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.

Salient landmarks enhance route learning. We hypothesised that semantically salient nostalgic landmarks would improve route learning compared to non-nostalgic landmarks. In two experiments, participants learned a route through a computer-generated maze using directional arrows and wall-mounted pictures. On the test trial, the arrows were removed, and participants completed the maze using only the pictures. In the nostalgia condition, pictures were of popular music artists and TV characters from 5 to 10 years ago. In the control condition, they were recent pictures (...) of these same artists and characters. In Experiment 1, in the test trial, participants in the nostalgia condition completed the maze faster than controls. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated these findings and extended them by exploring boundary conditions. Participants had to learn two mazes sequentially. In Maze 1, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks only at non-decision points (whereas we placed them at decision points in Experiment 1). In Maze 2, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks at decision points during acquisition but removed them in the test trial (whereas they were present in the test trial in Experiment 1). In both mazes, participants in the nostalgia (compared to control) condition completed the test trial faster. (shrink)

This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work.

Following are two short contributions to the book, _Criminal Law Conversations_: commentaries on Paul Robinson's discussion of "Empirical Desert" and Antony Duff & Sandra Marshal's discussion of the sharing of wrongs.

There is an "under-representation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change (Antony and Cudd 2012; Dotson 2012; Hassoun et al. 2022). In this paper, we present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early (...) as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the case study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change. (shrink)

Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England...

Bangladesh continues to experience stubbornly high levels of rural malnutrition amid steady economic growth and poverty reduction. The policy response to tackling malnutrition shows an overwhelmingly technocratic bias, which depoliticizes the broader question of how the agro-food regime is structured. Taking an agrarian and human rights-based approach, this paper argues that rural malnutrition must be analyzed as symptomatic of a deepening agrarian crisis in which the obsession with productivity increases and commercialization overrides people’s democratic right to culturally appropriate, good, nutritious (...) food. Using qualitative insights from a case study of three villages, this research illustrates how agricultural modernization and commercialization reproduce rural malnutrition by degrading local biodiversity and the rural poor’s access to nutrient-rich diets. In so doing, it undermines the official discourse’s simplistic and literal reading of malnutrition as a pathological health condition resulting from the mere absence of certain micronutrients in the human body, and thus questions the adequacy of the proposed solutions. Instead, this research suggests that solving malnutrition in large part involves facilitating the rural poor’s access to nutritious diets through democratizing and reorganizing the agriculture sector in a manner that is eco-friendly and unconstrained by market imperatives. It cautiously advances agroecology and food sovereignty as possible alternatives, while recognizing that overcoming the challenges agrarian class conflict, gender disparity and urban–rural divide pose would not be easy. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy, various attempts have been made in relation to placing our minds or mental states in the natural world or nature. In this context, there is a clear divide between naturalism and anti-naturalism, materialism and immaterialism, etc. Driven by the influence of naturalistic turn in philosophy and scientism, many philosophers have tried to put forth various naturalistic accounts of the relationship between mind and natural world. However, many of these accounts are naturalistic based on the modern scientific conception (...) of nature which has been hailed as the dominating conception of nature. John McDowell in his magnum opus Mind and World, while criticizing modern scientific account of the relationship between mind and world, has not resorted back to anti-naturalism. Instead, he has tried to give us certain clues to develop an account of an alternative form of naturalism which is at the same time radically different from both scientific naturalism and mysterious anti-naturalism. In this paper, I will try to search for an alternative naturalism following McDowell and examine to what extent this account is tenable. In this context, we shall discuss various approaches to understand the relation between reason/normativity (which is one of the significant constituting elements of our mind) and natural world. (shrink)

Digital sweatshops represent exploitative digital workplaces where individuals are compelled to work long hours under high demands for minimal compensation. This study employs in-depth, semi-structured interviews with digital workers to explore digital sweatshop operations’ challenges and adverse aspects, mainly focusing on ethical considerations. The collected data were transcribed and analyzed using grounded theory methodology. The findings highlight three key themes: conditions mitigating factors, organisational factors, and work environment factors, all of which contribute to the persistence of digital sweatshops. The study (...) advocates for comprehensive labour laws, education and advocacy for digital employees, mental health support, transparency and accountability, skill development, career advancement, and ethical business practices. These recommendations are intended to help governments and organizations create a fair and ethical digital workplace, prioritizing workers’ rights and well-being. (shrink)

