One way to improve ethical standards and competency of psychologists is by understanding how they respond to ethical dilemmas. This study asked psychologists to choose what they would do and what would be the worst thing to do in response to each of 20 vignettes describing an ethically difficult scenario. Participants were 95 registered psychologists practicing in an Australian state. Normative responses for “would” and “worst” responses were defined by a reference group of five psychologists experienced in professional ethics. The (...) results showed that, unlike some previous studies, years of experience, gender and qualification were not significant predictors of normative choices. Overall, psychologists were better at identifying normative would than worst responses to ethical dilemmas. This finding highlights the need to raise awareness of what constitutes “bad” practice in order to help psychologists avoid engaging in behaviors that lead to misconduct. In addition, those who engaged in peer supervision were more likely to perform better on choosing the normative responses, suggesting the importance of receiving feedback and reflecting on clinical work to maintain ethical and professional standards. (shrink)

Marginalisation is both a structural and an epistemic issue. The struggle against exclusion and marginalisation should take place within larger social structures. Moreover, we should address the legitimacy offered, through the knowledge production process itself, for exclusion and marginalisation. Knowledge production regarding the oppressed should document their lives, experiences and concerns. It must take place with an appropriate methodological struggle informed by alternative epistemologies. While creating alternative epistemologies, it is important to challenge the value-neutrality claim of mainstream research practices. We (...) should acknowledge that mainstream epistemic domination exists ‘not because of objectivity or universality of their research practices but their privileged location within a historical, material and social setup of dominant power relations’. A ‘situated knowledge’ building process may help to end the epistemic oppression of marginalised groups. This process lends new forms and applications of enquiry that are necessarily inclusive and that pay closer attention to elements such as personal experiences, subjectivity, worldviews, and emotions. (shrink)

This paper investigates the gendered and racialized discourse on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in India. A complex metabolic, endocrinal and reproductive disorder, PCOS is one of the most common endocrinopathies in women of reproductive age today. Due to an unclear etiology, there is no single clinical definition for PCOS, contributing to a sense of confusion around the syndrome. India has one of the highest rates of PCOS in the world. Medical and social discourses on PCOS suggest the high rates are due (...) to the failures of Westernized lifestyle and diet in women from developing countries. Taking the example of India, I argue that the lack of a clear etiology creates a discursive vacuum and that PCOS in itself is not a gendered and racialized syndrome, but the discourse on it is. Through the figure of the “new Indian woman,” I address the socio-political anxieties of nationalism projected onto the female body and suggest that the discourse on PCOS in India is in reaction to a rising nationalist rhetoric. As a syndrome that presents through “masculine” symptoms, PCOS acts a unique entryway into the intersectional issues of gender, race, sexuality, class and national identities. An analysis of the Indian setting might shed light on PCOS discourses that are increasingly relevant globally. (shrink)

Our understanding of the decisions made under scenarios where both descriptive and experience-based information are available is very limited. Underweighting of small probabilities was observed in the gain domain when both description and experience were provided. The divergence observed from the prospect theory suggests a need for a separate or modified theory of decision making under risk. Recent studies suggest a possible role of probability weighting in the choice behaviour under risk. We investigated both gain and loss domains with and (...) without feedback for small and large probability conditions. We characterized the shape of the probability weighting function by a two-parameter functional form representing discriminability (concave-convex shape) and attractiveness (level of absolute weights relative to objective probability). We replicated four-fold pattern of risk attitude on non-WEIRD population. We find that feedback leads to underweighting of small probabilities and overweighting of large probabilities in the gain domain and overall underweighting of probabilities in the loss domain. We find that underweighting of small probabilities is driven by changes in discriminability and attractiveness components in the gain domain and changes in the attractiveness component in the loss domain. We have interpreted the results by proposing an updated belief-based account of decisions under uncertainty in which feedback, when available, influences the probability weighting mediating the choice behaviour. (shrink)

