The essays in this collection were developed by scholars expert in their own religious traditions, and were written to explain how those traditions intersect with the practices of business. While there have been other collections that attempt to relate faith to business, none has posed a common set of questions to contributors representing such a broad set of religious traditions. These include the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.These essays helpfully present the particular sources and thought patterns of each religious (...) tradition, and illuminate their respective values, belief structures and patterns of moral reasoning. Topics covered include: product safety and liability, downsizing and closures; the charging or receiving of interest; privacy in the workplace; contingent workers; bribery; and women in the workplace. This collection of essays will help deepen the bonds of mutual respect within increasingly diverse religious traditions in business organizations.The collection will serve a variety of audiences. For academic researchers the essays offer a set of historical claims and contemporary interpretations to use in formulating hypotheses about the ways believers interpret their involvement in business. For business practitioners the essays open up windows into the faith-worlds inhabited by those who work around them. And for those struggling to connect their work lives with their spiritual lives, these essays will offer resonances with organized religion to help them cope with the pressures of the business world. (shrink)

Relativism, provisionally definable as the view that no view is knowably better than any other, is widely accepted today. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand more fully what relativism is by looking at ancient and modern discussions of this view. ;Chapter one begins by considering Michael J. Sandel's recent discussion of a difficulty that modern liberalism faces in its acceptance of relativism. Sandel argues that relativism renders ineffective the attempt to promote toleration of various practices, and thus we (...) must argue for tolerating them in terms of their goodness. Sandel's suggestion that certain goods are knowable leads us to wonder whether the best life is knowable and hence to reconsider the principle of justice that seems to exclude knowledge of that life: Locke's principle of modern natural right. We first raise the question of whether the basis of the knowability of this principle is found in Locke's political work or his epistemological work. After considering Locke's epistemology and Husserl's revision of it, we suggest that Locke's political work is the principle's ultimate basis, for Locke's mechanistic epistemology presupposes that the highest good, or the Biblical God, has been ruled out. ;Chapter two is thus a reading of the opening chapters of the First Treatise, Locke's work confronting the problem of the Biblical God. We argue that Locke does not show, and is aware that he does not show, that man is naturally free, or that man is not in the hands of the mysterious God who orders human life by means of particular providence. Instead, Locke argues only for the supposition that man is naturally free. ;This result permits reconsideration, in chapter three, of Plato's discussion of relativism in the Theaetetus. After clarifying what relativism is, Plato suggests that there is no argument, beginning from perceptual experience, for this view. He also may suggest that relativism stems from the apparent awareness that we cannot explain the grounds of that experience, which could be the gods. (shrink)