Can Gandhi bridge the gap between Rawls & Sen?

Rawls thought that rational people would choose a highly egalitarian fiscal policy such that there would be high marginal rates of tax on the highly skilled while there would be a generous 'social minimum' for those unable to work. At the time, it was in fact the case that the 'replacement rate' (i.e. Social Security as a proportion of the average wage) was rising. Inflation was pushing people into higher and higher tax brackets. Would this state of affairs continue or would the voters rebel? The answer is that they rebelled. It turned out that nobody wants 'Social Justice'. They want Courts to send rapists and murderers to prison for a very very long time. 

Sen, who came from a country where the Supreme Court denies 'the doctrine of political question' and says it can do anything it likes to secure justice, criticized Rawls for only looking at Fiscal policy. He thought the State- or the Bench- should just take any arbitrary action it pleases. He forgot that people disintermediate or exit a jurisdiction which acts arbitrarily. 

Gandhi, being a religious man who believed in reincarnation, thought that good Hindus might want to give up sex and eating nice things so as to get reborn on a paradisal planet. Of course, merely pretending to give up sex and eating nice things so as to get political power and enrich yourself was an even better strategy. To this day, to be a member of the Congress Party you have to affirm that you don't drink alcohol and are a 'habitual' spinner of cotton. 

Can Gandhi bridge the gap between Rawls & Sen? Sure- if you bring in reincarnation. But the same thing happens if you bring in the Christian of Islamic Heaven or Hell. Make sacrifices in this life so as to have a super-duper after-life. 

Prakash Khundrakpam & Jayanta Krishna Sarmah write- 

The Rawls-Sen debate: A Gandhian Revisit of dual subjectivities

The Gandhian causal link, highlighted above, between the idea of equality of opportunity (and its deficiency of not accounting for capabilities of individuals) and the need for distributive justice,

there is no such link and no such need. It is a different matter that anybody can arbitrarily stipulate that what rich people should do is chop off their own heads and shove those heads up their own rectum.  

has profound implications for the Rawls-Sen debate on justice.

There was no such debate. Sen pretended that Rawls was an 'institutionalist'. This wasn't true. Sen thought Rawls's notion of a 'basic set of goods' needed to be changed to reflect 'capabilities'. The example he gave was of a person who is less capable of converting food into nutrition. What he didn't understand was that this is merely a statistical matter. There is a 'normal distribution' of capabilities with respect to any given basic good- e.g. food- and thus Sen wasn't actually saying anything interesting.  

Sen (1992) had argued, in one of the most significant critiques of Rawls’ theory that individuals have different capacities to absorb the allocated  social goods and realize their potential.

So what? There is a 'normal distribution'. Those with superior ability cancel out those with inferior ability. Provision of basic goods remains the same. Pareto improvements can be made on the fly- e.g. the one who needs less food trades some of his ration for extra clothes.  

In other words, Sen criticized Rawls for focusing only on the means to achieve justice and for neglecting the ends; which he believes to be the enhancement of people’s capabilities.

Sen thought giving a person more food changes his capability to eat food. It does not. The capability remains the same. What changes is availability.  

For this very reason, Sen opined that Rawls’ theory of justice which relies on just institutions (what he referred to as the Niti-centered approach)

Rawls makes no mention of institutions. He foolishly thought that rational people would prefer a rule which prioritized the worst-off (just in case they found themselves in that position) rather than the thing they actually choose- viz. various sorts of insurance schemes against particular threats and the formation of relationships which are 'incomplete contracts' such that 'risk pooling' occurs.  

is at best partial and incomplete as it does not account for what happens to the people (what Sen calls the Nyaya-centered approach).

Nothing can account for 'what happens to people' till after it has happened. True, the Indian Supreme Court can do stupid shit and say it is doing 'nyaya', but the result of the Bench doing stupid shit is that the Legal system is increasingly ignored or disintermediated.  

