Two decades ago Akeel Bilgrami wrote an essay titled
Gandhi, the Philosopher
Gandhi’s thought and his ideas about specific political strategies in specific contexts flowed from ideas that were very remote from politics; instead they flowed from and were integrated to the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments.
Only in the sense that the purring of a cat flows from and is integrated into the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments.
The plain fact is, Gandhi was a Hindu. He was given the title 'Mahatma' by another Mahatma who was being promoted to the status of 'Swamy'. As a Mahatma, Gandhi could be taken as an exemplar for 'vyavahara'- behaviour. This is because a Mahatma has a special relationship to Parmatma that is God that is 'Sattva' or Truth. The Vyavaharika-sattva or 'relative reality' of the Mahatma may be the one we should internalize for soteriological reasons. That's it. That's the whole story. Hindu epistemology, ontology and soteriology fully explains everything in Gandhi. Why? Because he was a Hindu- not an Analytical philosopher of a Left wing orientation.
The quality of his thought has sometimes been lost because of the other images Gandhi evolves – a shrewd politician and a deeply spiritual figure.
All 'Mahatmas' and 'Swamys' are spiritual figures just as all Popes and Bishops are religious figures. But the correct way to judge their thought must rely on the spiritual or religious tradition to which they belong. There may be exceptions. A particular Pope may have formerly been a distinguished Theologian and Philosopher. But such was not the case with Gandhi.
Gandhi’s view of moral sense, his denial of the assumed connection between moral sense and moral judgment, is of considerable philosophical interest and in his writings, take on a fascinating theoretical consolidation.
What if Gandhi's views were 'strategic'- i.e. simulated for a specific purpose? Would they still have philosophical interest? The answer is no. However, they would have utilitarian value for political or socio-economic reform movements- e.g. Bhave's 'bhoodan' or Anna Hazare's 'Lok Pal' agitation. I think most people recognize both were failures. There is an element of magical-thinking or pure mummery in such exercises.
In Gandhi’s highly ‘integrating’ suggestion, as this paper suggests, there is no true non-violence until criticism is removed from the scope of morality-
This is certainly the Christian view. Judge not lest ye be judged. However, 'parrhesia' may involve testifying to what you believe is the true state of affairs even if you are martyred for it. Thus if I say 'Bilgrami eats his own shit', it may be that I am not criticising Bilgrami or seeking to defame him. I am merely stating what I believe to be the truth.
the ideal of non-violence is thus part of a moral position in which moral principles, which lead us to criticise others, are eschewed.
Gandhi was constantly criticising others. However true non-violence eschews the eschewal of not eating your own shit every other Saturday. Oddly, true true non-violence is precisely the other way around.
The strategy of non-violent resistance
Passive resistance by Dissenters to the 1902 Education Act, which forced them to pay for Catholic or Anglican Schools through their local authority rates, was a factor in bringing down the Tory Government in the 1906 election. The question it raised was how many people would the Government be prepared to jail before they yielded and withdrew a law to which a vocal minority objected to. This tactic appealed to Gandhi because the method of 'boycott' appeared to have succeeded in Bengal where Curzon's partition was reversed.
was first introduced by
him so as to bring into the nationalist efforts against the British,
Gandhi adopted these tactics in South Africa against the Boer leaders who had taken power.
an element beyond making only constitutional demands.
Passive resistance or Civil Disobedience can be used for all sorts of things. But so can being a nuisance.
On the
face of it, for those reared on western political ideas, this seemed
very odd.
In Britain, Gandhi's antics looked similar to those of the Passive Resisters and then the Suffragettes- who also used hunger strikes. Gandhi could not prevail against the Boers in South Africa- who were determined to be masters in their own house. But he could prevail in India- provided his nerve held. Sadly, his nerve didn't hold. He surrendered unilaterally in 1922. In Egypt a spontaneous uprising caused Allenby to demand that unilateral independence be conceded and thus Saad Zaghloul returned from exile.
Constitutional demands, as they are understood in
liberal political theory, are the essence of non-violent politics;
Violence can be used in furtherance of constitutional demands. The essence of non-violent politics is money. Gandhi was very good at getting hold of it. Indian industrialists wanted tariff protection, or the boycott of foreign cloth, and were happy to finance Gandhi's antics.
as is well known the great early propounders of liberal democratic
thought conceived and still conceive of constitutions and their
constraints on human public action as a constraint against tendencies toward violence in the form of coercion of individuals
by states and other collectivities, not to mention by other individuals.
That ended with the Great War. It turned out that conscription might be necessary as might the suspension of civil liberties under a Defence of the Realm Act or state of Emergency.
So why did Gandhi, the prophet of non-violence, think
that the Indian people, in their demands for greater self-determination, needed more than constitutional demands?
All politicians thought people needed higher income and better public goods as well as increased political and legal rights. In India, peasants wanted lower rents or land revenue demands. Every caste or community wanted a larger share of government jobs. There also had various religious demands- e.g. a ban on cow slaughter- and redressal or reparation for what they perceived as historical injustices.
And why
did he think that this is best called ‘non-violent’ action?
He seems to have got it into his head that 'passive resistance' was legal under British law provided you really really believed you had a moral obligation to persist in it. He was wrong.
The
obvious answer is the instrumental and strategic one: he knew
that making demands for constitutional change had not been
particularly effective or swift in the first two decades of this
century, and that since the conventionally conceived alternative
was violent revolutionary action – which found advocates on the
fringes of nationalist sentiment in India – he instead introduced
his own strategy of civil disobedience, at once a non-violent and
yet a non- or extra-constitutional strategy.
He didn't introduce anything. There were boycotts and hartals and other types of peaceful agitations before he returned to India.
But, of course, he had
more in mind than this obvious motive.
First, Gandhi wanted all of India to be involved in the movement, in particular the vast mass of its peasant population.
All Indian politicians sought to mobilize the masses.
He
did not want the nationalist achievement to be the effort of a
group of elite, legally and constitutionally trained, upper-middle
class Indian men (‘Macaulay’s bastards’), who argued in assemblies and round-table conferences.
Yet that is what he got. Nehru wasn't exactly a picaninny.
He almost single-handedly
transformed a movement conceived and promoted along those
lines by the Congress Party into a mass movement of enormous
scale, and he did so within a few years of arriving from South
Africa on Indian soil.
