This study contributes to the micro-credit literature by addressing the lack of philosophical dialogue concerning the issue of trust between micro-credit NGOs and rural poor women. The study demonstrates that one of the root causes of NGOs’ contested roles in Bangladesh is the norm that they use (i.e., trust) to rationalize their micro-credit activities. I argue that Bangladeshi micro-credit NGOs’ trust in poor village women is not genuine because they resort to group responsibility sustained through aggressive surveillance. I maintain so (...) by drawing on a trust-based theoretical framework that uses various philosophical insights. Drawing on the same conceptual framework, I also contend, somewhat softening the previous claim, that if micro-credit trust is trust at all, it is at most strategic, not generalized. For being strategic, it has many undermining effects on local social solidarity norms, rendering Bangladeshi micro-credit NGOs and strategic trust an odd couple with no moral compass. To bring forth the moral impetus in micro-credit activities, I lay out some recommendations intended for organizations, managers, and policymakers, consistent with normative corporate social responsibility initiatives. However, further studies can be initiated based on this paper, suggesting its importance for future research. (shrink)

The author examines the problem of motivation about future generations. He argues that though many philosophers think that direct motivations are problematic for future generations only, they are not unproblematic for the current generations too, and that the motivation problem can be solved if we consider the idea of “leaving the earth no worse.” He also shows why such an idea should be promoted and can motivate us to work in the best interests of current and future generations. The author (...) also contends that prioritizing the idea of “leaving the earth no worse” is not exclusively anthropocentric. (shrink)

Abstract— The term Health Informatics represent a huge volume of data that is collected from different source of health sector. Because of its’ diversity in nature, quite a big number of attributes, numerous amount data, health informatics can be considered as Big Data. Therefore, different techniques used for analyzing Big Data will also fit for Health Informatics. In recent years, implementation of Data Mining on Health Informatics brings a lot of fruitful outcomes that improve the overall healthcare system both in (...) analyzing disease and improving healthcare services which eventually reduce expenses. This paper will define the term the health informatics with a detail discussion about different source of heath informatics. Finally, some case study will be illustrated as examples where data mining techniques are applied to produce more efficient, in depth outcomes in analyzing disease. (shrink)

Abstract: The usage of ICTs has become essential component of the teaching methodology in the field of Education. ICT can equip the female students of the area with global information and they can meet the challenges of 21st century. The purpose behind the survey is to analyze the current practices of emerging technologies. The title of the study is; “The Uses of Information and Communication Technologies to Strengthen Girls Education in Govt. Girls Secondary Schools of Rural Areas of Sindh”. Objectives (...) of the research were to evaluate the existing practices of emerging technologies in girls’ secondary schools and to propose certain measures to strengthen girls’ education through the use of emerging technologies. Survey approach was followed to complete this study. A test, questionnaire, interview protocol and focused group discussion were used as data collection instruments. Random sampling method was followed for study. Sample size was; fifteen head teachers, twenty nine teachers, and nine hundred forty students and they were collected randomly from the population of government girls’ secondary schools. (shrink)

As social and interdependent beings, we have responsibilities to each other. One of them is to recognize each other appropriately. When we fail to meet this responsibility, we often stigmatize. In this paper, I argue that the COVID-19-related stigmatization is a variation of the lack of recognition understood as an orientation to our evaluative features. Various stereotypical behaviors regarding COVID-19 become stigmatized practices because of labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss and discrimination, and power. When people stigmatize COVID-19 victims, they orient (...) themselves to their evaluative quality of being vulnerable to the SARS-CoV-2 virus by internalizing the victims as dangerous, understanding them as separable, and being motivated to act with them differently. All this causes the COVID-19 victims to lose status and suffer discrimination for which they do not experience participatory parity in different facets of their lives, rendering the COVID-19-related stigmatization an appalling example of misrecognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an expansionist view of the Frickerian central case of testimonial injustice, citing examples from the South Asian context. To defend this expansionist position, I provide an argument in three parts. First, I argue that credibility deficit and credibility excess are entangled with each other in such a way that often, one produces the other. Secondly, I contend that we should not say that systematic testimonial injustice is a consequence of credibility deficit only because of the (...) entanglement between them. I also contend that for being the central case of testimonial injustice, identity prejudice should not be necessarily negative; it can be positive as well. Propounding a twofold condition of the status of a knower, the last part claims that testimonial injustice occurs when one of the two conditions remains unmet. (shrink)