Gandhi, however, has used the same aforementioned deficiency to argue for a case of redistribution on the same lines that Rawls did.

No. He talked bollocks about how everybody should give up sex and eating nice food or wearing nice clothes.  

The implications of the above Gandhian causal link on the Rawls-Sen debate on justice are discussed below.

But first, a clarificatory note is in order. Sen’s capabilities approach to justice has been subject to varying degrees or camps of acceptance by Rawlsian rejoinders and in general, other political theorists. Some view it as a very strong critique of Rawls’ theory and argue that Rawls’ theory fails apart on being subjected to Sen’s critique.

Rawls theory falls apart because it ignores the fact that an Insurance industry has an incentive to reduce Society's exposure to particular types of risk. To give an example, an insurance company may subsidize gym fees for specific age-groups of policy holders.  

Others are more forgiving and see it not as a critique or inimical to Rawls’ normative theory, but merely as a valuable addition to it.

It is stupid shit. Saying 'it is not enough to give everybody enough food. We must find out if some of those people have inferior power to digest that food' is mere virtue signaling, more particularly if you are an Indian citizen and are aware that lots of Indians can't afford a balanced diet.  

The above Gandhian causal link has repercussions for both subjectivities.

There is no 'Gandhian causal link'.  

In the case of the first subjectivity (wherein we view Sen’s capabilities approach to justice as a humbling critique of Rawls’ theory of justice and the two theories as being inimical to each other), it is possible and even tempting to argue that Rawls was, in the prologue, aware of the difference in the capabilities of individuals; and with that knowledge, he sought to remedy it (the difference in the capabilities and consequent injustices) by providing for a just society using his principles of justice. Bluntly put, Rawls did not lament nor stress the difference in the capabilities of the individuals in an unjust society but simply sought to rectify it.

Nonsense! Rawls knew that many Western countries had well designed food and cloth rationing during the Second World War and the first few years of Post-War Reconstruction. It was well known that different people were of different weight, height, metabolism etc. This did not mean that an allocation of basic good could not be made. However, for any actual 'rectification' to occur, smart people- not Sen-tentious cretins- needed to be in charge.  

Seen from this perspective, it is thus possible to argue that Rawls is more concerned (than Sen and other capability theorists) with the ‘ends of justice, it being a just society. Rawlsian rejoinders would be tempted to ask a moral question here, in the critique of Sen: Who is more concerned about ‘what actually happens to the people?’ Is it not Rawls, who attempts to right the wrongs by establishing a just society rather than Sen, who is more concerned about protesting that the capabilities of individuals in a pre-just society are being ignored to arrive at a just society?

Rawls thought that rational people would make a social contract which prioritized the needs of the worst off (just in case people found themselves in that position). But this was foolish. When it comes to risk, insurance is the way to go. But 'moral hazard' means that those who receive an insurance pay-out must always be worse off than they would have been had they suffered no misfortune. Otherwise, for example, healthy people would pretend to be sick so as to get Sickness Benefit.  

If the goal of politics is that of ‘a good life,’ is a better formulation not the one that arrives at it rather than the one that laments about the conditions of the prologue?

Only if the goal of politics is to talk bollocks.  

Capability theorists can indeed counter this. It is possible to argue that even if Rawls did account for the difference in the capabilities of individuals in a pre-just society, it is never possible to arrive at such a just society from a pre-just society using Rawls’ principles of justice.

Actually, Rawls's principle is 'anything goes'. You can justify slavery using it by stipulating that the worst off would die if it were not implemented. 

The different capabilities of the individuals and conversion factors would successfully hinder the transformation of the unjust society into a just one. Seen from this perspective, Rawls’ just society seems a distant utopia at this point.

It was and is nonsense. The Social Contract is 'incomplete' because of Knightian Uncertainty. This means there has to be periodic readjustment to preserve incentive compatibility.  

Rawlsian rejoinders can however respond by saying that institutional justice, manifest in the modern-day state, has enough prowess to oversee the transformation.

