Although Indic perspectives toward nature are now well documented, climate engineering discussions seem to still lack the views from Indic or other non‐Western sources. In this article, I will apply some of the Hindu and Jain concepts such as karma, nonviolence (Ahiṃsā ), humility (Vinaya ), and renunciation (Saṃnyāsa ) to analyze the two primary climate geoengineering strategies of solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). I suggest that Indic philosophical and religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, (...) and Jainism offer ethical concepts to call for humility in all acts of climate engineering leading to a favoring of CDR over SRM and a favoring of lifestyle changes (particularly vegetarianism) over both. I demonstrate these concepts by introducing the five great elements from the Hindu philosophy, two Hindu legends from Hindu mythology, the Indic ethical ideas of karma, renunciation, and humility, and the moral authority of Gandhi. (shrink)

America now is home to approximately three million Hindus and Jains. Their contribution to the economic and intellectual growth of the country is unquestionable. Dharma in America aims to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in diverse fields such as: education and civic engagements medicine and healthcare music. Providing a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, Dharma in America also gives some insights into the ongoing issues and challenges these (...) important ethnic and religious groups face in the America today. (shrink)

On the life and philosophy of Kundakunda, 2nd century exponent of Jainism.

This study examines the variations in corporate social orientations across developed and developing countries in the context of a legitimacy threat. Conceptualizing CSO as signals, the author develops and validates a seven-code index of CSO that identifies executive orientations toward multiple stakeholders. Using this index on CEO shareholder letters from the United States, Germany, and India, the author finds that firms signal a multi-stakeholder image toward employees, communities, and environment during good times to enhance their social license to operate, and (...) yet such signals are not carried through during the threat period. This disconnect in signaling in the wake of a legitimacy threat is indicative of decoupling in corporate orientations and exposes the multi-dimensionality of the CSO concept. By adding a cross-national and temporal dimension, this research contributes toward better understanding the complexity behind CSOs and opens new areas for future research. (shrink)

This essay is conceived as a contribution to the academic debate on the ethical status of mystical traditions with regard to Jain asceticism in particular and—through comparison of Jain with Advaita Vedanta asceticism—to ideologies of radical quietism more generally. For both Jain and Advaita Vedantic ascetic traditions, the material world, and particularly the body, are the primary obstacles to spiritual development. We deal with the social, physical, and environmental implications of such a worldview, rather than with the (...) practice or the phenomenology or the doctrine of mysticism, which we grant to be an accurate reflection of a particular kind of cosmic experience. We address ethical issues, not metaphysical ones. In our discussion of Jain asceticism, we demonstrate that the basic problem (and promise) of quietism, in almost any cultural form, is the shocking realization it can occasion that the Real has absolutely nothing to do with the social or with any sort of ethical action. We argue that Jain asceticism cannot function as an adequate resource for contemporary ethics. Our normative concerns lie exclusively with the adequacy of Jain quietism in supporting a stable global community and a sustainable natural environment. One can be mystical without being ethical, and ethical without being a mystic. We conclude that the truths of quietism are both very profound and profoundly nonethical. (shrink)

Nationwide, almost 11% of women abuse drugs during their pregnancy. In some communities, these numbers are as high as 25–30%. Drug abuse is not limited to the poor or to African Americans, but is seen among affluent and white Americans as well. It is widespread, irrespective of race or social class. Annually, nearly 375,000 infants are exposed to drugs in America. Because of the terrible suffering caused by these births, and the conflicts caregivers experience in the treatment of these infants, (...) Trollope's quote is very apropos. Although caregivers have good motives in trying to rescue these babies and helping place them in a nurturing environment, despair about this objective is always close to the surface. (shrink)

We appreciated the important commentary provided by Michelle Oberman on our paper, “Discontinuing Life Support in an Infant of a Drug-Addicted Mother: Whose Decision Is It?” . For the most part we agree with Oberman's analysis of the issues, but there are seven points of variance, either of conception, emphasis, or accuracy. We wish to clarify these and welcome the chance her commentary provided to offer aspects of the social situation surrounding the case we presented.

Annotation Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? This book explores the above question with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi, and the Bhil communities.

Limiting identification of r.e. indexes for r.e. languages and limiting identification of programs for computable functions 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)

As Acharya Vidyanand writes in the Foreword of Samayasara, it is the ultimate conscious reality. The enlightened soul has infinite glory. It has the innate ability to demolish the power of karmas, both auspicious as well as inauspicious, which constitute the cycle of births and deaths, and are an obstacle in the path of liberation of the soul. Samayasara is an essential reading for anyone who wishes to lead a purposeful and contented life. It provides irrefutable and lasting solutions to (...) all our problems, concerning worldly ways as well as spiritual curiosities and misgivings. (shrink)