This study aims to identify the ethical challenges in the process of product marketing. It conducted a bibliometric study to evaluate the major ethical concerns in the area of product marketing. The data for the current study was extracted using the Scopus database. The study uses VOSviewer and Biblioshiny-bibliometrix to analyze the data. The results revealed that in the twenty-first century, ethical concerns and research related to pharmaceutical marketing, consumption behavior, and sustainability have significantly grown and are emerging as important (...) issues. The study is novel in its approach and develops a theoretical model to know ethical issues related to product marketing with multidimensional process (i.e., identification, search strategy, and analysis) for a long-term sustainable business success. By this study, the academicians and researchers will focus greater attention on the rapidly developing human-techno-centric world to fulfill the organizations’ service promises. The study contributes to the marketing ethics literature, particularly to the literature related to ethical issues in product marketing. (shrink)

Event segmentation theory posits that people segment continuous experience into discrete events and that event boundaries occur when there are large transient increases in prediction error. Here, we set out to test this theory in the context of story listening, by using a deep learning language model (GPT‐2) to compute the predicted probability distribution of the next word, at each point in the story. For three stories, we used the probability distributions generated by GPT‐2 to compute the time series of (...) prediction error. We also asked participants to listen to these stories while marking event boundaries. We used regression models to relate the GPT‐2 measures to the human segmentation data. We found that event boundaries are associated with transient increases in Bayesian surprise but not with a simpler measure of prediction error (surprisal) that tracks, for each word in the story, how strongly that word was predicted at the previous time point. These results support the hypothesis that prediction error serves as a control mechanism governing event segmentation and point to important differences between operational definitions of prediction error. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 1, Page 7-10, January 2022.

The study is an attempt to understand the prevailing discourse in India on education as a right by closely reading the parliamentary debates on The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Educatio...

Purpose The aim of this research is to conduct a systematic review of the literature on responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) practices within the domain of AI-based Credit Scoring (AICS) in banking. This review endeavours to map the existing landscape by identifying the work done so far, delineating the key themes and identifying the focal points of research within this field. Design/methodology/approach A database search of Scopus and Web of Science (last 20 years) resulted in 377 articles. This was further filtered (...) for ABDC listing, and augmented with manual search. This resulted in a final list of 53 articles which was investigated further using the TCCM (Theory, Context, Characteristics and Methodology) review protocol. Findings The RAI landscape for credit scoring in the banking industry is multifaceted, encompassing ethical, operational and technological dimensions. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in banking is widespread, aiming to enhance efficiency and improve customer experience. Based on the findings of the systematic literature review we found that past studies on AICS have revolved around four major themes: (a) Advances in AI technology; (b) Ethical considerations and fairness; (c) Operational challenges and limitations; and (d) Future directions and potential applications. The authors further propose future directions in RAI in credit scoring. Originality/value Earlier studies have focused on AI in banking, credit scoring in isolation. This review attempts to provide deeper insights, facilitating the development of this key field. (shrink)

This book by an internationally reputed Indian scientist traces the developments of Science, Religion and Philosophy in human civilization through the ages. The common underlying bond-more specifically, a linkage of philosophy with both science and religion-has been examined incisively. All the three sub-areas of human culture have been presented from a holistic point of view, and at the same time, stressing some of their irreconcilable basic differences in scope and outlook. Meant primarily for general readers, the book achieves a fine (...) balance between basic comcepts, historical evolution and a critical unbiased analysis of rituals, dogmas, unresolved queries and it leads to an enlightened view of 'humanism', 'Nature', 'Unity of man', need for a new paradigm of social and political order transcending globalization and control of resources of weaker nations by supremacy in global power equation. The book reviews the wisdom of the ancient Hindus, Buddhism, Jainism and of the three semitic religions-Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It presents a concise account of the Indian Vedas, Vedangan, Saddarsana, the two epics and the Bhagavadgita, of the philosophy and science of the Greeks, science and technology of ancient Egypt, Babylonia and China. A valuable special feature is a summary of the status of present-day science, starting with the classical phase, and ending with the developments in the last century comprising the Theory of Relativity, quantum physics, genetics, various aspects of human consciousness, modern astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. Last but not least, the author critically reviews some of the presentday fashionable discourses on 'science as the best way to reach God' and leads the readers to an appraisal of the on-going researches on the unification of the four fundamental interactions of physical sciences. He ends with the inexorable conclusion that this unification, when fully achieved, would still not strictly identify the unique force as 'God as concieved in different religions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

Akshaya Mukul, Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, The New India Foundation, 2015. 540 pp., ₹799. ISBN: 139789351772309; 109351772306.

