The desirability of creating norms within the framework of law has been a challenging process in a free market economy. The principles of antitrust law enunciated by courts in abuse of dominant cases has led to ‘refusal to deal’ as a contested doctrine. When dominance is treated as legitimate aspiration and free market choices are the medium to achieve the aspirations of free market enterprises, any duty or obligation cast on the firm is considered antithetical to the spirit of free (...) market unless it eclipses the anticompetitive effect. Where an economic analysis of antitrust law has non-economic impacts with ethical and moral issues, it calls for an alternative economic thought which also considers plural values of society. This also reflects a conflict arising out of lack of norms and respect for property rights. This paper attempts to analyze the cases and framework which is currently employed by the courts and the challenges it puts forth in creating a norm that is universal. The author by drawing on the principles of Gandhian economic thought and its essential features of trusteeship, non-possession and non-violence creates space for resolution of conflicts promoting ethical and moral considerations. Resolution of conflict through ethical and moral norms also assimilates the varied goals of antitrust regulation, including non-economic goals when the goals of antitrust require a broader consideration that accommodates the wider spectrum of market participants. (shrink)

The paper presents a method for interpreting religious texts for use in psychotherapy. In particular, the paper takes the example of the pivotal character Arjuna in Bhagavad-Gita as having low frustration tolerance and uses the collective philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita and Bhagavata-Purana through six steps of Logic-Based Therapy to overcome it. Although the paper uses Hindu religious texts, the treatment of these texts will speak to anyone interested in the possibility of integrating religious texts into psychotherapy.

Computer ethics, or more broadly, Information Technology (IT) ethics, is often concerned with issues about privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility and framing of policies and rules on the features. While ethical issues on these topics are important, issues about IT ethics apply more broadly. The purpose of ethics is not just to draft new policies or legal codes. Ethics also aims to probe and bring into limelight for ethical deliberations those issues, which have escaped policy formulations or human introspection. This (...) paper tries to address one such ethical issue. This paper concerns with email ethics and with one of the features of emailing - ‘forwarding’. As an applied ethics domain, I have tried to use some samples of forwarded mails. Through the analysis of the given sample mails, I claim that (1) this issue of ‘forwarding’ falls well outside the domain of framing ethical policies and (2) it is a matter of ethical concern. I have addressed this ethical concern by drawing a criterion to judge if one’s act of ‘forwarding’ a mail is ethical act or not. (shrink)

Peter Singer in his Practical Ethics and in other works as well gives importance to reason in making an ethical decision. Thinkers question Singer’s consistency and employment of reason in his ethical decisions. Jacqueline A Laing talks about Singer’s inconsistency in her article 'Inconsistency and Consequentialism'. With reference to animal rights and abortion, she claims that Singer uses different yardstick, thus Singer is inconsistent. She remarks that Singer uses the notion of ‘sentientism’ for the defense of animal rights, whereas he (...) comes up with ‘personism’ for human centered ethics. She claims that if Singer is consistent why can’t he use the same notion of ‘sentientism’ for animal rights as well as issues on humans like disabled human beings? According to her, this suggests there is an inconsistency in Singer’s work on ethical issues concerning animals and ethical issues concerning humans. As a corollary conclusion, she claims that Singer is biased towards animals. In this paper, the authors try to show that there is no such inconsistency. Contrary to her claims, the authors like to show that Singer uses personism in the discussions related to animals and similarly he uses sentientism in his discussion related to abortion and other human centered ethical issues. Therefore, Laing’s claims about Singer’s inconsistency and her following claim that Singer is biased towards animals need to be reconsidered. (shrink)

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion , synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness are (...) local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body. (shrink)

This article is inspired by Jane Sahi’s commentary, ‘Dialogue as Education: Martin Buber’, published under the feature ‘Classics with Commentary’ in the Monsoon 2005 issue of Contemporary Education Dialogue. I seek to further the discussion of the contributions of Martin Buber to the discourse of education through an elaboration and clarification of the ideas, concerns and critiques exposited by Jane Sahi. These concerns can perhaps be understood under the following themes: (i) reflections on educational practice in the light of Buber’s (...) ideas; (ii) the role of language in dialogue; (iii) the idea of learning; (iv) attitudes towards the ‘other’; (v) the teacher–pupil relationship and (vi) the role of the teacher. Although ideas on these themes in the writings on Martin Buber’s have helped me in articulating this response, Jane Sahi’s commentary forms the basis of my reflections. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to further the conversation about the possibilities of dialogue with technology that Wegerif and Major have initiated. In their paper Wegerif and Major have argued that “constructive dialogue with technology is possible, even essential, and that this takes the form of opening a dialogic space” and they also “argue against Buber that dialogic spaces do not all take the same form, but that they take a multitude of forms depending, to a large extent, on the (...) mediating technology”. Reflecting on the paper by Wegerif and Major, the present paper attempts to highlight certain issues and possibilities for such a dialogue. In the first section of the paper, Wegerif and Major’s discussion of technology-mediated dialogue has been reflected upon. This is followed by a reflection on the possibility and challenges of engaging in a dialogue with technology as ‘other’ by referring to the case of a robot ‘Sophia’ getting citizenship in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The third section discusses certain concerns regarding the interpretation of Buber’s idea of dialogue by Wegerif and Major. The conclusive section highlights some key aspects that need to be considered while reflecting on the possibility of dialogue with technology. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explicate the ways in which three important Indian thinkers- Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, and Krishnamurti understand the holistic development of a child. These thinkers become even more important in light of the fact that with periodic changes in the education policies of the state, and the changing view of how a child’s development in school is visualised, the thoughts of these thinkers have, in a sense, remained eternal and have continued to inspire schools and find expression. Their (...) ideas present to us very unique and refreshing ways of looking at childhood and the role of the school. Rather than moving from the theoretical ideas presented by these thinkers to their pedagogical implications, the discussion in the paper would proceed from describing the practices in these schools and then explaining their theoretical bases. The primary focus in the paper is on the holistic development of a child’s personality and re-thinking assessment practices in school. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Serageldin, Ismail and Martin‐Brown, Joan Ethics and Values: A Global Perspective.