The use of a placebo arm in clinical trials is unethical if there is an active comparator that is acceptably safe and effective. We argue that reasonable evidence of effectiveness and safety of an inexpensive alternative to an expensive therapy is sufficient to require that the inexpensive therapy be included as a comparator when the expensive therapy is tested, and that use of an inactive placebo comparator only is not ethical. For example, studies of the expensive drug eplerenone for congestive (...) heart failure have not included a spironolactone arm, although there is reasonable evidence that spironolactone would be safe and effective, and spironolactone is inexpensive. The requirement to study inexpensive therapies is based on avoidance of unnecessary cost in medical care as an example of non-maleficence. Several ethical actors in the design, conduct, and publication of clinical trials and their results bear responsibility for the appropriate conduct of clinical trials. That responsibility includes protecting study subjects from being asked to participate in clinical trials that serve primarily to promote the use of new and expensive therapies. (shrink)

1. Manipur is a state in the Northeast region of India with a history of ongoing militarized social structure. ‘Northeast’ is a term used to label an entire region by the Indian state, which has a...

Development is a process of achieving a right balance between economic growth and psychic income growth. A foreign investor’s manner of conducting business in a country could result in any of four scenarios in which economic/psychic income is low/inadequate, high/inadequate, low/adequate, or high/adequate. Foreign investment will contribute to development only if it reflects the fourth scenario. A responsible corporation can contribute to money income and more importantly to psychic income of a company’s workers. This paper examines the corporate responsibility performance (...) of Indian and Chinese investments in Zambia’s mining sector. The paper finds that while Chinese companies seem to be operating close to the first scenario, Indian companies are operatingbetween the first and fourth. Thus, neither of them is contributing to true development. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

In giving a historically specific account of the self in early twentieth-century India, this article poses questions about the historiography of nationalist thought within which the concept of the self has generally been embedded. It focuses on the ethical questions that moored nationalist thought and practice, and were premised on particular understandings of the self. The reappraisal of religion and the self in relation to contemporary evolutionary sociology is examined through the writings of a diverse set of radical nationalist intellectuals, (...) notably Shyamji Krishnavarma, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Har Dayal, and this discussion contextualizes Mohandas Gandhi. Over three related sites of public propaganda, philosophical reinterpretation and individual self-reinvention, the essay charts a concern with the ethical as a form of critique of liberalism and liberal nationalism. While evolutionism and liberalism often had a mutually reinforcing relationship, the Indian critique of liberalism was concerned with the formation of a new moral language for a politics of the self. (shrink)

There is a paucity of treatment options for cognitively normal individuals with drug resistant genetic generalized epilepsy. Centromedian nucleus of the thalamus deep brain stimulation may be a viable treatment for GGE. Here, we present the case of a 27-year-old cognitively normal woman with drug resistant GGE, with childhood onset. Seizure semiology are absence seizures and generalized onset tonic clonic seizures. At baseline she had 4–8 GTC seizures per month and weekly absence seizures despite three antiseizure medications and vagus nerve (...) stimulation. A multidisciplinary committee recommended off-label use of CM DBS in this patient. Over 12-months of CM DBS she had two GTC seizure days, which were in the setting of medication withdrawal and illness, and no GTC seizures in the last 6 months. There was no significant change in the burden of absence seizures. Presently, just two studies clearly document CM DBS in cognitively normal individuals with GGE or idiopathic generalized epilepsy [in contrast to studies of cognitively impaired individuals with developmental and epileptic encephalopathies ]. Our results suggest that CM DBS can be an effective treatment for cognitively normal individuals with GGE and underscore the need for prospective studies of CM DBS. (shrink)

It has been argued that attention and awareness might oppose each other given that attending to an adapting stimulus weakens its afterimage. We argue instead that the type of attention guided by the spread of attention and the level of processing is critical and might result in differences in awareness using afterimages. Participants performed a central task with small, large, local or global letters and a blue square as an adapting stimulus in two experiments and indicated the onset and offset (...) of the afterimage. We found that increases in the spatial spread of attention resulted in the decrease of afterimage duration. In terms of levels of processing, global processing produced larger afterimage durations with stimuli controlled for spatial extent. The results suggest that focused or distributed attention produce different effects on awareness, possibly through their differential interactions with polarity dependent and independent processes involved in the formation of color afterimages. (shrink)

