Mahatma Gandhis Ethics - Research Paper Example

? Mahatma Gandhi’s ethics Number Mahatma Gandhi’s ethics Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in the western region of British-controlled India. A fearful teenager, Gandhi was married to his age-mate, Kasturbai in 1882. After his father’s demise, Gandhi's kin sent him to Britain to pursue legal studies in 1888. There, he developed interest in the idea of peacefulness, as enshrined in the Hindu sacred writings, and in Christian teachings in the Bible (Sudhir, 2012). Gandhi returned to his home country three years later, having received his certification in the discipline, but was not successful in his attempts to establish a career in law in India. He then went to South Africa to help with a court case. In South Africa, Gandhi became part of campaigns to end injustices against his countrymen and women in the region, who were discriminated against both by the colonial masters and by the Boers, the first Dutch inhabitants of the southern African region. Although his stay in South Africa was expected to last for a year, he eventually remained in the country until 1914 with his family. Gandhi is credited with the founding of the Natal Indian Congress, an organization which laboured to improve the welfare of Indians. He led an Indian medical force that fought alongside the British troops in the Boer War (1899-1901), which resulted in the British control over the remaining autonomous Boer regions (Dutta, 2010). After the conflict, his image as a trusted leader grew. Gandhi became insistent on his individual values and ethics, observing sexual abstinence, rejecting modern equipment, and expanding a "soul- force” or Satyagraha (Sudhir, 2012). The main idea was peaceful resistance, usually referred to as “civil-disobedience” that he led his followers to embark on to the force the white minority rule in South Africa into submission. The group’s readiness to withstand punishment and incarceration earned him great admiration from oppressed groups in South Africa and in his native country India. His efforts eventually earned his people freedom from the rulers. By the time Gandhi departed from South Africa in 1914 for India, he had cut a niche for himself as a “saint”: people referred to him as a "Mahatma" meaning "great soul" (Dutta, 2010). Dutta (2010) has noted that at this juncture, Gandhi’s support for the British Empire was still intact, but when the white regime trampled on Indian civil freedoms in the aftermath of World War I, Gandhi embarked on nonviolent protests to reclaim it. The Amritsar Massacre, in which colonial forces killed peaceful Indian masses protesting against unfair rule, sent a chilling message to Gandhi and his native Indians on the urgency to pursue independence, and in the beginning of 1920s he organized extensive crusades of civil disobedience that brought government business in the expansive Indian region to a stand-still. The administration responded by jailing him for two years until 1924 (Dutta, 2010; Sudhir, 2012). After his freedom, Gandhi abandoned political struggle for some time and instead preferred to visit different parts of the country, interacting with peasants. Six years later, Gandhi voiced the strongest quest yet, for the country’s independence through his “Declaration of Independence of India.” He then followed it with the Salt March in mass protests against the Empire’s control of salt. The Gandhi’s move sparked-off cases of civil insubordination across India, prompting the colonial masters to convene a Round-Table meeting with Gandhi in London to discuss the issues. Although Gandhi was treated to a warm reception in London, the main agenda of the Conference was unfavourable to him; discussions about how India would handle its Muslim minority groups made Gandhi to adopt a low-profile on public policy debates for the second time (Dutta, 2010). Sudhir (2012) has noted that Gandhi’s efforts were attributed to the subsequent major step toward India’s independence through the enactment of the Government of India Act (1935), which transferred vital powers to the locals. When World War II erupted, India was engulfed in conflict, and many leaders with national appeal, including Gandhi, were sent to jail (Sudhir, 2012). After the conflict, the British authorities wanted to transfer the leadership of the region to local leaders soonest. But the Muslim League, through their leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah, demanded for the creation a different Muslim state for the followers and to Gandhi's chagrin, the Congress and the British rulers gave in to the move. In August of 1947, India attained its independence and was partitioned into two countries, with Pakistan been hived-off from the former expansive region India to create a home to the Muslims (Dutta, 2010). Nonetheless, neither measure helped to provide solutions to India’s challenges. And true to Gandhi’s fears the new state immediately degenerated into chaos: Hindus and Muslims turned on each other eliminating massive numbers of each population, resulting in heavy displacements towards the borders of the new states. The distressed Gandhi attempted to advocate for peace in the country, in vain; and instead the campaigns resulted in his assassination by a Hindu operative in Delhi in late January