epics, indian ethics and 'theory': thinking through matilal

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2009 3: 205History and Sociology of South AsiaSasheej Hegde

Epics, Indian Ethics and 'Theory': Thinking through Matilal

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Epics, Indian Ethics and ‘Theory’:Thinking through Matilal

Sasheej HegdeUniversity of Hyderabad

So it keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole twelvehours.

Kafka

The intent behind proposing the thoughts that I do is to prompt what couldbe called a ‘research programme’ in the form of a comparative study ofdisputes over ethics and ‘theory’ in a transhistorical context.1 What interestsme about the subject is not only the fact of salvaging something distinctiveabout ethics (or even morality) that transcends the purely contextual andthe historically specific, but also managing to do justice to the relativisminvolved in what might be termed people’s adherence to and participation indifferent ways of life. Indeed, I take it that this bipolar mode of assessmentwould interest as much the historian and social scientist as the philosopherwho follows problematising the work of concepts and orientations implicitto the former. Most of us, social scientists and critically minded historians,have grown so accustomed to categories of domination, resistance andcultural strategies and to studies of discursive systems that one hardlyanswers to the action which is encapsulated in socio-cultural practice and/or the system of discourse of which the words associated with action forma part. Studying Indian ethics, I think, necessitates contemplating both thesingular, personal and labile quality of the acts implicating it and to considerthe social-moral quality of what it is about the act that is felt to be imperative.

Contemporary Perspectives Vol. 3, No. 2, July – December 2009, 205–234

1 Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for being tremendously helpful and constructive, asindeed this journal’s editor Nasir Tyabji for providing the impetus. I have tried to workout a version of this essay which would stimulate dialogue between historians, socialscientists and philosophers, and hopefully will lend a new dimension to the journal’sthrust. Note also that transliterations of terms from their Sanskrit and/or other languageforms have been retained; diacritical marks have been avoided.



206 Sasheej Hegde

This would demand engaging with patterns of cultural life in the present aswith modes of inheritance from the past, an exercise as much in theanthropology of ethics (the study, really, of the many ways in which peoplework on themselves and others as moral persons) as with the philosophicalhigh-ground of ethical theory and moral practice – although, I must reiterate,it is the latter ground that our paper will predominantly traverse in thecourse of grappling with the efficacy of a distinctive moral tradition. Indeed,it seems to me quite striking that historical and social scientific scholarship,both in India and elsewhere, has not seriously sought to develop a dialoguewith moral philosophy. All too often, as James Laidlaw has pointed out,conceptions of the social have tended to so completely identify the collectivewith the good that an independent understanding of ethics appears neithernecessary nor possible.2

I hope, though, that my paper will not be interpreted as laying claim toa specific unitary thesis about the nature of ethics and morality. In fact, it isIndian ethics as a kind of philosophical-anthropological theme/endeavourthat I am interested both to conceptualise and to complicate, with theexpectation that this would yield new insights into social and political life,as indeed the history and sociology of South Asia. As our title indicates, Ipropose to work incisively – and perhaps far too obsessively – through aparticular rendition of Indian ethics that issue from the work of the Indianscholar Bimal Krishna Matilal, specifically the notes that he put together onmoral dilemmas in the Indian epics – the Mahabharata, in particular. I amas much interested to retrieve the ambit of this project as to come to termswith it; in particular, to see in what ways Indian ethics so reconstructedcan be seen to provide adequate moral guidance to action [Section I]. To besure, one might ask why any depiction of ethics – or, better still, anyparticular account of ethics should be subjected to this constraint, and Iwill explore this question in the middle segment of the paper [Section II].My last section invokes a wider ambit of discussion in getting a measure ofthe specificity of Indian ethics, while also avoiding, consciously, an excessivehistorical self-consciousness about the problem – of the order which asksof a representation, any modality, whether it is ‘Indian’, whether it is notactually ‘Western’ or ‘Hindu’, and, unto this frame, whether it is not always

2 See James Laidlaw, ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of the RoyalAnthropological Institute, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2002, pp. 311–132.



Epics, Indian Ethics and ‘Theory’ 207

or already ‘Brahminical’ or ‘Sanskritic’ [Section III]. There are many reasonsfor this avoidance, not least my ignorance, a sense of incredulity aboutmatters formulated as either traditional or modern. The effort has also beento fend away a line of criticism that would interpret any (or all) concernabout traditionality and traditionalisation as both archaic and abstruse or aslending themselves to a variety of nativist exceptionalism.

An even more decisive impetus marking out the contours of myengagement is the contemporaneity configuring the question of Indian ethicsas represented by Matilal, but as I seek to formulate it this contemporaneitywould have to be placed within a normative and conceptual grid so as toresonate in within the contours of both Indian and Western academia.

The Way In

The imperative of providing a necessary corrective to the standard pictureof India’s philosophical traditions (where metaphysics, theology andspirituality dominate, and ethics, politics and sociology are relegated to thebackground) cannot be gainsaid. Matilal’s work on the Indian epics (theMahabharata, in particular) is appropriable in this light, although it is strictlynot reducible to it; in that, the work has shown as much (if not a sustained)concern with the logical and metaphysical foundations of Indian philosophy.The perspective from which the work has issued embodies a concern asmuch with the deliberations in the Indian thought about knowledge andtruth, the metaphysical and the social, as with the intuitions and basicconcepts that guide the design of the philosophical traditions themselves(both in the context of India and the West). The analytic strategy exemplifiedby Matilal’s work is one of what could be called a reconstructiveappropriation: an effort, that is, to reconstruct and analyse a substratum ofideas and concepts latent in the culture of a society and its normativefootholds.3 The scene and the object of this appropriation is what Matilalsummarily states as ‘moral dilemmas’. As he observes (and I shall be quoting

3 Note, all paginations that follow in the text and the notes below, unless otherwisespecified, are from Matilal’s papers in the collection edited by Jonardon Ganeri, TheCollected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal, Vol. 2, Ethics and Epics, Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002. The reconstructive nature of Matilal’s undertaking makes itimperative that I replicate his gesture(s). Consequently, in the various sections of mypaper at least, I shall desist from paraphrasing him and will be quoting him at length.Something more than just narrative instantiation is involved here, though.



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at length hereon in order to give the reader a flavour of the moment andmanner of the appropriation, as well as to place in perspective both thesignificance and the nature of the moral guidance being attributed to Indianethics):

It takes some courage to talk about moral dilemmas with regard tothe great epic, the Mahabharata. Indological scholars have oftenargued that Hindu orthodoxy would seldom agree that there aredilemmas in the teaching of the Mahabharata. For is it not thecase that Lord Krsna is always in the Mahabharata to … resolvethe dilemmas for Arjuna? Is it not the case that Vidura is there togive the right kind of advice whenever the old, blind king Dhrtarastrais in any dilemma, whether or not the blind king, being blind inmore sense than one, pays any heed to the well-meaning and ever-righteous brother? Does not the deity Dharma, natural father ofYudhisthira, have to appear in many different forms … in order toinstruct and teach Yudhisthira the right path whenever dilemmashave presented themselves? It would be improbable to argue, onsuch a view, that there could have arisen any genuine dilemmas inthe dharma-ethical system that has been delineated in theMahabharata (pp. 19–20).

It is important to point out that not just legal and social codes but alsomoral principles or moral codes were designated by the pervasive termdharma; and, what is more, Matilal is only too aware of the ambiguitiesattached to its usage – its [that is, dharma’s] ‘often-emphasised subtletyand ever-elusive nature’, as he puts it (p. 20). The epics, for him, ‘apartfrom being the source of everything else’ also represent a distinctive aspectof what is termed ‘moral philosophical thinking of the Indian tradition’(p. 22).