A community based cross-sectional study was carried out by a self-structured questionnaire on 168 participants aged between 18 and 60 years at two arsenic prone area of Bangladesh to determine the association between extent of depression and socio-demographic as well as illness characteristics in arsenicosis population. The mean age ± SD was 42 ± 10.15 years. Female respondents were almost twice (63.1%) than the males (36.9%) in this study. Most of the respondents (94.0%) were shallow tube well water user. Among (...) them most (80.0%) of the respondents were detected as arsenic contaminated water consumer over more than six months. Study estimated that almost half (44.3%) of the participants had suffered from mild to moderate depression in the moderate arsenicosis group. Less than quarter (20.8%) participants suffered severe depression in severe arsenicosis group. Quarter (26.7%) had mild arsenicosis with no depression. This difference was not significant. Gender had significant influence on proportion of level of depression. Females significantly suffered more from depressive symptoms than males. More than two third of the female respondents suffered from some kind of depressive symptoms; where less than one third of the males were suffered from depressive symptoms. Age has no significant relation with depression. Respondents who were 48 years and above age group had highest percentages of severe depressive symptoms (35.8%). This age group also suffered from highest percentage of mild to moderate depression (37.1%). Though most of the respondent (85.1) had no diabetes and hypertension. Respondents with physical illness suffered more from some sorts of depression than those without illness, but the result is not statistically significant. We understood that depression has health challenges in adult arsenicosis patients. Therefore, physicians should take account depression in their treatment management when deal with arsenicosis patients. (shrink)

হেগেল তাঁর “লজিক এজ মেটাফিজিক্স” নামক গ্রন্থাংশের শুরুতেই অল্প ব্যবধানে যুক্তিবিদ্যার দৃশ্যত দুটি ভিন্ন সংজ্ঞা প্রদান করেন। এ দুটি সংজ্ঞানুযায়ী, যুক্তিবিদ্যা বিশুদ্ধ ধারণার বিজ্ঞান হলেও এটিকে চিন্তার বিজ্ঞান হিসেবেও আখ্যায়িত করা যেতে পারে। কিন্তু প্রশ্ন হলো, হেগেল একই গ্রন্থাংশে অল্প ব্যবধানে যুক্তিবিদ্যার এ যে দুটি ভিন্ন সংজ্ঞা প্রদান করলেন, তার কারণ কী? বা এ দুটি সংজ্ঞার মধ্যে সম্পর্কই বা কী? তারা কি একে অপরকে সমর্থন করে? বা তারা কি আসলেই ভিন্ন দুটি সংজ্ঞা? নাকি একই বক্তব্যের দুটি ভিন্ন প্রকাশ? এ প্রশ্নগুলোর (...) উত্তর খোঁজাই বর্তমান প্রবন্ধের মূল উদ্দেশ্য। এক কথায়, প্রবন্ধের মূল উদ্দেশ্য হচ্ছে, হেগেল প্রদত্ত যুক্তিবিদ্যার দুটি ভিন্ন সংজ্ঞার মধ্যকার সম্পর্ক নির্ণয়। প্রবন্ধে লেখক দেখিয়েছেন যে, হেগেল প্রদত্ত যুক্তিবিদ্যার সংজ্ঞা দুটির মধ্যে পারস্পরিক যে সম্পর্ক তা কোনোভাবেই সাংঘর্ষিক বা বর্জনমূলক নয়। বরং এ সম্পর্ক রূপান্তরমূলক বা স্পষ্টীকরণমূলক বলে সংজ্ঞাদ্বয়কে একই মুদ্রার এপিঠ ওপিঠ বললেও অত্যুক্তি হবে না।. (shrink)

Drèze and Sen are not entirely right in their apparent glorification of the roles of nongovernmental organizations in Bangladesh in An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions because they leave out and/or de-emphasize some important issues, especially those that are related to the problematic trusting relationship between nongovernmental organizations in Bangladesh and rural poor women. Nongovernmental organizations’ use of trust disturbs social solidarity in rural Bangladesh mainly because of their massive supervision mechanism that they undertake to sustain the so-called trusting (...) relationship between them and their debtors. The massive supervision mechanism damages social solidarity also because it creates a tension between local norms and nongovernmental organizations’ neoliberalist values of “discipline, efficiency and competitiveness,” which nongovernmental organizations try to inject into villagers by their numerous social engineering programs, which are state’s responsibility. Nongovernmental organization monitoring has some psychological impacts on their clients that also contribute to shaking social solidarity. The absence of a proper trusting relationship between nongovernmental organizations and rural poor women reduces the capabilities of the latter as a result of which Drèze and Sen’s glorification of Bangladeshi nongovernmental organizations and Sen’s capabilities approach are in tension. However, there are strategies that Bangladeshi nongovernmental organizations should employ to address the issues raised due to their massive supervision mechanism. (shrink)