Congress had achieved 'mass contact' through the cow-protection movement in the 1890s. Its first big success was the Swadeshi movement which led to the reversal of the partition of Bengal. Gandhi met Shukla- a usurer whom he described as a simple Bihari agriculturist- through the INC. That's how he became involved with Champaran. But his job was to distract attention from the on-going cow protection riots in Bihar.
Non-violent action was the central idea
of this vast mobilisation.
No. It was 'Swaraj'- self-rule.
Second, he knew that violent revolutionary action could not possibly carry the mass of people with
it.
Sure it could. But the peasants would take the land for themselves and then refuse to pay a penny to the Government. The parasitic urban middle class would be fucked.
Revolutionary action was mostly conceived hugger-mugger
in underground cells and took the form of isolated subversive
terrorist action against key focal points of government power
and interest, it was not conceived as a mass movement.
It could be part and parcel of such a movement.
He
was not unaware that there existed in the west ideologies of
revolutionary violence which were geared to mass movements,
but he was not unaware either, that these were conceived in
terms of middle class leadership vanguards that were the fonts
of authority.
Gandhian leaders were upper caste, urban and middle class. True, some were wealthy barristocrats and had attended foreign Universities.
Peasant consciousness mattered very little to them.
It didn't matter at all to Gandhi. He had nothing particular to say to peasants. It was weavers he was claiming to help.
In Gandhi there was not a trace of this vanguard mentality of
a Lenin.
No. Gandhi considered his Ashramites- trained in Satyagraha- to be the vanguard of his revolution.
He did indeed think that his ‘satyagrahis’ – the nonviolent activists whom he described, with that term, as ‘seekers
of truth’ – would provide leadership which the masses would
follow, but it was absolutely crucial to him that these were not
to be the vanguard of a revolutionary party along Leninist lines.
They were Congress members and were selected to offer passive resistance and to court arrest.
They were to be thought of along entirely different lines, they
were to be moral exemplars, not ideologues who claimed to
know history and its forward movement better than the peasants
to whom they were giving the lead.
Moral exemplars can be ideologues and vice versa. Gandhians had their own stupid version of history.
Third, Gandhi chose his
version of non-violent civil disobedience instead of the constitutional demands of the Congress leadership
No. He explicitly said that he had accepted leadership of the Congress/Khilafat combine for the express purpose of gaining Constitutional remedies. He was not seeking to fulfil the crazy program he had outlined in 'Hind Swaraj'.
because he
thought that the Indian people should not merely ask the
British to leave their soil.
Which he did in 1942. This was the 'Quit India' movement.
It was important that they should do
so by means that were not dependent and derivative of ideas and
institutions that the British had imposed on them.
The INC was created by an Scottish ICS officer. The Legislative Assemblies and Secretariats too were created by the Brits. Gandhi, when directing the INC, accepted that its goal was to take over the Legislature and the Administration.
Otherwise,
even if the British left, the Indian populations would remain
a subject people.
Gandhi, in 1939, said that if the Brits left without handing over the army to the INC then the Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of sect) would take over the country from the non-violent Hindu Congress-wallah. In 1942, he seems to have hoped that the Japanese would sweep over the country without setting up an administration of the cruel type they had instituted in other conquered territory.
This went very deep in Gandhi and his book
Hind Swaraj, is full of a detailed anxiety about the cognitive
enslavement even of the nationalist and anti-colonial Indian
mind, which might, even after independence, never recover from
that enslavement.
Indians weren't enslaved. They could not recover from a condition they had not experienced. Gandhi's 'epistemological commitment' was to tell stupid lies.
Gandhi ... linked ahimsa (non-violence) with satyagraha (literally, ‘truth-force’, or more liberally, a tenacity in the pursuit of truth).
Gandhi was a habitual and incorrigible liar. There is no relationship or other link between truth and non-violence. There is a link between being a charlatan and pretending that you are very truthful. In this way, your own testimony is accepted as proof that you possess some marvellous quality. I might pretend to be an ex-SAS operative who can beat up men twice my size. You accuse me of being a liar. I say 'it's a funny thing, but I've never been able to tell a lie. Ask any of the Super-Models who have dated me.'
There is a standard and entrenched reading of Gandhi which
is a bunch of stupid lies
understands the link as follows (and I am quoting from what is perhaps the most widely read textbook of modern Indian history, Sumit Sarkar’s, Modern India):
Indians only read English authors on Indian history. Leftist Academics, however, have to pretend to have read each other's dreck. To be fair, Sarkar's book is well researched. But, ideologically speaking, it was a cul de sac. 'Subaltern' communities were gaining political dominance and had their own historiography which was unconcerned with Marxist ideology.
“Non-violence or ahimsa and satyagraha to Gandhi personally constituted a deeply-felt and worked-out philosophy owing something to Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy but also revealing considerable originality.
There is a problem of circularity here. Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoy were influenced by Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Tolstoy read Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Equally, Hindus had been influenced by a mystical type of Christianity which had itself contributed to the Reformation.
The search for truth was the goal of human life,
No. Gandhi was a Hindu and believed in reincarnation. The goal of our succession of births is 'Moksha' or liberation from the circle of birth and death. Truth is God. Theists believe that 'Moksha' involves absorption in the Godhead.
and as no one could ever be sure of having attained the truth,
Everybody can be sure of anything at all. Sadly, they are likely to be wrong.
use of violence to enforce one’s own view of it was sinful.”
Sin only arises if there is wrong-doing. The use of violence may be righteous. Stringing together a series of obvious lies does not constitute a philosophy more particularly if the thing is self-serving.
I have no doubt that Gandhi says things that could lead to such a reading, and for years, I assumed that it was more or less uncontroversially, what he had in mind.
Given that he was a Hindu spending most of his time with other Hindus, it is likely that what was in his mind was the type of reformed Hinduism common at that time.
After scrutiny of his writings however, especially his many dispatches to Young India, it seems to me now a spectacular misreading.
Because Bilgrami had left a mainly Hindu country long ago. He could no longer read a Hindu writer, writing for Hindus, in a Hindu manner. I may make the same mistake when reading Maulana Azad. But what I can do is to consult an erudite Indian Muslim who is aware of the Arabic literature of that period. Thus Azad's 'Hezbollah' had little in common with contemporary movements with that name.
It fails to cohere with his most fundamental thinking.
which was that of a Gujarati Hindu Bania.