An ongoing debate in the United States relating to COVID-19 features the purported tension between containing the coronavirus to save lives or opening the economy to sustain livelihoods, with ethical overtones on both sides. Proponents of opening the economy argue that sustaining livelihoods should be prioritized over virus containment, with ethicists asking, “What about the risk to human life?” Defendants of restricting the spread of the virus endorse saving lives through virus containment but contend with the ethical concern “What about (...) people’s livelihoods and individual freedoms?” A commonly held belief is that political ideology drives these differential preferences: liberals are more focused on saving lives, whereas conservatives favor sustaining livelihoods with no additional government intervention in the free-market economy. We examine these lay beliefs among US residents in four studies and find that economic system justification (ESJ), an ideology that defends the prevailing economic system when under threat, is a reliable psychological predictor beyond political ideology. Specifically, compared to those who scored low on ESJ, people who scored high on ESJ judged China as more justified in downplaying the spread of virus to protect its interest in the global free-market economy, supported in-person over online learning, viewed shelter in place as less desirable, and perceived the opening of the Texas economy as more legitimate. We also find that multiple psychological mechanisms might be at work—resistance to market interventions, perceived legitimacy of opening the economy, perceived seriousness of the health crisis, and violation of human rights. (shrink)

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

Jainism is essentially a spiritual philosophy having a strong focus on the ultimate purification of the soul (ātmā). A human being usually when fails to understand things, when sorrows attack, etc., then he attributes to memorize the deva (celestial being) to seek help. Man can be guided both correctly and incorrectly by the deva and can establish a new system in a society that can be both in a positive form and a negative form. Thus, this involvement of deva in (...) human life brings change in his culture, behavior, spirituality, etc. There is a lot of misunderstanding about deva. In Jain literature, it is mentioned as the difference between Arhat (Supreme Divine) and deva (celestial being), which will help the man to move in the right direction. In various positive and negative ways, a human is affected by deva, in the past and the present. (shrink)

The system of sevenfold predication of the Jainas, while an invaluable tool in expounding the Jaina doctrine of "non-onesidedness" (Anekāntavāda), has also been criticized for being unsystematic and contradictory. In particular, the fourth predication has been suggested to embrace a kind of irrationality. An analysis is provided here that makes clear the logical basis underlying the seven predications. An interpretation is also offered of the problematic fourth predication that renders the system free from contradiction, and it is suggested that this (...) interpretation best captures the positive spirit of Anekāntavāda. (shrink)

The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, (...) a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners. (shrink)

This Is A Concise Narrative Of The Beginnings, History, Schisms, Social Organization And Cosmology Of The Living Jain Tradition. The Study Is Covered In 7 Chapters - Atheistic Jainism? - Textual Sources And Ethnographic Literature - The Grand Transition In Jainism: Digambar And Shvetambar As Continuity And Change - The Shvetambar `Church` - The Digambar Case Reconsidered: Contemporary Period - The Digambar Jains Of North India: Society And Religion In Baraut, Uttar Pradesh - The Kanji Swami Panth: Contestation, Cosmology (...) And Confrontation. Condition Good. (shrink)

In ‘Theorizing resistance: Foucault, cross-cultural psychiatry and the user/survivor movement,’ Swerdfager develops a rich argument about the relationship between user/survivor voices, cross-cultural psychiatry, and the emerging discipline of global mental health. The paper questions the future directions of cross-cultural psychiatry in the era of GMH, and discusses the implications for user/survivor voices. This commentary engages with Swerdfager, focusing on the historical development of cross-cultural psychiatry and the discipline’s evolving relationship with GMH, concluding with a brief discussion of recent developments with (...) potential to open up new spaces for user/survivor voices as mental health... (shrink)

This article examines how efforts at legal legibility acquisition by gender diverse litigants result in problematic (e.g., narratives counter to self-identity) and, at times, erroneous discourses on sex and gender that homogenize the litigants themselves. When gender diverse persons approach the court with a rights claim, the narrative they present must necessarily limit itself to a normative discourse that the court may understand and, therefore, engage with. Consequently, the everyday lived experiences of gender diverse persons are often deliberately erased from (...) the narrative as litigants mould themselves into the pre-existing normative legal categories of gender and sex. As a result of such mechanisms, the article finds that gender diverse litigants face epistemic injustice in the courts as their legal legibility is constructed within a constraining gender binary paradigm of judicial discourse.The article explores the trajectory of transgender rights in India, through an analysis of case law prior to and post the landmark NALSA decision, to understand how the approach to transgender rights and identities has been shaped by and shapes, in turn, normative conceptions of gender. The article argues for the incorporation of temporal pluralism into the law that would allow courts to hear gender diverse litigant accounts premised on contemporary gender diversity beyond the binary (rather than incontestable prior understandings based in past precedent), which would better account for such social injustices. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance (...) the discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

A model for effective management of human resources for organizational effectiveness is proposed. Several elements of this model are evaluated in the light of the failure of personnel and industrial relations policies of organizations in Canada. Suggestions are put forward to improve worker performance and job satisfaction as well as organizational growth and survival.