Without doubt, Matilal is interested to explore the dilemmas ‘within thestructure of the dharma-ethics as propounded in the epic’, and even viewssome of these moral dilemmas as ‘illustrations of perennial problems inmoral philosophy’ (p. 21). He presents as a clear case of moral dilemma inthe epic the situation faced by Arjuna in an episode in the Karnaparvan,when he (that is, Arjuna) is faced with a choice between two irreconcilableobligations – (what Matilal formulates as) ‘promise-keeping and avoidanceof fratricide’ (p. 25). The circumstances of this dilemma are worth




recapitulating, with Matilal reconstructing the incidents leading up to it asfollows: on the very day of final encounter between Karna and Arjuna,Yudhisthira fled the battlefield after being painfully humiliated by Krsna inan armed engagement. When Arjuna came to the camp to pay him a visitand asked what really had happened, Yudhisthira flared up in anger and toldArjuna that all his boastfulness about being the finest archer in the worldwas a lot of nonsense, because the war was dragging on. He remindedArjuna that he had claimed to be capable of conquering everybody and thusend the war within a few days. In a rage, he not only insulted Arjuna butalso slighted the Gandiva bow, the most precious possession of this valiantwarrior. The bow was a gift to Arjuna from Agni, the fire-god. He held it sodear to his heart that he had promised to kill anyone who would ever speakill of it. Hence Yudhisthira’s words put Arjuna in a very difficult situation:either he would have to kill his venerated elder brother or break his promise(p. 25). Now, what is important for our purposes at this stage of thediscussion is less the dilemma itself and more the moral philosophical overlaythat Matilal lends to it. As he writes:

When his [Arjuna] Ksatriya duty (dharma) made him choose thefirst alternative [that is, promise-keeping and therefore the killingof his elder brother] Krsna (his alter ego) appeared. On being askedArjuna explained: he was obliged to commit fratricide in order tofulfil his obligation to keep his promise. Arjuna had full knowledgeof the gravity of the crime he was about to commit but like amistimed Kantian he had already taken a conflict-free decision tomeet the Ksatriya obligation of promise-keeping (ibid.).

In other words, to the extent that one of the interpretations of Kantianthought has it that (in the context of Kantian ethics) ‘no agent can beforced to violate his duty’, to that extent (in Matilal’s words) ‘Arjuna mightbe said to be anticipating the Kantian model’ (pp. 25–26). On Matilal’srendition of Kant to the extent that for the latter objective rules should forma whole, ‘a system characterized by consistency, much like a system oftrue beliefs’, the moral conflict which could arise in the minds of moralagents ‘cannot, therefore, be genuine’ – ‘(i)t would be at best a confusion,at worst an illusion’ (p. 25). Matilal even quotes from Kant’s Introductionto the Metaphysics of Morals to bolster the point: ‘Because … duty andobligation are in general concepts that express the objective practical



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necessity of certain actions and because two mutually opposing rules cannotbe necessary at the same time, then if it is a duty to act according to one ofthem, it is not only not a duty but contrary to duty to act according to theother’ (cited on p. 25). Indeed, for Kant, as Matilal points out, a genuineduty cannot be conflated with ‘a ground of that duty’, so that ‘in a so-called dilemma, one horn is a genuine duty, and the other is merely a groundof duty’: ‘(t)here may be a conflict between grounds but not between duties’(ibid.).

Significantly enough, Matilal is concerned to press for more, insistingthat Krsna is not Kant and that, in starting a discourse with Arjuna, Krsna‘obviously turned an apparently moral conflict into a genuine moraldilemma’ (p. 26, emphasis added). He concedes that promise-keeping is ‘astrong obligation’ in India and the West; also that in both these contexts thetwo obligations of promise-keeping and benevolence are ‘invariably connected’(ibid.). But he adds:

There is no cultural relativism here. In Kantian ethics, truth-tellinggets the highest priority. Krsna, however, continued to argue thatpromise-keeping or even truth-telling cannot be an unconditionalobligation when it is in conflict with the avoidance of grossly unjustand criminal acts such as patricide or fratricide. Saving an innocentlife is also a strong obligation, saving the life of an elder brotherwould naturally be an equally strong obligation, if not stronger.Hence, in fact, according to Krsna, two equally strong obligationor duties are in conflict here (p. 26).

Matilal mentions that Krsna relates a story here to illustrate his point.The story is of a hermit, Kausika, who takes a vow of telling the truththroughout his life. One day, however, he is faced with a dilemma. Somebandits were chasing travellers with the intention of killing them. Kausikawas sitting nearby at the crossroad, when the travellers passed by. Thelatter requested Kausika not to show the bandits which way they had fled.When the bandits arrived, they asked him about the travellers; and Kausika,true to himself, told the truth. The travellers were soon caught and killed.Krsna further mentions that Kausika did not reach heaven after his death(his much-coveted reward) just because of this act of cruelty. In otherwords, although Kausika had abided by his principle of truth-tellingthroughout his life, it came to no effect. The attendant gloss on Krsna here




is that ‘under situational constraints, there might be stronger grounds forrejecting truth-telling as a duty and accepting the stronger duty of saving aninnocent life’; also, for Matilal, that ‘(t)his encapsulates a very strong moralinsight, although it is not Kantian’ (ibid., emphasis added). He is categoricalthat ‘(f)or Krsna, dharma is at least sometimes dictated by the constraintsor the contingency of the situation’ and that ‘this is no defense ofopportunism’ (pp. 26–27).

It is quite clear for Matilal that there are intricate issues of moralphilosophy involved here. He finds extant tendencies within moral theory –those that admit the reality of moral dilemmas but which insist that a‘commitment to consistency would require us to modify the system byreordering the priorities or by discarding certain principles’ (p. 27, hespecifically mentions R. M. Hare in this context) – to be simplistic. Besides,while discerning a Sartrean resonance to Krsna’s advice to Arjuna in theMahabharata episode being talked about (that Arjuna, unlike Kausika, mustnot regret his failure to keep the promise when the concrete situation wouldotherwise require him to commit fratricide), Matilal maintains that we shouldavoid such a reading.4 As he observes: ‘The situation is comparable inrespect of the recommendation of the unregretted choice to be reached(masucah) but not so, as far as the complete rejection of the search for aconsistent ethical system is concerned’ (p. 28). The point is, I think, important– that although dharma is at least sometimes dictated by the constraints orthe contingency of the situation, one cannot completely reject the idea of amoral agent. Indeed, it is in this backdrop that Matilal introduces the extremelysubtle ways of dharma or duty – what he characterises as the ‘subtlety ofDharma-ethics’ – and presses forth the claim that, for this ethics, ‘(t)he

4 The conflict, in the context of Sartre, is that of a young man who must choose betweenhis patriotic duty to join the French resistance and his filial obligation to care for hisageing mother. For Sartre, the conflict is real but (as Matilal renders) ‘uses such hardcases as evidence to draw the conclusion that it is useless for a moral agent to form anordered system of ethical principles and to try to live by it’ (ibid., p. 28). The agent,according to Sartre, is condemned to be free – condemned in the sense that ‘he did notcreate himself’ and free because ‘from the moment that he is thrown into this world heis responsible for everything he does’. The agent, therefore, should use his radicalfreedom, and improvise his choice according to the situation without regret or remorse.As already seen, Matilal finds ‘a resonance of the Sartrean advice in Krsna’s advice toArjuna’ (ibid.) but, as has just been pointed out in the text, desists from such a reading.Matilal further points out that ‘Krsna also would not say that humans are condemned tobe free’ (ibid.).



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goodness of a good human life is not always dependent on the things thatthe moral agent can control’ (p. 29). Indeed, informing this summation isanother story that Krsna is supposed to have told before the Kausika story.The story is about an innocent hunter called Balaka who used to hunt animalsto feed his blind parents. Balaka had a rare skill – he could hunt an animaleven when it was outside the range of his sight, simply by listening to thenoise made by the animal drinking water from a river. One day, he huntedin this manner a ferocious creature called Andha. But as soon as Andha waskilled, gods showered flowers from heaven, and the celestial chariot cameto fetch Balaka to heaven. Balaka had unknowingly done a great service tothe Lord’s creation, because this Andha had grown up to be a terrible creaturethat was almost unkillable. Having received a boon from Lord Brahma,Andha went on killing all the creatures. Although Balaka was unaware ofthis fact, he was somehow able to kill this evil creature, and thereby obtainhis just reward. Matilal mentions that this story ‘sounds like the case of“moral luck’’, in the sense that Balaka was a good person in his own modestway, but external contingencies made his moral reward far greater thanwhat he had dreamt of (ibid.). Thus, Matilal posits, ‘There is “externalcontingency” or luck coming to the agent from the world which is notunder his control. But this contingency cannot be totally eliminated’ (ibid.).In fact, for him (contra a certain dimension of Kantian ethics) ‘it is difficultto see how truth-telling as a duty can never be subject to externalcontingency’ (p. 32).

