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