Notice that according to this reading, or misreading, his view is no different from one of the most celebrated liberal arguments for tolerance – the meta-inductive argument of Mill’s On Liberty.
Which fails immediately. Useful discoveries and inventions can burgeon more in a Society which is intolerant of stupidity or superstition.
Mill contends that since much that we have thought to be true in the past has turned out to be wrong,
Mill's ideas are likely to be wrong
this in itself suggests that what we presently think true might also be wrong.
As is this thought. Perhaps 'wrongness' does not matter. What matters is utility here and now.
We should therefore tolerate not repress dissent from our present convictions just in case they are not true.
We should do stuff that is useful to us. This does not involve tolerating or repressing anything save in return for some tangible benefit. Mill was too stupid to understand his own Utilitarian creed.
According to Mill, and according to Gandhi on this widespread misreading of him, truth is never something we are sure we have attained. #
Utility is. We compare what we are doing with its 'opportunity cost'- i.e. the next best alternative- and seek to update our knowledge base so as to discern higher and higher opportunity costs. This is what drives productivity growth which in turn is what permits better provision of Public and Merit goods.
We must therefore be made modest in the way we hold our present opinions,
No. Modestly doesn't matter. We should be on qui vive for changes in opportunity-cost ratios brought about by advances in knowledge or changes in resource endowment.
and we must not impose our own conceptions of the truth on others.
Only in the sense that you must eat your own shit. Some smart people get paid for their more useful conceptions of the truth.
To do so would be a form of violence,
just as refusing to eat your own shit is a form of violence as well as a form of dissent and a form of repressing the tolerance of dissent.
especially if it was enforced by the apparatus of the state.
The State should not force us to pay for Schools. It should not force kids to go to such schools. This is a terrible form of violence. Such, at any rate, was the creed of the Passive Resister in Edwardian England. It was deeply silly.
Bilgrami thinks Gandhi was non-judgmental. This wasn't true. Still, we may ask if moral considerations can be de-linked from moral principles. If there are no principles, perhaps no judgment can be made.
In the philosophical tradition Gandhi is opposing, others are potential objects of criticism in the sense that one’s particular choices, one’s acts of moral conscience, generate moral principles or imperatives which others can potentially disobey.
In other words, even if you don't reproach such people, nevertheless your conduct is a 'standing reproach' to them.
For him, conscience and its deliverances, though relevant to others, are not the well-spring of principles.
How can you stop a person from deducing or otherwise affirming a principle which guides actions dictated by another person's conscience? Even if such a person does not exist, there may be the feeling that an 'impartial spectator' would deduce those principles and judge others in accordance with it.
Morals is only about conscience, not at all about principles.
But the conscience- for all we know- may be structured according to principles. It is essentially epistemic and anything knowable may have a structure.
There is an amusing story about two Oxford philosophers which makes this distinction vivid. In a seminar, the formidable J L Austin having become exasperated with Richard Hare’s huffing on about how moral choices reveal principles, decided to set him up with a question. ‘Hare’, he asked, “if a student came to you after an examination and offered you five pounds in return for the mark alpha, what would you say?”
Hare should mention which rule of the College the student was violating. He may himself be obliged to report the matter. This is informative. It is not necessarily 'ethical' nor does it involve the conscience or one's morality. I may be an immoral man, but I may find it safer and more sensible to stick by the rules.
Predictably, Hare replied, “I would tell him that I do not take bribes, on principle!”
If the College has no rules about taking bribes, I suppose Hare might make this reply. He may say that his principles forbid the acceptance of money bribes but permit favouritism based on the receipt of sexual services or the chance to mingle with people of a higher class.
Austin’s acid response was, “Really? I think I would myself say, ‘No thanks’.
The student may well conclude that Austin is acting on principle.
” Austin was being merely deflationary in denying that an act of conscience had to have a principle underlying it.
Such a principle could always be construed.
Gandhi erects the denial into a radical alternative to a (western) tradition of moral thinking. An honoured slogan of that tradition says, “When one chooses for oneself, one chooses for everyone”.
There is no such slogan. Sartre said ' “when we say that man chooses himself, not only do we mean that each of us must choose himself, but also that in choosing himself, he is choosing for all men.' Thus if I choose to be a plumber rather than a philosopher, other men will find in me a plumber not a philosopher
The first half of the slogan describes a particular person’s act of conscience.
It may be an act of conscience. It may be 'utilitarian' or represent 'discovery'. It may be wholly strategic or perverse.
The second half of the slogan transforms the act of conscience to a universalised principle, an imperative which others must follow or be criticised.
No. That would only be the case if the slogan ran as follows 'in choosing to act in accordance with a categorical imperative, a person chooses the same thing which all other people of equal moral worth would choose.' Alternatively, a person may feel that power has been delegated to them to choose on behalf of all men. In this case, we may well ascribe an underlying categorical imperative which motivates the choice.
Gandhi embraces the slogan too,
No. What the Satyagrahi chooses is not what everybody should choose. That is why he said only those whom he designated should court arrest. The notion was that there was some special training or inherent quality in the Satyagrahi which meant they could safely make a choice which others should abstain from.
but he understands the second half of it differently. He too wants one’s acts of conscience to have a universal relevance, so he too thinks one chooses for everyone, but he does not see that as meaning that one generates a principle or imperative for everyone.
Gandhi believed in karma. His doctrine is easily understood in his own cultural context. In this birth you can't be a satyagrahi, but you can give money to Gandhi. That way, maybe, in your next birth, you will be fit to be a satyagrahi. This will involve giving up sex and eating nice food and doing sensible things. The pay-off is that you get reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.
What other interpretation can be given to the words ‘One chooses for everyone’ in the slogan, except the principled one?
A consequentialist interpretation based on the doctrine of transmigration of the soul can be given. In this case, we may say that a 'Mahatma' or 'Tirthankar' or 'Boddhisattva' makes a choice which creates a blissful terminus for metempsychosis- e.g. Kevalya, Nirvana, Vaikunta, or the Heaven of the Christians or the Muslims etc.
In Gandhi’s writing there is an implicit but bold proposal: “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.”
That is obvious. We see people make different choices with the result that some are successful and others are abject failures. We say 'don't follow the bad example of the boy who chose to stab his teacher. He is now in jail.' Follow the good example of the boy who learnt mathematics from his teacher and who is now a well paid actuarial scientist.'
That is the role of the satyagrahi. To lead exemplary lives, to set examples to everyone by their actions. And the concept of the exemplar is intended to provide a wholesale alternative to the concept of principle in moral philosophy.