How? What is to stop people from choosing leisure (or emigration) rather than the 'disutility' of work? The State will go off a fiscal cliff and thus there will be entitlement collapse. 

The argument at this point would then center around the ability of the state to oversee the transformation from an unjust society to a just one. Note that this brings back us to the beginning of the argument where Sen criticized Rawls for focusing more on the means (the welfare state and other institutions) rather than on the ends of justice (enhancement of individual capabilities).

Justice does not focus on ends. That is why the Judge does not order the victim of murder to come back to life. However, the Judge can punish the murderer if there is sufficient proof.  

Rawlsian rejoinders and capability theorists can thus continue to argue along the same lines, in a cycle, with no resolution of sorts. At this point, it becomes a matter of personal philosophical choice to believe or choose a side of the argument.

Not really. You can stipulate that capabilities be taken into account such that a person with lower capability of converting food into nourishment is given a different diet.  

However, there are certain limitations in doing so. Godrej (2006) highlights that the problems in making such a choice of adoption of a competing notion of truth, in theory, or practice, are threefold. Firstly, how do we know our epistemological arguments are true?

We don't. Epistemology is not itself knowledge.  

In other words, how do we know our version of theorization or practice is true and not erroneous if the truth is so multifaceted? Secondly, what do we do when these conflicting truths collide with each other?

We can either make a trade-off or, as Rawls does, impose a 'lexical' ordering such that one type of evidence always outweighs every other. Thus, for example, we may say 'means and opportunity' must outweigh 'motive' in a criminal trial. The fact that this person had a stronger motive is irrelevant if he had neither the means nor opportunity to commit the crime.  

Lastly, how do we justify any sort of political practice or policy, say, for instance, a scheme of distributive justice, if the theory does not ride on the premise that it has arrived at some portion of the “Absolute Truth?”

We justify it on the basis of provisional, not absolute, Truth. In law courts this is the principle of 'reasonable doubt'.  

The following limitations signal that arbitration capable of reconciling the conflicting ideas of justice is crucial for a holistic understanding of justice.

This simply isn't true. Judges pronounce a verdict. There is no further 'arbitration'.  

How do we arrive at such a resolution — one that would help us in establishing a theoretical formulation of justice that would enable or at the very least, aid us, in acquiring a holistic understanding of justice?

We don't need any such thing. Justice is simply a service industry. Does it 'pay for itself'? If it doesn't, it is 'incentive incompatible' and will be disintermediated more and more.  

Is it even possible to arrive at one at this point of the argument; or is justice fated to be a construct, a notion that is to be debated and contested endlessly, and not understood in totality?

Justice is 'essentially contested'. So is Utility, or Beauty or Truth. Nothing wrong in that.  

Is political philosophy in general to remain an arena wherein different contested accounts of a concept of idea collide but never settle down; for there is neither a method nor “a way of looking at things” that facilitates the settling down of an idea into a holistic totality of a construct? Is this not a case of the infamously ignored Ia face honteuse de la philosophie?

Socrates defined philosophy as the arena where two opposite claims could be equally well argued. In other words, a philosophical question is 'open'. Some other discipline may 'close' it. At that point, the issue ceases to be philosophical.  

Feminist thought, particularly that of Le Doeuff, provides a useful insight to understand this particular problematic in political philosophy.

Nonsense! She is a silly person. 

Le Doeuff identifies in her work that despite feminist thought and philosophy sharing the most fundamental character, that of critical assessment and questioning of the environs to arrive at theories and consequent practices that would eventually lead to “a good life;” the development of a certain narrative, The Philosophical Imaginary, has placed the two at odds with each other.

Because 'a good life' involves doing worthwhile things- not talking bollocks.  

Among other manifestations of this narrative, she identifies that a particular masculinist style of writing characterized by an authoritative tone with a lack of receptivity and respect for the opponent's discourse has been normalized as original contributions in political philosophy while receptive works that take into account fallibility and gently respect for the opponent’s work have been sidelined as not philosophical interventions but mere “commentaries.”

