The First Comprehensive Work On The History And Religion Of The Sikhs Was Produced In 1914 By Khazan Singh, An Additional Assistant Commissioner. It Is A Systematic, True And Full Account Of The Sikhs And Is Regarded As A Milestone In The Early Sikh Historiography.

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing and swarming technologies promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks across domains, ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications. As these tools continue to improve, we are prompted to monitor how they may affect our society on a broader level, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, (...) responsibility, and other key concepts of our moral landscape.In this paper we take a closer look at this class of technologies – Technologies for Collective Minds – to see not only how their implementation may react with commonly held moral values, but also how they challenge our underlying concepts of what constitutes collective or individual agency. We argue that prominent contemporary frameworks for understanding collective agency and responsibility are insufficient in terms of accurately describing the relationships enabled by Technologies for Collective Minds, and that they therefore risk obstructing ethical analysis of the implementation of these technologies in society. We propose a more multidimensional approach to better understand this set of technologies, and to facilitate future research on the ethics of Technologies for Collective Minds. (shrink)

In developed economies, powerful legislative and regulatory frameworks, for people with disability over the last five decades, have provided major motivation for business compliance with disability in the workplaces. However, developing economy like India is marked by emergent disability legislation, weak institutional enforcement and an evolving disability rights movement. In the absence of strong institutional expectations, the private sector’s role in mainstreaming the disability agenda has been largely an act of voluntary participation. Drawing upon an in-depth, multilevel, cross-functional qualitative study (...) of four Indian information technology sector companies, this paper explores why these companies engage in pro-social corporate behaviour in favour of disability. The study locates itself in the context of conceptualization of PWD as employee stakeholders and the literature on strategic CSR. The findings reveal that strategic factors promote voluntary business engagement with disability at workplaces and contribute to understanding of workplace integration of minority employees. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in English; abstract also in Chinese. 腦機介面 (BCIs) 是大腦和電腦無需人工交互即可直接交流的一系列技術。隨著人工智能 (AI) 時代的到來，我們需要更多地關注腦機介面和人工智能的融合所帶來的倫理問題。那麼，與機器一起思考會帶來什麼樣的倫理問題？在本文中，圍繞這一主題，我們將重點關注以下問題：自主性、完整性、身分認同、隱私，以及 作為一種增強的方式，該技術在兒科領域的應用會帶來怎樣的風險和潛在收益。我們的結論是，雖然該技術存在多種令人擔憂的問題，同時也有可能帶來好處，但仍存在很大的不確定性。如果生命倫理學家想在這一領域有所建樹 ，他們就應該做好準備來迎接我們對醫學和醫療保健領域中一些我們視為核心價值的理解的重大轉變。 Brain-Computer Interfaces – BCIs – are a set of technologies with which brains and computers can communicate directly, without the need for manual interaction. As we are witnessing the dawn of an era in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) quite possibly will come to dominate the technological innovation landscape, we are compelled to ask questions about the ethical issues which the convergence of BCIs and AI (...) is poised to bring about. What are the ethics of thinking with machines? In this paper, we explore this question, focusing on some of the main arenas of ethical debate and contention, ranging from autonomy and integrity to identity and privacy, and discuss the risks and potential benefits of the technology in the domains of paediatric populations, and as a means of human enhancement. We conclude that, while there are multiple concerns as well as possibilities for the technology to do good, there are great uncertainties at play. If bioethicists want to stay relevant in this field, they ought to prepare themselves for seismic shift in how we conceptualise much of what we take to be core values in medicine and healthcare. (shrink)

Euthanasia has been a subject of debate worldwide. It has brought up multiple controversies in different countries and among different societies. Over the years, euthanasia has been an active topic of research in the field of bioethics, owing to its numerous ethical and legal implications. In this article, we take a brief look into the laws and legislation surrounding euthanasia in different parts of the world.

