Microsoft Word - 4.3.1 _2_.docxPaper Coordinator Shyam Ranganathan Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Department of Social Sciences, South Asian Studies, York University, Toronto
Content Writer Shyam Ranganathan Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Department of Social Sciences, South Asian Studies, York University, Toronto
Content Reviewer VibhaChaturvedi Retired Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi.
Language Editor Chitralekha Manohar Freelancer, Chennai
Description of Module
Subject name Philosophy
Paper Name Ethics-1
Module Id 4.3
1. Introduction
In the previous lesson on the scope of moral philosophy, the difficulty of understanding Indian ethics was discussed. Apurpose of this discussion was to make clear that the scope of moral philosophy can be occluded, very easily, by ignorance about the philosophical foundations of ethics, and by identifying ethics with a specific theory instead of philosophy. By failing to identify ethics with philosophy, it is easy for theorists to identify ethics with a narrow range of theories familiar to them, and to discount contributions of Non-Western thinkers because the contributions fall outside of the scope of the assumed range of moral theory. One such theory that I noted is peculiar to the Indian tradition but alien tothe Western tradition is Bhakti. All ethical theory attempts to explain the relative priority of the right and the good. Ethical theories disagree. Virtue Theorists hold for instance that states of goodness---the virtues---cause right behavior. Bhakti is the opposite view: right (procedure) causes the good (outcome) for the good is nothing but the practical realization of the regulative ideal of the right. In the case of Yoga, and related theories of Bhakti, it is the Lord---the person untouched by afflictions and the consequences of past choices---who we treat as the regulative ideal of our conduct, and the outcome is our own Lordliness. I call this “bhakti” (devotion) because on this account, it is our devotion to an ideal—vara or the Lord—that yieldsgood outcomes characterized by Lordliness.
Is not Bhakti a tradition of religious piety? Why would we think this? Perhaps because those who are interested in bhakti (devotion) are theists. But once again, it is unclear how this renders the matter religious. Theism (the view that there is at least one deity who is all good, powerful, and knowledgeable) is a philosophical position---it has to do with regulative ideals of ethics, metaphysics and epistemology. But the common view is that this is religion. This common view relies upon the assumption that religions can be definedby content, such as a belief in God. Indeed, in the extreme form, this is the view that something is a religion if it relies upon a belief in God. If one were to stick to examples of religion familiar in the West, this seems plausible. But the case of India is a powerful counterexample. First, many Indian religions do not believe in God: classical Jainism, andTherevada Buddhism are two Indic examples. Moreover, many classical philosophies that are Hindu also reject the reality of Gods: Skhya and PrvaMms(which will be covered in this course) are also examples of atheistic Hindu positions. Second, the only plausible way to distinguish a religion is in terms of its being based on tradition and having the political recognition that allows its followers certain public rights.
So merely because a philosophy takes God seriously does not entail that it is religious. Just because we are talking about ethics does not mean that we are talking about religion. However, a popular view is the opposite: ethics just is a part of religion, and not philosophy. Moreover, the idea of God is religious and not philosophical. There is after all fields of study in the social sciences known as religious ethics.1Moreover, there is a long standing tradition of translating the term “dharma” as religion in official contexts in India. Yet, Indian moral philosophers use this term for their moral theory. 1 There is even a scholarly journal devoted to the topic: The Journal of Religious Ethics (Wiley).
If we look at the history of moral philosophy, back to the very beginnings in the West with Plato, we find that philosophy’s identity was borne out of a dispute over the boundaries of ethics (moral philosophy). Practitioners of religion apparently wanted to claim ethics for themselves and philosophy rebelled. The argument from Plato is clear: we are better off treating ethics as the topic of philosophical investigation.
