Pragyanparamita Mohapatra

This chapter focuses on the doctrine of karma primarily as a theory of retributive morality. But it questions two of its fundamental presuppositions which, being logically flawed, severely weaken both retributivism and moral force of the doctrine. The first presupposition is (1) the supposed interdependence of its three claims that (a) every action produces some effects, (b) which and only which the agent must experience, because (c) she/he deserves them. The second presupposition is (2) the belief in rebirth and reincarnation as the sine qua non of the doctrine. We argue that assumption (1) is flawed because the supposed interdependence among a, b and c is neither logically provable nor empirically demonstrable, since each of them can be thought independently of the other two. As per assumption (2), it is argued that transmigration and rebirth are logically weak assumptions because, in the obvious absence of physical continuity, personal identity would be dubious, which alone could show that the putative karma phala is the phala of the doer’s own karma in his past life. Logically weak bases, thus, weaken the doctrine itself.Both the presuppositions, (1) and (2) above, were forced upon the law of karma because of the supposed absoluteness and inviolability of the law. In keeping with our reconstructive analysis, it is shown that the supposed absoluteness and inviolability of the law are not only empirically non-demonstrable but also logically indefensible. With copious scriptural support, the chapter concludes that the law of karma is not inviolable and karma phala is not unavoidable. Like all moral laws, this law too is absolute but defeasible.

The supposition of objectivity of moral values has been largely strengthened by the requirement of their universalizability. Ethical realism has had an attractive appeal as it carries with it a strong baggage of universalizability. And one thing that irresistibly binds philosophers together – from Greek philosophers to Kant, Hucheson, Hare and Habermas – is the idea that anything ethical must be somehow universal, ‘Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law’, said Kant.This chapter therefore focuses on universalizability vis-à-vis objectivity. Here it is argued that universalizability cannot be always true of moral principles. John Mackie, for example, exposed some subjective elements in universalizability. We thus try to show that universalizability of moral principles cannot promote their (literal) objectivity. Universalizability, we point out, is not the same as universality. And objectivity in the literal sense cannot draw support from universalizability. Moral values and moral principles, therefore, must be objective in a sense compatible with their defeasibility and justified violation.

This chapter continues the critical, reconstructive analysis on the traditional theory of niskama karma. Indian value system is entrenched upon a supposed logical trilogy comprising three interdependent beliefs – karma, transmigration and moksa – each belief putatively explainable only in association with the other two. But interestingly, while transmigration is essential to karma, moksa requires cessation of transmigration and so the cessation of karma (to experience whose results one has to be born again). That is why the karma that is required for moksa is niskama karma, which being desireless would produce no effects to be experienced in any life. In this sense niskama karma virtually renders the law of karma inoperative! But, we ask, is it not incoherent to claim that one ought to engage in niskama karma for attaining moksa and yet not to desire moksa that would inevitably result? Will it be immoral for a mumuksu to have mumuksa or even for a jivanmukta to work for nihshreyasa? Then why this emphasis on niskama karma? Reason: proneness for absolutism – absolute obligation to experience the desired result; the assumption that every desire is bondage- causing and every sakama karma is evil. In virtually putting a blanket ban on desires and attachment for any consequence of actions, the niskama karma theory in the received sense prescribed an absolute requirement for itself and thereby puts severe constraints on its success.We claim that the ideal of niskama karma does not mean that desirelessness is an absolute requirement for moral actions. The Gita conception of non-attachment in action, not for action, is brought in to justify our reinterpretation of the theory.

As a sequel to the claim that Indian scholars have been theorizing about practice, this chapter emphasizes that the domain of practice in the true sense is the domain of individual and social morality and that the centre of this morality is dharma. However, almost all Indian systems, with notable exception of Mimamsa, seem to be minimally concerned with dharma, which was virtually treated as an instrumental value, a means to moksa. This chapter focuses on a hermeneutic critique of the classical theory of dharma and on providing to it a firm foundation as moral duty, as a duty for its own sake, without which Indian thinkers’ claim to practicality would only be a pretence, the chapter argues. Of the many senses of ‘dharma’. its sense as moral duty, is shown to be of central importance to Indian ethics with arguments and support from scriptural sources.Further, dharma in this sense is critically examined and reinterpreted to suitably deal with conflict situations and ensure its consistent application. In keeping with the central contention of this work, dharma is shown to be [normally] absolute but defeasible. As a categorical imperative, the concept of dharma has been analyzed and reconstructed accordingly with support from Indian sources, especially the Bhagavad-Gita, as well as Kantian ethics.

