Drawing on both theoretical debates and case studies from around the world, this book explores how the politics of reconciliation relates to various models of democratic citizenship.

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical (...) injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable. (shrink)

The internationalization of professional practices and the export of western technology and higher education are accompanied by a need to establish international standards of ethics across different professions. This pioneering and provocative group of essays constitutes essential reading for those interested in understanding, formulating, and teaching ethical standards for professions in an international and particularly cross-cultural context.

SECTION ONE THE STATE OF OURWORLD It may easily be said that our so called modern twentieth century was one of the most barbaric and wasteful centuries of human history. Here are the statistics: World War I (9.7 million military and 9 ...

This book provides a careful and comprehensive, step-by-step method for providing clinical ethics consultation. This Guide can be applied in almost any healthcare setting and takes the reader from establishing an intake process and developing strategies for interviewing those involved in the situation, to undertaking a consultation meeting and following up on a clinical consult. The book is an invaluable resource to any clinical ethicist, or committee or consult team member who is seeking to provide their service with rigour and (...) quality. Written in simple language, the book explores ideas and concepts that will help the reader to understand, think through, and ultimately offer useful ethical consultation when facing ethically challenging issues. (shrink)

This workbook is a companion to Clinical Ethics Consultation: A Practical Guide to Changing Culture, Building Capacity and Solving Problems Case by Case. The Toolkit lays out the process for clinical ethics consultation in a series of steps within five phases: Pre-Consult, Interviews, Mid-Consult, Consult meeting(s), and Post-Consult. For each step, the Toolkit provides directions for how to complete it, tips for success, and worksheets for capturing data and analysis. The Clinical Ethics Consultation Toolkit is the playbook from which clinical (...) ethics consultants can draw methods and strategies for effectively delivering ethics consultation. (shrink)

Study of the philosophy of ethics introdued by noted ancient philosophers, reformers and moralists.

This volume identifies, discusses and addresses the wide array of ethical issues that have emerged for engineers due to the rise of a global economy. To date, there has been no systematic treatment of the particular challenges globalization poses for engineering ethics standards and education. This volume concentrates on precisely this challenge. Scholars and practitioners from diverse national and professional backgrounds discuss the ethical issues emerging from the inherent symbiotic relationship between the engineering profession and globalization. Through their discussions a (...) deeper and more complete understanding of the precise ways in which globalization impacts the formulation and justification of ethical standards in engineering as well as the curriculum and pedagogy of engineering ethics education emerges. (shrink)

Health care providers’ interpretation of law can have intended and unintended effects on health care delivery in Canada. At times, health care providers encounter situations where they perceive the law to conflict with their sense of what is most ethically justified. In many cases, these health care providers feel especially torn because they assume that the legal requirements must dictate the decision, and cannot be explored or questioned. We challenge this assumption: the law is not as cut-and-dried as some assume; (...) therefore, its significance to health care decisions should be carefully considered. Within a systematic ethics process, legal considerations can be a source of values and information and can create opportunities for further dialogue. This approach is justified because it appropriately reflects the relationship of the law to ethics. This way of thinking about the law and ethics also avoids potentially harmful consequences of legalistic approaches to decision-making, such as breakdowns in communication, adversarial relationships, and a reduction of ethically complex decisions to simple rule following. (shrink)

This article extends Georg Lukács’s theorization pertaining to historical fiction by considering a novel written in response to colonial conditions. It treats Abdulhalim Sharar’s Urdu Malik al-‘Aziz and Virginia (1888) as a case where a fictional version of the encounter between Muslims and Christians during the crusades in the twelfth century is used to counter the colonial Indian present in the nineteenth century. I suggest that novels such as Sharar’s exemplify a vein of global thought since the nineteenth century that (...) resisted historicism but without abandoning the notion that the past was real. Deploying a genre that came to the fore in colonial conditions, Sharar imagines an alternative future by narrating the past otherwise via fiction. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the ideological, social, economic, and political aspects of life on planet Earth. This study examines the visuals associated with COVID-19 published in Pakistani English newspapers. Visual data were collected through purposive sampling, analyzed using social semiotic theory, and discussed through a post-colonial lens. The visual data were grouped as Global South and North owing to socioeconomic and political categorization among countries. The results show that the Pakistani media portrayed the Global South as rebellious, miserable, and (...) noisy against the government. However, the Global North is depicted as civilized, stress-free, and abiding by all the instructions of the authority. Analysis shows that the two realms are visually represented as remarkably divergent from each other, and media portrayal has attached stereotypes identities to the nations. Pakistani media follows a basic restricted code of conduct, which should be extended to avoid labelling and politicizing groups and nations. (shrink)

