Shyam Ranganathan

Vedānta has two meanings. The first is the literal sense – “End of Vedas” – and refers to the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads—the latter part of the Vedas. The second sense of “Vedanta” is a scholastic one, and refers to a philosophical orientation that attempts to explain the cryptic Vedānta Sūtra (Brahma Sūtra) of Bādarāyaṇa, which aims at being a summary of the End of the Vedas. In the previous module, I review the ethics of the End of the Vedas and explicate the Moral Irrealism of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, which is articulated as a commentary on the Vedānta Sūtra. In this module, I compare Rāmānuja (Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta) and Madhva's (Dvaita Vedānta) account of the Vedānta Sūtra. Both are moral realists. They differ on the room for freedom given the necessity of moral considerations. One value of the Vedānta approach to ethics is that it provides a non-speciesist framework to think about ethics. It allows us to understand ourselves (ātmā) and our interest in Development (Brahman) as conceptually distinct, though identical in some manner. The Advaita view is that this identity is strict. The Dvaita approach is that Development realises the results of choices of individuals, but only some, owing to their good character, are capable of taking advantage of this for their betterment. The Viśiṣṭādvaita approach of Rāmānuja suggests in contrast that each self is a microcosm of reality. Reality is Development – the genus of individual selves. Each self has Development as an essential trait, but owing to past choices (karma), this is poorly understood. Things change when the individual self understands Brahman to be its true self, for then an individual can re-direct their efforts from procuring results to self-governance by treating the personal essence of the Development (the Lord) as the explanation for improvement.

Nāgārjuna’s “middle path” charts a course between two extremes: Nihilism, and Absolutism, not unlike earlier Buddhism. However, as early Buddhists countinanced constituents of reality as characterizable by essences while macroscopic objects lack such essences, Nāgārjuna argues that all things lack what he calls svabhāva – “own being” – the Sanskrit term for essence. Since everything lacks an essence, it is Empty (śūnya). To lack an essence is to lack autonomy. The corollary of this is that all things are interrelated. The Mahāyāna (Great Vehicle) school of Buddhist thought draws heavily on this insight: if all things are related, individualism has to give way to inclusivity. According to Nāgārjuna, the key to understanding his Middle path philosophy is dharma: ethics. It is only by a prior commitment to ethics that we can properly understand the Buddha's philosophy as teaching no doctrine of reality, for it is not a teaching of metaphysics, but of ethics, which is to say, Dharma. At the center of Dharma is a kind of Contractualism of the Buddhist community (saṅga). A failure to approach emptiness via ethics is like trying to hold a snake dangerously. However, approaching the emptiness of reality via ethics is grounds for optimism: nothing is stuck by essence, and we have reason to believe in positive change made possible by prudent ethical choice. In this module I consider some objections to Nāgārjuna's position from Vedic positions, and Yoga, and identify responses available to Nāgārjuna.

In the previous module, I covered the basics of Early Buddhist metaethics. The core ideas here are: (1) linguistic representation is not the same as reality – linguistic representation depicts reality as static, but reality is relational and dynamic; (2) reality can drift away from linguistic representation causing disappointment – duḥkha; (3) choosing wisely now can result in a better future; (4) ethical choice involves appreciating the justifying relations of states of affairs. In this module, I explore the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-Fold Path as efforts to systematise these findings as the basis of a normative theory and applied ethics. Of special concern is its culmination in Buddhist practices of meditation. In the fourth section, we shall examine the relationship between these meditational practices and Buddhist Consequentialism. Indeed, the very practice of meditation is, in large measure, justified by the outcomes that Buddhists meditate upon. This approach to ethics is not only consequentialist, but provides a uniquely Buddhist approach to overcoming personal challenges. This allows us to revisit the issue of rule following in Buddhism. Contrary to those who would claim that Buddhist uses of "dharma" to identify wrong motives is proof that such uses are amoral, or inconsistent with Consequentialism, I show that this is exactly what we would expect if Buddhist ethics is Consequentialist. Such dharmas (ethical ends) are to be treated as ends, and not as means. Mindfulness is the appropriate means justified by such ends. The absurdity arises if we abandon Consequentialism and treat such ends requiring justification or as procedures that are reasonable, and not what confers justification.