One can always find a set of principles which 'fit' with the behaviour of the exemplar. Consider the principles of Economics. The exemplar from which they are deduced, using mathematical techniques, is a particular market or Institution- e.g. the New York Stock Exchange or the Soviet GOSPLAN.
It retains what is right in Mill
there is nothing right in Mill
(the importance of being modest in one’s moral opinions)
this has no importance unless you yourself are an important man. But, in that case, it is not your opinions, but your powers and abilities which matter. If countervailing power over you can be gained, your opinions- obnoxious or otherwise- will be irrelevant.
while rejecting what is unsatisfactory (any compromise in our conviction in them).
What was unsatisfactory in Mill is that he didn't have the right mathematical theory of 'regret minimization' under Knightian Uncertainty.
There is no Millian diffidence conveyed by the idea that one is only setting an example by one’s choices, as opposed to laying down principles.
Though they can be deduced unless choice is known to be made in a random manner- e.g. by flipping coins.
One is fully confident in the choices one wants to set up as exemplars, and in the moral values they exemplify. On the other hand, because no principle is generated, the conviction and confidence in one’s opinions does not arrogate, it puts us in no position to be critical of others because there is no generality in their truth, of which others may fall afoul.
We can be critical of ugly or stupid people or those who got the last piece of cake. Putting yourself in a position to say really mean things about other people is easy. What is foolish is to be critical of others unless one is paid to do so or gains some other benefit.
But resistance is not the same as criticism. It can be done with a ‘pure heart’.
Anything at all can be done with a pure or impure or smelly or snuggly heart.
Criticism reflects an impurity of heart, and is easily corrupted to breed hostility and, eventually, violence.
Nonsense. Some people are paid to do criticism of various types. This can be very useful.
With an impure heart
or a pure heart or a smelly one or a silly one
you could still indulge in non-violent political activism, but that activism would be strategic, merely a means to a political end.
This is also true of a pure heart. Incidentally, politics isn't about pure hearts or sweet hearts or hearts filled with song.
In the long run it would, just as surely as violence, land you in a midden.
In the long run everybody dies. Violence or non-violence is irrelevant.
Even the following sensible sounding argument for his own conclusion, often given by many of his political colleagues who found his moral attitudes obscure, did not satisfy Gandhi: “Let us adopt non-violent and passive resistance instead of criticising the British colonial government. Because to assert a criticism of one’s oppressor would usually have the effect of getting his back up, or of making him defensive, it would end up making things harder for oneself.”
The British were nice. You could criticize their policies or even their senior personnel with a fair degree of impunity. There were other regimes which it would have been suicidal to appear disaffected in the slightest degree. Passive resistance there might take the shape of pretending to be ultra loyal but very stupid. Good soldier Svejk is an example.
Gandhi himself did occasionally say things of that sort, but he thought that colleagues who wanted to rest with such arguments as the foundation of non-violence were viewing it too much as an instrument and they were not going deep enough into the spiritual nature of the moral sense required of the satyagrahi.
i.e. stuff like sleeping naked with your great niece. But that was a privilege Gandhi reserved for himself alone.
One did not go deep enough until one severed the assumed theoretical connection between moral judgment and moral criticism,
there is no connection between the two. A critic is not a judge though both may use the same criteria of assessment. But so may a consumer or a bystander.
the connection which, in our analytical terms, we would describe by saying that if one judges that ‘x is good’, then we are obliged to find morally wrong those who in relevant circumstances, judge otherwise or fail to act on x.
This is nonsense. I may say 'this song is good.' I don't say a deaf person is evil because he can't affirm the same thing.
For Gandhi this does not follow.
The thing is a non sequitur for everybody.
The right moral sense, the morally pure-hearted satyagrahi, sees no such connection between moral judgment and moral criticism.
Pure hearted people are non-judgmental. If you ask them for criticism they will do their best to oblige or else frankly confess that they have no great interest in the matter.
Of course, we cannot and must not cease to be moral subjects; we cannot stop judging morally about what is and is not worthy, cannot fail to have moral values.
No. If we are engaged in work of great importance we stop judging 'morally' and act and speak as though we have no moral values. It is only if we are doing something stupid or useless that we gas on about morality or coolness or our five biggest turn-ons or turn-offs.
But none of that requires us to be critical of others who disagree with our values or who fail to act in accord with them.
If we have nothing better to do, we might gang up on the girl who denies that Beyonce is cool or who says abortion is wrong or whatever.
That is the relevant modesty which Mill sought to justify by a different argument.
He failed.
This view of the moral sense might well seem frustratingly namby-pamby now as it certainly did to those around him at the time.
It is foolish. I suppose you need to tell your students that they really ought to have a moral sense rather than simply try to set fire to the pussy cat.
Can’t it be argued then that Gandhi is shrewdly placing a screen of piety around the highly creative political instrument he is creating, both to confuse his colonial masters and to tap the religious emotions of the Indian masses?
No. Don't be silly. Viceroys found it easy to confuse him because he was as stupid as shit. But they weren't his 'masters'. Gandhi was born a British protected subject but chose to become a British subject no different from Atlee or Churchill. Indeed, the King Emperor had more power to compel his White British subjects than he did to compel dark skinned Indian subjects. The former were conscripted during the two world wars. The latter served in the Army on a voluntary basis.
Gandhi's political instrument was the INC. He did not create it. As a politician, he was merely doing what the Irish and the Trade Unions and the Suffragettes had already done. Still, it was useful to bang on about Non-Violence because the Quakers owned some newspapers back in Blighty. Also, the Brits remembered the Mutiny when 6000 Whites were killed.
This is the oscillating interpretation I have been inveighing against, which, finding his religiosity too remote from politics,
Khilafat & cow protection weren't 'remote from politics'. Indians were religious and Maulana Azad & Mahatma Gandhi gained by being seen as religious figures.
then fails to take his philosophical ideas as being intended seriously and views him only as a crafty and effective nationalist politician.
He was stupid. He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, India needed British protection and so his stupidity served a purpose.
It sells short both his moral philosophy and his politics. The fact is that his view of moral sense is of considerable philosophical interest,
No. Ex falso quodlibet just means that from a lie any other stupid lie can be logically deduced.
and is intended entirely earnestly by its author. It is given a fascinating theoretical consolidation in his writing which may be lost on his readers because it is buried in a porridge of saintly rhetoric, of ‘purity of heart’.