We propose a novel edge detector in the presence of Gaussian noise with the use of proximal support vector machine (PSVM). The edges of a noisy image are detected using a two-stage architecture: smoothing of image is first performed using regularized anisotropic diffusion, followed by the classification using PSVM, termed as regularized anisotropic diffusion-based PSVM (RAD-PSVM) method. In this process, a feature vector is formed for a pixel using the denoised coefficient’s class and the local orientations to detect edges in (...) all possible directions in images. From the experiments, conducted on both synthetic and benchmark images, it is observed that our RAD-PSVM approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art edge detection approaches, both qualitatively and quantitatively. (shrink)

Incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity are non‐Mendelian phenomena resulting in the lack of correlation between genotype and phenotype. Not withstanding the diversity in mechanisms, differential expression of homologous alleles within cells manifests as variations in penetrance and expressivity of mutations between individuals of the same genotype. These phenomena are seen most often in dominantly inherited diseases, implying that they are sensitive to concentration of the gene product. In this framework and the advances in understanding the role of microRNA (miRNA) in (...) fine‐tuning gene expression at translational level, we propose miRNA‐mediated regulation as a mechanism for incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity. The presence of miRNA binding sites at 3′ UTR, co‐expression of target gene–miRNA pairs for genes showing incomplete penetrance and variable expressivity derived from available data lend support to our hypothesis. Single nucleotide polymorphisms in the miRNA target site facilitate the implied differential targeting of the transcripts from homologous alleles. (shrink)

Examples are worked out using a new equation proposed in the previous paper to show that it has new physical predictions for mesoscopic systems.

We present an inventory of business ethics-related content to supplement and reinforce classroom education. The 23 films and documentaries introduced here allow the instructor to illustrate ethical issues in a manner which resonates with students. While sixteen of these selections involve fictitious plots, three selections (The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Inside Job) are documentaries, and four selections (Barbarians at the Gate, Rogue Trader, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Too Big to Fail) are based on a (...) dramatization of actual events. For each selection, we present a contextual synopsis and leading questions to help instructors demonstrate the existence of ethical issues so that students may gain a better understanding of the need for ethical behavior and practices in business. We also categorize various ethical breaches by functional business areas. (shrink)

Locke's contribution to the discussion was fourfold: First , he saw the importance of the problem; Second , he realized that the puzzle cases, the “strange suppositions,” were relevant; Third , he maintained “same” had a different meaning when applied to “person” from its meaning in other contexts; and, Fourth , he offered his much criticized solution of the problem.

Who Must Presume Whom to Be Innocent of What? This paper explores the roles that the presumption of innocence (PoI) can play beyond the criminal trial, in other dealings that citizens may have with the criminal law and its officials. It grounds the PoI in a wider notion of the civic trust that citizens owe each other, and that the state owes its citizens: by attending to the roles that citizens may find themselves playing in relation to the criminal law (...) (such roles as suspect, defendant, convicted offender and ‘ex-offender’), we can see both how a PoI protects us, beyond the confines of the trial, against various kinds of coercion, and how that PoI is modified or qualified as we acquire certain roles. To develop and illustrate this argument, I pay particular attention to the roles of defendant (both during the trial and while awaiting trial) and of ‘ex-offender,’ and to the duties that such roles bring with them. (shrink)