In this lesson, we shall pursue the question of the issue of God, ethics and religion further. In the Second Section, we shall explicate the idea of religion in a global context: while particular religions might have something to do with a belief in God, it is hardly essential to a religious world view. We shall also examine Socrates’ historical clash with religion.Socrates entertains the idea that ethics and the idea of God are the property of religion understood as what is customary and traditional, and compares it with a philosophical approach where both ethics and God must be vindicated by philosophical reason. This is his Euthyphro Dilemma. It is not much of a dilemma: Socrates steers us away from identifying ethics and God with religion. In the third section I will endorse Socrates argument in an updated format. In the Fourth Section I consider two counter arguments: (a) philosophy cannot make room for God in connection to ethics, as atheism is the critical response to religion’s identification of ethics with custom and tradition; and (b), Indian ethical orientations of dharma are religions, which shows that ethics is properly located within religion. In the fifth section I conclude with some observations about ethics and its autonomy from religion.
2. Religion and its Dis-contents
2.1. A Socratic Problem: What Is Religion
What is the definition of religion? By asking this, I am not interested in a description of this or that religion, but an account of religion as such that would apply to every case that something is a religion. If Socrates were around, he might ask us this question. Here are some bad answers, with their counter examples:
(a) claim: religion is a belief in god (false: there are religions that are atheistic—many portions of Hinduism, for instance, such as later PrvaMms, Skhya, perhaps some versions of AdvaitaVednta, orthodox Buddhism and Jainism in an orthodox form are atheistic.)
(b) claim: religions assert an afterlife (false: there are religions without any concern for the afterlife: classical Taoism and many version of Hinduism that value liberation over transmigration also have little stock in the afterlife. The classical Buddhist doctrine that there is rebirth but no transmigration—the idea that there is no continuity of one’s personal identity after death—is a criticism of ordinary ideas of the afterlife. )
(c) claim: religion is a concern for the “absolute” (false: there are religious practices that reject the idea of the absolute—many Buddhists deny there is such a thing, Jains seem to deny this too. Confucians do not have much room for this.)
(d) claim: religion is defined by a set of doctrines or beliefs (false: Hinduism is a great example of a religion were the identity of the religion cannot be reduced to a doctrine. Quite the opposite— Hinduism seems in large measure a disagreement about theological and practical questions.)
There are many who suggest that the very idea of religion is itself an invention of Western culture that contrasts an official practice—protected by the state—with superstition. The distinction has roots in ancient Rome, where the distinction had teeth.In the contemporary West, this distinction corresponds to the difference between a religion (which has legal protection) and a cult (which does not).
One scholar of religion, José Ignacio Cabezón(2006), points out that the very idea of “religion” is a category that was developed in the West to make sense of the other (formally known as alterity) and that this idea of religion is closely related to the very (academic) study of religion. This historical development proceeded in three stages.
2. Cabezón’s Stage 1
• “They are not like us.” • The sheer difference of the religious Other is stressed. • The writing uses nomenclature like “savagery,” “barbarism,” “sorcery,” “idolatry,” and
“heathenism” as ways to talk about the religious Other. • The term “religion” is reserved for Christianity or Abrahamic Traditions.
3. Cabezón’s Stage II
• “They are like us, but we are rational.” • The term “religion” becomes universal. • Notion of “world religion” is born. • The difference between the Abrahamic us and them has to do with our rationality and their
lack of it.
4. Cabezón’s Stage III
• “They are like us, but . . . .” • The universal rationality of religion is granted. Questions that define third-stage alterity
include the questionwhether other cultures have philosophy? • The topic of comparative philosophy thus takes on the load of carrying on the matter of
alterity.
Accordingto Cabezón, alterity as a feature of the discourse isn’t gone:
The dialectic operative in the stages I have just described—the logic of the genitive that concedes to the Other the possession of one trait while at the same time insisting on the absence of another, which admits a presence while simultaneously asserting a lack—does indeed grant to the Other something that heretofore had been denied it, something that was previously seen as an exclusive possession of the Self. And yet in the same breath it posits the existence of another category or attribute that reasserts the difference. They may be human, but they lack religion. They have religion but lack rationality. They have rationality but lack the ability to philosophize systematically. They have philosophy, but. . . . (Cabezón 2006, 26)
Left under-explained is what the “but” is. Cabezón doesn’t say, but it might simply be the notion that their philosophy is religious.