The stability of the power grid is concernment due to the high demand and supply to smart cities, homes, factories, and so on. Different machine learning and deep learning models can be used to tackle the problem of stability prediction for the energy grid. This study elaborates on the necessity of IoT technology to make energy grid networks smart. Different prediction models, namely, logistic regression, naïve Bayes, decision tree, support vector machine, random forest, XGBoost, k-nearest neighbor, and optimized artificial neural (...) network, have been applied on openly available smart energy grid datasets to predict their stability. The present article uses metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, and ROC curve to compare different predictive models. Data augmentation and feature scaling have been applied to the dataset to get better results. The augmented dataset provides better results as compared with the normal dataset. This study concludes that the deep learning predictive model ANN optimized with Adam optimizer provides better results than other predictive models. The ANN model provides 97.27% accuracy, 96.79% precision, 95.67% recall, and 96.22% F1 score. (shrink)

Precision medicine (PM) aims to revolutionise healthcare, but little is known about the role religion and spirituality might play in the ethical discourse about PM. This Perspective reports the outcomes of a knowledge exchange fora with religious authorities in Singapore about data sharing for PM. While the exchange did not identify any foundational religious objections to PM, ethical concerns were raised about the possibility for private industry to profiteer from social resources and the potential for genetic discrimination by private health (...) insurers. According to religious authorities in Singapore, sharing PM data with private industry will require a clear public benefit and robust data governance that incorporates principles of transparency, accountability and oversight. (shrink)

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English–Mandarin bilingual infants’ abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a (...) novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12–13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12–13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17–18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language. (shrink)

Our concern in this paper lies with a common argument from racial discrimination to realism about races: some people are discriminated against for being members of a particular race (i.e., racial discrimination exists), so some people must be members of that race (i.e., races exist). Error theorists have long responded that we can explain racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, so we need not explain it in terms of race itself. But to date there has been little detailed (...) discussion of whether it is better to explain racial discrimination in terms of race or in terms of racial attitudes alone. Our goal is to offer a novel and detailed argument in defense of explaining racial discrimination in terms of racial attitudes alone, by attending to the neglected phenomenon of misperception discrimination, which involves differential treatment due to misperceived race. We argue that the discriminatory action in misperception cases must be explained in the same way as cases where (according to the realist) the victim’s race is accurately perceived. Thus, the victim’s actual race cannot provide the best explanation. The main upshot of our argument is that explanatory arguments from racial discrimination to realism about race fail. (shrink)

The recent rise in ethical consumerism has seen increasing numbers of corporate brands project a socially responsible and ethical image. But does having a corporate brand that is perceived to be ethical have any influence on outcome variables of interest for its product brands? This study analyzes the relationship between perceived ethicality at a corporate level, and brand trust, brand affect and brand loyalty at a product level. A theoretical framework with hypothesized relationships is developed and tested in order to (...) answer the research question. Data have been collected for 45 product categories in the fast moving consumer goods sector using a panel of 4,027 Spanish consumers. The proposed relationships are tested using structural equations modeling. The results suggest there is a positive relationship between perceived ethicality of a brand and both brand trust and brand affect. Brand affect also positively influences brand trust. Further, brand trust and brand affect both show a positive relation with brand loyalty. The managerial and academic implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

Classical treatise on the fundamentals of Nyaya philosophy with commentaries; critical edition.

This study uses a specific method to analyze the contents of the codes of ethics of the largest corporations in Australia, Canada and Sweden and compares the findings of similar content analyses in 2002 and 2006. It tracks changes in code contents across the three nations over the 2002–2006 period. There were statistically significant changes in the codes of the three countries from 2002 to 2006: the Australian and Canadian codes becoming more prescriptive, intensifying the differences between these and the (...) Swedish codes. The contents of these codes and the nature of the changes they have undergone over time are culturally driven: Australia's and Canada's reflecting their similar cultural profiles and Sweden's reflecting its differences from these countries on organizationally relevant cultural dimensions. The study reveals that corporate codes of ethics are living documents as reflected by the significant longitudinal changes in the frequencies of mention of several of the 60 items underpinning the content analysis of the codes of ethics. Consequently, and in light of their growing prevalence and importance as instruments of corporate governance, they should not be treated as static but as dynamic documents that are subject to various environmental factors. The clear implication of the findings of this study is that for corporate codes of ethics ‘one size does not fit all’ and that these instruments must be carefully monitored and revised to reflect changing conditions. (shrink)

