Value-based education aims to train students with appropriate attitude and values when they are interacting with their friends, family and outside the school. It helps in developing the child’s Personality, Character, Citizenship, and Spirituality. Stories are an effective tool and an ideal medium through which children can be taught essential life lessons. In ancient India, children were taught values and ethics through the oral story-telling tradition. Stories from Indian Folk tales such as Panchatantra, Hitopodesha, Epics like Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita (...) were told to children during their childhood to teach them Ethics, Values which plays a significant role in their personality development. In this article, we have attempted to bring out the commonality between the values as given in Patanjali Yoga Sutras and HYP as Yamas (Social Discipline) and Niyamas (Personal Discipline) with the characters of Ramayana and the values given in Bhagavad Gita. It is easy to incorporate them in the curriculum with the help of stories class wise. (shrink)

In this paper I describe and analyze an economic situation involving two competitive organizations. I put forth the argument that because of the systemic nature of decision making relative to managing the requirements of utilizing a descriptive equation that determines how many people an economic system can support, that even if all the players in the situation act ethically, the results will still be harmful, and necessarily so, to the system and to many innocent people. I will demonstrate that harming (...) innocent people is required and morally defensible given the choices available. The best one can do is slow down the increase in disutilities and possibly operate the system within a range of acceptable behavior that minimizes the resulting harm to innocent people, even if we cannot entirely remove this harm. In this context ethics becomes the study of the acceptable as opposed to the preferable. (shrink)

It is often said that if free speech means anything it means freedom for the thought we hate. This core idea is generally referred to as “viewpoint neutrality” and is consistent with the liberal intuition that governments should remain neutral with regard to conceptions of the good life. None of the traditional defenses of free speech seem to secure viewpoint neutrality, however. Instead, each justification leaves room to censor some viewpoints. Ironically my defense of viewpoint neutrality does not come from (...) the liberal assumption that governments should remain neutral about the good life. I defend a version of the virtue argument for free speech that is explicitly perfectionist—-government does not have to remain neutral when promoting good lives for its citizens. Free speech is not just a means to promote virtue but is part and parcel of intellectual virtue—-a decidedly perfectionist value. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: This commentary gives voice to Richards’s desire to move away from traditional formats, such as the paper presentation, by digressing from the OPC format by illustrating how the proposal inspires and disseminates rather than merely adding any critical commentary.