of 1948 (Sudhir, 2012). India was taken aback by the loss and grieved the hero. Gandhian ethics Ethics refers to the awareness of the importance of justifying an individual’s life and a moral choice involves the act of arriving at a decision based on a certain value (Sudhir, 2012). The feeling of content derived from an understanding that an individual may review his or her own individual life as they would decide another person’s fate and still find it attractive is what constitutes ethics. Ethical decisions require some serious self-evaluation and for Mohandas Gandhi, the clamour for truth was premised upon individual reality. When Gandhi suggested that that a person’s most important responsibility in life is to ensure the protection of the interests of mankind, he emphasized that ethics would fail if a leader failed to understand and honour the self. Dutta (2010) has indicated that true morality or life premised upon ethical rules, for Gandhi, does not entail conformity, rather it involves identifying the right path and following it without any fear. Gandhi pointed out the need and appropriateness to engage in what is right and positive in a voluntary way (Dutta, 2010). The true testimony of human's dignity relates to the fact that, instead of being compelled by external forces, an individual should stand strong and engage in activities that are deemed as appropriate. Gandhi expressed shock at how this ethical concept of "true morality”, supporting the achievement of a win-win situation in conflict resolutions could not be practised in the society without first seeking the blessings of religion (Sudhir, 2012). Gandhi determined that in order to withstand the challenges in its implementation such as perceptions of partiality, "true morality" based on religion ought to be a permanent creed rather than a temporary rule of expedience (Dutta, 2010). The philosopher encompassed the non-orthodox religious groups in his take on ethics by elaborating that in reality this meant that ethical considerations should be construed as part of religious teachings. The greatest form of ethical consideration in Gandhi's moral ideological bank is the implementation of altruism. Altruism, according to Sudhir (2012), is practicing self-sacrifice for the common good of the society. The outcomes of altruist practices are external in the sense that they assist in the mediocre resolution of disputes, but even unrelated to these initiatives, there are individual rewards. From the standpoint of existentialist philosophy, Dutta (2010) argues that selfless efforts that may lead to self-destruction may yield dramatic outcomes of self-affirmation within the larger societal setting. Gandhi was steadfastly convinced that suffering in the pursuit of proper governance was less demoralising than perpetrating them; that disparagement in the hands of an oppressive regime was fine when a case of injustice evoked the social anger and served as the rallying call to rise up to halt further injustice. In the Gandhi’s evaluation of whether altruist behaviours stems from being considerate to the plight of others by embracing sympathy and compassion or whether it takes place out of individual expediency is arguably inconsequential (Sudhir, 2012). He argued that sympathy and empathy are values whose origin is self-interest. In light of this, the capacity to practice them demonstrates that an individual is close to establishing and standing for the Truth, since Truth can only be felt by individuals who are close to it (Dutta, 2010). Moreover, although, the benefits of such campaigns may not be predicable for people who pursue the specified practices, Gandhi was insistent that one should not act in good faith to earn applause, but engage in appropriate causes because it his or her responsibility for the length of their lifespan. For Gandhi, avoiding the path to evil was never a justification for one’s achievement, rather working towards righteousness and actively engaging in practices that avoided evil was the better option (Dutta, 2010). Although, the self-sacrifices that Gandhi made for the overall good of the nation may be construed to mean utilitarianism, Gandhi’s concerns for minority groups in South Africa, India and Britain cannot be sidestepped. He emphasized on the importance of minority groups as too massive to be discounted in favour of the blanket interests of the majority in society. In light of this, Gandhi’s philosophy deviates from the utilitarian rule of endeavouring to build on the wellbeing of the majority (Dutta, 2010). Gandhi argued that Truth does not exist in the majority side; therefore, his “Ahimsa” values demonstrate his mild reservations to the utilitarian ideology. Gandhi’s ethics propelled him to struggle for the best interests of all and perish in the process of achieving the ideal or the ultimate prize. This implies that the utmost prize of all inexorably encompasses the meeting of the interests of the highest number of diverse populations. As O'Connor (1997) has suggested, this concept, to some extent, takes him closer to utilitarians. Gandhi’s ethics invokes the activities surrounding the World War I to discount the world’s abandonment of morality. Moral and utilitarian values came to a conflict during the World War, in which case every participant in the military