Of course, lending further bite to the remarks just cited is the contentionthat truth-keeping is not being given up as a moral obligation for a personlike Arjuna. On the contrary, ‘(t)he moral agent’s sentiment as well as hiscommitment have rather been respected. What was recoverable is salvagedfrom the conflict’ (p. 33). Relatedly, Matilal is categorical that Krsna’ssuggestion to a regretful and remorseful Arjuna (the latter is so, havingforegone his obligation for truth-keeping or promise-keeping) – that thisomission was reparable – is not a trivialisation of the dilemma. For him,Krsna’s suggestion turns on a seemingly semantic issue which, althoughlight, cannot be ignored:

When Arjuna promised to kill the person who would insult hisGandiva bow, he was obviously not thinking of Yudhisthira as hisvictim. Now, since Yudhisthira was the intended victim who wasalso his revered elder brother, he could even keep his promise




without actually killing him physically. Since insult and harsh wordsto such an elder brother would be as good as killing him in spirit,Arjuna could now insult Yudhisthira and use harsh words, and thuskeep his promise (p. 32).

Accordingly, while conceding that ‘those who want to deny the realityof moral dilemmas would deny such moral sentiments on the part of moralagents’, Matilal is clear that ‘in the case of genuine dilemma, the agent,while doing x would be invariably overwhelmed with a feeling of remorsefor not doing y’ (p. 33). Consequently, as he puts it:

(I)n a moral system, which acknowledges moral dilemmas, suchmoral sentiments are unavoidable, and neither of the conflictingobligations is permanently given up. The obligation that is overriddenis only rendered temporarily ineffectual by the constraints of theparticular situation (ibid.).

Certainly, speaking off the dilemma/episode that he does, it is to benoted that Matilal also considers the question posed by Arjuna at the beginningof the Bhagavad Gita – Should he (that is, Arjuna) fight the bloody battleand kill his kinsmen or should he not? – to be a genuine moral dilemma inthat the attendant moral sentiments, remorse, regret and so on also obtainhere. At any rate, for Matilal, the fact that a variety of ethical questions arecouched in the language of dharma implies that the latter designates morethan just legal and social codes; it also embodies moral principles or codesthat are taken to inform the parameters of human agency and responsibility.

Inducing Moral Guidance

Clearly, Matilal, in gathering together the moral insights from the Indianepics, is concerned to demonstrate not only that the tradition itself wasvery self-conscious about moral values, moral conflicts and dilemmas, butalso could help animate several intricate issues of moral philosophy. Evidently,it is the quality of the moral guidance that is demanded of – and by – anethics that Matilal is interested to capture through his discussion of moraldilemmas in the Indian epics (the Mahabharata, in particular). It alsotranslates into a norm for evaluating competing ethical theories, as we shallsee. There is, of course, the question of why ethical theories are subject tothis constraint of moral guidance, if indeed they are, and the implications



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thereof, but allow me to defer this question for the moment. It also needsto be complicated further – which, hopefully, the ensuing discussion willdo – so that the clarification of the space of this question might proceedupfront, even more truthfully and comprehensively.

Structuring the discussion as he has, Matilal seems to have made aconscious decision to depart from the canonical status of the foundingdilemma underlying the Gita. Now, on a certain register, such a decenteringseems necessary and desirable – contributing as it does to a widening ofthe moral space of Indian ethics, and indeed of the moral dilemmas intrinsicto the epics – although it has, as its flipside, a relative non-consideration ofthe host of questions attending to the Gita story. Indeed, with respect tothe latter, Amartya Sen has sought to lend further weight to the moralsituation and judgments structuring the Gita, critiquing Krishna’s deontology(articulating principles of action based on the priority of doing one’s duty,and accordingly insisting on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of hisevaluation of the consequences) and offering a defense of Arjuna’sconsequential perspective.5 Sen’s point, note, is a pertinent one, seeking tomodulate the bipolar partitioning of moral theories in the West as either‘deontological’ or ‘utilitarian’. While conceding that the deontological casefor doing what one sees as one’s duty is a strong one, he is asking howone can be indifferent to the utilitarian case of being mindful of theconsequences that may follow from our doing what is taken to be our justduty. But, of course, as we have seen in the previous section, Matilal’sdiscussion places in perspective a thicker self-description of Krishna,presenting him as both Kantian and non-Kantian. Even more frontally,perhaps, what Matilal is interested to do is to assert the moral weight of theintricate intertwining of Indian epics and ethics as a whole – that the latterwere based on (to echo Gayatri Spivak) ‘the reading of narrative instantiationsof ethical problems’.6

To be sure, this approach to and framing of Indian ethics is an interestingand challenging one. What is more, Spivak, citing Matilal, also speaks ofthe trap that nineteenth century Indologists fell into when, incorrectly

5 See Amartya Sen, ‘Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy,Vol. 97, 2000.

6 See Gayatri Chakravorthy Spivak, ‘Echo’, New Literary History, Vol. 24, 1993, p. 19.This bibliographic reference also holds for the lines cited in the next sentence of thefollowing paragraph.




estimating that India had no tradition of moral philosophy in the WesternEuropean sense, they had been unable ‘to grasp either the Indic tradition ofrational critique or the tradition of practical ethics in India’. The point isattractive (while not altogether profound) – although the more pertinentquestion would be whether dharma ethics is largely virtue ethics, even ason occasion precepts or rules may be found. I will be tackling this questionmore fully in Section III, although it might be worthwhile here to listen towhat Matilal has to say. Lending specificity to his moves on the terrain ofepics and Indian ethics is the wider negotiation that Matilal is interested tostage on the space of modern moral philosophy. Let me therefore invokethis broader context, before settling back with Matilal.

A question that has dominated modern moral philosophy is whether‘morality’ can be made sense of independent of belief in a transcendentsource of obligation or value. Answering that question has proved to be acontentious matter, for the terms in which it has been posed is open to avariety of interpretations. There are different definitions of morality, differentways of making sense, different kinds of independence and transcendence,and different accounts (as indeed different forms) of obligation and value.7

Equally constitutive of the space of modern moral philosophy has beenthe pressing problem of providing an accurate account of the relationshipbetween an agent’s having a normative reason to act (what one ought todo) and an agent being motivated to act (what one actually does). Broadlyspeaking, there are three rival accounts of this relationship on offer. Thereare those who argue that an agent has a normative reason to act if and onlyif so doing would satisfy some desire of the agent; consequently, their taskis to show that there is an internal relation between an agent’s having anormative reason to act and an agent’s having a desire to act. Alternatively,there are those (generally Kantians) who argue that any agent who has anormative reason to act, and who is practically rational (that is, not sufferingfrom some debilitating form of practical irrationality, such as weakness ofwill or depression), will act. Accordingly, the task of these Kantian theorists

7 A historically organised – albeit simplified – introduction to the space of these questionsis Duncan Richter, Why Be Good? A Historical Introduction to Ethics (New York:Oxford University Press, 2008). The essays collected together in Roger Crisp andMichael Slote (ed.), Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) also providean effective map of modern moral philosophy and the questions that this enterprise hastaken on about the complexity and vastness of our moral life, on what has value.



