Ethics (First Philosophy?)
I started my research in ethics by thinking about the idea that South Asian philosophers wrote on every topic except for ethics. I was able to show that this is false by being explicit about explicating, and then explicating South Asian moral philosophical discussions about the "dharma," which is the Sanskrit term that covers for the same concept as we find with "ethics" or "moral" in the Western tradition, or tao, in the Chinese tradition. That is the concept of the Right or the Good.
No one had ever fully explicated moral philosophy before. So that is an advance. This shows that the basic topic of ethics is the Right choice or Good outcome, with four basic theories. But if, as I argue, logic is best thought of in terms of an organizational approach to information that protects epistemic autonomy, then being responsible about right procedures and good outcomes for data processing is actually a form of metaethical responsibility. And so ethics is really what makes logic and all areas of inquiry possible.
How to Not Understand Ethics
What Indologists did is they interpreted Indian thought.
Context: Hence, when dharma was used in a context the interpreter believed referred to legal matters, they claimed dharma meant “civil and moral law.” When used in a context regarding character, they claimed it meant “virtue.” When used regarding the universe, they claimed it meant “nature” or “intrinsic quality.”
Proliferation: This resulted in lists of disparate meanings attributed to a single word. Scholars claimed dharma stood for “nature, intrinsic [ontological] quality, civil and moral law, justice, virtue, merit, duty and morality” simultaneously.
The Consequence: Erasure of South Asian moral philosophy by the gratuitous multiplication of meanings that violates Ockham’s Razor.
But they did this by explicitly judging South Asian philosophy by way of paradigms of the Western tradition.
A famous commentator said, “the professional philosophers of India have very seldom discussed what we call ‘moral philosophy’ today” (Matilal, Moral Dilemmas: Insights from the Indian Epics), and “it must be admitted that the contributions of Indian thinkers in the fields of ethics and socio-political philosophy seem to be very poor indeed when viewed against those of the European philosopher” (Devaraja, An Introduction to Sankara’s Theory of Knowledge).
How to Understand Ethics
I brought attention to the fact that we could use logic as a research methodology that avoids these problems. And this research is precisely what philosophy students are trained to do when they read philosophy. They have to put aside their opinion and use logic to extricate from a text the reasons that support a philosopher’s conclusion. And if we do this recursively, we will be able to determine what philosophers are talking about.
Specifically, I specified that there are two steps to explicating philosophy.
- First, identify a term, t, that shows up all over the place in philosophy but is used in differing and idiosyncratic ways.
- Second, explicate every perspective that uses t to articulate its views. This involves rendering explicit the reasons that entail such uses of “t.” And these reasons that would logically entail all of the perspectival uses of “t” is the perspective’s theory of T.
- Third, compare conflicting theories of T, and what they disagree about is the concept, T.
When you do this with discussions of ethics, or the tao (in Chinese philosophy) and dharma in South Asian philosophy, you see that the disagreement these terms center around is the right choice or good outcome: this is the basic concept of ethics.
And moreover, there are three common theories found in all three traditions, and the Indian tradition has a fourth, which completes the list of basic ethical theories.
- Virtue Ethics: The view that the Good (character or constitution) conditions or produces the Right (choice or action).
- Consequentialism: The view that the Good (end) justifies the Right (choice or action).
- Deontology: The view that the Right (procedure) justifies the Good (actions or omissions).
- Yoga/Bhakti: The view that the Right (devotion to the procedural ideal of the Right, namely Sovereignty) conditions or produces the Good (autonomy).
Some Lessons
No one had ever bothered to explicate ethics before me. If they had, they would have noticed that there is a space for a fourth ethical theory,
not present in the Western tradition. Moreover, what this shows is that the four basic options of ethics are mirror opposites of each other. That’s also an advance. And I think this is important because often, when Consequentialism and Deontology are being discussed, it’s difficult to discern the difference.
Kant, a Deontologist, asks us to consider consequences when formulating our proposals for obligations (the Categorical Imperative), and Consequentialists do the same. This list shows that while the activity is the same, the explanations these theories provide are distinct. This was never made clear because Deontology had not been clearly accounted for as the mirror opposite of Consequentialism.