The compound “Hindu philosophy” is ambiguous. Minimally it stands for a tradition of Indian philosophical thinking. However, it could be interpreted as designating one comprehensive philosophical doctrine, shared by all Hindu thinkers. The term “Hindu philosophy” is often used loosely in this philosophical or doctrinal sense, but this usage is misleading. There is no single, comprehensive philosophical doctrine shared by all Hindus that distinguishes their view from contrary philosophical views associated with other Indian religious movements such as Buddhism or Jainism on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics or cosmology. Hence, historians of Indian philosophy typically understand the term “Hindu philosophy” as standing for the collection of philosophical views that share a textual connection to certain core Hindu religious texts (such as the Vedas), and they do not identify “Hindu philosophy” with a particular comprehensive philosophical doctrine. Hindu philosophy, thus understood, not only includes the philosophical doctrines present in Hindu texts of primary and secondary religious importance, but also the systematic philosophies of the Hindu schools: Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Pūrvamīmāṃsā and Vedānta. In total, Hindu philosophy has made a sizable contribution to the history of Indian philosophy and its role has been far from static: Hindu philosophy was influenced by Buddhist and Jain philosophies, and in turn Hindu philosophy influenced Buddhist philosophy in India in its later stages. In recent times, Hindu philosophy evolved into what some scholars call “Neo-Hinduism,” which can be understood as an Indian response to the perceived sectarianism and scientism of the West. Hindu philosophy thus has a long history, stretching back from the second millennia B.C.E. to the present.

In this module I set out the Moral Non-Naturalism of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā as a version of Deontology that defines duty in terms of its beneficent properties. It elucidates the scheme of right living according to ordinance or command. Whereas natural accounts of moral terms suffer from circularity (by merely re-naming of a natural property with a moral term, which then serves to justify its moral appraisal), proponents of Mīmāṃsā defend their position by offering the Vedas as constituting independent evidence about what yields goodness. In some ways, the argument provided by the defenders of Mīmāṃsā prefigure Moore's complaint of the Naturalistic Fallacy, but the Mīmāṃsā approach doesn't claim that defining natural properties by ethical terms is a fallacy: it is simply circular.

In this lesson we review the philosophical foundations of ethics as a sub-field of philosophy. Ethics, moral or dharma philosophy is the confluence of dissenting theories and what they have in common as they disagree is the basic concept of ETHICS/DHARMA: THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD. Every theory of ethics or dharma is an account of this concept from some perspective. This allows us to identify three varieties of moral philosophical investigation: applied ethics, normative ethics and metaethics. It also involves discerning four basic, normative theoretical options: Virtue Ethics (the good leads to the right), Consequentialism (the good justifies the right), Deontology (the right justifies the good), and a fourth theory peculiar to the Indian tradition: Bhakti/Yoga (the right leads to the good). Examples of all four ethical theories are found in the Indian tradition.

In this lesson, I review critical responses to Kant that can be understood as having non-Western, Indian roots. One criticism is articulated by the famous contemporary moral philosopher, Thomas Nagel. While Nagel is not a Buddhist, his criticism of Kant’s ethics is Buddhist in essence. The other response is based on an appreciation of the philosophy of Yoga. Yoga and Kantian thought are both versions of a kind of moral philosophy, which we could call Explanatory Dualism. Moreover, Yoga and Kantian moral philosophies attempt to defend Normative Compatibilism, which is a version of Nonnaturalism. Yet, Kant relies upon the idea of Humanity, which is a naturalistic concept, while the Yogi defers to the nonspecisit, abstraction of the Lord to account for moral standing.

Translation theory and the philosophy of language have largely gone their separate ways (the former opting to rebrand itself as “translation studies” to emphasize its empirical and anti-theoretical underpinnings). Yet translation theory and the philosophy of language have predominately shared a common assumption that stands in the way of determinate translation. It is that languages, not texts, are the objects of translation and the subjects of semantics. The way to overcome the theoretical problems surrounding the possibility and determinacy of translation is to marry the philosopher of language's concern for determinacy and semantic accuracy in translation with the notion of a “text-type” from the translation theory literature. The resulting text-type conception of semantics (TTS) is a novel alternative to the salient positions of Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism in the contemporary philosophy of language.

