Comments on: JRE Focus on The 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Journal of Religious Ethics 26.2 “Rethinking Human Rights: A Review Essay on Religion, Relativism, and Other Matters” by David Little, Journal of Religious Ethics 27.1.

This book seeks to critically expound and appraise the thoughts of the foremost British philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart, with respect to three principal themes of his philosophy: substance, self, and immortality. Sharma draws on all of McTaggart’s major writings to provide a comprehensive exposition of his overall theory of reality.

Contributed articles on Advaita, Hindu philosophy, Vedic and Sanskrit literature.

ABSTRACT:Globally, family firms are the dominant organizational form. Family involvement in business and unique family dynamics impacts organizational strategy and performance. However, family control of business has rarely been adopted as a discriminating variable in the organizations and the natural environment (ONE) research field. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior we develop a conceptual framework of the drivers of proactive environmental strategy (PES) in family firms. We argue that family involvement in business influences the attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived (...) behavioral control of a firm’s dominant coalition. Together these factors determine the extent of the dominant coalition’s intentions to undertake PES. Further, family firms with lower levels of relationship conflict within the controlling family will be more successful in translating the dominant coalition’s intentions to allocate resources for the pursuit of PES. Research implications of the theory are discussed. (shrink)

Corporate ethical values (CEVs) can be viewed outside the realm of organizational training, standard operating procedures, reward and punishment systems, formal statements, and as more representative of the real nature of the organization (Organ, 1988). Past researchers have empirically demonstrated the direct influence of CEVs on job performance. This study argues that employees' perception of organizational fairness will create perceptual distortion of CEVs. The results of the study indicate that perceived fairness moderates the influence of CEVs on two seminal outcomes, (...) namely, job performance and commitment. The study offers prescriptive and descriptive insights to both academe and industry to understand the influence of CEVs and fairness on the performance outcomes of employees. (shrink)

The effect of germanium addition on the physical properties, i.e. density, molar volume, compactness, number of lone-pair electrons, average coordination number, heat of atomization, mean bond energy, cohesive energy and glass-transition temperature, of (Se80Te20)100− x Ge x (x = 0, 2, 4, 6) bulk glassy alloys was investigated. The density of the glassy alloys is found to decrease with increasing Ge content. The molar volume and compactness of the structure of the glass were determined from the measured density. The mean (...) bond energy is proportional to the glass-transition temperature. The cohesive energy of the samples has been calculated using a chemical bond approach and is correlated with an increase in the optical energy gap with increase in the Ge content. The heat of atomization was also calculated and correlated with the optical energy gap. The glass-transition temperature has been estimated using different methods and is found to increase with an increase of Ge content. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, corporate sustainability has been established as a legitimate research topic among management and organization scholars. This introductory article explores potential avenues for advances in research on corporate sustainability by readdressing some of the fundamental aspects of the sustainability debate and approaching some novel perspectives and insights from outside the corporate sustainability field. This essay also sketches out how each of the six articles of this special issue contribute to the literature by going back to some (...) of the conceptual roots of sustainability and/or by offering novel perspectives for research on corporate sustainability. As these six articles and the outlook on future research opportunities show, broadening the inquiry of corporate sustainability in terms of topics, theories, and methodologies holds considerable potential to improve our understanding of how decision makers and organizations respond to sustainability. (shrink)

This study engages with the experiences of Dalit-Bahujan (oppressed social castes) students at a higher education institution in India. Drawing from interview-based data, it explores the students’ narratives to map their educational experiences, taking the medium of instruction as a case in point. The study aims to deepen understanding of the intersection of caste and curricular-pedagogic context of higher education and its relation to knowledge production in institutional contexts. The findings highlight a significant gap between the socio-economic backgrounds of Dalit-Bahujan (...) students and the institutional and pedagogical structures, processes, and discourses they encounter. Based on these findings, the study further examines the framing of marginality at the intersection of caste, language and background of Dalit-Bahujan students. The lack of institutional support often relegates Dalit-Bahujan students to the margins within higher education institutions, not only excluding the disadvantaged social groups but also impinging upon the democratisation of knowledge production. We conclude that the question of medium of knowledge production necessitates a critical examination of which lives and voices are included in curricular and pedagogic processes. (shrink)

A cross-cultural examination of the well-known Hindu school of philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, in light of modern Western philosophy of religion. Western philosophy has long regarded Indian philosophy as its Other. Philosophy of religion, as we know it today, emerged in the West and has been shaped by Western philosophical and theological trends, while the philosophical tradition of India flowed along its own course until the late nineteenth century, when active, if tentative, contact was established between the West and the East. (...) This book provides a definite focus to this interaction by investigating issues raised in Western philosophy of religion from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta, the influential school of Indian thought. In promoting the emergence of a cross-cultural philosophy of religion, Arvind Sharma focuses on John H. Hick and his well-known work The Philosophy of Religion as representative of modern Western philosophy of religion and on Sankara, along with his modern successors such as M. Hiriyanna and S. Radhakrishnan, as representative of Advaita Vedanta. His argument is developed in a series of chapters devoted to central issues in the philosophy of religion (God, Belief, Evil, Revelation, Faith, Religious Language, Verification, Existence, Reality, Human Destiny) and concludes with a study of conflicting truth claims of different religions. (shrink)