Gandhi was as ugly as fuck. That is why he said 'true beauty is purity of heart'. True truth, on the other hand, is any shite he happened to talk.
What this means is that truth for Gandhi is not a cognitive
notion at all.
No. He was a lawyer and often spoke and wrote to his interlocutors as a lawyer would do. In particular he emphasized the rules of evidence and 'simple rules of construction'- e.g. contra proferentem- which are to be used to find the truth regarding what has been agreed or what interpretation is correct. This is 'cognitivist' under the rubric of 'Construction Grammar'. On the other hand, as a Hindu, Gandhi subscribed to an ontological theory of Truth as Being. Hindu theologians might disagree as to whether Gandhi was 'mayavadi' or 'dualist'. Most would agree that the latter view is more compelling.
It is an experiential notion.
It is ontological. It may be that a 'Mahatma' or Maharishi or Yogic Parmanhans is capable of experiencing it.
It is not propositions
purporting to describe the world of which truth is predicated,
it is only our own moral experience which is capable of being
true.
This was not Gandhi's view. He was a Hindu and believed in karma. Sat is Truth is God and, after our cycle of re-birth is completed we are absorbed into the Godhead and become unanimous with Truth which is Being which is the taste of Bliss.
This was of the utmost importance for him.
He was a Hindu. God was important to him. Without God, there would be no eternal life and thus 'moral experiences' would be as transitory as any other sort of experiences.
It is what in
the end underlies his opposition to the Enlightenment,
He was a Theist, not a Deist.
despite
the undeniably Enlightenment elements in his thought including
his humanism and the concern that our moral judgments be
relevant to all people.
Gandhi wanted humans to give up sex so the human race would die out. We'd be reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.
Those who have seen him as an anti-Enlightenment thinker usually point to the fact that he
was a crackpot
is opposed
to the political and technological developments which, he insists,
issue inevitably from the very conception of Reason as it is
understood in scientific terms.
Sadly, Science had progressed to a level where its conception of Reason became more and more detached from the 'common sense' view.
So understood, some time in the
17th century, with the rise of the scientific method in Europe,
what rose was productivity which in turn meant more resources could be devoted to STEM subject research. However, there was an older magical or mystical aspect to Scientific thinking in the Seventeenth Century. It tended to fade because useful discoveries were being made without the mystagogy of the Alchemists or the doctrine of signatures of Dioscorides and Galen.
all the predispositions to modern government and technology
came into place.
Just as they had in ancient Sumer and Egypt and Greece and China and India and so forth.
All that was needed for those predispositions
to be triggered in our sustained efforts to organise and control
our physical and social environment, was for the Enlightenment
to articulate the idea of Reason as it affects social life and the
polity.
No. What was needed was expanded markets which created incentives for productivity enhancing innovations of various types. Warfare was another driver for innovation.
The idea of Reason doesn't need articulation. Either there is a more efficient way to do things or bollocks is being talked.
But this familiar understanding of his view of the Enlightenment does not take in what I have called his ‘final and
audacious integrating’ philosophical move.
Sleeping naked with little girls? That was very audacious.
This conception which
set in sometime in the 17th century itself owes much to a more
abstract element in our thinking, which is that truth is a cognitive
notion, not a moral one.
It can be both but it can also be an aesthetic or psychological or legal or paranoid notion. When it comes to collective action problems, it is the solution to either a coordination or a discoordination game.
Only if truth is so conceived can science
become the paradigmatic pursuit of our culture, without it the
scientific outlook lacks its deepest theoretical source.
Nonsense! Science burgeons when it can 'pay for itself' by raising efficiency and thus productivity.
And it is
a mark of his intellectual ambition that by making it an exclusively
and exhaustively moral and experiential notion instead, Gandhi
was attempting to repudiate the paradigm at the deepest possible
conceptual level.
Gandhi did no such thing. He was interested in ways of making the spinning wheel more efficient. He did care about how much more poor people were paying as a proportion of their income because of the increase in the salt tax. Sadly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, he got his sums wrong. He thought people might be paying ten or even twenty percent of their income for salt. The figure was more like one percent for even the poorest.
What I mean by truth as a cognitive notion is that it is a property
of sentences or propositions that describe the world.
Which is like the notion that beauty is a property of the proposition- 'This sentence is lovelier than lilacs' or that people would really enjoy eating the sentence 'This sentence is tastier than truffles'.
Thus when
we have reason to think that the sentences to which we give assent
exhibit this property,
that reason may be aesthetic or strategic or our being hypnotized.
then we have knowledge of the world,
We may gain information about the world from propositions but having a reason to think something is true (e.g. my vanity gives me a reason to believe I am as beautiful as Beyonce) does not by itself produce knowledge of the world.
a
knowledge that can then be progressively accumulated and put
to use through continuing inquiry building on past knowledge.
Inquiry does not matter. Doing stuff which makes money- i.e. for which there is effective demand- may, under certain conditions, lead to knowledge accumulation.
His recoil from such a notion of truth,
Gandhi does not recoil from it at all. Hinduism has a doctrine of onomatodoxy such that the Name or the Mantra- e.g. 'He Ram!' or 'Hare Krishna!' is highest truth or Reality.
which intellectualises our
relations to the world,
Nope. This 'cognitivism' is stupid shite. It isn't intellectual at all because it involves the intensional fallacy.
is that it views the world as the object
of study, study that makes it alien to our moral experience of
it, to our most everyday practical relations to it.
The world as the object of our pissing upon it is alien to our moral, spiritual, aesthetic and drunk off our head experience of it. Indeed, everything material is alien to everything which isn't material- e.g. experience or memory or reverie.
He symbolically
conveyed this by his own daily act of spinning cotton.
No. He genuinely believed he was helping the weavers by spinning yarn for them to use. On the other hand, his donning of a loin-cloth was symbolic. It was his way of showing that he identified with the starving peasants of India who were being subjected to fellatio and cunnilingus by evil Viceroys.
This idea
of truth, unlike our quotidian practical relations to nature,
e.g. answering its call by pissing and shitting
makes
nature out to be the sort of distant thing to be studied by scientific
methods.
No. Nature remains a fit subject for poetic effusions. Physics and Chemistry and Biology are scientific subjects.
Reality will then not be the reality of moral experience.