This paper examines a recent argument in favour of strong precautionary action—possibly including working to hasten human extinction—on the basis of a decision-theoretic view that accommodates the risk-attitudes of all affected while giving more weight to the more risk-averse attitudes. First, we dispute the need to take into account other people’s attitudes towards risk at all. Second we argue that a version of the non-identity problem undermines the case for doing so in the context of future people. Lastly, we suggest (...) that we should not work to hasten human extinction, even if significant risk aversion is warranted. (shrink)

This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...) interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions. (shrink)

The current study has mapped the impact of changes in different climatic parameters on the productivity of major crops cultivated in India like cereal, pulses, and oilseed crops. The vulnerability of crops to different climatic conditions like exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive indicators along with its different components and agribusiness has been studied. The study uses data collected over the past six decades from 1960 to 2020. Analytical tools such as the Tobit regression model and Principal Component Analysis were used for (...) the investigation which has shown that among climatic parameters, an increase in temperature along with huge variations in rainfall and consistent increase in CO2 emissions have had a negative impact by reducing crop productivity, particularly cereals and oilseed. Among various factors, adaptive factors such as cropping intensity, agricultural machinery, and livestock density in combination with sensitivity factors such as average operational land holding size and productivity of cereals, and exposure indicators like Kharif temperature, heavy rainfall, and rate of change in maximum and minimum Rabi temperature have contributed significantly in increasing crop vulnerability. The agribusiness model needs to be more inclusive. It should pay attention to small and remote farmers, and provide them with inclusive finance that can facilitate the adoption of climate-smart financial innovations, serve the underserved segments, and help them reach the target of a sustainable and inclusive agribusiness model. Though the social, technological, and economic initiatives can enhance the adaptive capacity of farmers, political measures still have a major role to play in providing a healthy climate for agriculture in India through tailored adaptive approaches like the adoption of craft climate adaptation program, dilating the irrigation coverage and location-centric management options. Hence, multidisciplinary and holistic approaches are worth emphasizing for evaluating the future impacts of change in climate on Indian agriculture. (shrink)

Act-consequentialism (C) is self-effacing for an agent iff that agent’s not accepting C would produce the best outcome. The question of whether C is self-effacing is important for evaluating C. Some hold that if C is self-effacing that would be a mark against it (Williams 1973: 134); however, the claim that C is self-effacing is also used to defend C against certain objections (Parfit 1984: Ch. 1, Railton 1984). -/- In this paper I will show that one argument suggested by (...) Parfit and Railton fails to establish that C is self-effacing for individuals. However, a slightly different argument may show that C is self-effacing for groups. This raises the intriguing possibility that it might be right for an individual, but not for a group of which they are a member, to accept a moral theory. This possibility, odd though it seems, might be helpful to consequentialists. (shrink)

In his famous ‘Integrity Objection’, Bernard Williams condemns utilitarianism for requiring us to regard our projects as dispensable, and thus precluding us from being properly committed to them. In this paper, I argue against commitment as Williams defines it, drawing upon insights from the socialist tradition as well as mainstream analytic moral philosophy. I show that given the mutual interdependence of individuals (a phenomenon emphasised by socialists) several appealing non-utilitarian moral principles also require us to regard our projects as dispensable. (...) This means that those who endorse those principles cannot appeal to Williams’s argument against utilitarianism. It also puts pressure on his thought that moral theories ought to permit commitment – in fact, it suggests that they ought not. Regarding one’s projects as dispensable may be alienating, and this may motivate us to hang onto commitment and reject these non-utilitarian principles along with utilitarianism. However, commitment also threatens a kind of alienation – from other people. Drawing upon the socialist tradition again, I argue that avoiding this form of alienation is necessary for proper engagement with our projects, and thereby with ourselves. (shrink)

The Bhagavad Gita's philosophical and political significance remains forever contemporary. In this volume a group of leading historians reflect on the significance of the Bhagavad Gita for political and ethical thinking in modern India and beyond. These essays contribute new perspectives to historical, contemporary and global political ideas. Violence and nonviolence, war, sacrifice, justice, fraternity and political community were constitutive of India's political modernity, and it was to these questions that Indian public figures turned their attention in the nineteenth and (...) twentieth centuries. Oriented towards the future, these commentaries and interpretations of a text that locates war as the central problem of human life have detached the Gita from antiquity and made it foundational for India's modernity. The book would be of interest to academic researchers as well as general readers interested in South Asian history, Indian philosophy and religion. (shrink)