This study has proposed to apply change leadership as a vehicle forward for sustaining the growth of the tourism industry to eradicate poverty through the Pakistani tourism industry. Applying a mixed method approach, this article has attempted to uncover the role a change leader can play to help achieve the United Nations’ sustainable development goals of poverty reduction. In this study, one of the authors interviewed stakeholders of the tourism industry to find out the major drivers of the industry and (...) identify the leadership style that may prove to be effective in the said industry. In the next phase of the study, a survey method approach was used where different tourism companies and hotel chains were included for analysis. The study aimed to check employee’s perception of change leadership and its impact on their resilience and ultimately the sustainable organization performance of companies’ operationalizing in the sector with moderating impact of sustainable tourism attitude in times of a crisis. In total, 430 full-time workers in the tourism industry were contacted for a self-administered survey achieving a response rate of 83%. The findings of the study confirmed that in the presence of a change leader, the process of adaptation to sudden changing situations amidst financial crises, pandemic, and climatic change, becomes bearable and employees can cope with the work situations without pushing them to quit the industry. The study has a significant contribution toward a rapidly growing and focused industry, which can play a major role in the economy of any country leading toward job creation and poverty reduction. (shrink)

This research topic is very important and shows the social causes of poverty alleviation. Poverty is today’s biggest problem in Pakistan. This research made an effort to find out and to discuss the related elements of poverty. The Researcher proposed to study problems and prospects of hand embroidery in the cottage industries, Cottage industry sector plays a dominant role in the economic development of countries. In developing countries cottage industries are especially important in the context of employment opportunities, equitable distribution (...) of national income, balanced regional growth, and development of different areas. A sample of 70 home-based workers selected from convenience sampling in Gadap Town, Karachi. After assembling data, we found that the government is providing the required level of support to hand embroidery, Respondents cannot perform household chores along with their work and create differences in the domestic economic conditions. (shrink)

Analyzing encounters between Europeans and their eastern others before the European Enlightenment, this book illustrates that adopting an intercultural perspective in western political theory is necessary because the West’s cultural others have played a foundational role in developing a distinct western cultural self-understanding.

Analyzing encounters between Europeans and their eastern others before the European Enlightenment, this book illustrates that adopting an intercultural perspective in western political theory is necessary because the West’s cultural others have played a foundational role in developing a distinct western cultural self-understanding.

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Operational and financial sustainability have, over time, remained as issues in the microfinance industry. The microfinance industry is struggling to gain self-sufficiency in Pakistan due to non-performing loans and operating costs. Simultaneously, deliberation on corporate social responsibility is also considered in academic literature and organizational practices. However, studies on CSR and financial performance in the microfinance sector are scarce, especially in Pakistan. CSR will develop customer attraction and loyalty, employee attraction, motivation and commitment, MFIs' reputation and access to capital, and (...) eventually build financial performance. Interviews were conducted with branch managers of microfinance institutions to test previous questionnaires. A self-administered survey was conducted to collect data from the managers of the microfinance banks operating in Punjab. Descriptive and inferential statistics were performed to answer research questions using Smart PLS. Most of the microfinance institutions believe in social responsibilities but lacks fund allocation and approval from higher management, and results are in line with prior studies. These empirical findings lead to the perception that CSR is not a barrier performance in microfinance banks as they have access to capital. The results indicated a strong positive correlation between CSR and the financial performance of the MFIs. CSR also positively correlates with customer retention, employees' motivation and attraction, and business reputation. CSR was associated with access to capital but was found to be weak. The research also narrated the limitation and practical implications of the study. The study also discusses further research directions. (shrink)

