Immoral

Increasingly, the phenomenon of terrorism has begun to occupy the media, politics, and the lives of people in different parts of the world. The more the attention, however, the less the clarity: what kind of a phenomenon is terrorism? What generates it, what sustains it, and what allows it to expand on an ever-increasing scale? This lack of clarity has to do with the fact that our ideas about …

A Disquieting Suggestion Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaced a book he wrote in the 70’s on oriental thought and moral philosophy titled Mysticism and Morality with the following words: The factual beliefs (that the civilizations of the East) take for granted are …too alien to our (the West’s) representations of the World to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their …

[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107] Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, 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 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 …