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs are increasingly popular corporate marketing strategies. This paper argues that CSR programs can fall along a continuum between two endpoints: Institutionalized programs and Promotional programs. This classification is based on an exploratory study examining the variance of four responses from the consumer stakeholder group toward these two categories of CSR. Institutionalized CSR programs are argued to be most effective at increasing customer loyalty, enhancing attitude toward the company, and decreasing consumer skepticism. Promotional CSR programs are (...) argued to be more effective at generating purchase intent. Ethical and managerial implications of these preliminary findings are discussed. (shrink)

Developing countries often rely on consumption taxes, because these are broad, easy to administer, and harder to evade. However, the taxation system becomes inherently regressive. To counter this problem of the regressive nature of consumption taxes, there is a temptation among policymakers to address equity concerns through a multiplicity of rates, making the consumption tax system complex. Here, complexity is considered the by-product, or companion, to pursuing goals of equity. Complex tax systems, however, pose a different problem relating to equity. (...) Assuming a minimum fixed cost of compliance imposed by a complex tax system, smaller firms and individuals face a much higher cost of compliance relative to larger firms and richer individuals. Oligarchic sectors dominated by a few large firms also find it easier to organize and lobby to get favorable rates compared to competitive sectors with small firms. Though complexity is considered a by-product of several equity-enhancing measures, the Indian experience with its Goods and Services Tax reform serves demonstrates the opposite, that there is a trade-off between equity and complexity. (shrink)

Utilitarianism is the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being—that is, that maximises the sum of whatever makes life worth living, with each person’s life equally weighted. The promise of utilitarianism is to reduce morality to one simple principle, easily incorporated into policy analysis, economics and decision theory. However, utilitarianism is not popular amongst moral philosophers today. This is in large part due to the influence of (...) Williams’s ‘Integrity Objection’ (1973). Though the Integrity Objection has been influential in turning philosophers against utilitarianism, it is also difficult to make precise, evidenced by the myriad interpretations in the literature. In this paper I interpret the objection as holding that agents who accept utilitarianism cannot, as a matter of psychology, be committed to their projects. I explore other interpretations, finding some to be inconsistent with Williams’s approach, and others to be relatively easily answerable by the utilitarian. The psychological problem I identify is harder for utilitarians to avoid, though I have begun to offer a response in other work. (shrink)

Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection (...) to make such a tiny impact on the world that it makes no expected difference to the outcomes with which we’re concerned. I argue that even if this is impossible, there are cases in which each action makes no difference, not because it has such a tiny effect on the world, but because if it were not performed, a similar action would be. This recognition allows us to connect these problems with discussions of structural injustice. (shrink)

This paper introduce a new variant of the Genetic Algorithm whichis developed to handle multivariable, multi-objective and very high search space optimization problems like the solving system of non-linear equations. It is an integer coded Genetic Algorithm with conventional cross over and mutation but with Inverse algorithm is varying its search space by varying its digit length on every cycle and it does a fine search followed by a coarse search. And its solution to the optimization problem will converge to (...) precise value over the cycles. Every equation of the system is considered as a single minimization objective function. Multiple objectives are converted to a single fitness function by summing their absolute values. Some difficult test functions for optimization and applications are used to evaluate this algorithm. The results prove that this algorithm is capable to produce promising and precise results. (shrink)

Some of the world's most powerful corporations practise what Shoshana Zuboff (2015; 2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The core of their business is harvesting, analysing and selling data about the people who use their products. In Zuboff's view, the first corporation to engage in surveillance capitalism was Google, followed by Facebook; recently, firms such as Microsoft and Amazon have pivoted towards such a model. In this paper, I suggest that Karl Marx's analysis of the relations between industrial capitalists and workers is (...) closely analogous to the relations between surveillance capitalists and users. Furthermore, three problematic aspects of industrial capitalism that Marx describes – alienation, exploitation and accumulation – are also aspects, in new forms, of surveillance capitalism. I draw heavily on Zuboff's work to make these parallels. However, my Marx-inspired account of surveillance capitalism differs from hers over the nature of the exchange between users and surveillance capitalists. For Zuboff, this is akin either to robbery or the gathering of raw materials; on the Marx-inspired account it is a voluntary sale. This difference has important implications for the question of how to resist surveillance capitalism. -/- Joint winner of the 2020 Philosophy essay prize. (shrink)