Recently, Victoria Harrison’s (2006) excellent review of competing definitions of religion ends with the plea that religion is what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance concept. Such concepts are not defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, but genetic similarities. This avoids trying to pin down a concept, such as religion, to any essence that Socrates could find a counter example for.
The reason she identifies religion thus is that while religions as such do not have anything in the way of teachings or doctrines or practices in common (internally that is), they are afforded political rights in many jurisdictions. From Harrison’s discussion, we can even draw the further observation: all there is to being a religion is being granted special political rights of accommodation.
2.2. Socrates’ Objection to Religion
A mature review of the idea of religion shows that it is very difficult to define it in terms of content, i.e., beliefs or practices.
Modern South Asia is a perfect repository of evidence about the problem of defining religion in terms of content. Similarities and differences in practice and belief cross religious boundaries, and moreover, there are no defining religious beliefs and practices for some religions—only disagreements about what is basic or definitive. Moreover, it is not the case that all things that count as a religion in South Asia share any particular belief or custom.
Does it follow then that there is no such thing as religious thinking? Not quite. To see how there can be a distinction between religious and philosophical thinking, though there is no content (practice or belief) that is by definition religious, we need to consider the roots of Western philosophy.
If we look back to Socrates’ life and recognize that Socrates was doing philosophy as he claimed to be, we see that it was eulogized by Plato as a clash with religion. The clash in question, Plato is careful to point out, is not between people who believe in God or supernatural forces and those who do not. Philosophers can believe in God without giving up on philosophy. Neither is it the difference between philosophers and religious folks—a difference in terms of a belief in or a concern for righteousness or the holy (what should be revered). Philosophers are very much concerned with this topic. This is part of what it is to think about interests. Hence, thinking about the holy or righteousness is very much a part of ethics or moral philosophy.
The difference between philosophy and religion (for Socrates) is that religion is sociological and empirical: it has to do with traditions, practices and social-scientific matters. Philosophy in contrast is abstract, critical, and concerned with presenting reasons and arguments that are to appeal to reason and not to prejudice. The same belief, say a belief in God, or a belief in a certain practice, can be entertained
in the context of philosophy or in religion. The difference is the grounds of justification. In philosophy, we assume that the motive for a belief or a practice is its philosophical virtue. In religion, it is its incumbency.
This clash between philosophy and religion is hence ubiquitous: any place where one has philosophy, one has a clash with religion as a largely empirical affair. But the place where it seems to step most on the toes of religion is in ethics. Ethics, as the field of philosophy concerned with interests, is thereby also concerned with ideals of interests. If philosophy lays claim to being the means by which we figure out the ideals of interests, then religion has no job, for the guidance that people expect from religion would be performed by moral philosophy.
Our story of Socrates, an analogy for philosophy’s clashes with religion, starts with the following.
Following a discussion on the nature of knowledge, in which Socrates famously assigns the condition that it should be justified to be true belief (Theaetetus), he has to leave abruptly to go to a court house to find out about a charge brought against him. Here he meets Euthyphro, an Athenian noble. Euthyphro is there to bring charges against his father for murder.An employee of his father who had murdered someone else in their household had been bound and apprehended, and while the father was trying to figure out what to do with him, the apprehended murderer died. Euthyphro believes this makes his father a murderer, much to the chagrin of everyone else in his familyand Socrates who hardly believes that Euthyphro is in much of a position to know what is right and wrong. But Euthyphro insists that he does know. Socrates responds:
Socrates: But, in the name of Zeus, Euthyphro, do you think your knowledge about divine laws and holiness and unholiness is so exact that, when the facts are as you say, you are not afraid of doing something unholy yourself in prosecuting your father for murder? (Euthyphro 4e).