This chapter tries to bring out some specific features of ethical theorizing in Indian philosophy and examine the fall-outs thereof. A remarkable feature of Indian ethics is that, like that of Indian philosophy in most of its aspects, it is practical in its approach and intents, because it expressly aims at removal of suffering and attainment of moksa. Even dharma that is supposed to regulate Hindu practical life is pursued as a means to moksa, not for its own sake. But although this highlights the practical aspect of Indian ethics and philosophy, this has led to a general impression among some western philosophers (notably Hegel, Husserl and Stace) that (a) there was no theory of ethics and philosophy in India and that (b) Indian ethics was nothing but religion and spirituality. As against this, we argue to the effect that such an impression is based on gross misconception about practicality and misrepresentation of the relation between theory and practice.We adduce arguments and provide textual support to show that Indian philosophers did theorize about ethics, quite remarkably by reinterpreting old texts and not merely dogmatically listing duties and virtues, and that the Indian mind was constantly engaged in theorizing about practice. Some eminent contemporary philosophers have been cited in support of this.

As a forerunner to a treatise on Indian ethics, the first question that calls for deliberation is: Why should men be moral? This is a question about ethics. Here we question the need for the ethical point of view; we ask for justification of ethics – justification of our being moral. This chapter treats this question as an improper question since it is a question about something that is normally presupposed by the question itself. One reason why ethics and the moral point of view is normally presupposed is that men are naturally moral beings. To highlight this, a unique conception of moral personhood is proffered which, it is argued, is a logical consequence of men being rational as well as spiritual beings – the former being a necessary condition and the latter a sufficient condition of men being moral.Thus argued ‘why should men be moral?’ is a logically odd sort of question, much like the question ‘why should men be rational?’. In asking this second question, one asks for the reason for one’s being rational, which is presupposed by the question itself. And in asking the moral question ‘why should men be moral?’, it is morality that is normally presupposed. The chapter further shows that the Indian philosophers’ special emphasis on the spiritual faculty of man has contributed significantly to our conception of moral personhood.

Absolutism and literal adherence to ethical theories – which have been a major source of the problem of application – have been largely because of the supposition that moral values and moral principles must be objective and absolutely inviolable, not to be affected by peculiarities and perspectives of individuals. The chapter analyses and reconstructs this supposed objectivity required for ethical theories. Alluding to contentions of both Indian and western scholars, this chapter comes up with the theory that objectivity in moral matters is a special sort of objectivity suited to my argument from defeasibility and justified violation. This reveals the significant fact that moral values are objective but defeasible under appropriately demanding situations: they instantiate those important kinds of principles and relations which hold necessarily but, on occasions, are defeasible if a competing value demands preference in the interest of morality. The focus here is to show that our argument from defeasibility and justified violation can help bridging the gap between ethics and its application. This also reveals the crucial trait of rational morality.

As per a general strand of Indian ethics, with the attainment of moksa, morality becomes unnecessary, presumably because moksa happens only once, and so there is no need for morality to lead to moksa. But such a theory would be a clear threat to morality; we argue against it as being counterintuitive. We reinterpret moksa not as transcending morality but as consummating it by incorporating morality within itself. We try to show that treating morality as means to moksa cannot work. It cannot work either in the case of videhamukti or in the case of jivanmukti. In videhamukti, the obvious absence of physical continuity makes identity of the person highly dubious, and we cannot know if an action is conducive to moksa prapti and hence is a morally right action; and in both videhamukti and jivanmukti, since liability to be reborn is terminated, no one [not certainly an ordinary person who matters for ethics] can know in principle if an action is morally right. The notion of moral rightness thus becomes ambivalent and so inapplicable in practice.So we reinterpret dharma as precondition of moksa on the ground that a mumuksu has to lead a long rigorous moral life in order to be eligible for moksaprapti. Morality thus cannot be dispensable; the supposed means here becomes indispensable to the end, since the means here happens to be a value-carrying means and determines the value of the end. Morality makes moksa is not only a higher value but a higher moral value.