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is to show that normative reasons always have overriding authority and thatit is always irrational not to act upon them. A third group is concerned topress the point that normative reasons for action are derived from factsabout human well-being, and that an agent will be motivated to act providedthat he or she has been habituated into having desires, guided by reason, toact for his/her own well-being. Consequently, the burden in this third accountis to show how normative reasons can be derived from facts about humanwell-being and whether it is always in an agent’s best interest to act morally.8

To be sure, Matilal concedes that professional philosophers of Indiahave seldom discussed what is called moral philosophy in the sensesdisclosed above; and yet, as he puts it, the tradition did bring a unique setof recognitions to the space of ethics and practical reason. As he strikinglyobserves:

It is true that the dharmasastra texts were there to supplement theHindu discussion of ethics, classification of virtues and vices, andenumeration of duties related to the social status of the individual.But morality was never discussed as such in these texts. On theother hand, the tradition itself was very self-conscious about moralvalues, moral conflicts and dilemmas, as well as about thedifficulties of what we call practical reason or practical wisdom.This consciousness found its expression in the epic stories andnarrative literature which can, therefore, be used for any illuminatingdiscussion of moral philosophy in India (p. 22, emphasis added).

Matilal is emphatic that the situations described in the epics are genuinedilemmas, and that ‘traditional wisdom … maintained an ambivalent attitudetowards the ad hoc resolutions described in the ancient texts’ (p. 24). Hepointedly remarks:

Some of them have no satisfactory solution, although, in each case,an ad hoc practical action-guide was devised in the original storywhile the main problem remained unsolved. Over the ages we noticethat various episodes and subplots of these epic stories have beenretold with great ingenuity in various regional and vernacularversions of the epics, in folktales, plays, dramas, etc. Each new

8 For a clarification of the ground of these three competing accounts of the connectionbetween ethics and practical reason, see Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (ed.), Ethics andPractical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).




version may be regarded as a novel attempt to resolve the dilemmainherent in the original version (p. 21).

At another point, Matilal mentions that even as the same episodes wereretold through the ages in different versions of the epics and the ad hocresolutions of the dilemmas differently conceived, this ‘probably reflectsthe changing pattern of the social ethos of the narrator’s time’ (p. 24). Healso finds the distinction made by Indologists – between the narrative andthe didactic materials in the epic [the thought being ‘that the didactic materialwas added to the narrative material and sometimes the narrative to thedidactic, so that modern scholarship could separate one from the other’ (p.23)] – to be an artificial one as far as the text of the Mahabharata isconcerned. As he affirms (and I think this is important as a further axis ofdetermination of Indian ethics): ‘The so-called narrative and didactive materialare found inextricably fused together in the text, such that often they cannotbe differentiated. Sometimes the narrative itself imparts the moral lessonwithout any deliberate efforts on the part of the narrator. In other words,the medium itself is the message here’ (ibid.).

What we have then, within the parameters set by Matilal’s discussion,is a reformulation of the guidance constraint held to underly ethical theoriesand which is also taken to serve as a norm for evaluating ethical theories inthe space of moral philosophy proper. Perhaps a word about this constraintis in order, before getting back to our point about how Matilal’s discussionseems to be reformulating it. Following a recent examination of this constraint,it might be rendered as follows: ‘(o)ther things being at least roughly equal,ethical theories are better to the extent that they provide adequate moralguidance’; also, that ‘(a)n ethical theory gives adequate moral guidance if itmakes reliable strategies for acting well – for doing the right thing for theright reasons in particular situations – available to practical thinking’.9

9 Pekka Vayrynen, ‘Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance’, Utilitas, Vol. 18, 2006, pp. 292,293. Vayrynen asks, ‘(a)n ethical theory that makes right actions frequently inaccessibleto us, or offers us mere hindsight in the face of moral novelty, uncertainty and difficulty,fails adequately to guide action. Is such an ethical theory worse than one that doesprovide adequate moral guidance?’, while going on to state that the aim is ‘to contributeto our understanding of why ethical theories are subject to the Guidance Constraint, ifindeed they are, rather than to argue that they are’ (pp. 291, 292). There is animportant clarification effected by Vayrynen, who points out in a footnote that ‘(m)oraltheorists who deny that moral principles need be suitable for use in public justificationare not thereby enemies of the Guidance Constraint’ (p. 293, n. 6). As is astutely observed:



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Moreover, the analysis in question goes on to stringently state thatthere are three central facts about adequate guidance and their relevance toethical theory which any account of why ethical theories are subject to theguidance constraint should explain:

(1) An ethical theory fails to provide adequate moral guidance if itevaluates certain actions as right and others as wrong withoutproviding any sufficiently reliable direction for acting in conformitywith those evaluations. A theory that is unreliable will all too easilylead us to act wrongly. (2) For an ethical theory to provide adequateguidance, an agent’s acceptance of it should reliably lead her toperform right actions on the basis of her acceptance of it, and forthe reasons why (according to the theory) right actions are right.Even if doing the right thing for non-moral reasons (say, to avoidpunishment) were a reliable way to act rightly, it would not be acase of moral guidance. (3) A reliable strategy for acting well mustbe available … for use in agents’ practical thinking. If an ethicaltheory only identifies features of right actions that are eitherinaccessible even to a conscientious agent or accessible only inhindsight, it provides no useful direction for acting well.

So modulated, it seems that these are rather strict requirements for anytheory to be assessed as giving adequate moral guidance. Indeed, for thenotion of ‘moral guidance’ to retain any purchase, it may require to bemodified or, perhaps, reformulated. It is this thought which brings backinto focus Matilal’s discussion and the latter’s ability to think modernproblems through ingenious use of ancient insights.10 Structuring as hedoes a discussion around the very idea of moral dilemmas (whose genuinenesshe is unwilling to discount), Matilal is able to weave together an interestingset of considerations on moral guidance with its concomitant novelties,uncertainties and difficulties.

‘Because we know more than we can articulate, a reliable strategy for acting well may beavailable to us even if we are unable to articulate the considerations governing ourdeliberations in a way that public justification requires. If so, violating the publicitycondition does not entail violating the Guidance Constraint’ (ibid.). The other longquote that follows in this paragraph is also from the same source (pp. 293–294).

10 For a further take on this aspect of Matilal, see the overtures of Arindam Chakrabarti –‘Introduction: The Absence of a Philosopher’ – in his specially edited number on thetheme ‘Epistemology, Meaning and Metaphysics after Matilal’ featured in Studies inHumanities and Social Sciences , Vol. 3, 1996, pp. 1–11.




It should be quite clear that Indian ethics as a form of ethical theory isseen to provide moral guidance often based on the reading of narrativeinstantiations of ethical problems. The ethics in question is perspectivistand performative, but not quite only so. As Matilal concludes, in lines whichstand out as much for their piety as for their conviction about an aspect ofIndian ethics:

The nature of our practical wisdom has a sort of malleability, whichis comparable to the ever-elusive nature of dharma-ethics to befound in our epic literature. It has been said that dharmasya tattvamnihitam guhayam (the truth of dharma lies in the dark cave). Itcannot be completely known by us as universally fixed. But theacknowledgement of possible flexibility does not mean that the fixityand universality of ethical laws will be entirely negotiable. Situationalconstraints may require some bending, but by allowing genuinemoral sentiments like remorse or guilt it makes up for occasionallapses. A moral agent … has an enriched practical wisdom when itis informed by his experiences of genuine moral dilemmas. A moralagent needs also a character which is nothing but a disposition toact and react appropriately with moral concerns (p. 33).

He grants that the history of moral thought of mankind as a wholelends itself to ‘two different types of moral persons as paradigmatic’ – oneis the ‘dutiful fulfiller of universal obligations a la Kant’ and the other iswhat he forwards as ‘an imaginative poet … a perspectivist [who]understands the contingency of the human situation’ (p. 34). Accordingly,he holds that, in the Indian context, Yudhisthira’s (or Rama’s) moral idealswould fall into the former category – ‘The nature of dharma idealized byRama (or Yudhisthira) seems to have been very rigid. It seldom bends’(ibid.) – whereas Krsna belongs to the latter type, attentive not only to theparticularity of the situation but also looking beyond it: ‘Krsna allows forflexibility in dharma. But this flexibility never means the “anything goes”kind of morality … He governs from above but does not dictate’ (ibid.,emphasis added).11

11 I shall return to the italicised portion in a subsequent section. One could state that intaking these two different types of moral persons as paradigmatic, Matilal has simplifiedthe issue. But what follows, is the drift of the thoughts that have anchored the discussionthus far.