This study aims to identify the influence of knowledge management practices on the entrepreneurial and organizational performance with the mediating effect of dynamic capabilities and moderating role of opportunity recognition. Data were gathered from 486 entrepreneurs and applied a structural equation model to test the hypotheses. We found that knowledge management practices have a positive and significant influence on dynamic capabilities, as well as have a significant impact on entrepreneurial and organizational performance. Moreover, results indicated that dynamic capabilities partially mediate (...) in the relationship between knowledge management practices on entrepreneurial and organizational performance. Furthermore, the relationship between knowledge management practices with entrepreneurial and organizational performance strengthening by opportunity recognition. Further, implications and limitations were discussed in the paper. (shrink)

Software defects prediction at the initial period of the software development life cycle remains a critical and important assignment. Defect prediction and correctness leads to the assurance of the quality of software systems and has remained integral to study in the previous years. The quick forecast of imperfect or defective modules in software development can serve the development squad to use the existing assets competently and effectively to provide remarkable software products in a given short timeline. Hitherto, several researchers have (...) industrialized defect prediction models by utilizing statistical and machine learning techniques that are operative and effective approaches to pinpoint the defective modules. Tree family machine learning techniques are well-thought-out to be one of the finest and ordinarily used supervised learning methods. In this study, different tree family machine learning techniques are employed for software defect prediction using ten benchmark datasets. These techniques include Credal Decision Tree, Cost-Sensitive Decision Forest, Decision Stump, Forest by Penalizing Attributes, Hoeffding Tree, Decision Tree, Logistic Model Tree, Random Forest, Random Tree, and REP-Tree. Performance of each technique is evaluated using different measures, i.e., mean absolute error, relative absolute error, root mean squared error, root relative squared error, specificity, precision, recall, F-measure, G-measure, Matthew’s correlation coefficient, and accuracy. The overall outcomes of this paper suggested RF technique by producing best results in terms of reducing error rates as well as increasing accuracy on five datasets, i.e., AR3, PC1, PC2, PC3, and PC4. The average accuracy achieved by RF is 90.2238%. The comprehensive outcomes of this study can be used as a reference point for other researchers. Any assertion concerning the enhancement in prediction through any new model, technique, or framework can be benchmarked and verified. (shrink)

Ranging from miniaturized biological robots to organoids, multi-cellular engineered living systems (M-CELS) pose complex ethical and societal challenges. Some of these challenges, such as how to best distribute risks and benefits, are likely to arise in the development of any new technology. Other challenges arise specifically because of the particular characteristics of M-CELS. For example, as an engineered living system becomes increasingly complex, it may provoke societal debate about its moral considerability, perhaps necessitating protection from harm or recognition of positive (...) moral and legal rights, particularly if derived from cells of human origin. The use of emergence-based principles in M-CELS development may also create unique challenges, making the technology difficult to fully control or predict in the laboratory as well as in applied medical or environmental settings. In response to these challenges, we argue that the M-CELS community has an obligation to systematically address the ethical and societal aspects of research and to seek input from and accountability to a broad range of stakeholders and publics. As a newly developing field, M-CELS has a significant opportunity to integrate ethically responsible norms and standards into its research and development practices from the start. With the aim of seizing this opportunity, we identify two general kinds of salient ethical issues arising from M-CELS research, and then present a set of commitments to and strategies for addressing these issues. If adopted, these commitments and strategies would help define M-CELS as not only an innovative field, but also as a model for responsible research and engineering. (shrink)