Euthyphro is adamant that he knows what is holy and unholy. It is worth noting that from the very start, this ethical issue of whether it is appropriate to judge the father as guilty of a crime is being framed both by Socrates and Euthyphro in theological language. This is a ploy by Socrates to reveal that even if we use religious language, the issue of normativity (what is proper to do, or not to do, especially in response to ethical challenges of assessing guilt of wrong-doing) is the same. Euthyphro for his part frames the issue in terms of what is appropriate to prosecute. Since Euthyphro fancies himself an expert on normativity, Socrates invites Euthyphro to explain what holiness (virtue or righteousness) is. Euthyphro provides the following advice:
Socrates. Tell me then, what do you say holiness is, and what unholiness?
Euthyphro. Well then, I say that holiness is doing what I am doing now, prosecuting the wrongdoer who commits murder or steals from the temples or does any such thing, whether he be your father, or your mother or anyone else, and not prosecuting him is unholy. And, Socrates, see what a sure proof I offer you,—a proof I have already given to others,—that this is established and right and that we ought not to let him who acts impiously go unpunished, no matter who he may be. (Euthyphro 5d-e)
Socrates is not happy with this:
Socrates. For, my friend, you did not give me sufficient information before, when I asked what holiness was, but you told me that this was holy which you are now doing, prosecuting your father for murder.
Euthyphro. Well, what I said was true, Socrates.
Socrates. Perhaps. But, Euthyphro, you say that many other things are holy, do you not?
Euthyphro. Why, so they are.
Socrates. Now call to mind that this is not what I asked you, to tell me one or two of the many holy acts, but to tell the essential aspect, by which all holy acts are holy; for you said that all unholy acts were unholy and all holy ones holy by one aspect. Or don't you remember?
Euthyphro. I remember.
Socrates. Tell me then what this aspect is, that I may keep my eye fixed upon it and employ it as a model and, if anything you or anyone else does agrees with it, may say that the act is holy, and if not, that it is unholy. (Euthyphro 6d-e)
Recall that the conversation begins with Socrates amazed that Euthyphro is so confident about virtue and his own ethical judgement. So the idea of holiness here—what is to be revered—is the same concept as the righteous or the ethical. It is not an especially theological idea. It has to do in this context with when it is proper to pronounce guilt or innocence: an ethical notion.
What is remarkable about Euthyphro’s response is that it is radically empirical. The holy is defined in terms of the particularity of him.
What is remarkable about Socrates’ response to Euthyphro is that he articulates what the philosopher is concerned with. The concern is not with particular instances with holiness, but with the universal account that is also generally true. Socrates’ attempts to paraphrase Euthyphro’s response in an effort to consider its philosophical merits. He suggest the following:
Socrates. Come then, let us examine our words. The thing and the person that are dear to the gods are holy, and the thing and the person that are hateful to the gods are unholy; and the two are not the same, but the holy and the unholy are the exact opposites of each other. Is not this what we have said? (Euthyphro 7a)
This is quasi-philosophical as it is a general rule. Socrates has two problems with this definition.
(1) The gods quarrel, and thus it isn’t clear what it is that they love. (Today we could frame this in terms of the reality of religious pluralism and the fact that different religious orientations make differing presentations about what their deity wishes).
(2) We could revise (1) and conclude that what is holy is what the God’s unanimously love and what they quarrel over is neither good nor bad.
But, according to Socrates this leads to a dilemma that is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma:
(A) Is something holy, right, just, ethical because it is loved by the Gods
(B) Are the Gods the ones who love something because it is holy (independently of their loving it)? (Euthyphro 10a)
What is often not emphasized is that the two manners of interpreting the identification of Divinity with the Just, Right, Holy and the Good correspond to religion and philosophy respectively. To take a religious approach is to emphasize the importance of the particular God or Gods in identifying what is good or right. To take a philosophical approach is to discern rightness, the just, the holy or goodness as a general abstraction that would allow us to identifywho counts as a God.
The problem with (A): It makes what is “holy” arbitrary and dependent upon the whims of the Gods. (And recall, Greek Gods and most mythologies depict Gods in alarming ways.)
