Normative

X asks: I am unable to figure out what the special significance is of not having a ‘moral ought’ in the Indian traditions. If ‘should not’ and ‘must not’ have the same practical consequences as ‘ought not’, that is we are obligated to behave in a certain way, why does it make a difference how it is expressed in our language? Your question is probably the best way of showing the difficulty we have …

Whenever I discuss the absence of normative ethics in India, people, especially Indians, get agitated. They hear me say that India has no ethics. Consequently, they want to show that I could never be right in my claim. This has happened on the Abhinavagupta forum as well. Perhaps, I should say that the Indian understanding of ethics is different from the western understanding. While this might …

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 universalisability of norms does not mean that the western people all factually follow these norms. Even if everyone were to lie, the ethical statement “No one ought to lie” is a universal moral statement. The existence of debates about abortion, war, etc. is indicative of the nature of normative rules. Because “one ought not to kill”, debates and doctrines about “justified war” come into …

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 …

Does the notion of “relative ethics” make sense within the context of the western ethics? There are some attempts to develop “ethical relativism”, even though it is not clear what is relativistic about them. One would be a kind of factual claim: different people, different groups, different cultures have different principles which they consider as “morally good”. This does not make for ethical …

The inability of the Chinese language to express counterfactuals is even more intriguing. As you know, Confucius wrote his “Analects” in the Classical Chinese language. In order to see where I am heading, consider some of the thoughts that Rosemont, Jr. expresses. (Rosemont, Jr., H., “Against Relativism.” In Larson G. J. and E. Deutsch (eds.), Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in …

Are western traditions innately richer because they have the moral ought? My answer: No. In fact, in my book on ethics I will prove the following: the non-normative ethics are richer: Under specific assumptions, in limited conditions, one can derive a normative ethics from a non-normative one. The relation between non-normative ethics and normative ethics is analogous to the relation between …

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 …

(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 …

What is western normative ethics? It is a structure or style of thinking about ethics. What is its structure? It makes use of norms. What are norms? ‘Rules’ or ‘principles’ which have a characteristic structure that use certain concepts like the moral ‘ought’ and moral ‘ought not’. That is, some actions ought to be performed (i.e. they are obligatory); some actions ought not to be performed (i.e. …