In step with rapid advancements in computer vision, vehicle classification demonstrates a considerable potential to reshape intelligent transportation systems. In the last couple of decades, image processing and pattern recognition-based vehicle classification systems have been used to improve the effectiveness of automated highway toll collection and traffic monitoring systems. However, these methods are trained on limited handcrafted features extracted from small datasets, which do not cater the real-time road traffic conditions. Deep learning-based classification systems have been proposed to incorporate the (...) above-mentioned issues in traditional methods. However, convolutional neural networks require piles of data including noise, weather, and illumination factors to ensure robustness in real-time applications. Moreover, there is no generalized dataset available to validate the efficacy of vehicle classification systems. To overcome these issues, we propose a convolutional neural network-based vehicle classification system to improve robustness of vehicle classification in real-time applications. We present a vehicle dataset comprising of 10,000 images categorized into six-common vehicle classes considering adverse illuminous conditions to achieve robustness in real-time vehicle classification systems. Initially, pretrained AlexNet, GoogleNet, Inception-v3, VGG, and ResNet are fine-tuned on self-constructed vehicle dataset to evaluate their performance in terms of accuracy and convergence. Based on better performance, ResNet architecture is further improved by adding a new classification block in the network. To ensure generalization, we fine-tuned the network on the public VeRi dataset containing 50,000 images, which have been categorized into six vehicle classes. Finally, a comparison study has been carried out between the proposed and existing vehicle classification methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed vehicle classification system. Consequently, our proposed system achieved 99.68%, 99.65%, and 99.56% accuracy, precision, and F1-score on our self-constructed dataset. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Objective: To contrast relief efforts for the 26 December 2004 tsunami with current global HIV/aids relief efforts and analyse possible reasons for the disparity. Methods: Literature review and ethical analysis. Results: Just over 273,000 people died in the tsunami, resulting in relief efforts of more than US$10 bn, which is sufficient to achieve the United Nation’s long‐term recovery plan for South East Asia. In contrast, 14 times more people died from HIV/aids in 2004, with UNAIDS predicting a US$8 bn (...) funding gap for HIV/aids in developing nations between now and 2007. This disparity raises two important ethical questions. First, what is it that motivates a more empathic response to the victims of the tsunami than to those affected by HIV/AIDS? Second, is there a morally relevant difference between the two tragedies that justifies the difference in the international response? The principle of justice requires that two cases similarly situated be treated similarly. For the difference in the international response to the tsunami and HIV/aids to be justified, the tragedies have to be shown to be dissimilar in some relevant respect. Are the tragedies of the tsunami disaster and the HIV/aids pandemic sufficiently different, in relevant respects, to justify the difference in scope of the response by the international community? Conclusion: We detected no morally relevant distinction between the tsunami and the HIV/aids pandemic that justifies the disparity. Therefore, we must conclude that the international response to HIV/aids violates the fundamental principles of justice and fairness. (shrink)

The use of slang, abusive, and offensive language has become common practice on social media. Even though social media companies have censorship polices for slang, abusive, vulgar, and offensive language, due to limited resources and research in the automatic detection of abusive language mechanisms other than English, this condemnable act is still practiced. This study proposes USAD, a lexicon-based intelligent framework to detect abusive and slang words in Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu Tweets. Furthermore, due to the nonavailability of the standard dataset, we (...) also design and annotate a dataset of abusive, offensive, and slang word Perso-Arabic-scripted Urdu as our second significant contribution for future research. The results show that our proposed USAD model can identify 72.6% correctly as abusive or nonabusive Tweet. Additionally, we have also identified some key factors that can help the researchers improve their abusive language detection models. (shrink)

Mining social network data and developing user profile from unstructured and informal data are a challenging task. The proposed research builds user profile using Twitter data which is later helpful to provide the user with personalized recommendations. Publicly available tweets are fetched and classified and sentiments expressed in tweets are extracted and normalized. This research uses domain-specific seed list to classify tweets. Semantic and syntactic analysis on tweets is performed to minimize information loss during the process of tweets classification. After (...) precise classification and sentiment analysis, the system builds user interest-based profile by analyzing user’s post on Twitter to know about user interests. The proposed system was tested on a dataset of almost 1 million tweets and was able to classify up to 96% tweets accurately. (shrink)