Arindam Charkabarti's Mahabharata

 A concept is an abstract idea. It may be considered a plan or a program with a particular intention. A percept is the impression made by a thing on the senses.  

What is the concept of the Mahabharata? The answer has to do with what Vedic Hindus would consider the proper content and structure of a comprehensive epic about the Bharatas (i.e. the descendants of Bharata- a legendary King, the son of Shakuntala, from whom many of the great royal dynasties on India were descended. Bharat became a synonym of the country as a whole in the way that Saudi Arabia is known by the name of its great King Ibn Saud.)

Since, in Hinduism, karma and dharma define the 'time axis' of causality and the 'space axis' of morality respectively, the concept of the Mahabharata would be a book about the descendants of Bharata in which the rigorous maintenance of symmetries permits, by Noether's theorem, the conservation of karma and dharma. This means there is a 'non-dissipative' manner in which any episode may be integrated into the text. In this way, folk heroes- e.g. Barbarik or Iravan- can enter the text without any disruption or attenuation of the text's organizing principles. One might ask 'could Spiderman or Dracula be put into the Mahabharata?' The answer is no. They are not of Bharat. The fundamental categories of karma and dharma have no, or very limited, applicability to them. It is not the case that Dracula became a vetala because of a Sage's curse or some misdeed in a past-life. Peter Parker was bitten by a radio-active spider. He was not scratched or bitten by the Goddess Maya. 

Arindam Chakrabarti & Sibaji Bandhopadhyay, who edited 'Mahabharata Now', take a different view-

The concept of a tower constructed to celebrate the victory of Islam existed before the Qutub Minar was constructed. We say, it is an Indian version of the Ghurid Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan. The concept of the leaning tower of Pisa came into existence as it was being constructed and was discovered to be likely to lean. Here an accidental percept became the basis of a concept. 

The Mahabharata explains its own 'general concept'. It is intended to contain everything found in other texts but to be comprehensible to ordinary people. Since great care was taken to preserve certain symmetries or dualities, this was indeed the outcome. However, the Mahabharata is not the only text whose general concept is to condense and present all relevant material about Indic people of antiquity. There are Buddhist and Jain and other such collections. The Mahabharata however is about Vedic religion and its author is also the editor of the Vedas. He appears as an important character within it. The Ramayana and later Vaishnavite texts are equally revered by Hindus. Sri Lanka, of course, has the Mahavamsa. One may say the general concept is the same though, since the Religion is different and the country is smaller, the method taken is different. 

Does a modern novel or film or TV series which is based on Homer or the Old Testament or the Mahabharata have the same 'general concept' as the original? No. The purpose  is different. The method is different. Just as a James Bond film may borrow from Samurai films without having the same general concept- which may involve 'bushido' and other traditional Japanese values- so too may any idiot pretend that Rama was a rapist and Ravana a champion of the rights of the down-trodden. On the other hand, a traditional form of representing the Ramayana or Mahabharata may have the same general concept even if is done using puppets or the representation is through operatic arias. What matters is whether the symmetries are preserved such that karma and dharma are conserved properties of the system. On the other hand, some may say only the soteriological worth of the great epics matter. Moreover, perhaps that which is aesthetically pleasing in a certain way, achieves the same effect. Thus some who dislike or disbelieve the Bible say they receive its equal from Bach's fugues.  

Many Hindus read the Vedas and the Brahmanas, Upanishads etc. They are welcome to supplement this by reading the Mahabharata, with or without a gloss in the vernacular. For the Sanatani Hindu, Mahabharat is 'shaashvat' or perennial. We can use it to clear up any doubts we may have in the interpretation of scripture. This is because the Indians have a pragmatic hermeneutics and jurisprudence. If you can understand economics well enough, you will have no problem with understanding Indian ethics or aesthetics. 

Arindam and Sibaji, being Bengali, quite naturally refer to the great Bengali poet Jibananda Das. But Das taught English. He was neither a Sanskritist nor had he any acquaintance with mathematical physics. It would be easy enough for either a Mimamsaka or a Math maven to lay bare the deep symmetries that permit the exposition of the MhB's 'general concept'. 

This is silly. Jibananda was a Baidya and thus his ancestors may not have studied the Itihasas. But plenty of his Brahmin friends did do so. Why would an Indian not have the same sort of relationship to the MhB which a Greek person has to Homer? Indeed, the Indian's task is much easier. True, many Hindus are poor and have to study English or Econ or Accountancy at Collidge. But lots of them are pious and, especially as they get older, start turning to scripture. Sanskrit isn't particularly difficult. If you speak Hindi or Malyalam or Gujarati or Bengali, you are already halfway home. 

What is unique about the MhB? There were other Iron Age epics which show the transition from a Timocratic to a mercantile society. The answer is the MhB alone, in the Nalophkyanam, shows that the Just King needs to learn statistical game theory to dispel 'Vishada' or mental depression. 

Since Noether's theorem was published in 1918 and Tagore and Bengal had plenty of smart mathsy guys- both SN Bose and Mahalanobis were associated with Shantiniketan- they could have quickly got the gist of the MhB's general concept. Once game theory became available, the symmetries could be appreciated for their aesthetic value. Since the system is 'non-dissipative', there is actually an element of suspense or 'surprisal'- e.g. will Lord Krishna forget that Arjuna doesn't know he has 'chaksushi vidya'? Thankfully Arjuna reminds the Lord of this and is granted 'divine eyes'. But the reader remembers that Arjuna had been given this (unvested or asvamika) boon by a Gandharva. Once he ceased to be his own master because of 'Vishada' (i.e. he himself was asvamika) the faery's gift vested in him. But it could have no ill effect. As the Quran says, God is the best of planners! But, perhaps, our reminders to God (zikr), too, are part of his plan. 

The MbH has a lot of good stories but the reason it has the form it has is because it was useful for jurists and economists and businessmen (like the Vyadha (butcher) in the Vyadha Gita). It's like when you read a John Grisham novel and gain some small knowledge of the law. But its basic organizing principle is perhaps most easily recognized by accountants- who do double entry- or production economists who find it easier to solve the 'dual' of a problem. My guess is that ancient Indians used some form of 'discrete math' for sampling and cluster analysis. That's why the Nalophkhyanam is not just a superbly romantic tale. Nothing of that earlier learning survives in the Naishadyacharitra. Why? By then there was a hereditary caste of such calculators. 

The MbH doesn't say that everything is perishable. It merely says that all compound things are perishable. That is Vedic. That is Buddhist. That is Jain. It is also what we mean when we speak of Markov properties- though strong Markov may have time irreversibility. There is also the problem that the state space must be de-limitable. The MbH does reflect on this sort of thing which is why we would have expected Bengalis- more especially those trained in Mahalanobis's Institute- to be able to tell us something interesting about the Gita. Sadly, Bengali buddhijivis are virtue signaling cretins. 

Consider the following- 

The MhB isn't a midden in which archaeologists can poke around. True, it describes a transition from a Timocracy when Great Rishis and Kings wandered around to a more mercantile 'homonoia'. But so too do other Iron Age epics. What makes it different from other works is that it is so scrupulous in maintaining symmetry and providing every character, every episode, every event, with a dual. Obviously, for unambiguous interpretation, this type of 'redundancy' is necessary. What is dramatic or aesthetic is the way in which each episode is a 'balanced game'. Also there is a lot of humor under the surface. It is like a situation comedy on TV. You know that if a character says 'I will never do x', he will do x in a particularly humiliating manner by the time the credits roll. 

These two cretins think the MhB is a 'literary unthing'. It isn't. There's a reason why every sentence in it is where it is. True, for any artistic purpose you can leave things out but if you find you are going wrong, you can go back to the text or better yet employ a Pundit to do it for you. I suppose it is fair to say that people who didn't get to go to Collidge before the Great War were somewhat handicapped in grasping the mathematical side of things. It would also be fair to say Andre Weill didn't understand the Gita. But then the fucker was French. Allowances should be made. Still, for Bengalis born after about 1918 who went to Presidency, there is no fucking excuse. 