Also men have dicks and don't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair?  

One might argue here that it is this very nature of “writing” philosophy that lends to it a very contested character.

It is written by stupid people. That is why it is ignored.  

The lack of receptivity and non-acceptance of fallibility, conjoined with an authoritative style of writing philosophy and imposition of ideas has resulted in philosophy being a battlefield of fetal ideas; of half-truths, in a state of endless entropy and conflict, thereby making it impossible to understand philosophy as a “totality.”

In 'totality' it is stupid shit. People working on 'open problems' in other disciplines may wax philosophical- but that philosophy is a 'displacement activity'. Once a 'crucial experiment' can be made, some questions are 'closed' while others 'open' up.  

This makes it difficult for philosophy to arrive at a holistic understanding of any concept or idea; let it be equality, freedom, gender, or justice, for that matter.

They are 'Tarskian primitives' and can't be grasped 'holistically' till everything is known and History has come to an end. 

Holism in philosophy has traditionally been treated as an “Eastern” notion

Jan Smuts invented the term. He was a White South African who ran circles around Mahatma Gandhi.  

and has not been granted much importance. Au contraire, philosophical confusion based on dualities and multiplicities and also, the development of compartmentalized subjectivities of an “idea” have been encouraged- based on the formulation of an “idea,” critique and then consequent rejoinder groupism- with no or little efforts to arrive at a holistic understanding of an idea.

Stupidity has a 'holistic' understanding of everything. Einstein's theory of Relativity explains why Time crawls when your boring relatives visit.  

For this way of writing philosophy makes “the vagueness of the concepts and the multiplicity of the criteria involved, aspects of the subject matter itself; and not of our inadequate methods of measurement nor incapacity for precise thought.”

Philosophy can be written in the language of mathematical logic. Sadly, that's a high IQ affair.  

Holism is a new entrant into the realm of philosophy and owes much to eastern thinkers such as Gandhi.

No. The term was coined by Smuts and carried forward by Physicists and Systems theorists. Arthur Koestler could be said to have popularized it. He had a low opinion of Gandhi and his book 'Lotus & the Robot' was banned in India.  

We argue, before addressing the second subjectivity, that the Gandhian notion of “Absolute truth” and “competing truths” provide us with a way to address this “shameful face of philosophy;” and arrive at theories that are more “complete” than the extant theories with distinct, factional rejoinder cleavages.

Gandhi wanted everybody to give up sex. Let the Human Race die out. It is very shameful that Daddy put his pee pee in Mummy's chee chee place.  

Gandhi's notion of truth is based on the Advaita branch of Hindu Vedanta philosophy which professes that transient realities do not have an existence of their own, but are only manifestations of the Brahman- the ultimate being that underlies all phenomena.

No. Advaita says that Gandhi's ideas were delusive- i.e. part of 'Maya'.  

Citing the example of seven blind men

that is a Jain parable. They have a different epistemology and ontology.  

who offered differing accounts when they were told to describe an elephant through their sense of touch, Gandhi believed that there exist multiple accounts of “competing truths” in this reality, which are not wrong but are only partially true.

They are wrong. Advaita says that the elephant itself is not real. It is a delusion.  

These half-truths are thus impartial truths of the “Absolute Truth” that can be arrived at through “ceaseless striving.”

Or ceaseless mental masturbation.  

However, Gandhi's stand on whether we could (and should strive to) actually arrive at the “Absolute truth” or rather arrive at a truth that is nearest to the “Absolute Truth,” during our brief human lives, is scandalously inconsistent.

Not really. If Gandhi was right then giving up sex and sleeping naked with little girls would give you a super natural power such that you could bring peace to an areas where pogroms were occurring. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made a lot of money by teaching people 'yogic levitation' which would 'broadcast peace rays' and thus avert a nuclear apocalypse.  

