On Saturday 14 August 2010 07:26 PM, . wrote: > Consider the newspaper or TV as a landscape and ask where ethics come > from and where are the ethical figures? It is definitely not in > religion. Our gurus and acharyas preach well being, they might be > ascetics and renouncers but they offer a religion separate from > ethics. Take our corporate dons. Even the best, from Ratan Tata to > Narayan Murthy, remain blasé about the violence of Gujarat riots, > almost suggesting that investment is a substitute for ethics. > Corporate life has a discipline which often simulates ethics. Sadly, > our social movements have lost the edge that JP, Baba Amte, the early > Medha Patakar provided them with. One can hardly think of ethicists in > academic life.
He has got to be kidding me! Regardless of what one thinks of their views, there are a great many academics (Nandini Sundar of DSE, for instance) who engage at the grassroot and infuse their activism with a theory of ethics. > Earlier nationalism provided a framework of values through people like > Gandhi, Gaffar Khan and Kumarappa. They walked their talk. But as > nationalism yielded to the nation state, value frames got dessicated > into policy frames. Gradually, politics became managerial. I feel this is pretty incisive analysis. > Thirdly, there is something about democracy that banalises ethics. > Ethics get managerialised, banalised or become a collection of > regulations. It becomes a rote procedure rather than a set of > individual initiatives. It is reduced to a set of do’s and don’ts and > as a result it lacks inventiveness. An ethical act, rather than being > the norm is seen as a signal for deviancy. Ethics becomes a singular > act of whistle blowing where the ethical act is seen as rare, even > eccentric and vulnerable. This isn't "about democracy", just practices of democracy that reduce it to majoritarianism decided via voting. > Fourthly, we are caught in a dualistic economy of thought which > separates the ethics of science from the ethics of religion, the > ethics of the formal and the informal, the domains of public and > private, the ethics for male and female. Oddly, where we need > specialised thinking as in the ethics of scale or the ethics of risk > technology, we assume stupidly that conventional science or economics > has the answer. We assume that ethics is a symptom that surfaces in > crises, disallowing a prosaic ethic of everydayness. I find no support whatsoever for this assertion. From what I understand, the "prosaic ethic[s] of everydayness" has been explored by Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and a gazillion other thinkers. > As a result, India as a civilisation, as a nation state, as a civil > society, as a community, has few answers about development, > displacement, diversity, alternatives, terror, poverty or torture. The > poverty of our ethics is more stunning than the poverty of our > society. Maybe the two are connected and we need to invent a different > ethics of technology, development, poverty and ecology, if India is to > remain a viable democracy. This to me seems like gibberish.
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