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It is imperative to grant that Matilal’s reconstruction is also a staging ofthe contents of Indian ethics, if not the entirety of that content at least animportant slice of it. On this register, to be sure, the test of an ethicaltheory would be not just the moral guidance it offers, but also the specificquality of that guidance. For one, Matilal is claiming that any system ofethics must give moral guidance even if the guidance entailed need nottranslate into a resolution of the moral dilemma(s) which underwrite action.This might seem contentious, but I think it is a particularly erudite claimthat Matilal’s discussion of Indian epics and ethics is both working off andintending to consolidate: namely, that any serious discussion of moraldilemmas must cross-cut the system of ethics and yet give adequate moralguidance. Indeed, Matilal’s specific gloss on Krsna (already alluded to) that‘under situational constraints, there might be stronger grounds for rejectingtruth-telling as a duty and accepting the stronger duty of saving an innocentlife’ and that ‘(t)his encapsulates a very strong moral insight, although it isnot Kantian’ (p. 26) is appropriable in this light.12 Even more notably though,it is also being claimed that the moral guidance is itself part of the ethicaltheory in contention, so that the former (the moral guidance) is not outsidethe latter (the ethical theory or claim in perspective) and which the lattermust accede to.

We need to be clear here. One is not discounting the guidance constraintof/for ethical theories; only transposing the requirement differently fromwithin a modulation effected on (or by) an aspect of Indian ethics. It opensup another space of consideration – whether Indian ethics in the form ofdharma ethics is largely only virtue ethics, even as on occasion precepts orrules may be found – to which I will presently turn. For the moment, the‘moral realism’ on which Matilal both premises and carries forward hisdiscussion – ‘I personally believe that certain moral dilemmas are genuine,and also that occurrence of such dilemmas does not present any problemfor moral realism’ (p. 24) – is a fairly robust one; and it is in keeping withthis robustness that he offers a dichotomy between two types of genuinedilemma – one type where ‘what ought to be done has remained unsettledfor the agent even when he has considered all the relevant information

12 As already seen, in the context of the dilemma discussed by Matilal, that while Arjunamight be said to be anticipating the Kantian model, Krsna is not Kant; and, what ismore, that in starting a discourse with Arjuna, Krsna ‘obviously turned an apparentlymoral conflict into a genuine moral dilemma’ (p. 26).




known to him in the situation’ and the other type where ‘what ought to bedone remains unsettleable even after the exercise of all rational means’ (ibid.)– while going on to maintain that his concern is primarily with the secondtype of dilemma. It is important to get the measure of this difference: in thefirst type of dilemma, there is the hope that with the deemed informationalconstraints being removed, the dilemma may dissolve, whereas, in the secondtype, the presence or absence of informational constraints has no bearingon the decision. In fact, given the case of dilemma that Matilal discusses inthe Mahabharata (and taken as emblematic of the second type), one is notentirely sure whether this is antecedent to or a concomitant of the moralrealism that he attributes to Indian ethics.

But of course, consistent with the philosophical controversies that aboundon the subject of moral realism, it might be insisted that we need to distinguishbetween a morality (as a theory of right and wrong) and a realism (as atheory of mind-independent existents); between morals (mind-dependentconstructs) and rocks (mind-independent objects); and all of these fromconditions of truth or falsity.13 In fact, arraigning against the robustness ofthe situations described by Matilal, it might be claimed that morality is notwhat is right/wrong, good/bad, and so on; indeed that morals are not likerocks over which you can stumble or sit on (nor are they semantic artifacts,in the sense that the conditions under which statements are true or falsewill not tell us what to do). In other words, on this register, a morality is atheory about what is good or bad, right or wrong, etc. It specifies a certainset of ‘social norms’ whose elasticity would have to be further contextuallydetermined. All the same, it is important to notice that these distinctions donot say anything about whether ‘x’ or ‘y’ is right or wrong independent ofone’s (your or my) attitude/disposition (which is really what concerns Matilaland the situations of Indian ethics from which he speaks). If one startswith the fundamental notion that the specification of whether ‘x’ or ‘y’ isright or any subset of that specification (any particular social norm) cannotbe independent of the conceptualising mind or the situation from which itspeaks, this beginning could make a big difference to an ethics (like in theIndian instance of the epics) which posits that part of right and wrong isat least partly made up (constructed?) of human values, habits and

13 I must confess this is a thorny ground of debate, and my thinking on these questions ispresently somewhat muddled. Yet, it seems to me an important ground of clarification.Hopefully, I can sort out this ground in due course, if not entirely in this text.



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associations.14 Thus, as I mentioned very early on in my introductoryoverture, studying Indian ethics necessitates contemplating both the singular,personal and labile quality of the acts implicating it and to consider thesocial-moral quality of what it is about the act that is felt to be imperative.This would need to be complicated, of course, which is what the nextsection attempts.

Translating Indian Ethics

Morally substantive commitments are both internal to Indian ethics as wellas underwrite a certain disposition towards Indian ethics. This is very clearas one works through Matilal, although the weight of his assessment, I aminclined to state, tends to fall more on the latter (the attempt, that is, toformulate a certain disposition towards Indian ethics) than on the former(the outlining of the morally substantive commitments internal to Indianethics. The challenge, to be sure, is in coming to terms with the morallysubstantive commitments internal to Indian ethics, and I venture somesuggestions in what follows. There is, however, a small knot (a general oneat that) which needs to be untied before embarking on aspects of thatground. The matter has to do with whether there is – or can be – anadequacy condition for ethical theories over and above the guidance constraintthat we have talked about earlier. In other words, for an ethical theory to bean ethical theory, it must not only provide adequate moral guidance, it mustalso be answerable to purely theoretical, morally neutral norms. Of course,in doing so, they may nullify the force of the morally substantivecommitments that underwrite an ethical theory, but I will not be exploringthis line here

Pekka Vayrynen, in the paper cited earlier (n. 9 above), mentions‘(i)nternal consistency, simplicity, unity and explanatory power … [as]plausible candidates for purely theoretical norms for evaluating ethicaltheories’, and adds (problematically, one would think) that ‘in so far as

14 Whether this dissolves the ground of the debate between the three rival accounts of therelations between ethics and practical reason is another question. Considering that thishas come to represent a specialised ground in modern moral philosophy, the resolutionsoffered on the space of Indian ethics might seem pretty trite. I have ventured somefurther suggestions about the specificity of Indian ethics in a review essay entitled ‘EthicalSpecificities: Repositioning Indian Ethics’, Sophia, Vol. 47, 2008, pp. 243–249.




these features are advantages in a theory, they are so regardless of thetheory’s subject matter’.15

Interestingly enough, Vayrynen notes that the ‘capacity of purelytheoretical norms to discriminate among competing ethical theories is limitedanyway’ and that consequently the many norms which we deploy widely inevaluating ethical theories are not morally neutral in that ‘they reflectsubstantive moral ideals that enjoy at least provisional acceptance’. Whileall this seems obvious enough – of course, it need not always dawn on oneand all - the point to be noted for our purposes here is what follows fromthis. In Vayrynen’s words, ‘Purifying our norms for evaluating ethicaltheories of morally substantive implications would require us to abandonnorms that we deploy widely’. Indeed, in a further weighty considerationthat has some direct bearing on Matilal’s discussion of moral dilemmas inthe Mahabharata, Vayrynen notes:

(M)any philosophers argue that an adequate ethical theory may notallow for situations in which an agent ought (‘all things considered’)both to do A and to do B … but in which she can only do either Aor B but not both. The thought is that genuine moral dilemmas ofthis kind are impossible because the assumptions that generate theirimpossibility are impeccable. But a deontic logic that is consistentwith the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas can itself be perfectlyconsistent, and need be no less simple or unified than one thatentails the impossibility of moral dilemmas. Reasons to deny orallow the possibility of moral dilemmas apparently have to stemfrom morally substantive rather than purely theoretical norms(emphasis added).