The main reason for such an inconsistency in his notion of the possibility of the attainment of Absolute truth by human beings is because this conviction of the possibility of human perfectibility (which forms the basis for his notion of truth) is also inconsistent.

It is stupid. Queuing up to get hit on the head and to go to jail could not and did not deliver Independence to India. Churchill and Roosevelt had to expend a lot of blood and  treasure to prevent India becoming a colony of Japan. Atlee wanted India to be free and once he got elected that is the outcome he imposed on India.  

Notwithstanding the inconsistency, this notion of truth helps arrive at a resolution of conflicting truth claims. Gandhi emphasized that the only way to arrive at a resolution of such conflicting claims is through non-violence.

He was wrong. It took a lot of American planes and the efforts of a lot of foreign troops- including Chinese and African troops- to defeat the Japanese and thus ensure India got what Westminster had been promising for the past twenty five years.  

The problem however is that the notion of non-violence Gandhi espouses in these claims of resolution is “far too dependent on the stringent requirements of right living” and “intensive training of the conscience;” for a non-spiritual man or philosopher to adhere to.

Neither is difficult. Just give up sex and stop eating nice things. Sadly, this won't prevent the Japanese enslaving you. 

The truth is Gandhian 'non-violence' means 'money'. If you have a lot of it you don't need to beat people. You can buy what you like. Sadly, you will still need an Army and a Navy and an Air Force to defeat invaders.  

This problematic is solved by Godrej, who establishes that we can utilize the notion of “Ahimsa as civic virtue”

It is no such thing. If your soldiers won't fight, your country is doomed. Your 'civic virtue' will consist of sucking up to the new Imperial overlord.  

and not a creed, to excavate “a model of moral and political arbitration shorn of the Mahatma’s metaphysical framework,” which relies heavily on the assumptions of Hinduism.

The attraction of Gandhi-giri was the notion that you might be re-born on a paradisal planet where there is no sex or dirty pictures.  

It is this notion of arbitration of morally competing for truth claims to arrive at the Absolute truth or at least a truth that is more “complete,” which assumes that humans are fallible but can be perfected; through ceaseless striving which uses non-violence, that makes the second subjectivity in this paper more “tempting,” holistic, coherent; and a necessity in the formulations of justice.

This is nonsense. How do we decide if Super-String theory is true? Should we see whether its proponents are celibate and enjoy getting hit on the head and forming an orderly queue to go to jail? No! There is no 'arbitration' here. We have to wait till a crucial experiment can be performed.  

Now, the second subjectivity. In the context of the second subjectivity (wherein we view Sen’s arguments as an additive to Rawlsian ideas of justice and not inimical to it), it can be stated persuasively that the casual link that Gandhi so established between the difference in capabilities of individuals and the need for distributive justice through institutional mechanisms such as the modern-day state leads to a harmonious concept of justice linking Sen, Gandhi, and Rawls.

No it can't. The Gandhian State would collapse immediately because of an invasion or insurrection. The Rawlsian State would collapse because of 'moral hazard'- i.e. everybody would pretend to be an unemployable cunt. Sen's State would be even more ludicrous because people would be saying 'I don't have the capability to derive nutrition from rice and curry. I need to be fed caviar and champagne by naked super models- otherwise I will starve to death'.  

This model of justice, which we would call, “The Sen-Gandhi-Rawls Trinitas model,” presents a holistic concept of justice, with the Gandhian causal link stated above serving as the missing link between the Rawlsian theory and the capabilities approach of Sen and others.

The Gandhian 'causal link' would involve your muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!' as you are robbed, beaten and raped to death- unless, obviously, starvation kills you first.  

If Sen provided Rawls Theory of justice with a valuable addition to the capabilities approach, Gandhi's causal link filled in the glaring philosophical gap between the two.

The 'philosophical gap' had to do with why we don't need an Army or a Police force. Let some invader take over the country and rape us all to death.  