Consider the phrase 'compulsion to repeat'. Either repetition is by reason of hysteresis, in which case there is no such compulsion, or else what we have is 'memoryless'. If stochastic, it is a Markov process. Strong Markov is defined in terms of a repetition time, or stopping time, which may be random, after which the chain restarts. The MhB doesn't really take a position on this. We may say 'strong Markov' implies pralaya or is 'Saguna'. Alternatively, we could say MhB is mithya or maya. Karma and dharma are illusions. Neither 'state space' nor the 'time index' can be defined. Even the Just King's 'samkhya' is an illusion. Indeed Yuddhisthra does say as much at the end of MhB but that takes us back to its beginning. If there is a future, we are interested in it. If there isn't, though the Vedas remain there can be no nearer approach to its knowers. 

Turning to a specific example of the editor's stupidity, I may mention Sibaji's addled account of the gambler's lament. Every Hindu who has read the Rg Veda however perfunctorily knows that the disrobing of Draupati is a reference to the 'stripping of the gambler's wife'. What is the solution? The answer is Krishi- agriculture. You may say that it is a bit of a gamble, but it aint a zero-sum game. Neither is Krishna. That's it. Simples. 

Another supremely silly essay is by Enakshi Mitra who thinks the Bhagvad Gita's message applies to Yuddhisthra. It doesn't. What causes him 'vishada' is the duty to dependents. Even if you don't want 'fruits' for yourself, you do for your kiddies or younger brothers or family retainers. They are agents. You are a principal though, as such, you may be concerned with the welfare of your agents. That's why Yuddhisthra's vishad is dispelled in two parts. The first is the Vyadha Gita which says, if you are self-employed, tell Pundits and Princes to fuck off. Earn well. Live well. Treat your own parents as your gods. Taste the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya.

Yuddhisthra has another problem- viz. gambling. Now, if you don't care about 'fruit', gambling is just as good a way of redistributing wealth as any other. If it is okay that slavery exists, it is okay to be a slave. However, for some reason, the dude's wife had an objection to being stripped and forced to suck off all and sundry. What to do? Women are like that only. Still, there is a remedy. Learn statistical game theory of the Von Neumann sort. Make smart decisions. Fuck Witlesstein and his 'language games'. That's it. That's the whole story. 

This is crazy shit. Yuddhishtra is law minded. The fact is a game of dice was part of the coronation ritual. True, he was a shitty gambler. But he could learn statistical game theory (though a king could always appoint someone else to play for him). It is easy to understand Yuddhishtra's actions. His 'vishada' was caused by Bhima saying he would go off an kill the Kauravas by himself because Yuddhishtra would be bound to fuck up in exactly the same way once again. But Kings and other 'Principals'- i.e. guys running their own business- can always outsource expert advise or else take a course at the local College.

Consider the action of scratching your bum. Which 'fruit consequence' or 'desire consequence' does it absorb into itself? I want to scratch my bum. Sadly my hand ended up on your wife's behind. She slapped the black off me. Wittgenstein would so not have approved. 

Arindam Chakrabarti, Ramachandra Gandhi & meriting death

 

  Arindam Chakrabarti asks, in an Op-Ed in the Telegraph newspaper. if anyone deserves to die. If life is a conditional gift and it is taken back by its giver, we may well ask whether the dead person did something which made him undeserving of retaining that gift. The Christian view is that through Adam's sin, death came into the world. We are descended from Adam. We ought to construct a time-machine and catch hold of Adam before he was tempted to eat the fruit of knowledge. 

If, however, life on earth arose through Darwinian evolution, the question of whether a particular person deserved to die is medical or legal or political. Thus if we see a fit young person who leads a healthy life-style suddenly drop dead in the street, we may be interested to discover from the autopsy report whether she had done something to precipitate this outcome or whether Society as a whole could have taken some action to prevent it. Suppose, the lady had been taking a health supplement approved and promoted by the State licensing board. We discover that there was act of negligence or corruption on their part. We feel the girl didn't 'deserve' to die. Her blood is on the hands of the powers that be. On the other hand, if it is discovered she was secretly part of a terrorist cell planning to detonate a nuclear bomb, we might feel she deserved her fate. Perhaps she was poisoned by a secret agent of ours. Give the fellow a medal!

Arindam takes a different view. 

The question is doubly impenetrable.

No. We all understand the notion of 'desert' as well as what death entails. 'Deserved to die' means that some supervenient consideration obtained such that death was 'just deserts'.  

It involves death, the most tantalizingly imponderable topic that human mortals must but can never figure out.

Why should we 'figure out' death? We may wish to find ways to prolong our lives because that is useful or pleasurable to us. Equally we may want to know what happens after death. I suppose, there are medical reasons to investigate death itself- when does it actually occur? can it be reversed? If so for how long? But these are not questions philosophers have the required skills or knowledge to 'figure out'. 

Thinking about death is one task which clearly makes a mockery of the Kantian dictum: “Ought implies can.”

Nonsense! Suppose you don't want your good and dutiful servant to die. You order him to present himself at such and such a place a thousand years in the future. You may say 'he now ought to live for at least a thousand years'. But people will laugh at you. His duty may be to obey you but death releases him from that duty. There is nothing he can do to avert it. You have misused the word 'ought' because no one can have an obligation to perform an impossible task- e.g. living for a thousand years. 

From Nachiketa, through Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein to Ramchandra Gandhi, every thinker-without-borders found it obligatory as well as impossible to think clearly about death.

Nonsense! Nachiketa gained knowledge of the after-life. Schopenhauer may certainly have felt he had avoided the Christian Hell. What is certain is that he and Witlesstein understood very clearly that they wouldn't be able to keep publishing books after they died. Ramchandra Gandhi was not in their league. But, even he understood that much.  

Wittgenstein’s remark that death is not an event in life, though meant to be a strictly analytically true statement, nevertheless strikes me as plainly false.

Everything the fellow said was stupid. Still, we may say, sudden unexpected death is not a knowledge-event (i.e. an instantiation of predictive knowledge)  in a particular person's life, unless, actually it was something she had thought about and made provision for. A baby, which may not know that biological beings die, who suffers cot-death, could be said to have known some of the sweetness of life and a mother's love without that knowledge ever having been blighted by the realization that Mummies die. It may be some consolation for those that grieve that their little angel did not know death on earth and now, in Abraham's bosom, sees that, it is but the door through which one is re-united with Mummy.

It is analogous to the over-smart counter-comment that my birth is not an event in my life because my life starts after it.

Right to lifers, would say it started some time after conception but before birth 

How can Socrates’s or Gandhi’s life story be complete if we do not describe their deaths?

Very true. Did Gandhi shit himself a bit when he was shot? I would. Actually, I'd have been shitting myself so constantly after the first assassination attempt that Godse couldn't have got near me through the rampart of turds I'd erected. On the other hand, people who are beforehand in shitting themselves tend not to be worth assassinating. 

Still, it must be said we don't understand Socrates if we don't see why his own stupidity led to his having to swallow hemlock. True, he may have thought he was the 'scapegoat' needed to purify his City, but he was wrong. As for Gandhi, we have to ask why Congress didn't think it worthwhile to protect the old coot. How come, some American bloke caught Nathuram? Where were the plains-clothes cops? Why did Morarji Desai refuse to heed the warning of the plot given to him by an Indian Sociology professor? Why did Morarji threaten to arrest the Professor instead? 

But the other concept that this question introduces, the concept of deserving, is no less impenetrable.

No. It is pellucid. Professors should try to give only deserving students good grades. 

The idea of deserving has close ties with the idea of justice: If X deserves P (a certain prize or punishment), then it would be unjust if X does not get P. But the two notions: justice and desert, instead of making each other clearer, seem to make each other obscurer by a vicious mutual dependence.