15 Vayrynen, ‘Ethical Theories and Moral Guidance’, p. 306. The rest of the quotes thatfollow in this paragraph of my main text are from p. 307. For Vayrynen, the worry thatholding ethical theories answerable to morally substantive norms is unreasonable becauseit begs the question against certain ethical theories is ‘less serious than it may seem’,especially since (following a suggestion of John Rawls from A Theory of Justice) ‘(t)hemerit of proposed adequacy conditions ‘depends upon the soundness of the theory thatresults’ and such conditions can be justified ‘only by the reasonableness of the theory ofwhich they are a part’ (p. 308). It is further noted: ‘Rawls’s idea may to some extentfrustrate our desire to establish adequacy conditions on ethical theories before particulartheories come in, so that we can prevent some from entering. But its application to theGuidance Constraint is instructive’ (ibid.).



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Mark the point that I have italicised, which is consistent with the stancetaken by Matilal as well. More strictly, the effort to pull togetherconsiderations that are both Kantian and non-Kantian, which emblematisesMatilal’s approach to Indian ethics, so to say, might have a Kantian deonticsource after all. I guess, at a certain personal level, we modern scholars areall default Kantians. At any rate, considering where we have arrived, thequestion to be faced squarely is the one I asked early on in Section II,namely, whether Indian ethics in the form of dharma ethics is largely virtueethics, even as on occasion precepts or rules may be found. Let us moveon, then, to this more substantive terrain of appraisal.

In another essay entitled ‘Dharma and Rationality’, which is part of thecollection from which I am speaking, Matilal notes: ‘By the term dharma inthe title of this essay, I understand nothing short of moral virtue, or rather,a theory of moral behaviour, as it is found implicit in India’s traditionalwisdom … [f]or, in the wider tradition of India, dharma stands for neither“religion” nor the narrower caste-oriented duties’ (pp. 50–51). While thisby itself need not translate into anything much, it is what Matilal weavesinto the subject of dharma and its rational critique that is very significant:

Dharma is a popular subject of inquiry, often found in all [the]narrative literature. The nature of dharma is often hotly debatedand argued about; no other principle has been regarded as sacred.This need not be very surprising, for neither in Buddhism nor inJainism, or even in Hinduism, was God cited as the authority ondharma. Hence the search for a rational basis of dharma is oftencompatible with these religious traditions. There were, of course,the Hindu scriptures. But these scriptures proved to be flexible,sometimes to the point that they seemed to have meant whatevertheir interpreters chose to make them mean. Furthermore, evenwhen the literal text of the scriptures was taken seriously, theinterpreters of the Mimamsa school undertook to make a rationalexamination (mimamsa means rational examination) of the meaningof the Vedic (scriptural) statements (p. 51).

For Matilal, then, it is very clear that the dharma tradition is not amatter of blind faith, but developed through an attempt at rational criticismof itself; and, in this sense, it inscribes a principle of rationality or rationalinquiry that needs attending to.




Interestingly, another piece of evidence that is presented in support ofthis claim bears a reference to the caste-hierarchy, which (as Matilalacknowledges) is almost as old as Vedic Hinduism. According to him:

The Sramana tradition provided a rational critique from outside.But, even within the domain of Vedic Hinduism, there occurred asearch for a rational basis. What resulted was an interpretation ofthe karma doctrine that was intended to provide a ‘rational’ basisfor the apparently irrational practice of caste-hierarchy or socialinequality’ (ibid.).

He mentions Max Weber’s discussion in The Religion of India, which,although characterising caste-dharma as ‘anti-rational’ (because it deniedthe ‘natural’ equality of man), held the karma doctrine of Hinduism to providethe rational basis of the caste-hierarchy (indeed, for Weber, the karmadoctrine represented ‘the most consistent theodicy ever produced in history’).Matilal, though, does not share Weber’s enthusiasm for the doctrine; whilealso disagreeing with Louis Dumont’s valorisation of the Hindu caste systemas a ‘value’ and also a ‘rational’ practice (pp. 52–53). He gives furtherevidence of the linkage between dharma-ethics and the search for a rationalbasis – where a moral decision gets to be made on the basis of a rationalargument – while going on to show ‘the ambivalence of the later traditionto accept as entirely rational the prevalent resolution of caste-hierarchy interms of the past karma of the individual’ (pp. 53–54). Even more pointedly,yet, Matilal notes that in the case of the Hindus – where the Vedas weregiven the supreme authority (although subjected to rational investigation[cf. mimamsa]) – two further points need to be made:

First, the Vedic injunctions cover only a very small part of ournormal behaviour at the social and personal level. Hence the necessityarose for guidelines – from the conduct of the good as well asfrom appeal to good conscience – to achieve rational resolution ofconflict-situations. The second point is that medieval authors ofthe dharmasastras such as Manu and Yajnavalkya were fully awareof the role of rationality in determining various moral or dharmapreferences (p. 58).

In fact, even as these authors achieved a certain notoriety for theirnarrow-mindedness – ‘for “irrational” rationalisation of the same existingunjust social institutions such as inequalities in caste discrimination, and for



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resisting the change that was bound to come along with the change of timeand environment’ – Matilal concedes that ‘it is undeniable that these sameauthors also realized that the full extent of dharma-morality can be sustainedonly if it can be given a rational basis’ (ibid.). For him, the stream ofcritical rationality in the tradition ‘was already alive and active’, emanatingas much from the low castes as from the higher strata of the society, theBrahmin priests, etc. (ibid.).

In a principled sense, then, something more than simply or only virtueethics is involved in this characterisation of dharma-ethics; it implicates atradition of rational critique and a tradition of practical ethics in India whichneeds sorting out both in their complex intertwining and transformation andin their own independent spaces of articulation. The problems andpossibilities, as I see it, attending to Matilal’s reconstruction of Indian ethicslie essentially here, in this process of sorting out. Clearly, strong conceptsof ‘rationality’ and the ‘rational’ are involved here, which would require tobe further addressed. Notably, in another context, introducing his bookabout philosophical theory in classical India, Jonardon Ganeri observes,‘(w)hat do we mean when we speak of a culture’s notion of the rational.Not, of course, that the concept itself is culturally specific, but only that itis embedded, articulated and manifested in culturally specific ways’; andgoes on to link Matilal’s study of the concept of reason embedded in changingtreatments of moral dilemmas in the epic literature and dharmasastras with‘a diachronic study of conceptions about what constitutes an adequateresolution to a moral dilemma … [and which] … illuminates both shifts inthe notion of reason itself, and also the mechanics of internal criticism,theory revision and paradigm rejection’.16 To be sure, Matilal’s study doesoffer glimpses of the latter (some of which can be had in our foregoingpages) although it is not quite presented in the way that Ganeri seems toimply. At any rate, the point is important, and is a key issue in the sortingout that one could be striving after.17

16 See Jonardon Ganeri, Philosophy in Classical India: The Proper Work of Reason, London:Routledge, 2001, pp. 2–3.

17 I am afraid Amartya Sen’s immensely readable The Argumentative Indian: Writings onIndian History, Culture and Identity, London: Allen Lane, 2005, bearing as it does thetheme on its sleeve, hardly encounters this terrain. I guess the work, a panegyric topublic philosophising, could not have borne the weight of this mode of reflection.




Suggestions of a different kind emanate from the notion of a ‘thick’ethical concept as framed by the philosopher Bernard Williams. By such anotion, Williams means a concept such as ‘coward, lie, brutality, gratitudeand so forth’ (including infidelity or blasphemy, remorse and regret, treacheryand promise, and courage) whose applicability is both ‘world-guided andaction-guiding’.18

‘If a concept of this kind applies’, he observes, ‘this often providessomeone with a reason for action. … At the same time, their application isguided by the world. A concept of this sort may be rightly or wronglyapplied, and people who have acquired it can agree that it applies or fails toapply to some new situation’. In other words, to apply a thick ethical conceptin a given situation (for instance, to accuse someone of infidelity) is, inpart, to evaluate the situation, which characteristically means eithercondemning or commending certain courses of action; but it is also tomake a judgment which is subject to correction if the situation turns outnot to be a certain way (for instance, if it turns out that the person who hasbeen accused of infidelity did not in fact go back on any relevant agreement).Now, while the notion seems to lend a certain currency to the situationsdescribed and foregrounded by Matilal – indeed, the resulting picture ofIndian ethics as either invoking or presupposing a body of thick ethicalconcepts is all the more resonant, and when filtered through the fact thatthe axis of this retrieval is through the notion of moral dilemmas, the accountseems to render Indian ethics itself as at once singular, personal and labile –there are also difficulties here, and not just because of the incompletenessof Matilal’s account and/or the shifting parameters of Williams’ discussionof thick ethical concepts itself. Let me tackle the sources of the latterdisparagement before resuming my discussion of embellishing ourunderstanding of Indian ethics (and accordingly rendering Matilal’s accountmore complete than it is).