Finally, the South Asian tradition not only contains all of these ethical theories, ubiquitously discussed and adopted, but it also contains a fourth basic ethical theory absent in the other two traditions, which completes the list, for this fourth option mirrors virtue ethics.
And what explicating ethics does is it turns the myth of South Asian philosophers not being interested in ethics on its head. Not only was this topic their basic disagreement (everyone had a view on dharma, and everyone disagreed about it), the tradition considers the topic of moral philosophy even more broadly than the other two.
Moral Philosophy is Not Ethnic
If moral philosophy were ethnic, we could only make sense of it in terms of the accomplishments of people in specific ethnic or cultural groups. But it’s philosophy, which is a discipline. And the content of that discipline transcends language and culture. And we can see this if we are willing to use
reason to understand the topic. Again, no one had ever bothered before me. And I think that says a lot about the ordinary interpretive practices of the world we live in. People are exposed to certain paradigms of moral theory, such as what we find in the Western tradition, and then on the basis of opinions that take them as their content, people try to interpret everything. And the result is erasure of interesting philosophical diversity. And that is, in a way, entirely on purpose, for we have to choose to interpret to create the kind of mess we see in the world, and this is the mess of colonization. Colonization is this interpretive imposition of a culture’s outlook on everything else. It’s a form of oppression that, like all oppression, is irrational, as it is interpretation.
What we lose out on is clarity on the topic of moral philosophy. When we interpret, it seems like values and choices are really just about cultures, ethnicities, or specific races. We might come to believe the stories that are told that no one else but Europeans thought about practical matters.
That is a story that fits a colonial narrative. But colonization is a result of the same process, or interpretation. And so this is no accident. But the point that we should bear, which again, I was the only one to make, is that interpretation is irrational and oppressive, and the resulting erasure of moral philosophy as a thing all people have an interest in, arises from this irrationality.
From South Asian Dharma Philosophy, to Objective Ethical Truth
The study of moral philosophy has barely begun. Of the three traditions, only the Western tradition has been well studied. But much of this
lacks context. If you appreciate that the Western tradition is based on assuming the Linguistic Account of Thought, you will find that many of the things that Western ethicists say (especially in their anthropocentrism and communitarianism) are not conceptual restrictions on ethics: they are an
entailment of LAT. When I wrote my first book, Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy, nothing had been written on the topic for decades.
Aside from Purushottama Billimoria, who has been churning out anthologies on Indian ethics (focusing in large measure on contemporary matters),
there hasn’t been anyone who has kept with the topic for decades. It’s gaining popularity, but so far, what I see is still interpretive.
What this means for the study of moral philosophy is that a lot of what people think are just the parameters of the topic have more to do with
prioritizing ethnicity, namely the ethnicity of being Western.
In my Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism, I argue that if you apply the full three-part step of explication (specified below) to the challenge of studying ethics, you will find that the theory of ethics that ends up being the best explanation of the disagreement is Yoga, for it is founded on the interpretation/explication distinction, which you need to make sense of the debate.
Logic as Research Methodology Resolves Ethical Debate
The organizational approach to logic provides a structured methodology for research. This is the fully realized version of explication.
(1) Deductive logic renders explicit reasons for controversial conclusions about first-order options.
(2) Induction—the logic of generalizing from samples—helps determine the general topic of controversy by examining a representative sample of first-order disagreement.
(3) Inference to the Best Explanation (Abduction) discerns the explanation that accounts for the first-order disagreement.
This is a method of research applicable wherever controversy is possible. It allows us to arrive at objective answers—not based on our beliefs or outlook—about the controversy. Once we reach this point, we have reason to conclude what is objectively true, in the sense that the objectivity of the debate is elucidated.
This schema is content-neutral. You can use it for the empirical sciences and philosophy alike.
Logic as Metaethical Choice
If we can distinguish between explication and interpretation, and these constitute two different ways to approach information, then we have a choice at an abstract, metaethical level (that is, at a level before we can even understand ethical options). I demonstrate in Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism, that we have a rational obligation to reject interpretation and to adopt explication. That’s derivable by proof. (If we adopt interpretation, we will wind up with the absurdity of deviating from the guardrails of reason.)
But what this shows is that reason is not something independent of values or ethics. It’s a very basic moral choice.
Again, that’s something I produced against a vacuum of arguments for explication, barring what we find in the Yoga tradition.