This lesson explores the relationship between ethics and religion. There is a tradition of thinking that religion takes explanatory priority in ethics, but there is a counter tradition of philosophy that shows that philosophical questions of the right or the good take priority over religious questions: without answering the philosophical question we are not in a position to endorse a religious tradition as right or good. But on a global scale the issue is fraught with the realities of the colonial context of the classification and minting of religions from prior philosophical traditions. This serves to delegitimize non-Western moral philosophy as a mere traditional practice in need of further philosophical justification, which by default (owing to this process) ends up being philosophical justification from the West. Thinking critically about ethics involves reclaiming the philosophy under the veneer of the political identification of non-Western moral traditions as religions. The idea of religion on a global scale must be criticized as a means of avoiding moral theory and moral philosophy from diverse sources. The argument involves exploring a revised version of the Euthyphro Dilemma that I call "Euthyphro Dilemma 2.0."

Undergraduate students of philosophy are often told that Kant is famous for teaching us that “ought implies can,” and furthermore that this principle implies that it makes no sense to tell someone that they ought to do something if they do not have the ability to execute the action in question. It is thus surprising to find that the words “ought implies can” do not appear conspicuously in popular English translations of Kant’s main moral philosophical texts (such as the Groundwork, and Critique of Practical Reason). I argue that Kant’s writings do not clearly support it, and at points stand opposed to it. One may still attribute the formula “ought implies can” to Kant, but only at the cost of understanding this formula in a nonstandard manner.

The Yoga Sūtra (YS) is perhaps the most popular book of Indian philosophy today the world over. It is widely regarded by practitioners of Yoga as a conceptual manual for yoga and there are several competing translations of the work on the market. Yet, the Yoga Sūtra is also widely regarded as a difficult text to read. It is written in a dense, aphoristic, sūtra format. In the introductory section, I tackle the question of methodology in reading the Yoga Sūtra. In the second explication section, I move to the crux: Yoga and Sāṅkhya—two schools that are often conflated with each other—present two very differing accounts of Freedom and Determinism. In the third section, I review the considerations that Yoga presents for its Normative Compatibilism. Yoga is depicted by the Yoga Sūtra as a process that we explore and finalize in public space. The goal of extricating ourselves from nature so as to deliver us into a personal world is the aim that underlies the project of liberating ourselves from external coercion in public. Ethics, or Dharma, is the normative light that makes us unique and makes us individual persons, as opposed to functions of nature or our environment. Isolation, autonomy, kaivalya, is our freedom as individuals in a social world free from external influence and coercion.

In this chapter I respond to objections that we should shift our focus from truth to objectivity, from prejudice to research, and from doctrine to disciplinarity. Disciplines are the same practice from differing perspectives and they allow us to triangulate on objects of interest. This entails that objects are discipline relative, and hence the insertion of social scientific concerns in the study of philosophy, as is common place in Indology, is groundless. Having entertained and shown that disciplines aside from philosophy have nothing to teach us about the history of philosophy, I show that the common view that Indian philosophers were uninterested in ethics is a straightforward outcome of failing to employ the standard practice of philosophers (explication) in the study of Indian thought.

Why are we saddled with Eurocentric Interpretation, which results in the depiction of Nonwestern thought as religious, and bereft of serious moral theory, while the history of European thought is depicted as the content of secular reason? Interpretation as a mode of explanation is part and parcel with the dominant account of thought originating in Europe as the meaning of language. Interpretation is imperialistic. As it spreads, so too does the European outlook, rendering anything deviant inexplicable and mysterious. Orthodox Indology, with its emphasis on linguistics and philology, is a product of this tradition. In contrast, the idea that language encodes thought as its meaning is controversial in the Chinese and Indian traditions.