Both are 'Tarskian primitives' in themselves. They are undefined. Desert exists even if there is no Law or system of Justice. But the Law may mention desert and vice versa. We may say 'this is Just but undeserved' or 'this is deserved though not justiciable'.  

I wonder how Ramchandra Gandhi would have sorted out this question “Who deserves to die?”

He would have said nobody deserves to die. All are worthy of mercy and a chance to redeem themselves.  

or “For whom will it be unjust to stay alive?”

One who considers an order to give up life, to be just and worthy of compliance. Thus if soldiers are ordered to fight to the death, and they consider the order to be just, that is what they will seek to do. We can imagine a soldier who survives because a bullet knocked him unconscious and thus the enemy mistook him for a corpse. This soldier may feel Fate played a dirty trick on him. Through no fault of his own, he was unable to die as justice, as represented by military law, required.  

Right now, the parents and the community of the brutally raped and murdered 12- and 14-year-old Dalit girls in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh are demanding that the rapists and the policemen who connived at that grisly rape and murder should be executed.

The girls were of the Maurya caste- which is OBC like the Yadavs whom they accuse. However, the family did get 500,000 from the BSP which it used to bribe a couple of witnesses. Thus there was definitely a political angle to this. Since the BJP went on to win the State, the case lost salience. It appears one girl was romantically involved with the accused. Was this an 'honor killing'? Nobody cares anymore because the CM is Rajput. Indeed, voters have become skeptical or apathetic about such cases.  

The outraged community thinks with a certitude only extreme grief can bring, that these rapist-murderers deserve to die.

Mauryas might well want Yadavs to disappear from the face of the earth and vice versa. This is because India is extremely overpopulated.  If the BJP can create jobs and the region starts to prosper, there will be fewer crimes of this sort. More importantly such crimes will be more expeditiously investigated and no 'community' will have a vested interest in politicizing the matter. 

It may appear that to disagree with them at this grim hour is to condone the current countrywide epidemic of such crimes, especially against Dalit and tribal women.

the girls were not Dalit. They were OBC just like the accused. But it may have been an 'honor' killing because the elder was romantically involved with a Yadav boy. There could be a political and reputational benefit for the victim's family in being seen to have mercilessly killed a couple of their own wayward girls.  

A Madhya Pradesh minister,

Babulal Gaur a former CM of that State 

The Times of India reported, set an all time record of imbecility by making three comments on this general asurik trend of the Indian male: first, that not all rapes are wrong (logically, which means that some are right, giving us a new political meaning of “right”)

Gaur said- “It is a social crime which depends on the man and the woman. It is sometimes right and sometimes wrong,” What did he mean by it? Well, in India, a woman who has had a consensual sexual relationship with a man may say she has been raped because he promised to marry her but did not do so. The court may impose a criminal sentence for rape if the man refuses to marry the woman. On the other hand, if he has not taken her virginity and she has means of her own, they may dismiss the charge. Sex was consensual. In the West, this couldn't be rape. But, in some parts of India, it could be. 

What Gaur meant was that in some cases, Indians would consider that a man who fails to marry his paramour has committed a crime. In other cases, Indians would feel that the woman acted unreasonably. She made financial demands or pressured the boyfriend to cut off ties with his family and that was the reason the relationship ended. 

, second, that women should learn judo and karate to protect themselves (this minister would have been sorely missed in Dhritarashtra’s court, when Draupadi who never learned karate, was being disrobed),

Gaur was pointing out that rape is a violent crime. The Government can't be everywhere at once. Women should learn self-defense. It is a different matter, if a woman is dragged into the Governor's mansion and police officers and judges seek to disrobe her. In this case, her knowing karate would be of no avail. The State has much greater powers of physical coercion. Arindam is a cretin. He should not mention Draupadi who was a victim of State violence not criminal molestation by some private individual or group of individuals.  

and third, crowning all, that unless a woman wants to be molested no one can molest her.

only if she has learned martial arts or knows how to use a knife. Babulal is saying that women have the right to self-defense though, to make this effective, they need to enhance their threat potential. The fact is, if you can kill even one or two of a gang who wants to rob or rape you, they will seek easier prey even though, as a group they will prevail. This is because each member of the group fears that it is he who will be killed or maimed.  

One has to resist the violent rhetorical response that if anyone ever richly deserved an unceremonious death it is this moral moron who could think such thoughts and then could be shameless enough to publicize them.

He was an intelligent man, albeit an elderly one. He knew his voters better than Arindam. A little later he said 'drinking is a fundamental right- and a status symbol too'. In other words, he was showing an awareness of the mores of the new urban middle-classes and their better off cousins in the villages. Only foreign educated morons believed atrocity stories about Dalits being raped and killed in rural backwaters.  

No, no one deserves to die for stupidity though one can die of stupidity.

Nonsense! A soldier may know that the orders he has been given are as stupid as fuck. Yet it is his duty to obey them and gain that sweetest and most decorous of Deaths which is to die for your country. His deserts may be in Heaven or in the collective memory of his Regiment or, simply, in his own heart and soul as he valiantly makes his last stand.  

Surely, our asking the question “Does anyone, even those confessed rapist-murderers, deserve to die?” cannot be taken to have anything to do with such ministerial cretinousness.

The Minister wasn't a cretin which is why he, not Arindam, had been put in a position of authority by voters. On the other hand, Arindam's question is foolish. If no one deserves to die, then it must be the case that some Agency was derelict in duty or else there was something wholly unexpected and novel about the death- so much so that it appears 'an act of God' or effect without any cause.  

Perhaps, we should start by granting that if anyone deserves to die, those rapacious molester-murderers of Badaun do.

But it now looks as though this was a honor-killing. There was murder. There may have been no molestation. Arindam may be from India, but he seems to understand little of how India works. He believes anything he reads in the English language press.  

But the question — and it is not to be reduced to the important but hackneyed question of justification of capital punishment — remains: what is it to deserve death?

I have given a good enough answer. Arindam isn't interested in any such things. He just wants to repeat himself ad nauseam.  

In a paper published in Philosophy East and West in 1981, Ramchandra Gandhi delves into this question. The paper is called “On meriting death” (and it is accessible online via JStor).

It is stupid shit. It starts thus-  'In thinking murder through we encounter at its heart the idea of the innocence of the victim of murder,

No. Murder is a pre-meditated act, for which no Hohfeldian immunity or defense in law exists, which aims at the death of a person who may or may not be pure and innocent. If there is a Hohfeldian immunity- e.g. being employed as an executioner by the state or acting in self defense in a reasonable or proportionate manner- there is no murder even if the victim is shown to be wholly innocent of the crime imputed to him or of having intended to pose so serious a threat that killing him in self-defense was justified.

The grey area relates to things like abortion and euthanasia. 

a human being killed without meriting death at the hands of his killer.

this may be man-slaughter or it may be justifiable homicide. It is foolish to say that murder always means the killing of an innocent person who deserved better from her killer.  

The idea of innocence points beyond itself to the sanctity of human life,

No. Human life retains sanctity even if, like Ramachandra Gandhi, we lose our innocence and, defying the Mahatma, have sex with our wives.  

and the idea of the sanctity of human life has an insistence which makes the difficulty of saying precisely what it comes to less embarrassing philosophically than it might be otherwise.

So if a thing is insistent- like your bride's vagina- it becomes less embarrassing philosophically to defy your grandaddy and stick your dick in it.  

This article is based on the conviction that the idea of the sanctity of human life is nourishment without which the idea of the human right to life perishes.

Cockroaches gain nourishment. Why should their lives not have sanctity? The plain fact is that the notion of 'sanctity of human life' arises from the notion that God created Man after his own image. True, we can avoid mention of God and invoke some other transcendental entity in this connection. But that has nothing to do with 'nourishment' unless you are some sort of caricature of an idol-worshipper who believes that God only sanctifies human life if humans give God 'burnt offerings'. 

Does any human being ever have the right to kill any other human being?

