS. In my view, this project at the University of Utah is one of the most innovative interventions for substance use disorders. Providing full-spectrum oral health care to individuals in early recovery is shown to dramatically increase length of abstinence and other positive outcomes.

Treatment of patients with schizophrenia. I am not aware of any specific program that works on this, but there is clearly a need for one. Policies of “deinstitutionalization” have led individuals with schizophrenia to be treated at community health centers rather than in institutions. This presents a challenge for oral health care, as individuals with schizophrenia often have difficulty with oral health treatment, and community dental health centers are often challenged to make adequate accommodations.

As noted above, the literature on this topic is varied, and scattered across the journals of various disciplines. Some of the articles I have found helpful are cited above. I have especially benefited from the work of Steve Kisely, a psychiatrist in Australia who works on (among other things) the connections between psychiatric conditions and physical disorders. See his “No Mental Health without Oral Health”  and this 2015 meta-analysis of connections between oral health and mental health, on which he is lead author: “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Association Between Poor Oral Health and Severe Mental Illness.”

‘Can’ and Reference

I would like to make an observation about the semantics of ‘can’ (and, I believe, of agentive modals generally) that has not been noted, to my knowledge, in the previous literature. This observation appears to tell against a theory of ‘can’ of the kind proposed by Kratzer in her great essays on this topic.

Quine says that a context is ‘referentially opaque’ just in case the substitution of co-referring names may induce a change in truth value. Thus:

(1) Lois is unaware that Clark was born on Krypton

(2) Lois is unaware that Superman was born on Krypton

We can imagine that (1) is true and (2) false (perhaps this was true in the comic books). So ‘is unaware that’ is referentially opaque.

By contrast, a context is ‘referentially transparent’ just in case the substitution of co-referring names does not induce a change in truth value.

It will be helpful to define up an additional notion. Let us say that a context is strongly referentially transparent just in case the substitution of co-referring names OR definite descriptions does not induce a change in truth value. (Maybe this notion already has a name in the previous literature, and I think some people may already be using transparency in this broader sense, or even more broadly to range over demonstratives etc. Anyhow, this is how I will be using the term).

I now wish to make two claims: (i) ‘can’ is strongly referentially transparent and (ii) this is difficult to accommodate within the standard Kratzer framework for ‘can’.

Here is the argument for (i). Let us say that Smith is in fact the most popular man in town. Consider:

(3) Jones can have dinner with Smith

(4) Jones can have dinner with the most popular man in town

Given that Smith is in fact the most popular man in town, the truth of (3) ensures the truth of (4), and conversely. There is no way for the one to be true and the other false.

Crucially, this is the case even under unusual circumstances. Let us say that Smith would in fact have dinner with Jones only if his popularity declined – since he is so popular, he is very busy, but were he less popular, his calendar would free up. So – now speaking a bit more semantically – the scenario in which Jones in fact has dinner with Smith is one in which Smith is _not_ the most popular man in town. Nonetheless, that scenario suffices for the truth of (4), since we describe the scenario in terms of how things actually are – and, actually, Smith is the most popular man in town. So we might sensibly say: “Jones can have dinner with the most popular man in town, Smith, though, if they really did have dinner, Smith would not be so popular.”

Here is the argument for (ii), that it is difficult to accommodate this observation within the Kratzer semantics. On the Kratzer semantics, (3) is true only if there is a world w meeting certain conditions (roughly, that it is in the set of worlds W that are compatible with the modal base and that are most highly-ranked according to the ordering source) such that Jones has dinner with Smith at that world. Let us say that there is some such world – call it w1 – and so that (3) is true.

Now, by our argument above, (4) must be true as well. Is it? Well, (4) is true only if there is a world w meeting certain conditions (roughly, that it is in the set of worlds W that are compatible with the modal base and that are most highly-ranked according to the ordering source) such that Jones has dinner with the most popular man in town at that world. Is there? Well, there may or may not be. Since all that is ensured by the truth of (3) is the existence and accessibility of w1, the truth of (4) is ensured only if w1 is a world such that Jones has dinner with the most popular man in town at that world. And this may not be the case, as in the scenario described above.

So it is difficult to explain the strong referential transparency of ‘can’ on the Kratzer account. I do not say that it is impossible to do so, and I’m open to the idea that some mechanism could give an explanation of this phenomenon. That said, I think this little argument suggests two broader points.

First, there’s an extensive philosophical literature on reference and modality, including the Quine essay mentioned above and a few lectures. To some extent these issues have been taken up in the excellent recent literature on epistemic modals. To my knowledge, they are less studied in the literature on ‘root modals,’ which include agentive modals but also include circumstantial modals more generally as well as deontic modals. I’d be interested in seeing more discussion of how issues of reference and modality play out in thinking about root modals.

Second, I’m sympathetic with the thought that agentive modals don’t quantify over worlds but instead quantify over intra-worldly entities – what I call options. Options are not themselves modal, though they do have modal entailments. On my view, (3) is true because Jones has, at this world, a certain option. That very option is, at this world, an option of meeting the most popular man in town. So (4) is true as well. So this is a phenomenon that can be explained quite simply when we take options as fundamental.