The Department of Higher Education of the Government of India has created the e-PG Pathshala Program: an e-Graduate School initiative, consisting of free, online resources (essay-lectures, video lectures, and PowerPoint notes) for Master’s level education. Each course consists of about 30 to 40 lessons. Ethics-1 is the first year MA course in Ethics. All contributions were peer reviewed. This is the first historical survey of moral theory that spans the European and Asian traditions, and gives equal prominence to contributions from Europe and India. Much of the material and research published here was previously unavailable in other forms. (Title of this entry linked to Ethics-1.) From the first drop down menu, select "Ethics 1." From the second, select the module.

According to the philosophical tradition, translation is successful when one has substituted words and sentences from one language with those from another by cross-linguistic synonymy. Moreover, according to the orthodox view, the meaning of expressions and sentences of languages are determined by their basic or systematic role in a language. This makes translating normative and evaluative discourse puzzling for two reasons. First, as languages are syntactically and semantically different because of their peculiar cultural and historical influences, and as values and norms differ across cultures, it is unlikely that languages will have synonymous evaluative and normative expressions. If translation is only successful by cross-linguistic synonymy, it would seem that we will not be able to translate the value theoretic claims of persons from radically different cultures. But it is with such persons that dialogue on evaluative matters is imperative, to resolve ethical and axiological differences that could be the root of conflict. Second, as the orthodox account of meaning renders it linguistically relative, it is unlikely that expressions across languages will be cross-linguistically synonymous. Thus, on the Orthodox account of translation, translation is indeterminate (as W.V.O. Quine has argued) or impossible (as Jacques Derrida has argued). In this dissertation I argue for a novel theory of meaning and translation based on innovations in the translation studies literature and my prior work in cross cultural research, which I call Text-Type Semantics or TTS. TTS explains how translation is successful while affirming radical cultural and linguistic diversity. It treats disciplinary concerns as the neutral criteria to calibrate translation. On the basis of TTS I argue that we need what I call the “Quasi-Indexical” account of thick and thin concepts (or QI) to translate normative and evaluative discourse. I argue that QI and TTS succeed where competing accounts in the moral semantics literature (such as Non-Analytic Naturalism and Expressivism) fail. The argument also shows that the relativization of truth (in philosophy and beyond) to languages and cultures is mistaken.

Indian thought is often said to be concerned with ethics (dharma) that leads to freedom (mokṣa). Either this means that we should treat freedom as the end that justifies the ethical life (Consequentialism), or that the ethical life is the procedure that causes freedom (Proceduralism). The history of Vedānta philosophy—philosophy of the latter part of the Vedas—largely endorses the latter option via the “moral transition argument” (MTA): a dialectic that takes us from teleology to proceduralism. It is motivated by a desire to remove luck from moral theory. But this leaves open the Paradox of Development (Brahman), which posits our moral freedom as a condition of protecting it. I explore the MTA, and Śaṅkara’s, Madhva’s, and Rāmānuja’s response to the Paradox of Development.

In this module, I first explore the dialectic that leads to Kant’s substantive moral theory. In the second section, I explicate the roots of Kant’s ethical theory in terms of his attempt to resolve the antinomy of freedom and determinism. Kant’s solution is a Normative Compatibilism that resolves the inconsistency via morality, in general, and self-governance in particular. As noted in our lesson on Yoga, this is a strategy that Yoga endorses, and hence, predates the Kantian approach by over a millennia and a half. Yet, Kant’s approach to Normative Compatibilism is unique to him, and perhaps, more influential. In the third section, I review Kant’s dialectic by which he concludes that The Categorical Imperative is the means by which rational agents resolve this tension by freely determining themselves. In the fourth section, I consider some preliminary objections to Kant’s theory. In the fifth section, I draw some conclusions.

Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra (second century CE) is the basic text of one of the nine canonical schools of Indian philosophy. In it the legendary author lays down the blueprint for success in yoga, now practiced the world over. Patañjali draws upon many ideas of his time, and the result is a unique work of Indian moral philosophy that has been the foundational text for the practice of yoga since. The Yoga Sutra sets out a sophisticated theory of moral psychology and perhaps the oldest theory of psychoanalysis. For Patañjali, present mental maladies are a function of subconscious tendencies formed in reaction to past experiences. He argues that people are not powerless against such forces and that they can radically alter their lives through yoga—a process of moral transformation and perfection, which brings the body and mind of a person in line with their personhood. Accompanying this translation is an extended introduction that explains the challenges of accurately translating Indian philosophical texts, locates the historical antecedents of Patañjali’s text and situates Patanjali’s philosophy within the history of scholastic Indian philosophy. This is explicitly a philosophical translation of the text.