The fact that the Gandhian causal link serves this purpose in an integrated theory of justice is appropriate in itself; for he was one of the few thinkers who rejected the sharp dichotomy between the means and ends.

Because if a Society uses Gandhian 'means' it will end up being conquered and enslaved.  

In addition, as alluded to in the preceding sections, Gandhi subscribed to ‘organic holism’ which is a stance somewhere between strict individualism and a Vedantist pantheism wherein strict individualism is not well recognized.

If everybody gave up sex, the Human Race would soon go extinct. There would be no 'individuals'.  

Gandhi had always been a mediating, transitional, and median figure between philosophical extremes.

He tried to keep the Brits around to protect India. Sadly, in 1942, he thought the Japs would win and so he told them to fuck off.  

The fact that he serves as a connection, a causal link between Rawls and Sen, is allegorically appropriate.

Sen rejected Gandhi. One of his earliest papers showed that the spinning wheel was inefficient. Rawls had been a soldier in the Second World War while Gandhi was sulking in a jail cell.  

The Difference Principle revisited

The Difference Principle is where Rawls and Gandhi share a similarity, which is the easiest to identify. Rawls, idea of assigning the greatest benefits to the least advantaged is mirrored by Gandhi's Talisman.

Rawls was mislead by the Social Choice theory of Arrow, Sen, etc. and thus didn't get that expected utility maximization did not obtain in the real world (because of Knightian Uncertainty). 

Gandhi's talisman is one of the last notes left by Gandhi before his demise in 1948. The talisman is for a confused person in doubt who is unable to decide any further course of action. Gandhi advises the person to recall the face of the worst-off person and imagine if the work that is going to be undertaken will benefit the person and eventually lead to Swaraj (freedom) of the countless starving (literally and spiritually) millions.

Gandhi dressed up as a poor and starving person so as to get money out of Birla, Bajaj & c. Rawls did not claim that he himself was the worst off in society. He may have been stupid but he was a can-do American- not a sly bania.  

Gandhi believes that in the process, all doubts shall melt away and the person will be informed of what is to be done.

i.e. dress up as a starving person. Why help others when you can pretend to be most in need yourself? 

At the first glance, the similarity between the talisman and Rawls’ Difference Principle is evident.

No. Rawls thought there should be knowledge based industries which would create a vast surplus which could be used to raise up the worst off. This in turn would mean that Marxian 'underconsumption' would be defeated and so industry would have an assured market so as to exploit scope and scale economies, invest in R&D etc. Gandhi was a nutter who thought everybody should starve to death in autarkic villages. At the very least, they should give up sex so that the Human Race could die out.  

Additionally, implicit in Rawls’ Difference principle, is the assumption that the better endowed in a societal setting have a responsibility towards the worst off, to ensure that they have access to human needs and societal benefits.

Sadly, Rawls also gave everybody the liberty to exit jurisdictions where taxes were too high.  

For Rawls, “a principle of paternalism is to guide decisions taken on behalf of others.”

 There was already a notion of the 'bonus paterfamilias' in tort law. 

In this regard, Rawls says that this situation is comparable to “trustees acting to promote the interests of the beneficiaries they represent.”

Rawls wasn't a lawyer. Gandhi was. That's why Gandhi distrusted charitable trusts. The trustees would enrich themselves or be as lazy as fuck.  

Such a conviction of the better off in society acting as trustees on behalf of the worst off is also shared by Gandhi.

No. Gandhi thought his wealthy backers should give him money. They should not give money to the poor directly. Otherwise his Ashrams and other money-pit schemes would go bankrupt.  

Gandhi believed that ensuring justice and social benefits for the Harijans (and other worst-off groups in the society), necessitates a premediated duty on the part of the higher castes to consciously devote themselves to this cause.

Ambedkar disagreed. He noted that the money Gandhi collected for the Harijans wasn't actually going to them.  