Acceptable programming systems have many nice properties like s-m-n-Theorem, Composition and Kleene Recursion Theorem. Those properties are sometimes called control structures, to emphasize that they yield tools to implement programs in programming systems. It has been studied, among others by Riccardi and Royer, how these control structures influence or even characterize the notion of acceptable programming system. The following is an investigation, how these control structures behave in the more general setting of complete numberings as defined by Mal'cev and Eršov.

"This book... is the English translation of the Hindi book Tattvārthasūtra with Upādhyāya (now Ailācārya) Srutasāgarji, as the principal commentator and edited by Dr Sudeep Jain in Hindi"--P. 3.

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed. It traces the links between his conception and that of the French tradition of historical epistemology which is critical of positivism. How Bourdieu extends their views, and those of Bachelard especially, beyond the realm of the natural sciences, to the social sciences and sociology in particular, is discussed. In the process he introduces new concepts (...) and methods, such as that of participant objectivation. His perspective reveals a convergence between the natural sciences and the social sciences as human endeavours striving for universal truths. This is reinforced and widened to include the humanities as well as demonstrated by his analysis of the literary field. The paper concludes with the observation that Bourdieu’s post-positivist science is a salutary alternative to the postmodern critique of science. (shrink)

Social development organizations increasingly employ artificial intelligence -enabled tools to help team members collaborate effectively and efficiently. These tools are used in various team management tasks and activities. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, this study explores various factors influencing employees’ use of AI-enabled tools. The study extends the model in two ways: a) by evaluating the impact of these tools on the employees’ collaboration and b) by exploring the moderating role of AI aversion. Data (...) were collected through an online survey of employees working with AI-enabled tools. The analysis of the research model was conducted using partial least squares, with a two-step model – measurement and structural models of assessment. The results revealed that the antecedent variables, such as effort expectancy, performance expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, are positively associated with using AI-enabled tools, which have a positive relationship with collaboration. It also concluded a significant effect of AI aversion in the relationship between performance expectancy and use of technology. These findings imply that organizations should focus on building an environment to adopt AI-enabled tools while also addressing employees’ concerns about AI. (shrink)

This volume is based on innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies.

We seek to understand how third-party observers respond to allegations of sexual transgressions, whether their responses vary and if so why, how they determine perpetrator sanctions, who is more forgiving of them, and what is the psychological mechanism underlying this preference. We draw on one dimension of Hofstede's theory of cultural orientations—power distance belief, and one dimension of Haidt's work on moral reasoning—moral decoupling. Results from three studies on recent real-life cases—those pertaining to Harvey Weinstein, Brett Kavanaugh, and Peter Martins—reveal (...) interesting, consistent, and dramatic findings pertaining to these research questions. Specifically, compared to observers who endorse a low power distance belief, high PDB observers selectively suspend judgments of culpability and express higher evaluations of the alleged perpetrators, are significantly more forgiving of them, convey a lower preference for naming and shaming them, and consider the alleged transgressions as less serious. These outcomes are predicated on the psychological mechanism of moral decoupling. Both high and low PDB respondents decouple the perpetrators’ competence and morality. However, high PDB observers gauge the actions of the perpetrators by emphasizing competence, while low PDB observers gauge their actions by emphasizing morality. (shrink)

The initial online publication contained a typesetting mistake. The original article has been corrected.

In its seventy-fifth year, the UN needs to reflect more seriously on its value in the current global scenario, the current flow of ideas, and the current flow of power that is prevalent in the world. It is important to recall that the UN was founded after World War II as a way of addressing conflict at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. Negotiating peace, attempting to provide some form of justice, and affirmation of human rights seemed to (...) be the aspiration. It is within this context that women engaged in affirming their own special location in society and economy. However, over the years the UN has revealed its inability to fulfill these goals. Perhaps in the midst of all these failures, the only category of people that has drawn strength from the UN, but now has to leave it behind, are women. Scattered as they were across a world of distances, women of different cultures and classes found strength in numbers and, through the UN system and the conferences they convened, became a power of their own. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that today, however, women do not need and cannot have their aspirations be facilitated by the UN, because in their engagement with one another they have also recognized their differences. Being of similar gender does not necessarily overcome other oppressive differences. (shrink)

“Ethical dilemmas…are rarely simple and stark but are, instead, multifaceted, complex, and gut wrenching for parents and care givers alike.” This is never more the case than when one must treat vulnerable babies who are not, nor ever can be competent to offer us some guidance about that treatment. The ethical problems are heightened when the parents, or the single mother, are incompetent to make decisions themselves, for example, because of drug addiction. In such cases, when the baby is premature (...) and suffering the effects of the drugs the mother has taken, and the mother herself is either no longer available for consultation or so damaged by her own addiction that she is not a reliable decisionmaker, the usual trend In the United States is to initiate treatment and continue until it is virtually certain that the infant will die. (shrink)