CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ETHICS
Ethics
has always been man's great passion. It studies the nature of vice and virtue.
To an ethical philosopher, "the good" or "the bad" means
what is intrinsically good or bad and not good or bad as a medium to accomplish
or avoid something.
Is there anything which is really
good or bad in itself? Fire is good in winter to warm the sitting room but it
turns bad in the same lounge during summer; the same thing can be the source of
opposite effects: electricity both burns and chills. Of course, hot and cold are
two realities but neither is intrinsically good or bad; it all depends upon
their usage, the particular situation, the purpose and the belief of the user.
Unless a balance is struck between
vice and virtue - harmony, the chief guide to eternity cannot come into being.
Though ethical values such as justice, velour, happiness etc. cannot be defined,
still we believe in their existence without knowing what they really are. For
example, a sadist is happy to watch blood gush out of his victim's jugular vein
and a bank robber feels delighted with his haul. But these acts are grievous to
the sufferers of violence and theft. Thus one man's happiness becomes another
man's grief. Am I being narrow minded in describing these ethical concepts? This
is not the case. All conquerors who headed large groups of populations, and were
thus morally and lawfully considered respectable and divine, indulged in murder,
theft and depriving the vanquished of their liberties. This was the main purpose
of their conquests. Islam openly legitimised pillage and murder of the infidels
and called such wars (Jehad) holy and righteous. Christians who waged wars
against the moslems for centuries as crusaders, were no less rapacious and
murderous than their adversaries, yet their atrocities ranked as acts of piety!
Is it possible to strike a balance
between vice and virtue?
Dualism
If we look at the history of human
thought, we realise that the concept of vice and virtue has become a basic
doctrine known as "dualism" which holds that the reality or world
consists of two principles or substances such as good and evil or mind and
matter; they are irreducible and nothing can exist without them.
Iranians believed in the eternity
of the good (Ahuramazda) and evil (Ahriman) principles, which are equal and
opposite. They always have been at war, and they always will. Plato speaks of
two souls of the world, one causes good and the other evil. Thus the cosmos
faces an eternal recurrence of two alternating cycles, each being guided either
by gods or men. His theory of soul and body is an extension of his dualistic
views. Gnosticism also firmly opposed body and preached the divinity of soul.
The Indian dualism involves the opposition of the one and the many i.e. a
struggle between reality and appearances. Thus rebirth of a soul is considered a
punishment and its return to Brahman (God) is thought of as salvation because it
ends the duality. Chinese also believe in the dualistic principle known as the
Yin and the Yang. However, this duality is similar to as it exists between male
and female, active and passive, solar and lunar, earthly and celestial sweet and
bitter, light and dark, and so on. The Chinese idea of duality is rational for
being complementary. The opposite principles, in this case, are protagonistic
and not antagonistic. The Chinese principle is eternal and indivisible; it is
singular in nature and both Yin and Yang are its double manifestations.
Christian and Islamic faiths also
advocate the duality of good and evil. In this case, God is good, and Lucifer or
Satan is evil but he is not eternal because he is a creation of God. On the Day
of Judgement, he will be cast into hell and his existence will come to an end.
Yet they hold that God is not responsible for the vice that pervades mankind but
stress it arises from the improper use of freedom by man himself.
Polarity
Polarity is the operational law of
nature but the tension between the opposite poles is complementary as assumed by
the Chinese philosophers. Without a complementary polarity man will lose his
excellence as the highest specimen of nature. It is because his nature is based
on the working of the opposite attributes. In fact, instead of calling man a
molecular assemblage, one ought to name him as an aggregate of the opposites
such as intelligence and ignorance: courage and cowardice, magnanimity and
meanness, kindness and cruelty, magnificence and malevolence, loving and
loathing, remission and retribution, fairness and foulness, trust and treachery,
fidelity and fickleness, affection and animosity, concealment and candour,
honour and humbuggery, suzerainty and slavery, fact and fantasy, tolerance and
tyranny, delight and disgust, and so on. These are the characteristics that
constitute human nature. They are exactly equal and opposite: love has no
meaning without hatred, justice cannot be imagined without unfairness, and
freedom does not make sense without the idea of restriction. The fact that
different people may view the same thing differently and come to different
conclusions shows that the power of perception ascribed to sensory organs is
directed by the quality of the opposite attributes. Though they are endowed with
equal intensity, the operation of their contrariness is peculiar to each
individual: in some people it is intelligence and not ignorance that is
activated more readily; in some, loving has the tendency to operate more freely
than loathing and in others it is cruelty instead of kindness. It is like two
millionaires having equal amounts of money but one being mean and the other
munificent. This is what colours depth and attitude of the sensory organs
leading to different judgements and deeds. It is the operational preponderance
of the one opposite over the other that makes a person intelligent or ignorant
and kind or cruel. Though these opposites are determined, their determination is
not absolute; it carries an amount of suppleness which enables people to modify
and adjust. Again, this suppleness though limited, is like a seed which may
multiply itself a hundred-fold or more, according to the limate.