The Nietzschean undertows of Williams’ investigation need to be keptin mind (and contrasts fairly sharply, I think, with the inspirationsunderscoring Matilal). It is this influence which oversees Williams, suggestion

18 See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 129–30 and 140–42. The lines that follow in thetext are from the same work, pp. 140–41.



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to distinguish ethics, which is a way of answering the Socratic question‘How one ought to live?’, from morality, which is a certain kind of answerto that question – one which, though it has come to play a major part in theethical life of the modern West, is none the less in broader historical andcomparative terms a ‘peculiar’ institution. This is perhaps as it should be,although I think the distinction is overdrawn and makes sense only within adefinite discursive context.19 Besides, in terms of the situations reconstructedfrom the Indian epics and the normative overlays that attach to them –whether approached through the lens of Matilal or even beyond in terms ofthe normativity attaching to the morally substantive commitments internalto Indian ethics per se – it seems very difficult to hold on to the ethics/morality distinction. There is, nonetheless, a specific weight that Williamsseems to be lending to his idea that the application of thick ethical conceptsis ‘at the same time world-guided and action-guiding’ which is interesting.The standard account – Williams calls it ‘prescriptivist’ – has it that ‘(a)nysuch concept … can be analyzed into a descriptive and a prescriptive element:it is guided round the world by its descriptive content, but has a prescriptiveflag attached to it’.20 This standard account is, doubtless, simplistic, andWilliams gestures accordingly: ‘Prescriptivism claims that what governs theapplication of the concept to the world is the descriptive element and thatthe evaluative interest of the concept plays no part in this’. More decisively,

19 For the ‘ethical’/‘moral’ positioning just alluded, see Williams, Ethics and the Limits ofPhilosophy, pp. 174–196. The distinctive thing about morality, for Williams, is thatjudgment is in terms only of obligations – a specific set of so-called moral obligations –and these can be outweighed only by other such obligations. All ethical considerations tendtherefore to be phrased in moralised forms of judicial language – rules, rights, duties,commands and blame. Moral thinking accordingly, as Williams’ renders it, is a matter ofweighing obligations and deciding where one’s duty lies, and moral judgments rest onwhether one chooses, whatever one’s desires or inclinations, to act in accordance with thisduty. According to him, these distinctive features of ‘the morality system’ are found inmuch of our social and political life – part of the structuring of modernity, one might add– but they do not exhaust how we actually make ethical choices. Williams point is thatour lives would be greatly impoverished, and in even greater confusion, if they did.

20 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 141. As he adds: ‘It is the first featurethat allows it to be world-guided, while the second makes it action-guiding’ (ibid.). Seealso pp. 120–131 passim. The indexed quotation that follows in this paragraph is fromp. 141. The dimensions of social and political critique that attach to our present hasmuch to learn from the ensuing clarification, if its bite needs to be retained.




for Williams, in order to trace the contours of the ethical concept’sapplicability, we have to understand its evaluative point:

How we ‘go on’ from one application of a concept to another is afunction of the kind of interest that the concept represents, and weshould not assume that we could see how people ‘go on’ if we didnot share the evaluative perspective in which this kind of concepthas its point.

Noticeably, the situations described and the concepts invoked in Matilal’sreconstructive appropriation of Indian ethics make these demands onunderstanding; and it is but a crude representation of the latter to pose itmerely as a form of virtue ethics. Matilal’s specific suggestions on thisscore seem to suggest otherwise, although his intimations about elusivenessand ambiguity in dharma-ethics seem to implicate precisely that crudity ofrepresentation.21 This of course does not complete the picture, since, althoughthe question that we asked whether dharma-ethics is largely virtue ethicshas now obtained a negative answer, the question of the kinds of preceptsor rules that obtain within the space of Indian ethics also has to be handled.What follows are some suggestions on this score.

To be sure, the familiar Kantian idea of the will as practical reason hashere – in the context of Indian ethics (or, at least, Matilal’s reconstructionof it) – acquired an active mode, willing as a capacity (faculty?) of practicalreasoning. But what oversees the movement from reasoning to ‘obligation’– note, not quite only because that shift is also important to the Kantiannotion of will and willing but in the sense of giving a normative reason forwhy someone ought to do something? What is to prevent a rational agent,

21 See Matilal’s essay ‘Elusiveness and Ambiguity in Dharma-Ethics’ in the collection fromwhich we have been speaking (op.cit., pp. 36–48). I must hasten to clarify that myremarks here are not to be interpreted as a dismissal of the space of virtue ethics. Thisremains a veritably inexhaustible terrain of reflection and reconstruction, although oneneeds to be a little wary of the folk-psychological notions that seem to both feed offand into the project. Indeed, to the extent that the virtues imply specific traits ofcharacter, the moral psychological integuments of the virtues can be particularlyfascinating; and, to the extent that there could be incompatibilities between the virtuesas traits of character (so that the possession of certain virtues conflicts in some measurewith the possession of some others), the field of argumentation can be contentious andlively. Some interesting suggestions obtain in John D. Smith, ‘Consistency and Characterin the Mahabharata’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol.72,2009, pp. 101–112; as also Leela Prasad, Ethics in Everyday Hindu Life: Narration andTradition in a South Indian Town (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007).



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when putting reason to practical use, from adopting only resolutions thatare not principles, resolutions that serve merely as private recipes fororganising? This can be given a Kantian answer, which may be found to belimiting, which, in turn, may elicit a further Kantian answer, and the cyclecan go on. But my point is different. It has to do with the basic idea(adapted from Williams, of course, and which following Matilal one findsas important within Indian ethics) that anyone who embraces a thick ethicalconcept thereby has certain reasons for doing something. No doubt, thespecific gloss that we put on the words ‘doing’ something, on ‘having’ a‘reason’, and on ‘embracing’ a concept is crucial, but I am here concernedabout the normativity of it all – indeed, in the contexts that one is straddling,the reason why someone ought to do something, whether in the midst ofmoral dilemmas or in the thrall of moral certainties.

Doubtless, this question can be given a psychological or psychologisinganswer, and one might even broach the idea by considering the very notionof putting reason to practical use – a consideration as vital to Kant’s moralphilosophy as to the idea of Indian ethics approached as a unique or distincttradition of practical ethics.22

But this is not a very interesting or even challenging route to take.Allow me a quick nod in the direction of Matilal, who as we have alreadyseen is only too aware that not just legal and social codes but also moralprinciples or moral codes were designated by the pervasive term dharmaand that one must never lose sight of the ‘often-emphasized subtlety andever-elusive nature’ of dharma (p. 20). It may be necessary to sharpen thisformulation as a way of gaining more critical purchase on the question ofnormativity that we have posited. Needless to say, I shall be venturing onlya few thoughts here.