Purusartha literally means an object of desire – what men desire to have. Men desire to have what they value as worth having. This reveals a normative element, revealing the nature of purusartha as an evaluative concept, not merely a descriptive concept. But what different people value often comes into conflict. The urge to solve this problem plays a decisive role in distinguishing what men value and what they ought to value. This distinction is famously known as the distinction between preya and shreya in Indian ethics. What men ought to value/desire is what I call bona fide purusartha and what they actually value, purusartha by courtesy.This is/ought or fact/value distinction must not be taken as absolute. For, we argue, a factual phenomenon has considerable effect in shaping its evaluative nature. [e.g., if p is elder/wiser then he should be obeyed/respected; if p has made a promise, then he should keep it; if a society comprises of diverse ethnic groups or religious following, then it ought to be governed by secular rules]. Thus, common usage that is governed not only by semantics and formal logic but also by the pragmatics of language shows the flexibility of the is/ought distinction. This also shows that the desirable is essentially related to the desired. And the process of arriving at the desirable is an inductive-evaluative process.The purusarthas in the normative sense are organically/integrally interconnected. Artha and kama will be bona fide values only if regulated by dharma. Otherwise each would be a disvalue – not a negative value, as some seem to think.Considered in the normative sense, the trivarga theory of purusarthas is self-complete in shaping the good life, dharma playing the dominant role in this. Moksa, by common admission, was a later addition to the scheme; and we argue that it is not an integral part of the scheme. We further argue that moksa is a purely personal value in contrast with the other three that are essentially social, so moral, values. Putting them together would be a category mistake, and therefore the chaturvaga theory would be logically incongruent. The Indian theory of purusarthas is thus a theory of general values, comprising both moral and non-moral values.

The proposed book, being a study on Indian ethics from an applied ethical point of view, calls for a second question, namely, why and how ethics should be applied in life. This question is asked within ethics and presupposes the ethical point of view and hence can be answered by appealing to the nature and spirit of ethics. The problem addressed to is that ethical theories are exalted principles of morals meant for guiding practical life, yet more often than not, many such theories seem to be inapplicable or difficult to apply. This chapter attempts to explore the source of this seeming paradox and offers some methodological hints for effective application of ethics to practical life. It is argued that ethics can be applied effectively (1) by striking a reasoned balance between the spirit of the ethical principles concerned and the demands of the situation and to that purpose (2) by taking a liberal view of ethics as opposed to the literal, absolutistic view espoused in tradition. In course of this argument, the need for justified violation is pleaded with supporting illustrations from prominent Indian texts. We offer the argument from defeasibility (of particular moral theories under adequately demanding situations) and justified violation in support of applied ethics.

Dummett construes that the issue of realism does not centre around the nature of entities; it is rather associated with the nature of truth. The real question is not the objectivity of entities of a certain class; it is rather a question of objective truth of statements of a certain class, and the class possesses an objective truth value independently of our means of knowing it. This has been criticized by Dummett in his proposal of an anti-realist position. The disputed or given class (the class about which the question of objective truth arises) may be that of statements about physical objects or about mental events, or about mathematical entities, or about past or future. Realism about the disputed class is characterized by Dummett as the belief that the statements of the disputed class possess an objective truth-value, that means the statements are true or false independent of any means of recognition. The realist therefore admits evidence transcendent truth of statements in question and every statement of a given class is determinately either true or false. Dummett has argued that this principle cannot operate globally because there is no determinate truth available for a large segment of natural language. It can operate where we can verify the truth/falsity of statements. For him any cognition transcendent truth is beyond our cognition grasp and therefore it remains forever indeterminate and unknowable. If truth is beyond our cognitive grasp, we cannot explain how truth can be ascribed to language at all. We cannot even explain the meaning of statements if truth-conditions of those statements themselves are beyond our knowledge. He holds that the world is empirically real in so far as it is given in experience, but it cannot be transcendentally real as there is no such reality which can be made intelligible at all. Transcendental reality is an incorrect assumption as it has no foothold in our verifiable language. My aim in this paper is to deal with Dummett’s view on meaning where he has discarded the truth-conditional theory of meaning by denying truth to be the central notion in the theory of meaning. He holds that the truth-conditional theory should be substituted by verifiability and hence Dummett’s view is called as semantic anti-realism. The paper also discusses briefly Rorty and Davidson’s view on truth and meaning.