campaign justified their own utilitarian moves (Dutta, 2010). Failure to be cognizant of utilitarian philosophies, according to Gandhi, led to a misconception that fighting for the general good of individual countries and attempting to promote the interests of the allied forces justified the contravention of moral rules (Dutta, 2010). The war also heralded the perception that other morals, even those that remained secret such as deontological ones justified the carnage. According to O'Connor (1997), in situations marred with conflict, it may not be easy to recall forsaking potential contentment by the dynamic avoidance of evil on the opponent’s side. A party in a war cannot therefore act in the best interests of itself and the other party due to profound partisanship that cloud such moves. The issue concerning why an individual ought to base his actions on morality has dominated the history of moral thought processes since time immemorial, but people fail to summon the noble cause in demanding situations (Dutta, 2010). A Gandhian response to the confusion; that happiness, spirituality and riches can be traced to an individual’s faithfulness to the self, a lack of bad faith or abuse of others, and ensuring that one bases his decisions on unadulterated thought, possibly does not resolve the puzzle, nonetheless. Kantian ethics Emmanuel Kant’s philosophy of turning reason into practical moves with the aim of achieving a clearer understanding of the disposition of human freedom is evident in Gandhi’s ideals of self-sacrifice for the good of the society (Kendall, 2013). Like Kant, Gandhi believed in the immortality of thoughts and soul of an individual who has lost his or her life in the pursuit of Truth. True to Kantian philosophy, Gandhi’s ethical concepts represent the conventional formulation of deontology. For Gandhi any right action in the society should be based on the adherence to a justified moral principle (Dutta, 2010). Gandhi’s pro-civil rights campaigns against discrimination for all communities were based on the duty to uphold goodwill without necessarily standing to gain something in return. According to Kendall (2013), Gandhi followed the Kantian philosophies of "Good Will" in his practice of good without necessarily expecting individual benefits in return. He embraced the good will based on moral principles in his attempt to bring about unity of the Indians and honour for all in the society. Like the Kantian philosophy so indicates, the idea of “responsibility” was evident in Gandhi’s entire life and campaigns against social stratification and discrimination. O'Connor (1997) notes that throughout his campaigns, Gandhi’s steered clear of self-interest, such as expression of empathy and sympathy to victims of discrimination, arguing that these practices are merely symbolic of one’s understanding of and closeness to Truth, but they do not constitute True per se. Like the Kantian ethical concepts renouncing the argument that moral actions as ‘spontaneous', Gandhi’s nonviolence campaigns against bad governance were not spontaneous; for instance, after his release from prison in 1924, he took 6 years off from active political campaigns to plan for a new cause of action that he believed would deliver lasting solutions to the masses. Apart from Kantian ethical theories based of practicing Truth, O'Connor (1997) has pointed out that Mill’s ethical philosophy advances utilitarianism. Mill’s primary objective was to justify the need for the abstract, common good of the people and pursuing moves to this end. This rule indicates that the appropriateness of actions should be measured in relation to their impact on promoting the common comfort and happiness of human beings. Like Mill on the repercussions of actions and not on the Kantian advocated rights and ethical considerations, Gandhi viewed his personal sacrifice as the key to greater freedom of the general community. Conclusion Gandhi’s life, actions and experiences are one in way or another based on ethics. He advocated for utilitarianism in India’s independence from British authorities because he felt that the colonial masters were discriminating against the overall population. His nonviolence campaigns against minority discrimination in South Africa and in India underscore his disdain for utilitarianism in some cases that warranted calls to establish justice for all. It is notable that Gandhi’s quest for minority rights was derived from the Kantian philosophy of pursuing Truth as a duty, rather than a process aimed at gaining benefits in return. Either way, Gandhi’s ethical philosophies earned him profound admiration within communities which he sought to elevate their socioeconomic and political statuses and the world in general. References Dutta, A.M. (2010). Mahatma Gandhi on Ethics. New York: Concept Publishing Company. Kendall, M.K. (2013). Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanist Ethics. Journal of Modern Literature, 36(3), 100-119. O'Connor, M. (1997). John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism and the social ethics of sustainable development. European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 4(3), 478. Sudhir, K. (2012). Mahatma Gandhi on Religion and Polity. International Journal of Educational Research & Technology, 3(2), 146-149. Read More