From this discussion, it is quite
obvious that poles of vice and virtue are real at least operationally and,
therefore, neither can be eliminated.
If it were possible, the removal of
one pole would lead to the extinction of the other, and eventually chaos would
result. But we are talking of harmony. The only way to achieve this goal is by
making one pole operationally ascendant over he other. Take electricity, for
instance, it is the ascendance i.e. excess of positive and negative charges
which create electric current; one pole pulls and the other pushes. Thus despite
being opposite they attain uniformity of action, that is, they both act in the
same direction, and an electric circuit is built up. This is an example of
harmony; it shows how the opposites are capable of moving in the same direction
to work together.
Such harmony is feasible amongst
people of varying or even conflicting interests provided members of the society
have developed a live ethical sense of vice and virtue. It happens when they not
only appreciate the difference between right and wrong but also practice it. At
this stage, one can say that the concept of ethical values ranks as morality,
which is the conduct based on the distinction between good and bad. The concept
of morality is initially a private affair because it concerns not only the
activities but also the intentions of an individual. Once this individual
attitude and practice receives approval of the majority and becomes the symbol
of a good social custom, the society is likely to march together harmoniously.
Moral strength is the pillar of
harmony. Moral discipline must come from within. It is entirely different from
the military discipline which is imposed from without because morality is
morality only when it is self-propelled; forced conduct, no matter how nice, is
not morality. Of course, moral sense is innate but the practice of morality is
not. The difference between the two is the same as between knowing and doing;
and we all understand that an ounce of practice is better than a ton of theory.
Like a species, morality also requires a suitable environment to survive and
flourish. It is no good expecting of a hungry person not to steal a loaf of
bread, or telling virile men to practice celebacy. Man has all sorts of needs
and desires. Development of a healthy personality depends upon fulfilling these
desires and not on denying them. Were this not true, the search for satisfying
these needs and desires would not be a part of humanity. In fact, the way a need
or desire is fulfilled distinguishes vice from virtue. When a need is met in a
legitimate way, it is a virtue otherwise it is a vice. Sleeping with one's own
wife is a virtue but going to bed with someone else's consort is a vice.
Polarity between the opposite human
attributes is intense, and without considerable force, it is not possible to
make one's desirable attribute ascendant over its opposite. One cannot be kind
without suppressing one's leaning towards cruelty nor is it possible to be brave
without overcoming the fear associated with cowardice.
It is this power of self-regulation
that exalts man over the rest of beings which are driven by the compulsive
desires but he has the ability to challenge them and steer his own destiny. He
does so through a process of self-improvement which is his nature like that of
the cosmos itself. If he succeeds, the ultimate reward is stupendous i.e.
eternity but if he fails, punishment for the fiasco is extinction which is
equally enormous. The key to failure or success is the ethical recognition
between vice and virtue, and this recognition has got to be practical, that is,
pursuit of purity in preference to pollution. This practice is known as morality
which is another description of harmonious adjustment with one's social
environment. However, harmony does not mean keeping up both with the hare and
the hound but standing up for one's own legitimate rights as well as of one's
fellow-beings, and an active participation in the removal of all those factors
such as poverty, disease, ignorance, hatred, bigotry, etc., which lead to
disharmony. The palace of harmony is best founded on a healthy individuality.
What is individuality?
This is the kernel of psychology.
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