The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility represents an unprecedented global collaboration facilitating the development and distribution of vaccines for COVID-19. COVAX pools and channels funds from state and non-state actors to promising vaccine candidates, and has started to distribute successful candidates to participating states. The WHO, one of the leaders of COVAX, recognised vaccine doses would initially be scarce, and therefore, prepared a two-staged allocation mechanism they considered fair. In the first stage, vaccine doses are distributed equally among participating countries, (...) while in the second stage vaccine doses will be allocated according to a country’s need. Ethicists have questioned whether this is the fairest distribution—they argue a country’s need should be taken into account from the start and correspondingly, have proposed a framework that treats individuals with equal moral concern, aims to minimise harm and gives priority to the worst-off. In this paper, we seek to explore these concerns by comparing COVAX’s allocation mechanism to a targeted allocation based on need. We consider which distribution would more likely maximise well-being and align with principles of equity. We conclude that although in theory, a targeted distribution in proportion to a country’s need would be more morally justifiable, when political realities are taken into account, an equal distribution seems more likely to avert a greater number of deaths and reduce disparities. (shrink)

Three doctrines have often been identified in the context of Hindu civilization as its distinctive markers: the doctrine of the varṇas (or the doctrine of the four classes), the doctrine of āśramas (or the doctrine of the four stages of life), and the doctrine of the puruṣārthas (or the doctrine of the four goals of life). The study of the last of these has been comparatively neglected and the doctrine has even been dubbed a myth (Krishna 1996, 189-205). The purpose (...) of this article is twofold: to establish the cogency of the doctrine of the puruṣārthas in the face of such criticism and to indicate the directions in which the doctrine could be developed further. (shrink)

Explores deep sleep (susupti), one of the three states of consciousness in Advaita Vedanta, and the major role it plays in this philosophy.

Hank Greely’s target article, “Human Brain Surrogates Research: The Onrushing Ethical Dilemma” reviews the manifold scientific and ethical questions surrounding models of human brains used i...

Limiting identification of r.e. indexes for r.e. languages (from a presentation of elements of the language) and limiting identification of programs for computable functions (from a graph of the function) have served as models for investigating the boundaries of learnability. Recently, a new approach to the study of "intrinsic" complexity of identification in the limit has been proposed. This approach, instead of dealing with the resource requirements of the learning algorithm, uses the notion of reducibility from recursion theory to compare (...) and to capture the intuitive difficulty of learning various classes of concepts. Freivalds, Kinber, and Smith have studied this approach for function identification and Jain and Sharma have studied it for language identification. The present paper explores the structure of these reducibilities in the context of language identification. It is shown that there is an infinite hierarchy of language classes that represent learning problems of increasing difficulty. It is also shown that the language classes in this hierarchy are incomparable, under the reductions introduced, to the collection of pattern languages. Richness of the structure of intrinsic complexity is demonstrated by proving that any finite, acyclic, directed graph can be embedded in the reducibility structure. However, it is also established that this structure is not dense. The question of embedding any infinite, acyclic, directed graph is open. (shrink)

Existing research posits that decision makers use specific cognitive frames to manage tensions in sustainability. However, we know less about how the cognitive frames of individuals at different levels in organization interact and what these interactions imply for managing sustainability tensions, such as in Bottom of the Pyramid projects. To address this omission, we ask do organizational and project leaders differ in their understanding of tensions in a BOP project, and if so, how? We answer this question by drawing on (...) a 5-year study of a BOP project of a global pharmaceutical company in India. In line with the existing research, we found three kinds of frames—paradoxical, business case, and business—held differently across organizational levels and over time. We also found that the shift in frames of both project and organizational leaders was mediated by the decision-making horizon. The initial divergence across organizational levels, seen in paradoxical and business frames, was mediated by long-term decision-making horizon. However, there was an eventual convergence toward business frames associated with the shift from long- to shorter-term decision-making horizons and one that led to the project’s closure. We contribute by proposing a dynamic model of cognitive frames in sustainability, where the research has either alluded to top-down or bottom-up understanding. (shrink)

The phenomenon of dreamless sleep and its philosophical consequences, particularly deep sleep's relevance to such issues as Self, Consciousness, Personal Identity, Unity of Subject, and Disembodied Life, are explored through a discussion, in varying detail, of certain noted doctrines and views--for example of Advaita Vedānta, Hegel, and H. D. Lewis. Finally, with a cue from Leibniz and McTaggart, the suggestion is made that at no stage during sleep is the self without some perceptions, however indeterminate. Support for this hypothesis is (...) claimed from the current psychoanalytic opinion that mental activity does not cease during any part of sleep and that human beings continue to dream even in the so-called dreamless state. (shrink)

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard said, “ It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” Management researchers are often attracted to the business and society domain because of a desire to impact management practice to create a better world. However, they often do not have the impact that they hope, because researchers tend to rely on historical data, but managers seek insights that inform future (...) actions. In this commentary, we describe our impact journey in three distinct moments in time. In the last one, both researchers and managers live forward. (shrink)