Em questões ambientais, a relação dos seres humanos com a natureza é vista como um problema ético importante. Isso gerou várias posições éticas como antropocentrismo, biocentrismo, ecocentrismo e similares. Sobre a relação do homem com o animal, B. G. Nortor menciona que animais em “contexto” devem ter prioridade em relação a animais em “conteúdo”. Norton nomeia animais domesticados e animais selvagens mantidos em cativeiros como animais em “contexto”. Ele sustenta que devemos cuidar dos animais domesticados na medida em que temos (...) um contrato hipotético com eles (Norton, 2003). Ao mesmo tempo em que concordamos com a posição de Norton de cuidar dos animais domesticados, defendemos que sua compreensão do contrato e sua subsequente compreensão de “cuidado” como derivando de um valor instrumental dos animais reflete sua posição de um antropocentrismo fraco. Neste artigo, defendemos que uma ética do “cuidado” é mais significativa quando emerge de uma perspectiva não-antropocêntrica que trate o outro como valioso intrinsecamente.: In environment related issues, the relationship of human beings to nature is seen as an important ethical issue. This issue has resulted in various ethical positions like anthropocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism and like. On man’s relationship with animal beings, Bryan G. Norton mentions that animals in ‘context’ should be given priority over animals in ‘content’. Norton brings the domesticated animals and captive bred wild animals under the ‘context’ animals. Norton maintains that we should take care of the domesticated animals as we have a hypothetical contract with them. (Norton, Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology, 2003) While we agree to Norton’s position of taking care of the domesticated animals, we maintain that his understanding of contract and his subsequent understanding of ‘care’ as stemming from an instrumental value of animals reflects his position of weak-anthropocentrism. In this paper, we claim that a ‘care’ based ethics is more meaningful when it emerges from a non-anthropocentric perspective that treat the other as intrinsically valued. Keywords : Content, Context, Intrinsic Value, Instrumental value, Pragmatism, Animal Care. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In _The Reveries of a Solitary Walker_, Rousseau keeps a record of the thoughts, ideas, and reveries that freely run through his mind during his solitary walks. He finds that it is only when he is alone and not being disturbed that he is able to exist just for himself, and can “truly claim to be what nature willed”. Rousseau goes on these solitary walks in the countryside on the outskirts of Paris. (...) But if solitude is what he requires, why travel all the way to the countryside, which he says is very far from his residence in the middle of Paris? Put another way, why does he feel the need to be amidst nature in order to engage in these reveries? What do his reveries tell us about the role that nature has played in his life? This article will examine the role of nature in Rousseau’s solitary walks, as well as its presence in his life as revealed through his reveries. In particular, we will see that nature has played a central role in shaping Rousseau’s soul both during his adolescence and his adulthood. It is an essential ingredient to helping Rousseau realize his project of examining and ordering his soul, and in his attempt to understand what kind of man he is, given his deracination from mainstream society. Throughout his life nature has served as his mirror for self-examination; it acts as a trigger for various memories, it provides a harmonious setting for delving into the more painful of these memories, and allows him to extract insights that enable him to face his mortality. (shrink)

A person’s financial well-being is the complete contentment gained from one’s present financial condition. This has a powerful impact on the entire achievement of an employee’s “well-being.” Researchers, financial analysts, financial planners, educationists, and economists have explored the “enablers” to improve employees’ living standards by investigating the possible “FWB” resources for decades. There is no literature available to show the connection between social capital theory, social exchange theory, social cognitive theory, financial literacy and FWB, and employees’ financial knowledge sharing a (...) moderator to expand the complete FWB. (shrink)

Being Two Addresses Delivered In The University Of Toronto At The Philosophical Conference, 1922.

"De la dmocratie en Amrique" (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville on the ...

Indian ethics is one of the great traditions of moral thought in world philosophy whose insights have influenced thinkers in early Greece, Europe, Asia, and the New World. This is the first systematic study of the spectrum of moral reflections from India.

Vol. presents a method for critically evaluating relevance in arguments based on case studies & a new relevance theory incorporating techniques of argumentation theory, logic & artificiaI intelligence. For scholars/students in argumentation & rhetoric.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)