It never has been. Another thing it isn't is stuff you experience when you drop acid.
It will become something alien to that experience, wholly external
and objectified.
Bilgrami thinks there was a time, or there were people, who experienced trees and clouds as virtuous or vicious or basically decent but a trifle untrustworthy.
It is no surprise then that we will look upon reality
as something to be mastered and conquered,
Fuck has Bilgrami 'mastered' or 'conquered'?
an attitude that leads
directly to the technological frame of mind that governs modern
societies
Politicians govern society. Technologists are employed by enterprises to produce goods and services more efficiently. Production is not Governance. Bilgrami is as stupid as shit.
and which in turn takes us away from our communal localities
the Islamic qasbah?
where moral experience and our practical relations to the world flourish.
Oh. Definitely not the Islamic qasbah. Where do we find the 'communal localities' of Bilgrami's description? The answer is, in fantasies about Merrie England or the idyllic Indian village of the time of good King Rama.
It takes us towards increasingly abstract places and structures such as nations and eventually global economies.
Nations which are peaceful and prosperous and where liberty flourishes, are exemplars. There are good global economic practices and there are bad ones.
In such places and such forms of life, there is no scope for exemplary action to take hold,
Yes there is. Countries or International organizations which do good things set a good example.
and no basis possible for a moral vision in which value is not linked to ‘imperative’ and ‘principle’,
There are many possible bases for values which are not imperative or which can't be encoded in a principle. Mysticism is one. Aesthetics is another. But so is the desire for novelty or FOMO (fear of missing out).
and then, inevitably, to the attitudes of criticism and the entire moral psychology which ultimately underlies violence in our social relations.
Moral psychology does not underlie violence. The thing is utilitarian. It imposes a cost but the benefit may outweigh that cost. Also, violence is a learned skill. You may do it just to get better at doing it.
To find a basis for tolerance and non-violence under circumstances such as these, we
act in a utilitarian manner and form a coalition of a economic type. This may involve something like a 'Social Contract'.
are compelled to turn to arguments of the sort Mill tried to provide
he didn't understand that 'disutility' converges to 'opportunity cost'. But modern economics has no difficulty explaining what sort of 'mechanisms' promote non-violent, non-coercive, outcomes.
in which modesty and tolerance are supposed to derive from a notion of truth (cognitively understood)
No. Mill gave a foolish argument for tolerance- viz. maybe the nutters are right and we are wrong- but there is an obvious utilitarian argument for not knifing every second bloke you meet.
which is always elusive,
the notion of truth is not elusive. The thing itself may be.
never something which we can be confident of having achieved because it is not given in our moral experience, but is predicated of propositions that purport to describe a reality which is distant from our own practical and moral experience of it.
Not if we are smart and are doing actual Science.
All these various elements of his opposition to Mill and his own alternative conception of tolerance and non-violence were laid open by Gandhi and systematically integrated by these arguments implicit in his many scattered writings.
Nonsense! Gandhi was a Hindu and his ideas are easily captured in simple Hindi- a language he actually used. Bilgrami is stupider than Gandhi. The 'integrated' shite he attributes to Gandhi reflects only his own mental pathology.
The only other philosopher who came close to such a sustained integration of political, moral, and epistemological themes was
Hitler? My neighbour's cat?
Heidegger, whatever the fundamental differences between them,
Heidegger wasn't Hindu. He didn't believe in karma or paradisal planets where everybody lives for ten billion years and there is no sex or dirty pictures.
not least of which is that Gandhi presents his ideas in clear, civil and bracing prose.
in Gujarati and Hindi.
There remains the question whether such an integrated position is at all plausible.
Karma provides an 'integrated' theory which is also a theodicy. But Bilgrami refuses to accept that Gandhi was a Hindu who firmly believed that no Hindu could deny karma.
It should be a matter of some intellectual urgency
especially for NASA- not to mention starving refugees in South Sudan
to ask whether our interests in politics, moral philosophy, and notions of truth and epistemology, are not more fragmented or more miscellaneous than his integrations propose.
They may be, they may not. Nobody cares. Notions don't matter. Bowel motions do.
Is it not a wiser and more illuminating methodological stance sometimes to recognise that there is often a lack of connection in our ideas and our interests and that to register that lack is sometimes more important and revealing than to seek a strained connection?
This is a methodical stance most people achieve by the age of five. I noticed there was a lack of connection between my idea that I was Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, and my great interest in getting Daddy to buy me an ice-cream.
I will resist answering these questions, except to say that Gandhi’s idea – the idea that it is a matter of great moment, both for epistemology and for society and politics and morals, that truth is not a cognitive notion – is impeached by the worst aspects of our intellectual culture.
Bilgrami thinks that 'worst aspect' involves making our lives better through discoveries made by Physicists and Chemists and Biologists.
If Gandhi is right
If Bilgrami is right about what Gandhi believed
and if truth is an exclusively moral notion, then
I didn't just fart. Farting is naughty. I am nice. Indeed, I don't even have an asshole. You are lying through your teeth if you suggest otherwise.
when we seek truth, we are pursuing only a moral value.
That may be true of Bilgrami. It isn't true of smart peeps doing useful stuff.
(Actually Gandhi’s writings leave it a little unclear whether he is making the steepest claim that truth is not a cognitive notion at all,
His claim was the standard Hindu one that Truth is God and beyond what can be cognized save by God's grace. Thus Arjuna gains 'visvarupa' theophany after Krishna grants him divine eyes.
or the more cautious one that even if there is such a notion, it yields no special value of its own for us,
it does if you are a lawyer or politician. Gandhi started off as the former and became the latter. He was making claims that he believed were or would be verified objectively- i.e. there was a 'correspondence theory' of truth here. More importantly, rebirth was a real thing. In a future life, you might become sufficiently spiritually advanced to remember all your previous births.
a specifically cognitive value. The texts don’t decide this matter, but it is obviously more sympathetic to
a cretin like Bilgrami
read him as making the latter claim, and in the rest of this discussion, I will assume that that is so.)
Why not also assume that Gandhi was actually a Philosophy Professor at Cambridge who was secretly married to G.E Moore?
This leaves a great deal out of our normative interest in truth,
It is normative for lawyers to be concerned with certain types of truth. Politicians may lie their heads off but they need to know who truly will support them.
which, as we have seen, Gandhi is perfectly willing to do. He is quite happy to discard as illusory our tendency to think that apart from the moral virtues involving truth (such as that of telling the truth, and living by and exemplifying our moral values) there is also in some sense a value or virtue in getting things right about the world and discovering the general principles that explain its varied phenomena.