Gandhi's quest for “an equalization of status” (discussed in the preceding section on the Fair equality principle) is therefore guided by his belief in two supplementary actions, namely, the power of “forgiveness in action” or active forgiveness on the part of the then victims of social discrimination (lower castes and Harijans) and actions of compensation to rectify past wrongs on the part of the past offenders (higher castes).

Plenty of 'higher caste' people were starving to death.  

It is worth mentioning here that “Gandhi was particularly known for advocating forgiveness as a key element of his theory of social change based on a relational worldview.”

Sadly, the Government of India did not forgive his assassin.  

Justice then for Gandhi is not merely distributive but also “restorative” in the quest for rectification of past injustices.

No. Gandhi did try to set up a parallel Court system as Sinn Fein had done in Ireland. He failed ignominiously.  

However, as stated above in the ‘necessaries argument’ (contained in the section on the Equal Liberty Principle), the definition of social ‘benefits’ might be radically different for Gandhi and Rawls. For Rawls, it is based on access to primary social goods. For Gandhi, it means much more than that and includes the idea of Swaraj (freedom) of the self in all spheres of life — whether it be political, economic, social, spiritual, or cultural.

Gandhi defined 'Swadeshi' as a principle of economic self-sufficiency or autarky such that, as far as possible, everybody produced everything they needed and each village had no need to import or export goods and services. The problem here was that an invader could conquer and enslave the people. That is why Gandhi insisted that Swaraj should not be granted to India till the British transferred control of the Army to the Congress Party. Otherwise, he said, the Muslims and the Punjabis would tyrannize over the non-violent Hindu. 

A Gandhian acolyte would thus view Rawls’ Difference Principle as a simplistic liberal restatement of Gandhi’s talisman, to be applied in the domain of political economy and the welfare state, and he would not be wrong in doing so.

He would be utterly wrong. Gandhi wanted everybody to give up sex and starve to death- whether or not some foreign power conquered the country. However, like most Hindus, he didn't want Indian Muslims, or Punjabis (regardless of creed) to dominate the country. Thus, his 'Ahimsa' did not extend to turning the other cheek to Muslim aggression. He approved of India's first Kashmir War.  

Conclusion

The paper analyzed The Theory of Justice and the resultant Rawls-Sen debates on justice through the Gandhian idea of justice and a broad Gandhian epistemology.

Gandhian epistemology consisted of telling stupid, illogical, lies. Rawls and Sen were useless because their model did not include 'Knightian Uncertainty'. But they were virtue signalers merely without any political influence. Gandhi, by contrast, was the patron saint of the dynastic, kleptocratic, Congress Party.  

Comparative studies of the philosophies of Rawls and Gandhi are scarce despite similarities in their central concerns such as social justice and civil disobedience.

If Rawls was interested in Gandhi, he would have said so. The fact is, after 1962, nobody in the West thought India could take a Gandhian path. It would simply turn Communist unless it had a kick-ass Army.  

What is however scarcer, are holistic works that attempt to arbitrate and reconcile conflicting accounts of an idea; works that attempt to bridge gaps and bring about the understanding of an idea in its philosophical totality.

If an idea is stupid, its 'philosophical totality' is shit.  

Rejoinder groupism and a resultant ensuing battle of conflicting ideas have invaded the realm of philosophy, with little regard or respect for the opponent's discourse.

Philosophy is adversely selective. Only stupid people study or teach it.  

The paper seeks to incite thinking in such directions of holistic conceptualization of justice and political theory through Gandhi and other “ignored” thinkers as a medium or frame of reference.

Justice is about what is 'justiciable'. It is a service industry. At one time there was the notion that people cared about 'Social Justice'- i.e. they were angry that some people were very rich. But, over the course of the Nineteen Seventies, it became obvious that the 'politics of envy' did not attract voters. Also, if you tried to impose Socialism, smart people ran away. That's why kids who had to study a bit of Rawls in Collidge turned to Reagan and Thatcher. 

As for Gandhi, once kids understood that he was against anybody having sex of any type, they realized he was a nutter. If his own sons didn't obey him, why should we?