No. However, you may have an immunity in this respect. I suppose we can imagine a civilization where sadists were permitted to purchase slaves purely to have the pleasure of inflicting a horrible death on them. A similar point may be made about Societies which practiced human sacrifice. But, even in those cases, what obtained was an immunity not an entitlement. To see why, suppose I buy a slave for the purpose of sacrificing him to Hecate. That slave attacks you. You slay him in self defense. Have you violated my right to kill the slave? No. You had an immunity to do what you did which overrode my right to be the guy who slaughtered the fellow.  

Of course so, one might want to say, giving the following representative example. Suppose a human being, X, was trying or intended to kill another human being, Y, such that the only way Y could prevent X from killing him was by killing X.

Y has an immunity, not a right. The ignorance of our Philosophy Professors is startling. I should mention Y's immunity is not absolute. If he himself did something which caused him to appear a threat so severe as to justify extreme violence, he may be considered to have forfeited the right to self-defense. Thus suppose a gangster gets drunk and breaks into the house of an elderly woman and talks of raping and decapitating her and the elderly woman grabs a gun and tries to shoot him at which point he kills her, it is likely that he can't assert 'right to self defense'. 

If in this situation it were also the case that neither Y nor Z merited death at the hands of X, some would want to say that Y had the right to kill X.

Only if they were stupid and ignorant. Y had an immunity in that respect.  

Or let us suppose that X was trying or intended to kill not Y but some other human being, Z, such that X could be prevented from killing Z only if Y killed X

This could be a defense in law more particularly if Z had a duty of care to Y or was employed as a policeman or other properly trained and experienced law enforcement operative. However, there may still be a tort liability.  

Indeed, even if it were the case that only Z, and not also Y, did not merit death at the hands of X, some would still want to say that Y had the right to kill X.

Not if they were educated. They would say 'he may have a defense in law'. No doubt, we may speak 'ad captum vulgi' to get the general point across that there is a legal dimension to this whose details, however, don't concern ordinary people.  

 If Y does not merit death at the hands of X, this means at least that X does not have the right to kill Y

No. Suppose a brave soldier gets drunk and runs amok. In self defense, a cowardly draft-dodger strikes down the old warrior. We may say 'the soldier didn't deserve to fall to the hand of a coward' but we would agree that the coward had an immunity in this respect. He has to be acquitted by the court. But this did not mean he had a right to kill. He merely had an immunity from a murder charge if he exercised a right to self-defense in a proportionate and reasonable manner.  

 Can a human being ever lose his self-defensive right to kill?

This cretin doesn't get that there is no such right- save in jurisdictions where you can buy slaves for the purpose of ritual slaughter.  

Let us for a moment bring back the human being Z from our earliest description of the situation, and suppose that although X has the right to kill Y,

there may be a duty to kill- e.g. X is a soldier under orders- but that is not a right which vests in X. We say that if X, the soldier, kills he may have an immunity. We don't say he has a legal right to kill. It is not the case that if a soldier is commanded to go kill the enemy, that instead of putting on his uniform, he should put on a suit and go to the Court and say to the Judge- 'I have a right to kill the enemy. Sadly, I am not able to enforce that right because the enemy has guns and I don't want to get shot. Kindly, supply the remedy to the rights-violation I am currently suffering. Send some officers of the court to go catch the enemy and bring them to me so I can slit their throats. I will pay reasonable court costs.' 

and is exercising this right, he has no right to kill Z, although in act he is trying or intends to kill Z. Would not we want to say that in this situation Y has the right to kill X, if the only way X can be prevented from killing Z is by Y killing X?

No. X may be a soldier under orders to kill terrorists. Terrorists can't rely on a self-defense immunity because some previous act of their own caused them to lose relevant rights in this respect.  

And let us not forget that X has the right to kill Y and both X and Y know this!

No. They know he has an immunity for killing them. Perhaps, he will also receive a reward. They may conspire to kill him before he kills them. But this would be a criminal act if his actions were legal and theirs were not.  

The idea of a self-defensive right to kill

does not exist. There may be a legal immunity to a charge of murder but there is no right linked to a remedy by a bond of law. I may report to the police that a dangerous lunatic is stalking me and seeking to murder me. I may even say that, in accordance with 'stand your ground' laws in the jurisdiction, I have equipped myself with a guy and plan to shoot the fellow before he gets a chance to kill me. The police may caution me that I must use only proportionate and reasonable force. But, they may promise to investigate the matter and detain the lunatic and see if they can incarcerate him for 'threatening behavior'. What I can't do is say 'I have a right to kill the lunatic. Since I can't do so I want you to kill him for me thus providing the remedy which I am too weak and feeble to provide for myself.' This is because there is no such thing as a right to kill. If there were it could be sold on the market or be performed by an agent.  

stems from considerations which have to do with the absolute integrity of a living body-

cockroaches have a living body 

in the present case a living human body-

which, nowhere in the world, at this present time has a 'right to kill'. All they have is an immunity under certain limited circumstances.  

and there is nothing about this idea which suggests that the absolute integrity of a living human body can become undermined by the right that some other human being may have to destroy it.

because this is not an idea. It is shit. Cockroaches have the absolute integrity of a living body. How can this be undermined by the right that an exterminator has to kill them?  

If this is sound, and if, in our example, one can say that Y retains his self-defensive right to kill X despite the fact that X has the right to kill Y, the situation yields strange consequences. In order to see this, let us suppose that X is an executioner duly authorized to kill Y who, let us suppose, is a murderer condemned by due process of law to death, and let us further suppose that X has commenced the exercise of his right to kill Y. Then, if the preceding reasoning regarding self- defensive killing is sound, Y, the condemned man, would have the right self- defensively to kill X, the executioner, if that is the only way he can prevent X from killing him. Of course Y is unlikely to have the resources to do this, but we are examining not the likelihood of such a thing happening but the theory, the moral theory of self-defense, whether the "self" happens to be a murderer or a saint. And why should moral or legal theorists wish to deny that a condemned murderer has the self-defensive right to kill his executioner at the point where this is the only possible self-defense? Would not it be more correct to say that all that morality and law and social policy require, if they require this, is that the condemned man ought not to succeed in this enterprise?

No. The executioner has an immunity. If through his own negligence, the condemned man kills him, he has only himself to blame. Sadly, the convict has no immunity for killing the executioner.  

Gandhi does seem to grasp that a duty is not a right. But, because he doesn't understand that it may create an immunity, he- like his grandaddy- talks bollocks about the Gita.

Do these examples make more plausible the claim that even if it is or could be our duty sometimes to kill a human being, it need not ever be our right?

It can only be a right if we could sell it. Thus, in Saudi Arabia, a person whose family member was killed by someone else might agree to accept blood-money in return for giving up the right to kill the fellow which the State exercises on his behalf. But, in this case, we would say that the duty of lex talionis vengeance was defeasible. The family of the victim showed mercy and were properly recompensed for it. 

Let us note that a too eager acceptance of human killing as being even sometimes a right could be disastrous;

So this dude thinks the Saudis will come to disaster. Why does he not tell them so?  

an acceptance of it as being sometimes both a right and a duty can only result in insufferable self-righteousness where fear and a sense of the tragic limitations of the human condition are called for;

But the Saudis firmly believe that God will lift up the pious Muslim to Paradise, far above any such tragic limitations 

a recognition of it as being sometimes a duty although never a right seems most likely to me to encourage the balance between courage and ahimsa that Gandhiji talked about.

In which case, the Brits had provided it already. Gandhi qualified as a barrister in London. English law has never had a 'right to kill'. There are immunities for certain types of killing. That is all. Incidentally, Brits showed courage in two world wars and provided India with a long Pax Britannica. Gandhi's stupidity precipitated the bloodletting of Partition.  

(In the Gita, Arjuna can be seen as claiming that he has no right to kill the enemy,

No. He foresees some of the disastrous consequences of the War. He loses his will to fight.

and Sri Krsna can be seen as conceding this point 

No. Arjuna has a duty to kill- though, in fact, it is not he who kills but God himself.  

but drawing Arjuna's attention to the fact that it is under specific circumstances that his duty is to kill).