Querying the relationship between law and dharma in the Indian context,the French Sanskritist Lingat observes that ‘(the) element which has served

22 For a variant of the latter, see Binu Gupta, ‘Bhagavad Gita as Duty and Virtue Ethics:Some Reflections’, Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 34, 2006, pp. 373–395; but remainsa somewhat misleading ground of appraisal at that. An interesting recent account in thecontext of Kant’s moral philosophy is Barbara Herman, one which resists preciselypsychologising Kant’s account of moral action and motivation (‘Reasoning to Obligation’,Inquiry, Vol. 49, 2006, pp. 44–61). Nietzsche and Williams point (although their usagesare not identical), that the term ‘morality’ designates ethical systems where self-denyingvalues inform law-like obligations in the way (say) Kant saw it, is not very helpfuleither. Of course, all this is not to imply that there are no problems with Kant’s ethics.




in the West as a foundation for a specific discipline, namely, the coerciveelement, which characterizes a legal rule and distinguishes it from otherrules which also control human activity’ does not so obtain in the classicalIndian context; and that the latter (in building up the law) ‘have derived itfrom a more general notion which exceeds the domain of law in manyrespects without actually comprehending it entirely: duty’.23 According tohim, ‘the classical legal system of India (unlike the ‘Western juridicalsystem’) substitutes the notion of authority for that of legality’. Lingat furthermaintains (an argument which could serve as the basis of a whole disputationin the context of Indology or Sanskrit knowledge systems):

The word ‘dharma’ which could be translated as ‘duty’ in effectexpresses conformity with what Hindus regard as the natural orderof things; and this explains its association with law. But the rule ofdharma can only become a rule of law by a process beyond theexpression of it, a process which enables it to enter society armedwith a power of constraint which is not inherent in it (emphasisadded).

Surely Lingat is not the last word on the subject, and given developmentsin classical Indian philosophy and theory the ideas that he is laying claim tocannot be taken as sacrosanct. But let us stay with the thoughts formulatedhere – incidentally, there are allusions in Matilal to this scholar – especiallythe idea that we have emphasised above, namely, that ‘the rule of dharmacan only become a rule of law by a process beyond the expression of it, aprocess which enables it to enter society armed with a power of constraintwhich is not inherent in it’. Louis Dumont translates this point as one of, inhis words, ‘the dharma rul(ing) from on high, but … not hav(ing) to govern,which would be fatal (emphasis added).24 However, I think Lingat’s

23 Robert Lingat, The Classical Law of India (New Delhi: Thomson Press, 1973), p. xii.The lines that follow are from pp. 257–58; the indexed lines in the same paragraph arefrom p. xiii of the same work.

24 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 78. To be sure, Dumont is perforce led tomaintain so, in keeping with the demands of his theory, but more importantly, I think,in order to retain that quest at the heart of his theory of hierarchy – namely, ‘the needto restore value to ideas’, and to reiterate hierarchy as ‘command(ing) attention as achallenge to the main trend of modern ideology (Ibid., 245).



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suggestion resonates differently, meeting as it does with a point that thejurist scholar J. D. M. Derrett formulates most adroitly (contra Dumont):namely, that of the rajadharma, ‘the teachers of which (all of them Brahmins)regarded kingship as a practical and religious necessity, for they fearednothing more than chaos.25 Derrett further observes:

Rajadharma is … a very different thing from rajaniti, thoughtreatises on the former incorporate, englobe, a great deal of thelatter. Rajaniti is “the way a king should comport himself to besuccessful”. Rajadharma is “the way a king should comport himselfin order to be righteous”. … No sacrificial performances by a formerruler can wipe out the effects of unrighteous administration persistedin, knowingly, while he ruled.

In short (to return to Lingat): the specific evaluative thrust of dharma,as indeed the passage of dharma into society, whereby its ‘rules’ aretransformed into rules of law, is mediated by the institution of ‘kingship’(or, in our secular modern democratic times, ‘government’), as part andparcel of its rajadharma; and it is by means of this mediation – the legitimateforce wielded by kingship or government, danda, in short – that the rule ofdharma enters society armed with a power of constraint which is not inherentin it.26

Should this entail that we formulate dharma, or even rajadharma, asexplicated above, as the grand evaluative point of Indian ethics? I supposenot – and indeed, notwithstanding some suggestions to the contrary, Matilalwould not do so either – and to be sure there are problems in resurrectingthe values of dharma and constituting them so. The specific issue here isfurther complicated when, for instance, Derrett, noting the shastric emphasis

25 J. D. M. Derrett, ‘Rajadharma’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 35, 1976, p. 606. Note,the indexed quote that follows in this paragraph is from the same source and so also thepagination. The implication, I suppose, is obvious: that Dumont’s locutions on therelationship between ‘priesthood’ and ‘royalty’ are drawn from treatises discussing rajaniti(cf. Derrett, Rajadharma p. 605) and that this should be kept distinct from rajadharma.For more on the latter point, see what follows in our text.

26 Concerning the king’s powers of command (ksatra), Lingat has this to say: ‘Ksatraconfers on the king independence, the right to act to suit himself without dependingupon anyone else. The king is independent of subjects, as is the spiritual preceptor ofhis pupils and the head of the family of the members of his household’ (op.cit., p. 211).




on the virtues (on codes of conduct or traits of character considered to beexemplary or desirable) observes that it results in the neglect of law:

India … [has the belief] that righteousness is an independent scienceof greater importance than mere day-to-day administration, and thatthe teacher’s duty is to exhort, and to set standards of conduct,based overtly upon transcendental considerations, recognizing thatdecisions will be reached by judges, arbitrators, or others, uponprinciples of ethics, custom or policy, but hoping that they would,if properly educated in righteousness, tend or endeavour to give ajust decision. … The sastra contains no rules of law which mustbe followed by judges on pain of illegality.27

It may be that our discussion has shifted gear; let us therefore regroup.This obviously does not settle entirely our question of normativity – even asit lends distinct shades to it – in the sense of the basic idea that anyone whoembraces a thick ethical concept thereby has certain reasons for doingsomething. The Indian philosopher Daya Krishna has in another contextencapsulated this point differently, when he observes that ‘(t)he Indianpolitical thinker … seems sensitive to considerations of dharma even withregard to issues that are primarily political in nature’.28 Indeed, as we havestated more than once in our preceding sections, approaching Indian ethics

27 J. D. M. Derrett, Dharmasastra and Juridical Literature, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,1973, p. 23. Indeed, the question is more complicated than what Derrett seems to beimplying. On any register, the assimilation of law with morality need not always becompelling because the political element of law brings completely different aspects intoplay. As Habermas has noted in another context: ‘In Kant and in early liberalism, thereis a conception of the rule of law which suggests that the legal order itself is exclusivelymoral in character, or at least is a form of implementation of morality. This assimilationof law and morality is misleading’ (Jurgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews,London: Verso, 1992, p. 252). Note also that Habermas is here responding to a questionconcerning how one ought to understand law and morality in modernity.

28 Daya Krishna, The Problematic and Conceptual Structure of Classical Indian Thoughtabout Man, Society and Polity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 107. Thisobviously renders the Indian language of power more equivocal than it seems. Thespecific normative implications of this are worthwhile exploring, both for conceptualisingpower and for defacing it. Michel Foucault’s conception, one defining the exercise ofpower as ‘a mode of action upon the actions of other’ (‘The Subject and Power’, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 221), although interesting, may not behelpful.



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necessitates contemplating at once the singular, personal and labile qualityof the acts implicating it as well as considering the social-moral quality ofwhat it is about the act that is felt to be imperative. Even as a conception ofbinding norms (rightness as such, the obligatory force of norms as havingthe absolute meaning of an unconditional or universal duty) is emphasised,the ethical space as a whole is premised upon significant recognitions withinthe structure of this normativity. Significantly, these recognitions seem toeffectively displace the problematic of rightness as such, and engage theimportant problem of the connection between the possession of the rightnorms (or rules or precepts) and the judgment(s) required to apply them.

I realise that the specific challenge of studying Indian ethics consists indebating (and conceptualising) the quality and effectiveness of this‘bindingness’ and normativity (as indeed the ‘us’ to which it comes attached),and I hope I have succeeded in communicating aspect of this challengethinking through Bimal Matilal. I also realise that the specific demands ofsuch a study must place a limit on one’s own historical standpoint and itsunreflected condition of emergence. But, above all, I am presuming of coursethat these orders of specification are both necessary and possible and thatquestions of explanatory graft cannot – and indeed do not – exhaust thesame. As the German theorist Jurgen Habermas has remarked elsewhere,‘an analytical procedure which demands sensitivity to context need notitself be context-dependent and lead to context-dependent results’.29 Thewhat invents the who just as much as it is invented by it.

29 Habermas, Anatomy and Solidarity, p. 267.



epics, indian ethics and 'theory': thinking through matilal

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