In other words, Gandhi was a lawyer/politician of a common enough type in India. That was why he had such a big following.
This latter is not a moral virtue, it is a cognitive virtue,
we may consider anything at all to be a moral virtue, even if it is a cognitive vice.
and for Gandhi, cognitive virtues are a chimera.
No. He believed that, by the Grace of God, we can have cognizance of that virtue which is Truth which is God which is the Bliss of Moksha.
For him truth’s relationship to virtue cannot consist at all in the supposed virtue of acquiring truths of this kind;
No. Gandhi did not reject 'darshan gyan'- more particularly of the Vaishnav or Jain kind. Though the 'matam' (metaphysical doctrine) of different sects is different, the 'vigyan' (the word literally means science) is the same.
it is instead entirely to be understood in how truth surfaces in our practical and moral relations.
No. God does not surface in our practical or moral relations. We may pray that He does so in practical, moral, or sexual relations. Sadly, my wife never uttered the name of God in the throes of passion though she often inquired if it was in yet.
That is why truth itself will have no value for us other than the value of such things as truth-telling, which does involve our practical and moral relations.
This is a non sequitur. What we value, if determined by anything at all, has to do with coevolved processes on an uncertain fitness landscape.
To tell the truth is among other things (such as, say, generosity or kindness or considerateness) a way of being moral,
by 'ipse dixit'- i.e. by making this arbitrary stipulation. But I could equally say ' telling the truth is my way of being my neighbour's cat.'
and it was an aspect of morals that Gandhi
himself was keen to stress.
Many lawyers, politicians, activists, writers etc. are keen to be seen as truthful and trustworthy
But the point is that truth being
only a moral notion,
it is a protocol bound notion though it could also be game theoretic- e.g. as a focal solution to a co-ordiation game
there is no other value to truth than the
value of such things as telling the truth, no more abstract value
that it has.
Nonsense! Telling the truth may have comic value but it also may have a very abstract type of mathematical value.
Was Bilgrami utterly stupid or is this a parody of some sort?
There is a palpable mistake in collapsing the cognitive value
of truth into the moral value of truth-telling,
But nobody has ever done so. We say there is a cognitive value in telling truths of a relevant and useful sort. You are a morally good person in so far as you do so. But there is no moral or cognitive value in giving utterance to everything which is true.
a mistake evident in
the fact that somebody who fails to tell the truth can, in doing so,
still value truth.
No. They don't value Truth or Beauty or the American Way when they are lying their heads off. They may, on the other hand, be valuing their own skill in mendacity.
That is to say, the liar often values truth and often
values it greatly, and precisely because he does so, he wants to
conceal it or invent it.
No. He values certain types of information. He conceals or invents it because of something else that he values- e.g. money.
The liar indeed has a moral failing in that
he disvalues truth-telling,
No. Lying is a failing. Disvaluing shite does not matter. Nor does disvaluing disvaluing or disvaluing disvaluing disvaluing etc.
but he still values truth,
No. He values accurate information which enables him to get what he wants.
and what he values
in doing so therefore cannot be a moral value.
Sure it can. Anything at all can be a moral value for some person.
It cannot be what
Gandhi (and more recently Richard Rorty) insist is the only value
that attaches to truth.
Rorty did not say that Truth is God. But that's what Hindus like Gandhi affirm.
To put it very schematically and crudely,
truth has to be a more abstract value
it is a protocol bound value in a law court. It is not abstract at all for lawyers. Gandhi was a lawyer. But it is also a value for politicians. Gandhi thought Smuts lied to him. This had a big political effect. British Viceroys learned that they must be very circumspect in their language when talking to Gandhi. He would get it into his head that a promise had been made- e.g. that there was a Gandhi-Irwin pact such that Civil Disobedience had ceased to be illegal. Successive Viceroys had to clarify that there was no such pact. Nobody had tricked Gandhi. He simply had an erroneous belief. Thus, the fact that he was sent to jail soon after the supposed pact showed that Civil Disobedience was as illegal as fuck. Indeed, the entire Congress Party was banned till it unilaterally surrendered.
than a moral value because
both the (moral) truth-teller and the (immoral) liar share it.
In which case shit has an abstract value because both the shitter and the constipated person share it.
So what is this more abstract value of truth, which even the
liar shares?
It is the same abstract value as shit possesses according to Bilgrami's crazy reasoning.
If there is this abstract value to truth, and if even
the liar values it, someone must surely in principle be able to
fail to value it, else how can it be a value?
Gold is valuable even if some people don't want it. It is easy for a thing to be valuable to some but not to others.
How can there be
a value if no one can fail to value it?
In the same way that a cat can be a cat even if nobody fails to think it is a cat.
This is indeed a good question
No. It is stupid.
and only by answering it can
we come close to grasping the value of truth that is not a moral
value. The answer is: yes, someone does indeed fail to value truth
in this more abstract sense. But it is not the liar.
Yes it is. Sooner or later, the liar will realize that having a reputation as a truthful person is very valuable indeed.
It is the equally
common sort of person in our midst: the bullshitter. This is the
person who merely sounds off on public occasions or who gets
published in some academic journals simply because he is prepared
to speak or write in the requisite jargon, without any goal of
getting things right nor even (like the liar) concealing the right
things which he thinks he knows.
I suppose Bilgrami is talking of himself. The dude is Indian. He knows Gandhi was a Hindu. But he pretends Gandhi did not think that God is Truth because that is what Hindu Scripture declares. Satyagrahis might not achieve anything politically in this world. But they will have a terrific next life.
The so-called Sokal hoax on which so much has been written,
allows this lesson to be sharply drawn.
Sokal wrote nonsense which was supposed to be 'scientific'. Bilgrami writes nonsense and tries to palm it off on some brown dude about whom Richard Attenborough made a film.
I don’t want to get into
a long discussion about this incident both because it is remote
from Gandhi’s interests but also because I think that it has become
a mildly distasteful site for people making careers out of its
propagandist and polemical potential.
Nobody made a career out of denouncing the careerists who published 'Social Text'.
Everything that I have read
on the subject of this hoax, including Sokal’s own contribution,
takes up the issue of how Sokal exposed the rampant and uncritical
relativism of postmodern literary disciplines.