Arjuna was aware that he wasn't supposed to kill humans anywhere save on the battlefield or else in a duel fought under prevailing rules of combat.  

I am not suggesting that the idea of human killing being sometimes a duty (a terrible and painful duty) is by itself likely to be corrective of human overeagerness to kill.

Gandhi's pals are constantly slavering at the mouth and displaying eagerness to kill and eat fellow faculty members.  

It can be so only in conjunction with the idea that human beings never have any right to kill one another.

The Sovereign does. Also in some countries, there may be a right to vendetta unless blood-money is paid. The Saudis, very sensibly, ensured this right was delegated to the State.

But I am arguing for the truth of a certain thesis,

that thesis was taught to his grandfather. In Anglo-Saxon law there is no duty to kill. There are immunities related to lawful killing. 

not its efficaciousness, although I am convinced that in the sphere of the spirit truth is the most efficacious policy.

The truth is that blathershite Gandhis only exist because they ignored the Mahatma's command not to have sex.  

I think the thesis I am proposing will be better understood if we reflect not upon the wrongness of murder, important though it is to do so, but on the badness of all human killing, whether or not wrongness attaches to it.

Why not reflect on the smelliness of farts? Surely, that will decrease flatulence?  

For even where it is a duty to kill a human being, the killing stares us in the face as a profound disvalue.

Ramchandra kept killing people. Those killings would stare him in the face reproachfully. Thankfully, the cunt kicked the bucket at the age of 70. Arindram hasn't got over the shock- perhaps because he himself poisoned his pal's beer at the India International Center back in 2007.

“Meriting”, like “earning”, has a prima facie positive association. Thus, when my mother died with only 15 minutes’ extreme suffering, at the age of 71, with no serious ailment, some neighbours commented that she earned such a death by her merit (punya). I did not understand that notion of earning then, and I do not understand it now when it is used in the negative way — when harsh retributive punishment is referred to as “pain earned by wrong-doing”.

Theists consider chastisement at the Lord's hand to itself be a mark of grace. I earned plenty of slaps from Mummy. That's why I was confident she loved me and would protect me from vaginas so I could remain faithful to the Mahatma's commandments. True, Mummy only slapped me when I insisted that she come and lie in my bed and tell me nice bed-time stories. But that was because, had she failed to do so, my wife might have done much worse to me. As things were, my wife was happy enough to return to her parents and get a divorce on the grounds of non-consummation.  

Of course, even if we take “meriting” to be synonymous with “deserving”, this question was not discussed exactly in this bald form in that paper. Ramchandra Gandhi’s concern was, “When can Y be said to merit or not merit death at the hands of X?” And we can imagine other ways of filling out the question of meriting or not meriting death. “Did Vivekananda deserve to die of diabetes at the age of 39?”

Yes, if he ate and drank too much.  

— which takes us to a very different zone of moral-metaphysical imagination, than the question, “Did MKG deserve to die by the gunshot of N.R. Godse?”

To be frank, Godse did Congress a favor which they didn't deserve.  

Well, Ramchandra Gandhi’s paper turns out to be on the right to kill, though he starts by stating, intriguingly, that X may have the right to kill Y and still Y may not merit death at the hands of X.

As we have seen, Ramchandra wasn't saying anything intriguing. He was saying something idiotic.  

When I heard of Ramchandra Gandhi’s death, I could not help asking, “Did he deserve the death that befell him?”

He should have died in an Ashram not a watering-hole for the elite like IIC.  

Of course, we did not deserve to lose him so soon. But that is beside the point here. It is not about us who are deservingly or undeservingly still living. It is about whether or not Ramchandra Gandhi merited the death he underwent. No one killed Ramchandra Gandhi, not even in the metaphorical sense in which cancer killed Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi. But every death, including Ramchandra Gandhi’s death, happens in a certain manner. And when I am urging us to inquire whether anyone deserves to die, I am not asking the cosmic or Christian question whether human beings have done anything to be susceptible to death at all. I am asking: “Does a particular person ever deserve to die in the manner in which he or she dies?”

In some cases, that would be a perfectly proper judgment to make. A person warned not to keep smoking, who keeps smoking and dies prematurely deserved his fate.  

A simple naturalistic response could be that deaths —especially natural deaths — are events like a flood or an outbreak of allergy, about which to ask the question of deserving or justice makes no sense.

It is useful to do so in some cases. If a thing was avoidable and proper steps were not taken, then there is a question of negligence or desert.  

If we raise the question of deserving to die, we have to be ready to raise the question of deserving to be born or deserving to live. And such a question can have disturbing and diabolical ramifications for the familiar applied ethics debates.

Nope. Anyway, such debates are utter shit. They can't get any worse.  

The typical Gandhian/Hindu/karma theoretic attitude would be that, if someone dies in a certain manner, then he or she must have deserved to die in that manner, because the law of karma or ishvara, the overseer of the law of karma, never permits an unmerited death to happen. But if that was to be taken flatly universally to be true, then all killings would be justified because the deaths they would cause would be well-deserved.

No. Hindus think that the souls of those who are good get something better in the next life. If they die a ghastly death, this burns up any karmic residue from misdeeds in a past life. This is an optimistic view of the world more particularly because God can avert 'prarabdha karma' by the arrow of his Grace.  

Perhaps it has been a bit inauspicious to raise the question if Ramchandra Gandhi (or Vivekananda or M.K. Gandhi) deserved the death that befell him in the context of asking whether the rapists have earned their death (to which one could say, “No, because they need to suffer much longer which they cannot if they are swiftly, if punitively, eliminated”).

It appears they were innocent.  

But I wanted to take two clear examples where common ethical intuition would say that someone deserves to die, and that someone does not deserve to die, with the same dearth of grounding reason.

Arindam very stupidly took a case where we now know the accused were innocent 

I could never understand

anything at all. That's why the guy teaches shite.  

how the question of “deserving to die or suffer” can even be raised by atheists and disbelievers in the law of karma. But the feeling that a passionate, kind, brilliant, creative philosopher-human being like Ramchandra Gandhi, who could help so many people live a better life of the mind, did not deserve to die at the time and in the manner in which he died is at least as natural as the feeling that a bunch of perverts who raped and murdered two innocent 12- and 14-year-old girls and a powerful minister who condoned that crime deserve to die.

Ramchandra Gandhi died of natural causes. The girls were probably killed by their family because the older was seeing a boy from another caste.  

But most probably both the feelings are, when examined, irrational.

Stupid. They were rational enough in the sense that these guys got paid to virtue signal 

One needs Ramchandra Gandhi himself to tell us if in spite of its irrationality these feelings of who does or does not merit death in which manner have any moral or metaphysical value.

Morality is concerned with what people deserve. The wiser course is to reward those who deserve well of you if only for reputational purposes. Merit can be the basis of 'public signals' which improve Aumann 'correlated equilibria'.  

Instead of invoking the glibly over-quoted Gita chapter II passage to the effect that death did not befall Ramchandra Gandhi’s soul, which went for a costume change, what, I imagine, he would have done if I asked him, “Did you, Ramuda, merit death when you died?” is to quip: “Only if you, Arindam, merited death at the same time, because I am thou.” And I would have died of epistemological embarrassment.

Both were already brain-dead. I am tempted to put the blame on Peter Strawson under whom both did their PhDs. Perhaps, if Frank Ramsey hadn't died young Anal-tickle stupidity would have died out in England by the mid-Thirties. It really is true that sometimes we are deprived of very deserving people. But perhaps this is because we deserve no better. 

Ramchandra Gandhi ended his silly paper thus 'I find liberation in the thought that human beings do not merit death at the hands of one another, 

I don't. This means that a person suffering terribly can't receive a dignified death at the hands of those who most love them. Also, I would be denied surgery where there is a 90 percent chance of a painless death whereas there is 10 percent charge of being completely cured of a very painful and humiliating disease. 

although often they ask for trouble.