A foundational problem in population ethics is the “repugnant conclusion", introduced by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons. It holds that for any possible population of at least ten billion lives of very high positive welfare, there is some larger possible population of lives of very low positive welfare whose existence would be better, if other things are equal. I call this claim RC1. In this article, I argue that by carefully considering the nature and variety of possible lives of (...) very low positive welfare, and distinguishing RC1 from a related but stronger claim I call RC2, we can show that RC1 is more acceptable than it first appears. It has been claimed that perfectionism— that is, a special concern for the best things in life—is a reason to reject the repugnant conclusion. I argue that although perfectionism gives us a reason to reject RC2, it does not give us any reason to reject, and might in fact support, RC1. In his last two papers on the subject, Parfit develops a strategy for avoiding the repugnant conclusion that appeals in part to perfectionism. In the final part of this article, I argue that Parfit’s strategy can help us avoid RC2 but not RC1. If I am right that RC1 is more acceptable than RC2, this may not be an unwelcome result. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper takes Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a weak-theoretic body of work conditioned and characterized by weak affectivity: a philosophy that similarly avoids strong stances and strong feelings. This renders it vulnerable not only to attack, but to defense: attempts to defend Wittgenstein from accusations of complacency and quietism tend to resort to affectively and theoretically strong interpretations that move against the grain of his own writings. What, then, is generative or productive about weakness, if it invites attacks against which (...) it cannot defend itself? Drawing from Sianne Ngai's studies of weak affects and aesthetics, I argue that Wittgenstein's persistent replication of weak affects is a condition of his inquiry into ordinary life and language—that ordinariness has a structural weakness, which Wittgenstein's writings invite us to practice. (shrink)

The article evaluates how knowledge workers in new-age businesses in developing economies conceptualize and practise acts of individual social responsibility vis-à-vis the corporate social responsibility endeavours of the companies for which they work. The study aims to differentiate between the values that drive ISR and CSR in such organizations. On one hand, the study targets young information technology professionals between the ages of 25 and 35 years exploring the individual motivations for socially responsible behaviour, and it looks at CSR managers (...) responsible for strategizing and implementing CSR portfolio, representing the organizational imperatives of CSR behaviour and practice on the other. The study concludes with a conceptualization of how the convergence or otherwise of motivations between ISR and CSR in such organizations are defined and what are their determinants, with the derivative managerial implications for firms in developing economies in the context of managing the relatively younger workforce’s participation in their CSR efforts. (shrink)

A unique study of the earliest recorded "discourses" of the Buddha, taking an approach that is at once psychological, philosophical, and literary. The book is a series of essays on specific passages from the Buddha's original Discourses and is an introduction to the Buddha's radical empiricism for all people who like to read, think, and investigate.

Although the genetics of dorsal‐ventral polarity which leads to mesoderm formation in Drosophila are understood in considerable detail, subsequent molecular mechanisms involved in patterning the mesoderm primordium into individual mesodermal subtypes are poorly understood. Two papers published recently (1,2) suggest strongly that an inductive signal from dorsal ectoderm is involved in subdividing the underlying mesoderm, and present evidence that one of the signalling factors is Decapentaplegic (Dpp), a member of the bone morphogenetic protein subgroup of the Transforming Growth Factor‐β (TGF‐β) (...) super family of proteins. (shrink)

Despite attempts to encourage whistleblowing, lingering reluctance to report questionable acts remains frustratingly apparent. Our objective is to examine the regret a professional anticipates when evaluating the action of reporting or not reporting, and whether the framing of the action influences regret. Responses from 263 professionals indicate that regret depends on the moral intensity of the situation and how the action is framed. Regret for whistleblowing is not comparable to regret for not remaining silent, despite the fact that these two (...) descriptions result in the same action. This important implication may inform the way we educate and encourage whistleblowing. (shrink)