In this lesson, I explore three areas of intersection between ethics and metaphysics: accounts of the self, the reality of value, and basic distinctions in ethical theory. I compare the account of the self as a chariot from the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (Deontology), early Buddhism from Questions of King Milinda (Consequentialism), and Plato's Phaedrus (Virtue Ethics). In each case, the metaphysical model is continuous with the moral theory of the same perspective and adopted to accommodate the moral theory. I also compare debates across traditions on controversies such as: Naturalism vs. Nonnaturalism, ethics vs. action (dharma vs. karma), and the perennial question of Moral Realism. The relationship between metaphysics and ethics is not peculiar to a specific philosophical tradition. It has to do with central questions of moral philosophy. A common point that these issues converge on is the question of moral standing: what kinds of things count, and what are their properties.

Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass 2007). Regretfully, it is not an uncommon view in orthodox Indology that Indian philosophers were not interested in ethics. This claim belies the fact that Indian philosophical schools were generally interested in the practical consequences of beliefs and actions. The most popular symptom of this concern is the doctrine of karma, according to which the consequences of actions have an evaluative valence. Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy argues that the orthodox view in Indology concerning Indian ethics is false. The first half the book deals with theoretical issues in studying ethics: defining moral terms, understanding the subject matter of ethics so as to transcend culturally specific substantive commitments and touches upon issues of cross-cultural hermeneutics and translation. The second half consists of a systematic explication of the moral philosophical aspects of nine major Indian philosophical schools. I argue that “dharma” in its various uses in Indian philosophy is always rationally treated as a moral term—even in so called “ontological” employments of the term as seen in Buddhism and Jainism. In understanding “dharma” in this manner, the Indian philosophical tradition is replete with different versions of moral realism that fit tidily with other philosophical commitments of Indian philosophers. Pains are taken to show the breath of moral philosophical disagreement in this tradition. On a comparative note, some Indian moral philosophy resembles realist approaches of the Western tradition (such as the Non-natural realism of Neo-Platonism, or the Naturalism of Utilitarianism). Out of the major Indian philosophical schools, a slim minority are shown to be committed to moral irrealism while some are shown to regard their entire philosophical orientation as firmly planted within moral philosophy (such as Jainism, Buddhism, Purva Mimamsa and Yoga). In response to those who would argue that what Indian philosophers meant by “dharma” is very different from what moral philosophers in the West have meant by “ethical” or “good,” I argue that this is as vacuous as noting that Utilitarians have a different conception of the good from Deontologists. If philosophy is concerned with theoretical debate, as I argue it is, philosophical terms function to articulate such disagreements. The various seemingly desperate uses of “dharma” in the Indian tradition are no longer confusing or disorderly when we understand the theoretico-philosophical function of this term in Indian philosophical disputes. The second edition contains an additional chapter that addresses the colonial and political context of the study of Indian Ethics.

In this module lesson on Patañjali ’s Yoga Sūtra (I am relying upon my translation, listed in the bibliography: Patañjali 2008), I shall explore Yoga’s critical response to Western moral theory. Yoga was not part of the Western tradition and the author or authors of the Yoga Sūtra were not responding to Western moralists Nevertheless, what Patañjali, the legendary author of the Yoga Sūtra, has to say about moral standing and reason serves as a response to standard accounts on those topics, and in turn, it provides grounds for a response to Western moralists. Yoga is contrasted with the ethics of Plato, Kant, Spinoza and Schopenhauer.

Yoga is a nonspeciesist liberalism, founded in a moral non-naturalism, which identifies the essence of personhood as the Lord, defined by unconservative self-governance—an abstraction from each of us that is non-proprietary. According to Yoga, the right is defined as the approximation of the regulative ideal (the Lord) and the good is the perfection of this practice, which delivers us from a life of coercion into a personal world of freedom. It is an alternative to Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue Ethics, which provides a unitary account of moral well-being and worldly well-being. The seeming antinomy of freedom and determinism is resolved in the ethical life. I argue that Yoga provides a critical and instructive response to alternative ethical theories and the problem of collective harm.