That is irrelevant. 

 But human beings have been dying ever since they began to be born.

As did the creatures from which they evolved. So what? 

 Does this mean that they-we-merit death after all, although not at one another's hands? 

Yes. If it was good enough for Daddy, it is good enough for me. 

Do we offend the nature of things in some unavoidable way?

Nope. We are the natural product of a natural process- viz. Evolution. 

 Is death a kind of ransom or sacrifice?

No. Don't be silly. 

 Is it maya? 

Only in the sense that maya is maya. 

These are dark and deep questions, 

they are shite

quite beyond my capacities to attempt even to begin to answer here.

Only because this nutter incapacitated himself. He could have studied something useful at Collidge. Anal-tickle philosophy made this fellow as useless as Bilgrami. 

Arindam Chakrabarti getting Nyaya wrong.

Some sixty years ago, some Indians began to suspect that Indian logical 'Nyaya' or 'Vakyapadiya' linguistic philosophy or Jain syadvad 'fuzzy logic' might have some marvelous property connected to 'cognitive science' or whatever it was Chomsky was up to. Then, we realized, the thing was a waste of time. 

Save in matters of sectarian doctrine (matam), where- perhaps in response to Gautama's Nyaya-sutra- Theologian-Saints, like Umasvati, Nagarjuna, Sankara etc, so 'reverse-mathematicised' (i.e. winnowed out axioms) in their respective doctrines as to make them 'observationally equivalent'- Indians, more particularly because their economy was growing rapidly, considered reasoning to be a pragmatic activity- an empirical Science or Vigyaan- pursued to some useful end. Truth- याथार्थ्य:- is that which it is useful to attain- which is why we have a predisposition to verify it or, to simplify or speed up matters, have an emotional response to it such that it is action-guiding to our benefit and profit. 

I have commented, somewhat unkindly, on Matilal's misprision of Gangesha elsewhere. What I failed to mention was that it it was a Nyaya dogma that the mind processes knowledge sequentially. Yet something like 'parallel processing' means we are frequently in 'two minds' about a thing. However, when discharging a duty in a protocol bound manner, or when giving an account of our having done so, we have to pick on one connected train of thought as if 'the mark of the mind' was what we call 'concurrency'. But this is purely a matter of utility. No larger ontological commitment is required. If we say 'things which are true are knowable and nameable' this is merely a useful working assumption in certain protocol bound contexts which arise by reason of collective action problems. But there is compartmentalization in such cases. We may say 'to the legal mind, x is the case' whereas ' in foro conscientiae, or to the feeling heart, x is not the case' while adding 'to the mind of the economist, 'x' is mis-specified'. Now, the very same person may say all these things. Since the man is the Chief Justice, we may say he has spoken authoritatively of the 'legal mind's' settled view on the matter. However we may doubt that his conscience or his 'feeling heart' is quite as angelic as he would have us think. Economist too might ridicule the CJI's statement about what they would think, though, no doubt, they'd try to scratch each others eyes out if he tried to gain a consensus amongst themselves regarding 'x'. 

Still, though the mind is myriad, for the purposes of Jurisprudence, it is actually very useful if it is univocal on points of law even if its practitioners have wide differences on every other matter. But this is a convention of an expedient or pragmatic type. 

Some 30 years ago Arindam Chakrabarti published a silly paper which I will briefly quote and comment on. 

Before doing so, I draw your attention to this statement of his published by the Telegraph- National pride is immoral because un-universalizable. 

In that case it is immoral to wipe your own bum or even to care greatly that your bum should be wiped. Your concern must be with all bums everywhere which might need wiping. You must first wipe the bums of people lazier than you in the vicinity if you want to be considered a moral person. Moreover, since human morality is not universalizable to other sentient beings, humans should be as immoral as fuck. 

Nyaya says the above is bad logic. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry of an informational type. You know the condition of your own bum. You don't know which other bums require wiping. You know your own country is good. You don't know which other countries are equally good or better. You can usefully proceed on the basis of 'determinate' (savikalpaka jnana) information you have. After all, it is mere conjecture, not inference, that your Boss or your Professor has a shitty bum and thus it would be a kindness to offer to wipe it for him. 

Believing one’s own cultural heritage or religion to be the greatest in the world is unethical because you cannot consistently will that this maxim be universally and sincerely embraced as objectively true by all other peoples of the world. 

It is not unethical if this is indeed the case. Indeed, people in other countries would thank you for opening their eyes to the immorality of eating all their babies. Love your country and try to make it the best. Don't be mean. Share news of its achievements with others. 

What is Arindam's mistake? He ignores the 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which dictate eusocial strategies and which are the foundation of Oikeiosis. Indian thought never suffered from this defect. Its 'mimamsa' hermeneutics was always linked to pragmatic, Oikos based, 'Artha-shastra' economics and jurisprudence. It may be that some academics thought there was something Kantian about Navya Nyaya despite the fact that it is a pragmatic, not analytic, theory and focuses on usefulness (arthavat) as defining knowledge. Thus, this entire academic availability cascade was based on stupidity and ignorance- speaking of which let us hear Arindam's thoughts 

On Knowing by Being Told

A person should know what he was or wasn't told provided he was paying attention and it was his duty, or in his interest, to do so. The proviso here is that the speaker should be saying something useful (arthavat) to qualify as a knowledge source. 

Words are sometimes said to clothe our thoughts and beliefs.

Only if there would be some unseemliness or violation of relevant protocol if they appeared naked.  

But, like some clothes, they usually reveal more than they conceal, often imposing shapes on our ideas which they might have lacked in their naked state.

Words, like clothes, can be used to emphasize particular points or distract from others. But they don't 'impose' anything. Either they serve their intended purpose or they don't.  

Beliefs put on the dress of language not only when they are exhibited but also when they travel from one person to another.

Not necessarily. If I see people screaming and running away, I too run in the same direction. I don't care if they are naked or wearing Top Hats or are reciting Homer rather than screaming 'save me for the Holy sake of Fuck!'  

Perhaps this whole sartorial imagery is wrongheaded.

It is.  

The very notion of beliefs or awareness episodes in their prelinguistic nudity may be a myth.

Nonsense! We readily understand that the crying baby may be scared of the barking dog even though it can't speak.  

However, while enough attention has been paid by recent philosophy to the phenomenon of expressing or displaying our thoughts, beliefs, or pieces of knowledge through our utterances, the major role of language in instilling information, in causing people to have true thoughts, and in generating knowledge has remained relatively neglected.

By shitheads. So what? Smart guys at IKEA figured out that you don't need to communicate through language. Stylized pictographs are good enough.  

Too busy with explaining exhibition, we seem to have forgotten about the transmission of knowledge through the medium of speech.

If you can explain how the thing is exhibited you have have also explained how it is transmitted. This is because exhibition of any sort is the emitting of a signal. Transmission is achieved when the signal is correctly decoded. This is a case of co-evolution and may feature 'arms races' of various sorts.  

Yet, as has been realized and elaborately articulated by Indian philosophers well over a thousand years ago, true utterances in a certain language are not only caused by pieces of knowledge acquired by the sincere and competent speaker but can themselves, in their turn, cause genuine knowledge in the unsuspecting audience that is trained in that language.

Nobody doesn't or didn't know this. Sincerity and competence and sharing a language don't matter. If it is useful for transmission to occur, a mechanism for it will exist. That is why humans can communicate with their hunting dogs so as to achieve a common goal. There has been co-evolution.

Indian philosophers did not think training in a particular language- e.g. Sanskrit- would itself cause 'unsuspecting' audiences to accept a doctrine (matam) as true. It wasn't the case that if you were well-spoken enough, you could convince Umasvati to give up Jainism or Nagarjuna to give up Buddhism. On the other hand empirical statements (Vigyaan) might be accepted if certain protocols were observed. Thus, you might be believed if you said 'the swan's feather can indeed separate milk from water. Watch as I show you how it is done. This experiment of mine has been validated by the physicians of the Royal Courts of the entire Gangetic plain.' 