In this article, I examine children's reported experiences with stimulant drug treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in light of bioethical arguments about the potential threats of psychotropic drugs to authenticity and moral agency. Drawing on a study that involved over 150 families in the USA and the UK, I show that children are able to report threats to authenticity, but that the majority of children are not concerned with such threats. On balance, children report that stimulants improve their capacity (...) for moral agency, and they associate this capacity with an ability to meet normative expectations. I argue that although under certain conditions stimulant drug treatment may increase the risk of a threat to authenticity, there are ways to minimise this risk and to maximise the benefits of stimulant drug treatment. Medical professionals in particular should help children to flourish with stimulant drug treatments, in good and in bad conditions. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

The use of Ritalin and other stimulant drug treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) raises distinctive moral dilemmas for parents; these moral dilemmas have not been adequately addressed in the bioethics literature. This paper draws upon data from a qualitative empirical study to investigate parents' use of the moral ideal of authenticity as part of their narrative justifications for dosing decisions and actions. I show that therapeutic decisions and actions are embedded in valued cultural ideals about masculinity, self-actualization and success, (...) as well as in moral conceptions of authenticity and personal freedom. I argue that this investigation of parents' moral justifications and dosing dilemmas raises questions about the validity of authenticity as a transcendent moral principle. Moreover, this study demonstrates that in order to be relevant, bioethical analysis of neurocognitive enhancement must engage with ground-up studies of moral principles and decision-making in context. (shrink)

Both actions and beliefs are subject to normative evaluation as rational or irrational. As such, we might expect there to be some general, unified story about what makes them rational. However, orthodox approaches suggest that the rationality of action is determined by practical considerations, while the rationality of belief is determined by properly epistemic considerations. This apparent disunity leads some, like Rinard (2019), to reject orthodox theories of the rationality of belief in favor of pragmatism. In this paper, I argue (...) we should reject pragmatist approaches to unifying the rationality of action and belief. Instead, I argue, we should embrace a correctness-based view of rationality, on which rationality is fundamentally about getting things correct as best we can, given our epistemic limitations. On such a view, the facts about rational action and belief are a function of the facts about correct action and belief. I contend that the apparent disunity of orthodox theories is created by the fact that action and belief have different correctness conditions. Nevertheless, on the correctness-based view, this disunity is merely apparent. This renders pragmatism’s revisionary implications for the rationality of belief unnecessary to take on in order unify it with the rationality of action. (shrink)

Bhakti is a remarkable existential tendency that shows itself in the rich expanse of the tradition originating from the Vedas. Recognized as a prize possession of the religions, philosophies, and culture of India, it has often won fascination and admiration from students of Eastern heritage. However, its nature, role, and history remain misunderstood and have not received all the attention they deserve. Its role as a gatherer of life, love, thought, and the divine is missed in its partial characterizations as (...) “Hindu devotion” or “divine love” or “theism implicit in polytheism.” Its status as a perennial thematic concept of the Indian civilization is missed when its pervasiveness is overlooked by the cultural historians preoccupied primarily with its periodic eruptions. Furthermore, the philosophical role of bhakti is missed when it is deemed as an alternative to jnana (knowledge) rather than “the living of jnana.”. (shrink)

A critical interpretation of Sikh literature from a feminist perspective.

Business ethics has been described as a prime academic growth industry. This paper reports the findings of a survey aimed at establishing the status of ethics in the curricula of Canadian Schools of Management and Administrative Studies. It was found that twenty-three of the forty-two responding schools offer courses in business ethics and that they offer a total of twenty-five ethics courses, twenty of which are offered as electives. Forty-two percent of the schools not offering a course in business ethics (...) plan to offer such a course by 1989. This means that by 1989 seventy-four percent of the responding schools should have a business ethics component in their curricula. (shrink)

This paper compares the findings of content analyses of the corporate codes of ethics of Canada's largest corporations in 1992 and 2003. For both years, a modified version of a technique used in several other studies was used to determine and categorize the contents of the codes. It was found, inter alia, that, in 2003, as in 1992, more of the codes were concerned with conduct against the firm than with conduct on behalf of the firm. Among the changes from (...) 1992 to 2003 were a significant increase in the frequency of mention of environmental affairs, legal responsibility as the basis of codes and enforcement/compliance procedures. (shrink)

This book incorporates seven 'Introductions' that Hegel wrote for each of his major works: the Phenomenology, Logic, Philosophy of Right, History, Fine Art, Religion and History of Philosophy, and includes an Introduction and Epilogue by the Editors, serving to introduce Hegel to the reader and to situate him and his works into their wider context.

