Progress and Redemption: A Jewish Values Critique of Steven Pinker\u27s Enlightenment Now

Progress and Redemption: A Jewish Values Critique of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now ABSTRACT Steven Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, tells a provocative story. The central thesis is that about three hundred years ago human values and practices began to coalesce in ways that have allowed humans to live longer, healthier, safer, and more productive lives. Particularly convincing to the reader are the measured data and informative tables Pinker uses throughout the text to illustrate and to confirm his story of exponential human progress. He tracks the changes to a broad set of variables, across scores of domains, over hundreds of years. The Jewish values critique is based on an examination of two ancient Jewish practices: Sabbath observance and the performance of acts of loving-kindness. This critique does not nullify Pinker’s deeper message about the meaning of science, but it does suggest that Pinker’s view, while necessary is not sufficient for living a fully human life. A more encompassing and useful narrative than Pinker’s would include the practice of science as a legitimate source of human meaning and values among many other practices, including those legitimated outside of a scientific paradigm. Unlike Pinker’s either/or story, the story I want to tell here is both/and. In Section I, the paper summarizes the most important criticisms that have been lodged at Pinker. In Section II, I argue that despite these criticisms, Pinker’s general story survives the onslaught. In Section III, I offer a more encompassing narrative that includes Pinker’s story but, based on a Jewish values critique, offers a more inclusive perspective on the search for human meaning in what often does seem like an indifferent universe

Individual Investors Perceptions On The Summary Annual Report: A Survey Approach

As the role of institutional investors is being transformed, there is a tendency to overlook the needs of individual investors. Nevertheless, there are well over 30 million individual investors in the United States, and these numbers are growing rapidly. One area of particular concern is corporate communications. All investors, professional as well as non-professionals, should have access to financial information. However, annual reports, as currently issued, are often difficult to read and understand, and therefore lack communication value. A possible solution is the summary annual report (SAR), which has been designed to condense and simplify the traditional GAAP statements. To date, most U.S. Corporations have not adopted the new format, in part, out of a fear of negative shareholder reaction. Our survey results clearly indicate that annual reports, as they are currently issued, are difficult to understand for a sizeable minority of investors. One out of 4 investors reported that annual reports were so difficult to understand that they were of no substantial help in making investment decisions. Further, results show that a majority of respondents demand inclusion of further explanation of the financial information in less technical terms, and over a third would like to see SARs to the exclusion of full GAAP reports. Through the SAR, management has an opportunity to significantly improve corporate communications. WE strongly recommend that management continues to experiment with its format, design, and content

The shareholder's use of corporate annual reports.

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Why Corporations Should Not Abandon Social Responsibility

accountability, corporate social responsibility, dialogue, Robert Reich, triple bottom line reports,

Spirituality In (and Out) of the Classroom: A Pragmatic Approach

This paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, I discuss “what is spirituality?â€\x9D and in the section that follows, I examine some of the implications of my definition to the teaching of spirituality in an undergraduate business ethics course. For the purposes of this paper, spirituality is defined as the planned experience (the inner feeling) of blending integrity and integration through 1 – acceptance (of the past), 2 – commitment (to the future), 3 – reasonable choice, 4 – mindful action, and 5 –continuous dialog (both internal and external). This definition is a work-in-progress and offered mainly as a point of departure rather than a final destination. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007teaching ethics, spirituality,