The problem with (B): It suggests that we require philosophy to figure out what is holy apart from the Gods’ preferences so that we can identify Gods. But then, the philosophical approach to ethics is prior to the particular question of who counts as a God. Moreover, the philosophical approach shows that we cannot rely upon theology to identify ethical directives, for theology depends upon the more abstract idea of ethics to discern particular divinities.
Euthyphro is not so happy with this so he tries a second pass at answering Socrates’ question. He suggest that what is holy is:
Expertise in sacrificing to the Gods to gain favours. (Euthyphro 13d-14a)
The trouble with this is that (a) it seems like a kind of economic transaction (which hardly seems holy); (b) at most what the Gods seem to get out of this worship is a kind of gratification, but this leads back to the claim that what is holy is that which is loved by the Gods, but this was rejected.
Euthyphro is unable to answer these questions so he leaves.
There are some important implications of the Euthyphro Dilemma:
(I) Religion is not a good way to determine answers to ethical questions—that is, unless one wishes to have no way to discern the difference between a God and a demon.
(II) Ethics is best treated as a philosophical enterprise.Theology, or the idea of divine persons, is downstream from ethics—when we have discerned what ethics is about via philosophy, we are then in a position to discern what persons are divine. This helps separate ethics from the orders of any bully or tradition.
If religion were relevant to ethical questions, Euthyphro’s various responses would have been cogent. But they all lacked cogency and were characterized by problems.
The inverse is that we need philosophy to answer ethical questions, for we need some way to contend with an ethical question that is not about particular traditions, deities or practices, but one that takes a universal and general approach. Otherwise, we would have no reason to believe that our “God” is correct.
3. Main Argument: EuthyphroDilemma2.0
If religion were the kind of thing that we could define by content—such as a belief in God or the afterlife—we might be in a position to treat religion as something that can be identified analytically from the defining concepts. But we cannot for there is no essential content to religion. This means that we have to treat religion as a matter for historical and social scientific research. What counts as a religion is an empirical matter, and has to do with public policy.Some have argued implausibly that anything traditional and mainstream is religion. For instance, S.N. Balagangadharahas argued that Liberal Secularism—the idea that there should be a separation between the rules of public discourse and religious authority—is itself a religion. But not everything that is traditional and sanctioned by the state counts as a religion. One can have traditions of art, food, and research all permitted within the confines of society, none of which counts as religion. But religions are those traditions that are afforded protection so that their followers can be accommodated. Free and liberal societies tend to grant rights to many religions. Conservative societies grant them to a few. Either way, a religion is a tradition that is allowed by public accommodation. One can hence make a claim to special dress or holidays on religious grounds and have a chance at accommodation.One cannot gain the same accommodation on nonreligious grounds.
Either ethics is philosophy (P), or it is religion (R).
If ethics is religion, we have the following problems.
First, religions do not agree, so it is unclear which religion’s account of ethics we should follow.
Secondly, even if there were some core teaching common to all religions that we identified with morality (Kant 1998, 57–215)or if there were only one religion that ultimately prevailed in public policy, we would have to follow its dictates as ethics so defined. This provides no guarantee that the dictates are correct or in our best interests. The core commonality of competing doctrines need not be true or in our best interest in order to be common across the competition. It needs only be common to the competition. So a Kantian faith that the core, common teaching across religions is the true ethics is an invalid inference, that takes the commonality of the teaching as the evidence. The teachings of a single prevailing religion also need not be true nor in our interest in order to prevail: it needs only be endorsed by the powers that be in order to count as a religion.
Third, the process by which something becomes a religion is political, and the political factors that deem some traditions a religion (and others not)take the religion as having standing: not the individual. We thus have no reason to believe that because an ethical teaching is religious that it is in our interest.
If ethics is philosophy, the previous three problems can be avoided.
First, while philosophers might not agree on the right account of ethics, they have something in common that they can rely upon to mediate controversies: the discipline of philosophy. This provides the context to converge on moral philosophy.