In this module I explore some the points of convergence between early Buddhist and Jain doctrine. Buddhism is a form of Consequentialism, as noted in our other modules. Jainism rather holds the distinct philosophical thesis: the essence of the self is virtue. Jainism is a version of Virtue Ethics. The implications of this radical Virtue Theory is that action is a confusion, and morality (dharma) is movement away from activity. In the fifth section, we shall wrap up with observations in support of this argument: the primary virtue is not doing, for virtue is not the same as action, but our dispositions towards actions. We should, hence, strive to be virtuous, which amounts to being nonactive.

I contrast the methodology that prioritizes truth—interpretation—with the prioritization of objectivity or explanation by validity—explication. Explication, the cornerstone of philosophy, allows us to identify the basic concept ETHICS and DHARMA as what theories of ethics and dharma disagree about: THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD. This is objective: what we converge on while we disagree. Four basic moral theories that differ on this concept are: Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism (both teleological), Deontology and Bhakti/Yoga (both procedural). They are mirror images of each other. If we explicate Indian thought, we find that moral theory differentiates Indian philosophies. Interpretation, which prioritizes truth, is subjective and not basic to philosophy, and gives rise to the idea that Indian thought is religious, and bereft of moral theory.

Confucius, being one of the earliest of Chinese philosophers that we know of, seems uniquely responsible for setting the tone of Chinese philosophy. His focus on ethical questions of the Way no doubt serves as a reminder of the type of perennial questions that philosophers should answer. In this module, I outline the main concepts of the Analects, followed by an elaboration on the central Confucian ethical doctrines: The doctrine of the Mean, Filial Piety, Patriarchal Hierarchy and the Golden Rule. This is followed by a discussion of the Analects’ comments on politics, and finally, a discussion of the underlying metaethics or moral semantics of Confucius's ethics: The Rectification of Names. Confucius's ethics constitutes a uniquely Asian source of Humanism, and while similar to the ethics of Aristotle, provides a distinctive account of moral theory and Virtue Ethics.

According to the orthodox account of meaning and translation in the literature, meaning is a property of expressions of a language, and translation is a matching of synonymous expressions across languages. This linguistic account of translation gives rise to well-known skeptical conclusions about translation, objectivity, meaning and truth, but it does not conform to our best translational practices. In contrast, I argue for a textual account of meaning based on the concept of a TEXT-TYPE that does conform to our best translational practices. With their semantic function in view, text-types are Archimedean points for their respective disciplines. The text-type of philosophy is no exception. Culture-transcendent conceptual analysis can proceed on firm footing without having to deny the reality of radical cultural and linguistic difference by treating components of text-types as the concepts to be analyzed. Analyses of central philosophical concepts are provided as a means of adjudicating philosophical controversy.

This and the following lessons cover the topic of Vedānta and ethics. Vedānta has two meanings. The first is the literal sense – “End of Vedas” – and refers to the Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads—the latter part of the Vedas. The second sense of “Vedanta” is a scholastic one, and refers to a philosophical orientation that attempts to explain the cryptic Vedānta Sūtra (Brahma Sūtra) of Bādarāyaṇa, which aims at being a summary of the End of the Vedas. We shall pursue the question of ethics in both senses of Vedānta. In this module we shall examine the ethical theory of Deontology found in the Upaniṣads. Having explored the implications of this model for moral philosophy, we can reflect upon the three commentarial approaches. In this lesson, we will examine Śaṅkara’s Advaita approach. Advaita Vedānta, especially in Śaṅkara's form, presents a version of moral scepticism, or more strongly, moral irrealism. In this account, there is nothing objective about ethics: it mediates our desires-oriented psychology, and should be dispensed with along with the desire-oriented psychology. Śaṅkara seems to come close to doing the impossible: saying insightful things about what he takes to be a fiction, which is the individual self, for which ethics is essential.