In this long-awaited book, Antony Duff offers a new perspective on the structures of criminal law and criminal liability. His starting point is a distinction between responsibility (understood as answerability) and liability, and a conception of responsibility as relational and practice-based. This focus on responsibility, as a matter of being answerable to those who have the standing to call one to account, throws new light on a range of questions in criminal law theory: on the question of criminalisation, which (...) can now be cast as the question of what we should have to answer for, and to whom, under the threat of criminal conviction and punishment; on questions about the criminal trial, as a process through which defendants are called to answer, and about the conditions (bars to trial) given which a trial would be illegitimate; on questions about the structure of offences, the distinction between offences and defences, and the phenomena of strict liability and strict responsibility; and on questions about the structures of criminal defences. The net result is not a theory of criminal law; but it is an account of the structure of criminal law as an institution through which a liberal polity defines a realm of public wrongdoing, and calls those who perpetrate (or are accused of perpetrating) such wrongs to account. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fogelin on Hume on Miracles Antony Flew I.Introduction In "What Hume Actually Said About Miracles"1 Robert Fogelin maintains that two contentions are essential to what, following Dorothy Coleman, he calls the "traditional interpretation" ofSection X ofthe first Enquiry. The first is that "Hume did not put forward an a priori argument intended to show that miracles are not possible"; the second, that "Hume did put forward an a (...) priori argument intended to show that testimony, however strong, could never make it reasonable to believe that a miracle had occurred." Fogelin further sees me as "virtually alone in challenging the traditional interpretation, arguing, in particular, that... Hume's argument was intended to do no more than place a 'check' on arguments put forward to establish... miracles on the basis oftestimony." Fogelin concludes his statement of what he wants to refute by quoting from my Hume's Philosophy ofBelief: What he is trying to demonstrate a priori in Part I is: not that, as a matter offact, miracles do not happen; but that, from the very nature of the concept—'from the very nature of the fact'—there must be a conflict of evidence required to show that they do. Fogelin's own contrary conclusion is agreeably forthright and decisive: "the traditional readingofHume's essay on miracles is wrong, and Flew, in rejecting the aspect ofthe traditional interpretation that is correct, is doubly wrong." II.What, indisputably, Hume did not say About all this the first thing which we need to recall is that Hume certainly does not present, and in consistency could not present, what is the most obvious a priori argument to show that miracles, defined as supernatural overridings ofthe order ofnature, must be (naturally and) physically impossible. That obvious a prior argument takes off from the semantic observation that to assert that a law of nature obtains is to assert, among other things, that the occurrence ofevents the occurrence of which would be inconsistent with the truth of that lawis (naturally and) physically impossible. Forit is only and precisely inasmuch as the assertion ofsuch laws embraces assertions ofphysical Volume XVI Number 2 141 ANTONYFLEW impossibility that it becomes logically possible to deduce contrary to fact implications from nomological propositions. It therefore follows immediately that miracles, thus defined, must be (naturally and) physically impossible. The key word 'miracle'has to be construed in this way since Hume is here concerned, primarily albeit not exclusively, with the possibility of proving the occurrence of a miracle "so as to be the foundation of a system of religion. I have taken care regularly to insert the parenthetic qualification "(naturally and)" in order to make it quite clear that no one is trying to rule out the occurrence of such Supernatural overridings as, by definition, fogically impossible. Being unable to discover any antecedent impression from which the idea of physical necessity could be derived, Hume disqualifies himself from appealing thus openly and directly to the necessary physical impossibility ofthe miraculous. But, even ifhe had to his own satisfaction succeededinlegitimatingthat crucial concept, it would still have been pointless here to point to the (natural and) physical impossibility of the miraculous—as if this was a reason for thinking that there have not in fact been and could not conceivably have been or be Supernatural overridings of the natural order. Had Fogelin noticed that Hume certainly did not present that obvious yet irrelevant a prior argument, he could not have concluded, not at least without emphatic qualification, "that this consensus on the first part of the traditional interpretation is unfounded."??. Proofs against proofs are no proofs In arguing about the interpretation of"the first part ofSection X ofthe Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Fogelin insists upon attending only to what Hume wrote in that one part ofone section. But suppose we refuse to follow him in imposing this curiously unscholarly self-denying ordinance upon ourselves. Then we find, in the very first sentence of Part II of that same Section X, that Hume is at pains to warnreaders that we are to construe the previous Part I: not as offering "an apriori argument... to show that testimony, however strong, could never make it reasonable to... (shrink)