He exposed its paranoid stupidity and scientific illiteracy.
I don’t doubt that
literary people in the academy have recently shown a relativist
tendency, and yet I wonder if that is really what is at stake.
What was at stake was the value of a particular credential. It was good enough for shitty academics teaching shite to cretins. But that was also true of anal-tickle philosophy.
The
point is analogous to the one I just made about the liar. The relativist
also does value truth in the abstract sense
only in the sense that the relativist is also my neighbour's cat
I have in mind, even
if he has a somewhat different gloss on it from his opponents.
This is the case even if he has somewhat different whiskers from his opponents.
In fact it is because he does value truth
is my neighbour's cat
in this sense that he wishes
to urgently
twitch his whiskers
put this different gloss on it. I believe it quite likely
that the journal in which Sokal propagated his hoax would have
been happy (at least before the controversy began) to publish
a similarly dissimulating hoax reply to his paper in which all
kinds of utterly ridiculous arguments were given, this time for
an anti-relativist and objective notion of truth, so long as these
arguments were presented in the glamorous jargon and with the
familiar dialectical moves that command currency in the discipline.
No. They'd have liked someone like Karen Barad to come up with some sciencey shite to justify the supposed argument Sokal made.
If so, the lesson to be learnt from the hoax is not that relativism
is rampant in those disciplines but that
Leftist Academics will publish any old Leftist shite.
very often bullshit is quite
acceptable, if presented in the requisite way.
partisan bullshit is acceptable to partisans. It would be fair to say Gandhi was partisan and allowances should be made given that he had a particular political role a particular period. What is unfair- or bad faith- is to ignore the fact that Gandhi was a pious Hindu. He wasn't a left-leaning, atheistic, analytical philosopher.
I must conclude by saying
that I don’t think that Gandhi should have denied this cognitive
value of truth.
He never did. The guy kept saying he had a 'lawyer's mind'. The law has a cognitivist conception of truth upon which it places high value.
He should in fact have allowed that it defines
the very possibility of his own philosophical undertakings
he had none. Lala Hardayal did- but the Punjabi didn't get that the vow of celibacy precludes incessantly marrying Swiss or Swedish belles.
and
that it underlies his own yearning to find for his philosophical
ideas the highest levels of what I have called ‘integrity’.
Religious ideas. He was religious. He had zero interest in philosophy.
These
undertakings and yearnings are all signs of a commitment to the
very notion of truth which he wishes to repudiate.
Bilgrami yearns for a Gandhi who would say 'Fuck Hinduism. It is shit. Henceforth, I will be an atheistic cross between Karl Marx and A.J. Ayer.' Also, Gandhi will be as gay as fuck. He and Jinnah will become an item. Nehru will be totes jelly.
Whether
allowing it will in the end have unravelled that integrity must
remain a question for another occasion.
But I will end by saying that what that question will turn on
is really the underlying question of this essay: How much integrity
can these themes tolerate?
None. Bilgrami has no integrity and no intelligence. Since he teaches shite to shitheads, this doesn't matter in the slightest.
It is Gandhi’s essentially religious
temperament that motivates the extraordinary ambitions of his
integrations of these themes.
No. His religious temperament motivated his embrace of a 'Sanatan Dharma' which could slowly, but steadily, embrace Social reform.
What I mean here is that for all
his romanticism about the power of exemplary actions to generate
a moral community, Gandhi, like many religious people, is deeply
pessimistic in one sense.
This world is shit. This life is shit. Satyagrahis will get reborn on a paradisal planet like Vaikunta.
He is convinced of the inherent corruptibility of our moral psyches. This surfaces at two crucial
places, which are the well-springs of his integrity. It is what lies
behind his fear that criticism will descend inevitably into violence,
Fuck off! He criticised lots of people. He wasn't afraid that he would suddenly start biting and scratching them.
and it is also what underlies his fear that the intellectualisation
of the notion of truth to include a cognitive value, will descend
inevitably into an elevation of science into the paradigmatic
intellectual pursuit of our culture,
his culture was Hindu. Hindus were as poor as shit and only slightly smarter than the average cow. The paradigmatic intellectual pursuit of his culture involved passing an exam to get clerical employment.
and thus descend further in
turn to our alienation from nature with the wish to conquer and
control it without forgiveness and with the most destructive
technologies.
This is a bee in Bilgrami's own bonnet. Gandhi had the luxury of living in a country which was as poor as shit and twice as stupid.
The modern secular habits of thinking on these
themes simply do not share this pessimism. Neither descent is
inevitable, we will say. We can block the rise of bad technologies
by good politics.
No. If we don't do it, our rivals will and thus steal a march on us.
There is no reason to see it as inevitable once
we think of truth in cognitive terms, not even inevitable if we
value scientific inquiry.
We can always find a reason to see anything we like as inevitable or impossible or totes into anal sex.
So also we can block violence with good
constitutional politics
No. Look at Lebanon. Constitutions have no magic power. Bilgrami may have heard of a little thing called the American Civil War.
and the rule of law,
which didn't prevent my being mugged
and there is no reason
to think it inevitable just because we think of values as entailing
the exercise of our critical capacities towards one another.
Bilgrami may think in those Moorean terms. But he has no fucking critical capacity. Nor did Moore though, it must be admitted, he told Russell he didn't like him. This was probably because Russell had terrible halitosis.
This
modernist faith in politics to control and via this control to instil
cognitive and moral habits in us which distract us from what
might otherwise be seen as our corruptible nature is the real
achievement, if that is what it is, of the Enlightenment.
This is not a 'modernist' faith. Politics has always been about 'homonoia' i.e. social concord and unity of mind.
It is only
this faith that convinces us that the integrations which Gandhi’s
pessimism force on him are not compulsory.
They don't exist.
It needs a large and elaborate stock-taking of modernity
to figure out whether the faith is justified, one in which philosophy and moral psychology will play as large a part as
history and political economy.
No. We don't need to stock-take. We can simply 'mark to market'. Economics is valuable because it can actually improve outcomes. History need not be paranoid shite. But 'Philosophy' and 'Moral Psychology' shat the bed long ago. They have no value.
I have only raised the issue at
stake at the highest level of generality.
by telling a stupid lie.
It is in the details, however, that it will be decided,
by my neighbour's cat
and those really must await another
occasion.
When my neighbour's cat has completed its dissertation on 'Rahul Gandhi, the philosopher'.