This paper aims to revisit Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘higher’ from the understanding of Sankara’s conception of Jnana. According to Wittgenstein, values cannot be captured within the network of facts about living things or dead matters in the world; they are not the case in the world and are not relational, they are higher. That is why, we cannot call values natural in any sense of the expression. This compels Wittgenstein to appeal to the transcendental origin of the values. In this way, the world is bereft of the values and subsequently the knowledge about the values can be attained when the self is to be seen not in the world, rather be experienced with the world. The knowledge that Wittgenstein speaks about is not the ordinary knowledge of the world which logic and science provide, but is the knowledge of the divine state where one can grasp the oneness of the life and world. Such knowledge of moral interaction between the self and world seems to be closer to Sankara’s conception of Jnana which gives the knowledge of the identity of Jiva and Brahman. According to Sankara, it is a paramarthika experience of the atman which can attain the knowledge of absolute value or Brahman while remaining engaged in the worldly pursuits. The knowledge of absolute value for him, is a form of realization or anubhava of the self or atman which is distinct from knowledge of an intellectual or logical kind. Keywords: Wittgenstein, Sankara, world, self, higher, Brahman

This book presents a novel interpretation of major problems of Indian ethics from an applied ethical perspective. It approaches prominent theories like Dharma, Karma and Purusarthas from a critical point of view, so as to render them logically consistent and free from some standard limitations. Ethical theories are meant to provide guidance for life, but quite often many of our celebrated theories appear to be inapplicable or difficult to apply in practical life. Indian ethical theories are of special significance to this problem because they have in them rich potentials of applicability as much as many of them typify inapplicable abstract theories of morals. The book incorporates a wealth of research on ethical theories, keeping in view the spirit of ethics and the demands of the situations; for a reasoned balance between the two is the key to applied ethics. The book argues that ethical theories are objective but defeasible in overriding circumstances where competing values deserve preference. Such justified exceptions are warranted by the very spirit of ethics, which is to promote the good life. The argument from defeasibility and justified violation in the book helps bridging the gap between ethics and its application and makes Indian theories of value appear in fresh light- workable, practically applicable and effective as incentives for morality. With uncommon virtue of contemporized presentation of Indian ethics, this book should be of interest to scholars and researchers working on Indian ethics and moral philosophy, as well as to those interested in Indian culture and value tradition.

As modern datacenter networks grow to support hundreds of thousands of servers and beyond, managing network equipment - such as routers, firewalls, and load balancers - becomes increasingly complex. Network attributes such as IP address allocations and BGP neighbor relations are scattered among various network engineering groups, which makes troubleshooting the network a cumbersome task. In addition, network vendor diversity leads to an explosion of vendor-specific management systems or single-use automation scripts, limiting network scalability while increasing the time required to perform management tasks. In this article, the authors propose a unified network management system, Switch Manager, to cope with the growth by standardizing the language for describing network attributes and unifying the interface for executing management actions on the network equipment. © 2014 IEEE.

The rise of location-based services has enabled many opportunities for content service providers to optimize the content delivery based on user's location. Since sharing precise location remains a major privacy concern among the users, many location-based services rely on contextual location as opposed to acquiring user's exact physical location. In this paper, we present PACL, which can learn user's contextual location just by passively monitoring user's network traffic. PACL can discern a set of vital attributes from user's network traffic, and predict user's contextual location with a very high accuracy. We design and evaluate PACL using real-world network traces of over 1700 users with over 100 gigabytes of total data. Our results show that PACL can predict user's contextual location with the accuracy of around 87%. © 2014 IEEE.