Violence risk assessment tools are increasingly used within criminal justice and forensic psychiatry, however there is little relevant, reliable and unbiased data regarding their predictive accuracy. We argue that such data are needed to (i) prevent excessive reliance on risk assessment scores, (ii) allow matching of different risk assessment tools to different contexts of application, (iii) protect against problematic forms of discrimination and stigmatisation, and (iv) ensure that contentious demographic variables are not prematurely removed from risk assessment tools.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Innovation of Yoga in vedic saṁhitās -- Elaboration of yogic thought and practices in Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads -- Continuation of the tradition in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata -- Deviation from the vedic tradition in Jainism and Buddhism -- Systematization of Yoga in Patañjali and Haṭha-yoga -- Yoga of Vedāntic ācāryas and yoga-vāsiṣṭha -- Bhakti-yoga of medieval saints -- Yogic sādhanā in Tantra, Śaivism and Sufism -- Revival of the spirit of Yoga in modern India -- Yogic capability in (...) the estimation of logic. (shrink)

Recent figures reported by KPMG confirm the growing prevalence of corporate codes of ethics globally. Svensson et al. (Bus Ethics 18:389–407, 2009 ) in surveys of the largest corporations in Australia, Canada, and Sweden found a similar trend. The increased prevalence of corporate codes of ethics has been accompanied by heightened research interest in various aspects of these documents, e.g., the contents and focus of the codes. However, there is a paucity of research examining the effectiveness of these documents and (...) the organizational infrastructure that accompany them. This study, based on a survey of Canada’s largest corporations, sought to empirically assess the determinants of the effectiveness of corporate codes of ethics by regressing managers’ perceptions of code effectiveness against various elements of ethics programs. It was found that, in a statistically significant model, eighteen independent variables explain 58.5% of the variance in the perceived effectiveness of corporate codes of ethics. (shrink)

Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions and beliefs based on Discourse Representation Theory that captures many of their important logical properties. Unlike possible worlds approaches, this theory does not assume that agents are perfect reasoners, and gives a realistic view of their internal architecture; unlike most representational approaches, it has an objective semantics, and does not rely on an ad hoc labeling of the internal states of agents. We (...) describe a minimal logic for intentions and beliefs that is sound and complete relative to our semantics. We discuss several additional axioms, and the constraints on the models that validate them. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to return to the concept of bricolage as theorized in 1962 by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and examine its presence and utility in the art and architectural history of the twentieth century. While Lévi-Strauss was the first theorist to present bricolage as an analogy for the creation of mythical thought among indigenous cultures, the concept has seen a wide range of conceptual, methodological and practical applications across different fields, including design, visual arts, urban (...) planning and the built environment. This article will examine the applicability of bricolage as a technical metaphor for the creative process and its relevance to artistic creation by tracing its trajectory over the course of the twentieth century. It will evaluate the significance of objects and events of ‘everyday life’ in the creative practices of contemporary artists, and draw attention to the emerging role of the architect as bricoleur or improviser, to conclude that it was the art of the ‘ordinary’ that gave creative inspiration to twentieth-century artists and architects to engage with the materiality and past experiences of the world. (shrink)

The end of the cold war has elevated environmental issues to the highest level of concern for humanity while creating a world order dominated by the United States of America and other Western nations. This new power structure may likely lead to increased business activity in many parts of the world, as nations formerly preoccupied with the cold war turn their attention to economic development. This paper examines the linkages among ethics, economic development and protection and restoration of the environment (...) in The New World Order. (shrink)

