Corruption

Let us take the word ‘duty’ for the moment. Conflict in duties does not give you a moral dilemma. For a moral dilemma to occur two necessary conditions must exist: the prescribed set of duties must be logically consistent by virtue of which one is obliged to perform them all. A dilemma pertains to a situation where one has an obligation to do A and an obligation to do B; but can in fact do only …

Chairman Sir, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning. Actually I’m the odd man out. We have success stories. We have spiritual leaders; we have an extraordinarily organizational leader in front of us. And now I have to do an exam. You see, normally I take exams in the university. Now I have to do an exam. The exam is this I must move you from these wonderful stories, success stories, good stories, to …

While translating Russell L. Ackoff, you say that such a translation is “not a moral judgment now, but a statement about the state of the economy”. But your claim, according to Ackoff’s own argument, is untrue. Consider how he describes corruption: “We concluded that corruption occurs when one party, A (for example, a policeman), who has an obligation to a second party, B (for example, the …

Why does one bring up the issue of one’s grandmother’s judgment about a clerk taking bribes as a counter-example? First, what do I say? That he calls it as corruption has to do with western normative ethics. Does it follow from this that the action of the municipal clerk is ethically good? It does not, unless one assumes either (a) I am presenting an alternate moral principle, which will make the …

The ‘corruption’ refers to the social phenomenon in India which makes about 20% of the adult population into immoral people. When I said that I refuse to call the clerk ‘corrupt’ or that the issue I raise is anterior, I am talking about this phenomenon. One uses the word ‘cheating’ (something like the Hindi ‘Dhoka’ probably). One could, for instance, use this word to describe the individual …

The first thing to note is that there is no distance between how we use corruption in our daily language and the way it is used in political and sociological theories of corruption. You see, the problem we (Indians) face is the asymmetry in the way the word is used while talking about us and the way it is used when talking about India. I want to signal this by putting up the red flag: I want to …

Let us say that ‘X’ does something which ‘Y’ considers corrupt. To keep it simple, let us say that ‘Y’ expresses the aforementioned judgment. In order to express it, or persuade others about the validity of this moral judgment, ‘Y’ will have to do something like this: Y defines ‘corruption’: “All actions which exhibit _______ properties are corrupt” Y’s ’ethical principle’ (itself justified): “All …

The first thing that is really striking involves what I will call the burden of proof. That is, I am being asked to prove that my assertions about corruption are true. In one sense, it appears an entirely reasonable demand to make: after all, one should not entertain gratuitous claims. But what seems to have escaped the attention of many is this: what precisely do I have to prove? Who has the …

(A) Consider the following sequence of sentences: All Indians are perfectly and fully moral. All westerners are perfectly fully moral. All Indians are immoral. All westerners are immoral. For sentences (1) and (2), all it takes is one instance of immorality to be proven wrong. Our proverbial municipal clerk would be immoral, and it would disprove the sentence (1). The same example could also …

One of the striking things about the British colonial rule is its success in developing certain ways of talking about the Indian culture and society. The British criticised the Indian ‘religions’, the Indian ‘caste system’, the Indian education system, practices like ‘sati’ and ‘untouchability’, and so on and so forth. They redrew the outlines of Indian intellectual history as indigenous responses …