The Hastings Center

Tag: smoking

  • Income and Life Expectancy

    Today’s New York Times has an excellent article on income and longevity that compares Fairfax County, Virginia, to McDowell County, West Virginia. In Fairfax, median household income is $107,000. In McDowell it’s about one-fifth of that. In Fairfax, the average life expectancy for men is 82. For women it’s 85. In McDowell, the comparable life…

  • Response to Unreasonable Health Choices: Smoking cigarettes over age 65

    In her May 6 post about “Unreasonable Health Choices,” Sissela Bok poses the question of why people make unreasonable choices, using cigarette smoking as one example, since everyone knows that smoking is bad for your health.  In fact, during our lifetimes we have witnessed a revolution regarding attitudes and practices of smoking.  When I was…

  • Unreasonable Health Choices

    Long before reaching 65, most people know all too well the costs of decades of going against their own best interests by engaging in practices they knew carried risks for their health – as with smoking or overeating. In at least some respects, they resonate to Oscar Wilde’s “I can resist everything except temptation.” Even…