Second, if ethics is philosophy, we only have to take seriously those moral philosophies that display the virtues of philosophy: reason, argument and analysis that is at once abstract and generally salient. The ethics that display these virtues would provide their own guarantee that they are correct or in our interest.
Third, as the process by which a theory is deemed philosophical is not political but has to do with the disciplinary constraints of philosophy, and as these disciplinary constraints are in our interests as free thinking, critical individuals, then we have reason to believe that ethical theories that are vetted by philosophy are in our interest.
Given the problems with treating ethics as religion, and the comparative lack of problems with treating ethics as philosophy, we ought to reject one of the options: that ethics is religion or religious. This leaves us with the viable option: ethics is a species of philosophy.
4. Response to Objection
The argument set out in the previous section relies upon the claim that there is no substantive commitment common to all religions, and for this reason, religion needs to be treated as historical phenomena to be empirically discerned and not a conceptual matter distinct from philosophy. There are apparently two counterexamples to this.
First, the proper philosophical response to religion is not a Socratic belief in God, but atheism. This is because God belongs on the side of religion, not philosophy. This is a conceptual constraint on religion: if something consists in a belief in God, it is religious.
Secondly, Indian ethical orientations that Indian thinkers discussed as “dharma” are commonly identified as religions or at least religious. Moreover, the term “dharma” itself is commonly used as a term for religion. This suggests that there is a common substantive marker of religion: ethics. But then ethics belongs with religion, not philosophy.
4.1. The Philosopher’s God and Atheism
In the Apology, the Socratic dialogue that follows after Euthyphro, we find that Socrates is brought up on formal charges, including the idea that he promoted false Gods. Socrates gets his prosecutors to admit that what they really want to say is that Socrates is an atheist. But he points out that this is not true: he believes in Gods and divinities, and moreover, Socrates believes his divinity wants him to do philosophy. He rests his defense against the charges against him by insisting that if he was given his freedom at the cost of doing philosophy he would choose death, for his God (supernatural guidance) tells him to do philosophy and that“the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology 37e–38a). Socrates is found guilty and put to death.
There are two ways to read this twist in the Apology where Socrates gets the charge reinterpreted as pertaining to the question of atheism. One is skeptically—by getting his prosecutors to admit that what
they really want to say is that Socrates is an atheist, Socrates has changed the subject, for literally Socrates was guilty of promoting the idea of the philosophical God who is virtuous and this God was not the typical God of the religion of the time.Relative to the religion of his persecutors, the Socrates’ God is a false God. But less cynically, what Socrates has gotten everyone to admit is that the issue of importance is not whether one worships the Gods sanctioned by the authorities, but rather whether one believes in ideals that are not the same as what are visible. The visible includes religious practice. The ideal may not be visible and constitutes a critical point from which we might adjudicate religion itself.This point of criticism is ethics as a philosophical enterprise. Indeed, it is tantamount to divinity, but not the empirical ideas of religion.
So God as a super-sensible or supernatural being plays the philosophical role of the ideal point of moral criticism for Socrates. Not everyone is comfortable with theological thought.
Karl Marx, for instance, is often presented as a critic of religion and theology. Karl Marx defended Dialectical Materialism. This is a version of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel argued that history was the unfolding of a dialectic of opposing forces that resolved themselves momentarily, only for a new opposition to arise. Marxists embraced this idea but criticized Hegel’s Idealism (the idea that reality is mental or ideal). Rather, Marxists argue that reality is material and the oppositions that characterize history are grounded in the material circumstances of people.
Marx is famous for calling religion the opiate of the masses.2 In making this charge, Marx was apparently criticizing the role that religion plays in life to dull people’s sense of outrage at injustice as it gets them to accept the status quo. If religion takes ethics out of the realm of the critical— philosophy—and places it in the realm of tradition or practice, then indeed we can see how Marx seems right.When ethical ideas of duty or virtue are treated as mere practice and are given a factual stamp of acceptance without any scrutiny,these ideals are presented as accepted (not merely acceptable) and without need (or possibility) of justification.