Purpose E-commerce companies use dark patterns to manipulate customer decisions to survive in the crowded online market and make profit. Although some online customers are aware of the dark patterns, they cannot overcome such manipulations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and model the barriers to overcoming dark patterns using total interpretive structural modeling (TISM). Design/methodology/approach Barriers to overcoming dark patterns were identified from the extant literature and were validated by a panel of 18 domain experts. In (...) the modeling phase, TISM technique was used to identify the relationships between the barriers and assign priority to the barriers. Finally, the barriers were plotted and classified into three categories. Findings User unawareness, trust in brands and normalization of aggressive marketing were found to be the highest priority barriers. Whereas, designer bias, user fatigue, short-term user benefits and design complexity were identified as the most challenging barriers because they have least dependence over the other barriers. Research limitations/implications Because TISM results are based on the opinion of domain experts, other statistical techniques could be applied for validation. Practical implications This study would educate online customers, while assisting online user communities and regulatory bodies to devise strategies to overcome dark patterns. Additionally, business managers could use the study’s findings to encourage designers to embrace ethical design methods as a competitive advantage. Originality/value This study contributes to the research as it is first of its kind to examine the link between dark pattern barriers. (shrink)

The uniqueness of Psychiatry as a medical speciality lies in the fact that aside from tackling what it considers as illnesses, it has perchance to comment on and tackle many issues of social relevance as well. Whether this is advisable or not is another matter; but such a process is inevitable due to the inherent nature of the branch and the problems it deals with. Moreover this is at the root of the polarization of psychiatry into opposing psychosocial and biological (...) schools. This gets reflected in their visualization of scope, in definitions and in methodology as well. Whilst healthy criticism of one against the other school is necessary, there should be caution against hasty application of one's frame of reference to an approach that does not intend to follow, or conform to, one's methodology. This should be done within the referential framework of the school critically evaluated, with due consideration for its methods and concepts. Similarly, as at present, there is no evidence to prove one or the other of these approaches as better, aside from personal choice. We can say so even if there is a strong paradigm shift towards the biological at present. A renaissance of scientific psychoanalysis coupled with a perceptive neurobiology which can translate those insights into testable hypotheses holds the greatest promise for psychiatry in the future. This suggests the need for unification of diverse appearing approaches to get a more comprehensive and enlightened worldview. It requires a highly integrative capacity. Just as a physicist thinks simultaneously in terms of particles and waves, a psychiatrist must think of motives, emotions and desires in the same breath as neurobiology, genetics and psychopharmacology. However, the integration must be attempted without destroying the internal cohesiveness of the individual schools. This will give a fair chance for polarization in which a single proper approach in psychiatry could emerge, which may be a conglomerate of diverse appearing approaches of today, or one which supersedes the rest. A synthesis of cognitive psychology and neuroscience offers the greatest promise at present. (shrink)

The Chinese rites controversy is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the papal (...) legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon's 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf's text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia. (shrink)

This essay argues that the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ can help us understand the connections between seemingly disparate parts of Voltaire’s extensive corpus of work. It contends that even though the Enlightenment’s racial politics abounded with contradictions and ambivalences, Voltaire stood out from his contemporaries. While the connections between his polygenism – the theory that humans of different races were created separately – and material investments in colonial commerce have long been debated by radical historians, this essay suggests that Voltaire’s (...) views about race’s relationship to labour were transformed by France’s colonial losses during the Seven Years’ War. (shrink)

This paper investigates how specific notions of gender and ethnicity are integrated into diversity discourses presented on 241 top European company websites. Large European companies increasingly disclose equality and diversity policies in statements on websites. Such statements may be used to promote an ethical image of the company in terms of how well it manages diversity and guards against discrimination. In this paper, we argue that diversity statement discourses are important as they play a key part in socially constructing how (...) diversity should be regarded in the company by minority and majority groups, as well as indicating corporate values to external stakeholders. Sometimes, the notions of gender or ethnic diversity are positioned as a liability in need of protection, whilst in others, as a source of competitive advantage. We find evidence of use of discursive tools such as problematisation, rationalisation, fixation, reframing and naturalisation of the notions of gender and ethnic diversity, reinforced by use of symbols, such as statistics, photographs, membership badges and awards. Few statements directly associate gender and ethnic diversity with enhanced corporate performance. We found that diversity statements sometimes appear to reinforce existing business stereotypes of women and people from ethnic minorities, and in a few discourses, create new ones, particularly evident in photographs illustrating the diversity web pages. (shrink)