It is now well-appreciated by philosophers that contemporary large-scale ‘-omics’ studies in biology stand in non-trivial relationships to more orthodox hypothesis-driven approaches. These relationships have been clarified by Ratti (2015); however, there remains much more to be said regarding how an important field of genomics cited in that work—‘genome-wide association studies’ (GWAS)—fits into this framework. In the present article, we propose a revision to Ratti’s framework more suited to studies such as GWAS. In the process of doing so, we introduce (...) to the philosophical literature novel exploratory experiments in (phospho)proteomics, and demonstrate how these experiments interplay with the above considerations. (shrink)

This paper explores Gandhi’s attitude towards diversity of religions and examines as to how he attempted to bring inter-faith harmony. Religious diversity has been a topic of serious debate in the contemporary philosophical discourse on understanding religion. Religious pluralism is one of the approaches that deal with issues concerning the diversity of religions. It is believed that no single religion can make absolute claims about the nature of divine reality, its relation to man and the world. It stands in direct (...) opposition to exclusivism, inclusivism and also to fundamentalism by denying that any one religion is the sole possession of the whole truth. Different religions seem to put forward different and incompatible interpretations about the nature of ultimate reality, about the modes of divine activity, the nature and destiny of the human race. (shrink)

bk. 1. Historical -- bk. 2. Metaphysical.

Addressing religion and feminism on a global scale, this unprecedented book contains a nuanced and fine-tuned treatment of seven of the world's religions from a feminist perspective by leading women scholars. The fact that these authors share a dual but undivided commitment both to themselves as women and to their traditions as adherents imparts to their voices a prophetic quality, and if Mahatma Gandhi is to be believed, even scriptural value.

This article investigates the universal values scale, Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) for its applicability to measure cultural context-specific values. The study establishes a need to construct a new scale by identifying and incorporating Indian culture-specific values in SVS. Deriving data using self-assessment questionnaires from 709 respondents in 2 studies and analysing them using principal component analysis and structural equation modelling, the article reconceptualizes Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) and the 10 motivational value factors and develops a new 76-item Holistic Values (...) Scale (HVS) to measure Indian values using well-established scale development methods. The article further presents the research and policy implications and future research areas in this domain. (shrink)

In the present article, the concept of Human Development Index has been revisited so as to integrate the human values using the Corruption Perception Index measured by Transparency International, for different countries, as a simple generalization within the framework of existing Anand and Sen’s and Haq’s prescription. In this framework, a geometrical average of three indices corresponding to three dimensions, namely, the life expectancy, years of schooling and standard of living, was taken. In order to have HDI in broader perspective, (...) one has to integrate another important dimension known as human values. The main hypotheses of this article are: human values play an important role in human development; CPI has a strong correlation with HDI; and CPI is intimately linked with the outcome of human values. The important finding of this article is the successful establishment of these hypotheses which brought appreciable changes in the HDI when human values are integrated with it. As a result, most of the countries showed a vast decline in HDI, affecting the respective ranking of different countries. Such a value-based HDI is supposed to motivate even the richer countries to improve their HDI ranking in future. (shrink)

Plagiarism is growing at rampant rate due to available internet and the growing tendency of wrong practices of hiding the undocumented or documented sources. In academic institutions, plagiarism poses a threat to both students and instructors that ultimately leads to common plagiarism undetected, lost grants or public resources with over all poor quality. A step-by-step approach is proposed to avoid plagiarism for students by correct paraphrasing and quoting the words, sentences and paragraphs piece by piece to give the appropriate credit (...) to the author with existing work of its original author. This approach will avoid the parallel or reproduction of material inappropriately used in any way . Several examples are cited from documented websites of leading universities and institutions to make new freshman students aware of plagiarism and methods to avoid it. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of the study is to probe millennials on their perceptions towards consumer ethics and to generate new insights in the realm of consumer behaviour. Millennials constitute a big fraction of the total consumer base with immense buying power. Therefore, the exploration of the ethical perspective of millennials is of vital importance for organizations. Design/methodology/approach The study applies a grounded theory approach to explore the subjective experiences of consumers and draws insights from the data following an interpretivist epistemology. (...) Findings The findings revealed five prominent themes that throw light on the consumer’s ethical orientations. The findings extend Hunt Vettel’s theoretical framework and ethical relativism. Research limitations/implications This research is limited by the small sample of millennials studied. Practical implications The paper advances the Hunt Vittel theoretical framework of ethics and provides insights into the deontological and teleological evaluations of millennials while making ethical decisions. The study adds to the existing research on millennials materialism and ethical orientation. The organizations get an insight into the ethical perceptions of millennials. The findings reinforce the consumer’s perceived importance of adoption of green practices by the organizations. The organization’s investment in green practices precipitate a favourable image of the organization among the millennials. Originality/value Literature in ethics is replete with studies adopting positivist methodologies. This paper is unique as it shuns the methodological bias and adopts a grounded theory approach to study new age digitally savvy millennial consumers. (shrink)