Supererogation

It is advisable to get into a discussion about this question only after one knows what ‘supererogation’ means and how it has been discussed for centuries. In the Greek ethics (especially as Aristotle formulated it), the notion plays a very crucial role without it being related to a normative sense of duty. With the Catholics, especially as Aquinas gave expression to it, a normative notion of duty …

The first thing to notice is that I use the word “ideology” in a technical sense, which is both counter-intuitive and, for the time being, idiosyncratic. It is the first, namely counter-intuitive, because, as I use it, my use of the word does not refer to any theory, or to sets of beliefs, or to what one believes in. Normally, as we use the word in English, ‘ideology’ has multiple meanings: a …

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 …

There is ethics in India, but it is not normative ethics. It is a non-normative ethics. To get you going, consider acts like ‘generosity’, ‘kindness’, ‘bravery’, ‘friendliness’ and such like. Often called ‘virtues’, these actions do not come under the scope of normative ethics. You cannot say: “one ought to be generous”, because generosity implies doing ‘more than’ what is expected in the act of …