All things considered, Marx’s position is not different from Socrates’. Marx’s apparent atheism and Socrates’ theism amount to the same thing: for the Marxist atheism is very much the rejection of religion, which is Socrates’ theism.
The problem with religion, hence, is not the content. The content of religion is largely what we could or do talk about in philosophy: ideals of life (rolled up in ideas of divinity or duty). If ethics is the philosophical inquiry into matters pertaining to interest, then indeed such questions of ideals play a central role in moral philosophy.
If this line of argument is correct, Socrates is justified for regarding questions of what counts as a God to be a matter for philosophy. Then, in rejecting religion, we are not rejecting the idea of a deity or even non-natural ideas such as a life after death (for there may be philosophical grounds for taking such ideas seriously). We are merely rejecting the conservatism that treats such ideas as a matter for custom instead of scrutiny.
4.2. Indian “religions” and Ethics
It is not uncommon to hear that Indian philosophy is “religious”. Given a reading of Plato and Socrates’ battle with religion, it becomes clear that this is nonsense. Philosophy is never religion. But if we reject this confused conflation of philosophy with religion and note that philosophers are commonly interested 2 See Marx's Introduction to his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right(Accessed, July 2014).
in ideals, even the ideal person, then we see that moral philosophy is the field of philosophy that has to take charge of questions that would otherwise be left to religion.
When we look to the Indian philosophical tradition, we find some avenues of philosophical research that frame ethical issues in light of theological ideas, but they are few. However, to frame these issues theologically is not to give into religion at all, but to identify the ideals of ethics with personhood; this identification allows for the identification of some people as exceptional. So we find ethics in Indian philosophy framed with theological ideas in proportion to the importance given to persons.
Early Buddhism is famous for its criticism of personal identity, and perhaps persons too. Hence, orthodox Buddhism is known for the no self view. So here we find no obvious grounds for identifying ethical ideals with persons. Jains affirm the reality of distinct selves, but in the Jain story, people on the whole are confused and must extricate themselves from action which cleaves to their person. This allows an individual to become free and characterized by dharma, which early Jains defined as Motion. We are in essence who we are on this account: neither exceptional nor bad. Philosophically, this seems to undermine the idea that there are special persons whose moral properties are deserving of special mention. Hence, orthodox Jainism does not countenance Gods.
Patañjali’s philosophy of Yogais an interesting blend of Buddhist, Jain and Upaniadic sources. Here we find the Jain idea of many distinct selves affirmed. But Patañjali in contrast identifies an unusual person: the Lord (vara). According to Patañjali, the Lord is a special person and is untouched by actions(karma) and afflictions(klea)(YS I.24). A person who is untouched by actions and afflictions is someone who is unmanipulated. The Lord is hence the supremely free, unmanipulated person. Patañjali recommends meditating on the Lord—varapraidhna—as a chief means of accomplishing what he calls yoga: cittavttinirodha, moral constraint of thought (YS I.2). When we succeed in yoga, a person can live authentically.
The uncoerced person is the free person: the person whose interests have not been compromised. The philosophical contemplation of such a person is of first importance for ethics, insofar as such a person is possible. For if we can understand such a person, we understand what it is to have our interests in tact. This is central to ethics as the field of philosophy concerned with interests.
The idea of varapraidhnaoccursin many places in the Indian tradition. It has obvious theological affinities with the bhakti movement and with the idea of bhakti from Rmnuja, who defines bhakti as an upsan(sitting up close, meditation). The object of meditation is the Highest Person “whose nature is antagonistic to all evil” (rBhya 1.1.2, 106; Thibaut translation, 156).