Reading books or newspapers, listening to experts' lectures or radio reports, or checking with parents or eyewitnesses, we come by such important pieces of knowledge as the knowledge that each cell in my body contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes,

some do. Some don't- e.g. erythrocytes or mature red cells. 

that the forest fire in Yellowstone National Park is spreading,

it isn't now.  

or that I was born in September.

You may be wrong. Perhaps you were adopted.  

Some of these pieces of information could have been obtained by some of us perceptually or inferentially, but all of them may actually be learned from verbal testimony. As H. H. Price pointed out, we not only have to take on trust such facts as how old each of us is, but even our knowledge of what day or date or year it is today is based on the evidence of testimony.

only according to the testimony of a cretin doing useless shit.  

Until recently, it counted as a standard complaint against some classical Indian theories of knowledge that they recognize "Report of the Reliable" as an accredited source of or evidence for knowledge.

For certain types of protocol bound knowledge or adjudication- sure. But this is also the case in any court of law or administrative tribunal.  

After the great 'linguistic turn' took place in the West,

it was shitty. Just when Physics and Math were taking us far outside familiar linguistic paradigms, psilosophers buried their heads in the sand and went in for bad philology or worse semantics.  

comparative philosophers, who used to feel apologetic about the otherwise hardheaded Nyaya philosophy's concern with word-generated knowledge,

because Indian philosophy was about yogic levitation or miraculously defeating the cruel British, some 30,000 of whom were mercilessly oppressing 300 million Indians- probably because those Indians were too busy levitating and pooping on each other's heads.  

started defensively to discover echoes and anticipations of contemporary issues in the elaborate ancient and medieval discussions by Indian philosophers on themes like the meanings of words, sentences, quantifiers, pronouns, proper names, negatives, imperatives, and so on.

If Western philosophy became stupid and useless, India had an obligation that Indian philosophers had always been even more stupid and useless.  

The sheer opulence of dialectical materials and well-worked-out insights-on issues like the meanings of empty subject-terms, of existence denials, sentence-holism versus word-atomism, secondary (or metaphorical) versus literal (or first) meaning, the role of the speaker's intention in meaning-determination, and so on-sometimes dazzled our eyes.

It didn't dazzle the eyes of the descendants of Nawadwipa's Navya-Nyaya pundits. They quickly learnt a bit of English and made money as lawyers. The fact is there are certain rules for legal draughtsmanship which, if violated, lead to ambiguity and costly law suits at some future time. Nyaya had rules in the same way as the Chancery English of the lawyers had rules. Sometimes, it paid to pretend that they had been broken. Philosophy was a handmaiden to profitable employment in the Courts or the Administration. But Justice is only about utility as David Hume pointed out. Bentham may have fulmined against 'dog's law' but his disciples in Bengal didn't scruple to get rich by putting strained interpretations upon contracts and 'sanads'.  

Arindam thinks that  

haziness about the concept of word-generated awareness (sabdabodha)

verbal interpretation. The usual view is that some words used may be disregarded if not in keeping with the purpose of the sentence as a whole.  

is... important.

 In Law and Politics, this can indeed be the case. The Indian view is that verbal activity is the chief thing in a sentence and all the other words (excepting the one which expresses verbal activity) are subordinated to the verbal activity. Thus, some words may be 'read out' or 'read in' to a contract or law such that the purpose of the sentence- that which prompted the verbal activity- is properly served. But this is also the view taken by the law- unless Judges be kray kray in which case there is flight from the jurisdiction. 

The fact is, Bengali Nyaya Pundits effortlessly transitioned into pleaders in British courts.  Arindam know this. Yet he makes an astonishing claim- viz. the West understands sentences differently from Nyaya philosophy. The former understand stuff that is said. The latter gain 'awareness'. This causes the Indian to levitate and become one with the universe. It isn't true that the dude failed to show up for work because he was too lazy or drunken to do so. 

This is a convenient doctrine if you claim to have made the discovery your Graduate Student communicated to you. True, you have a vague memory that he babbled some nonsense to you. But you didn't understand what he was saying. Quite independently you gained awareness that a certain thing was true. So you published it under your own name. Strangely, Radhakrishnan didn't use this defense when accused of plagiarism by Jadunath Sinha. 

Still, in Law, there is a reason to have this distinction. You may not want to acknowledge that you gained a particular piece of knowledge from a tainted source because this may impugn your own character and credibility. You may say, 'I became aware that it was probably the case that natural deduction systems feature partial tautologies. I should mention I had begun reading C.S Pierce in Grad School.' Finally you may admit that you first came across the cut elimination theory in Gentzen. You didn't know the dude was a fucking Nazi. Anyway, you had your own way of working out the truth of that result. Incidentally, some of my best friends are Jewish. 

Arindam says the Western position is 'understanding followed by trust'. This is not the case. We may verify that our enemy has actually said something that is true or useful. We may be obliged to acknowledge the intellectual debt by the rules of conduct of our profession. But we may seek to give an account of how we came to know a thing such that no imputation could arise that we had become trusting of some fucking Nazi. 

The Nyaya- like many contemporary philosophers- does not admit intentional entities like meanings, propositions, or Fregean senses.

It does admit them as the raw material for  Anuvyavasaya (अनुव्यवसाय) which is like judicial deliberation about what testimony or other evidence can or can't be admitted and what legal ratio should be applied to adjudicate the case. 

Unless we admit a beliefless noncommittal state of apprehension (which we might call "mere comprehension"),

think of it as the lodging of various affidavits or exhibits some of which may be deemed admissible on the basis of further reflection or argumentation.  

it becomes difficult to answer this question without losing sight of the distinction between word-generated awareness (roughly, trust)

but trust isn't 'word generated'. I trust that the leading medical specialist will give the correct diagnosis of my case even if I don't know a word of his language and wouldn't be able to understand it even if it were translated for me.  

and the so-called understanding. So, Nyaya regards the trusting reception of information as the primary cognitive attitude to meaningful, nonfictional, nonfigurative speech.

This is not the case. What is required is 'bracketing'- i.e. accepting testimony and then deciding whether it is admissible. This was important at a time when different sects had very different 'Matams' or doctrines thought the 'Vigyaan' or empirical science was the same. We may speak of observational equivalence obtaining for the moment such that even testimony from a person with very different religious beliefs is accepted for some practical purpose. 

Artha- in Sanskrit means both 'meaning' and what is profitable or useful- i.e. is utilitarian for economics or pragmatic politics. It may be that for 'Moksha', our doctrinal beliefs matter. But we can rub along well enough in commerce and the administration without deciding whether a guy who belongs to the false religion must necessarily be accounted a liar. 

I wish in this essay to address the following three
issues.
(1) Is word-generated awareness (in the sense sketched above) classifiable as perception, memory, or inference?

It is the preliminary part of Anuvyavasaya- or a process of adjudication, where what is de facti or de juri is still a matter of contention. This may be protocol bound- i.e. the person doing it may have to show he had not prejudged the case or acted in a gullible or otherwise improper manner. 

(2) Does the Nyaya account of the content of word-generated awareness in the general terms of qualificand (subject) and qualifier (predicated property) fail to work in the case of sentences in the nonindicative- especially imperative or optative-mood?

No. Why should it have any such infirmity? Testimony re. motive and character may or may not admissible in a court of law. But the same is true in other fields. We might be skeptical of a scientific claim which could make the scientist very very rich. But, if we follow protocols, we escape the charge of having dupes or paid lackeys.  

(3) Is the Nyaya refusal to accept the "understanding followed by trust" picture based on a mistaken defense of gullibility?

No gullibility is involved if protocols are followed. Yes, there may have countervailing evidence. It wasn't admissible. Perhaps the protocols should be changed. But that is a separate matter.  

 when explaining the concept of a reliable authority, the "apta", Vatsyayana comments:

'By "apta" is meant any informer who has himself somehow directly apprehended the matter and is impelled by a natural desire to communicate facts as he has found them.... This definition applies equally to sages who have had direct vision of truth, to Aryans, and to Mlechhas or heretics.'