The paper explores the logical structure of Rawlsian justice principles in order to see whether their justificatory or explanatory conditions are unproblematic. To facilitate this purpose, drawing on readers of Rawls, the author shows that the Aristotelian principle is used to explain the principles of rational choice, particularly the principle of inclusiveness. Then, on the basis of the Aristotelian principle, Rawls justifies his conclusion, via the principles of rational choice and the theory of primary goods. After figuring out the logical (...) structure of justice as fairness, the author deals with the central objective of the paper, where he exposes some problems suffered by the motivational basis of the principles of justice. The foundation on which Rawls grounds his principles of justice is problematic, and consequently, they remain as matters of contention as of today. (shrink)

Development ethics is concerned with the justification of development in terms of different normative issues. Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest among all who contributed to the Indian nationalism movement. The focus of this article is to show that Mahatma Gandhi can be regarded as a third world precursor of development ethics. To facilitate the purpose, the writer will try to show first that Gandhi’s theory of ahimsa acts as a foundational ethics of his entire development thought, because it is against (...) arbitrary consumerism and unsustainable resource use. Then the writer will analyze three important concepts of Gandhi – sarvodaya, swadeshi and satyagraha – which are the three principles of sustainable development, an important aspect of development ethics. Through its preference to the essential unity and equality of all earthly creatures, the principle of sarvodaya shows an empathetic approach towards natural world. The swadeshi spirit is handy in getting support for the national economic planning. To fight against injustices, Gandhi resorted to the method of satyagraha. Hence it became a technique that made the foundation of development ethics (that is, ahimsa) practical. Before drawing the conclusion, the writer will briefly evaluate Gandhi’s development thought that will also depict how Gandhi pioneered development ethics. (shrink)

This paper explains how discrimination and COVID-19 related stigmas are intertwined. When people stigmatize COVID-19 victims, they act in ways for which the victims suffer status loss and discrimination. As a result, they do not enjoy participatory parity in various aspects of their life making COVID-19 related stigmatization a deplorable instance of discrimination. But a society already fraught with discrimination is a breeding ground of stigmatization often because of people’s fear and anxiety about their life once they become a patient (...) of a disease like COVID-19. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue the importance of competition and cooperation cannot be denied as they both are instrumental in making any business transaction. Because two parties always set for themselves different priorities to a business transaction, business has been thought of in terms of competition. But cooperative action is also important, because in the case of cooperative activities the overall total is greater (though the outcomes differ) if we do cooperate than if we do not. Hence humans form cooperative (...) groups to compete for scarce resources. Those business firms, where employees take specialized, interdependent jobs and work together to compete in the free market, produce higher quality products and show greater work efficiency. Hence friendly cooperation is needed to compete more efficiently against other individuals or groups. It is for this reason people should value more in belonging to a group, practicing teamwork, helping others, etc. They should put more value on cooperation than competition though both competition and cooperation are natural to man. (shrink)

This paper aims to show the necessity of development ethics. For this purpose, I discuss two of many moral issues of development policy – poverty and corruption. I argue that reducing poverty and curbing corruption are the two moral issues that should be considered seriously, because poverty and corruption prevent people from getting any access to development. But in order to reduce poverty and to curb corruption value-neutral measures of economics are not enough. They are also involved with ethical assumptions. (...) I show that if any development policy maker wants to reduce poverty and corruption to some extent, he has to resort not only to value-neutral strategies of development, but also to the ethics of development. And this opens the door for development ethics that can contribute to the creation of a sane and judicious development policy. (shrink)

Academic study of religion, embracing what at the University of Dhaka is called World Religions and Culture, is a relatively new eld of scholarship in the world. It is only beginning to emerge in Bangladesh and other South asian countries. as distinguished om the theological study of reli‐ gion, which favours one’s own faith tradition, academic study of religion uses the same descriptive, analytic and critical academic criteria and methods to study any form of religious life, including one’s own. In (...) this paper, there has been an e ort to discuss the basic di erences between these two sorts of study. The paper then explores the brief history of academic study of religion in the modern world and how it came into being at Dhaka University (DU) as the Department of World Religions & Culture (WRC) under the faculty of arts. Finally, the crucial role of late Professor Dr. Joseph T. O’Connell (1940–2012) in forming the Department and its a liated Centre for Inter‐religious & Intercultural Dialogue (CIID) as an academic place for the study, teaching and doing research on the di erent religious issues for the promotion of multi‐religious and multi‐ cultural peace and harmony in Bangladesh is discussed. The paper has been written on the bases of the o cial documents of Dhaka University as for the existence of WRC and CIID, academic activities and works of faculty members of WRC, especially of Professor Dr. Joseph T. O’Connell, along with other primary and secondary literary sources relevant to the academic study of religion. (shrink)