Rmnuja is widely regarded as a major founder of contemporary, Hindu, bhakti (devotional) practice— especially in the Vaishnava tradition. His philosophy of qualified monism is widely influential. But insofar as his account of bhakti is a copy of the yogic account of varapraidhna, it too is a formalization of what is essential to moral philosophyif persons are real. Indeed, if persons are real, a paradigm person whose interests are not compromised is of the utmost moral and philosophical interest.
Of course, one might counter that the reality of persons does not entail the reality of anvara— perhaps all persons are forever self-improving, but none is essentially unmanipulated.
This takes into account questions of metaphysics that we shall visit in the next lesson. However, if persons are not natural (that is, if their essence is non empirical), then we can distinguish between the empirical features of a person and their essence.Manipulation would be a confusion of the empirical and essential aspects of a person. But if persons are essentially non-natural, then
vara(Lordliness) is an ideal state that we should aspire to, and on this count, relevant to moralphilosophy as a paradigm activity of philosophical thinking about interest.
A few observations are in order. While Buddhism, Jainism and prominent Indian philosophies identified with Hinduism are tagged as”religious” it is not clear what this means. For starters, they do not share any central doctrine. Indeed, amongst the philosophies discussed here, the only common commitment seems to be karma, the idea that actions have consequences that can be good or bad. This is an ethical idea, but it is so basic to critical reflection on ethics that it is hard to see how this counts as some core common doctrine. Non religious philosophies take karma seriously too—most all Western moral theories do. Secondly, they are all philosophical theories, founded not on tradition and political accommodation, but philosophical reasons and concepts, presented in the form of analysis and argument combining to form theory.
We can and do call these philosophies “religions” in so far as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism in its many forms are counted as religions. But they are on all accounts, philosophies first. To the extent that these religionsbecame traditional and sanctioned by the powers that be as worthy of accommodation, this happened after the arguments, theories, reasons and philosophical conceptual analysis. In other words, Buddhists, Jains and Yogis did not become philosophical apologists for their religious traditions. Rather, they were philosophers, and posterity religified their efforts by granting their ethics special public status as counting as a religion (in the case of Buddhism and Jainism) or part of the religion Hinduism (in the case of Yoga).
So the fact that the ethical theories of these traditions are called “dharma” is not proof that “dharma” means religion. It only shows that through social process, these philosophies became traditional.
Dharma hence is first ethical theory and derivatively it is religion.
5. Conclusion
The main objection to the Socratic distinction between philosophy and religion that we find in the Euthyphro—the distinction that characterizes the two differing responses to the Euthyphro Dilemma—is the idea that this is an unfaircharacterization of religion. On this account, religion is concerned with the particular, with the empirical, with specific traditions, people or facts. One who sympathises with religion might claim that religion can be philosophical too.
Here we must note that given the colonial context in which religions have been minted, indeed, there may be very many philosophical practices that have come to acquire the political recognition of a religion: this is a tool of colonialism to marginalize the colonized’s philosophy and treat it as mere tradition or social practice. However, the real question is not whether something that is called a religion is philosophical or not. The question is: what is the grounds or justification for that view, on say, duty or righteousness. The philosophical approach grounds a platform on universal and general considerations. The religious, insofar as it is something that characterizes people’s identities, is something passed along through social means. The justification for calling a certain duty as characteristics of a religion X, hence, is not philosophical but empirical. It is social scientific. So indeed, we can provide religious justifications for a certain practice: practitioners of religion X might correctly claim that x is a duty for them for it defines their religious identity. But this is not in any sense a philosophical justification but a religious justification. As Socrates’ Euthyphro Dilemma shows, anyone who opts for this religious manner of thinking has two problems.
First, they cannot say why contrary religious traditions are wrong and theirs is right, for there is no independent criteria except for their tradition that accounts for its propriety. Gods disagree, as Socrates points out, and merely siding with a religious icon does not settle the matter. Second they have no objective reason to believe that their God (tradition) is correct, for “correct” is made up by their God (tradition).
Ethics as a philosophical justification avoids these problems, for any account of ethics that ends up being right, is correct on universal and general grounds that can be appreciated independently of one’s tradition.