Thus the meaning of 'reliable authority' is one whom we can rely on for any purpose of our own. However, stricter protocols may apply if we are acting as an agent. Thus if an elderly servant tells you that your wife is fucking the dhobi, you may consider him reliable. But this may not be enough to get a divorce. Others in the community may say 'how can you take the word of an uneducated slave while disbelieving your own high-born wife?' Thus, you may have to arrange for high-born witnesses to catch her in flagrante.  

Two things are to be noticed.

This cretin can't notice shit.  

First, it is not enough to know the truth. Someone may know the facts, but either because she lacks the desire to pass this knowledge on to others, or because she is too lazy to talk communicatively, or deliberately refrains from telling the truth, or because he has a perverse misanthropy in him, he or she may not tell the truth or state it otherwise.

In which case such a person can't be an 'apta' by reason of being unreliable or of bad character.  

But as long as there is no reason to suspect such abnormal features as mistake, delusion, deception, or defective sensory mechanism, the speaker can conventionally be taken not only to be one who expresses his purport but also to be one who communicates facts, giving us not only a piece of his mind but a glimpse of the world as he has known it.

No. The 'apta' must only give us relevant facts- i.e. ones which are useful for some purpose of our own. In Sanskrit, the word has the connotation of a friend or kinsman who knows what sort of information you need to hear.  

Second, this is not intended as a defense of overcredulousness.

This cretin thinks you should listen to some nutter who enjoys reciting facts about things which are of no interest to you.  

It might appear as if in emphasizing this knowledge-spreading function of speech

useful knowledge- i.e. stuff which raises productivity or improves decision making.  

we are about to forget the notoriety which 'rumor'

'upashruti' in Sanskrit. It is very powerful.  

-typically untrue information- has for its tendency to spread. The admission of words as a source of knowledge is no defense of overcredulousness or gullibility.

If it improved outcomes for you, that is all the defense you need provided you aren't breaking the law or violating relevant social or professional norms.  

It is just the robust recognition of the fact that without this straightforward and natural method of handing down knowledge through language, not only religion or common morality but even science or historiography would be impossible.

What about the robust recognition of the fact that without shitting from time to time, our fucking intestines would explode? What is the point of doing PhD in Amrika if you start robustly recognizing that shitting, and speaking and breathing and eating nutritious food are essential? Without them, even Academic Philosophy- not to speak of useful types of research- would disappear. Kindly take shits regularly otherwise our Department will be closed down and I will lose my job.  

It is not in spite of, but because of the progress of science that larger and larger amounts of findings, premises, theories, results of experiments, and technical know-how have to be taken on authority or learned directly from uttered or printed words.

No. The progress of science is irrelevant. We take stuff on authority, if this improves outcomes for us. If we get rich enough, we can hire reputable authorities on various useful subjects to make useful innovations so as to get even richer.  

If each individual or generation had to perceive directly, verify inductively, or work out everything from scratch, then, as a famous Sanskrit couplet goes,

This world would be immersed in total darkness of ignorance, deprived of the

light which we call "speech'

The same is true of shitting. If nobody shits, everybody would be dead and we would be deprived of the light which we call speech and the smell which we call farts. 

Nyaya-Vaisheshika was an orthodox Hindu school because it was useful and kept clear of doctrinal disputes. Indians abandoned it in favor of British jurisprudence because the latter was better administered or provided more 'incentive compatible' remedies. 

What was novel and- in the traditional Indian scene- courageous of Nyaya was to extend the domain of sabda (word) as a source of knowledge to ordinary matters of fact- flouting deliberately the stricture imposed by other schools of thought as to the assignment
of specific sorts of knowables to specific ways of acquiring knowledge.

This is nonsense. Ancient Indian states had law courts and medical experts and agronomists and engineers and so forth. Nyaya-Vaisheshika was given a bit of philosophical gloss so that instruction in useful arts and sciences could be given by a more elite type of instructor. Similarly, in Islamic or Christian lands, a sort of theological gloss was given to medicine and alchemy and so forth. They were things you could study if you didn't want to end up just as a parish priest or local 'qadi' (judge).  

To come back to our original uneasiness about the informational
content of commands or requests or moral injunctions: for one thing, we
must notice that the verb "to tell" is also used most naturally in the
context of an imperative utterance. Just as someone tells me what hap-
pened, someone tells me what to do, where to go, what to bring, and
so on. So, somehow the notion of 'what is told' must include both
states of affairs which can or cannot be the case, and actions which
should or should not be done.

All civilizations understood the distinction between imperative and alethic statements and the fact that a lot of statements mix both up together. But, for any given purpose, they may be factorized well enough. What is important is that protocols in this respect are not onerous and that their scrupulous observance does not lead to perverse outcomes.  

The Nyaya theory of action has a general rule: from cognition flows desire, from desire volition, from volition effort, and from effort the actual performance of the action.

This is how agents justify their course of conduct. They show that they came to know something in the proper manner. They then conceived a desire such as the proper discharge of their duty obliged them to have. They then exercised their will and chose a course of action. They discharged this plan in a manner that remained scrupulously mindful of their obligations and the possible consequences, intended or unintended, of their actions. 

If you are a principal, not an agent, you are welcome to have some desire of your own before you seek out information which will enable you to fulfil it.  

The standard case of action-motivating desire comes from a triple
awareness: (a) awareness that performance of the action will produce
desirable results, (b) awareness that it will not produce undesirable results
strong enough to counterbalance the former, and (c) awareness that such
an act is within the power of the actor.

This is not the standard case. Some actions are mandatory even if the result is known to be adverse.  We may say there is a 'Matsanyaya'- an imperative which is much bigger than any other consideration and which, so to speak, swallows them up in the way that a big fish eats up little fish. 

Now, when S tells H to "Bring the cow," what H learns immediately from the utterance is the following: the addressee (in this case H, reflexively identified as "I myself" when the
information is received and as "you" when it is passed on) has to be an
agent of the act of bringing the cow.

This is not the case. H may not be employed by S. He may understand that S, who is elderly, has mistaken him for his own servant. H explains this and S apologizes. Arindam, no doubt, fetches cows for all and sundry. Does he also suck them off, if commanded to do so? Perhaps.  

Since information or messages  received from utterances must be capable of turning into knowledge- and knowledge is somehow essentially linked up with the truth of the content-the informational content must be such that it can be true (or false) on standard appropriate occasions.

Nonsense! The fact that you saw the fugitive and he said to you 'I'm not really here. This is a dream of yours.' is knowledge which contradicts its own content. Saying 'I'm not here' proves you are here. 

As we know from the now- notorious problems of the separation and marriage of the assertoric force from/with the neutral content, in the Western analytic tradition, the only form which is suitable to bear truth seems to be the indicative form;

'factorization' could always get us to something useful enough to be deemed true. Ancient philosophers weren't stupid. Still, if they taught in the Academy, they had to tart up their lectures with pseudo-metaphysical shite because, back then, it was Theologians who made the big bucks and got all the posh totty.  

thus the embedded content even of imperatives had to be construed in the qualificand-qualifier form, which is the Nyaya substitute for the Western subject-predicate form of "basic combination."

Any sort of imperative logic can be made equivalent to any other sort or given a mathematical description. So what? Either the thing is useful or only cretins study it in order to teach it to yet stupider credential craving hacks.  

Orders are not as such capable of being true or false, hence Dummett's suggestion that we modify their correctness condition as obedience conditions. So the troublesome bit, namely "a has to be f" or "make a become f," in our initial construal of the content of an imperative utterance is reparsed as a kind of predication, where the predicated property was not apprehended as already actually residing in the qualificand or subject, but as "intendedly residing" or "commandedly residing" therein.

Yes, yes. We get it. You can shit out stuff like this till the cows come home. But cows are useful. You aren't. Even the barren cow fertilizes the land. What does bullshit do?