Introduction
The book titled IDENTITY AND THE MORAL LIFE by Mrinal Miri is a collection of essays written over a span of thirty years on various topics like morality, modernity, individual and group identity, rationality, the place of violence in politics, etc., I have gone through some of the essays dealing with morality and summarized as follows:
In the Essay Titled "Means-end distinction, Rationality, and moral life" is an exploration of the Gandhian idea that within the life of morality there cannot be a moral distinction between the means and the end for which it is a means. The author finds a surprising similarity between Gandhi's thought and Aristotle's moral philosophy— between satyagraha and prognosis.
Miri began with a discussion of the particular concept of rationality according to which the rationality of an action or rather, rationality in piratical (as opposed to theoretical) matters is a question of calculated matching of means of pre-conceived ends. This account of rationality might do as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is unable to account for the possible rationality of many actions, which are not, in any obvious way, directed towards any ends. The difficulty of this account of rationality is perhaps best stated by saying that it does not even consider the possibility of the rationality of ends as such; whereas much of traditional moral philosophy is concerned precisely with the question of the rationality of ends in themselves. The modern turn in the debate in moral philosophy is, however, quite consistent with this account of rationality; for the central point here is that ends—so far as they are the results of the exercise of our free choice— are, as it were, outside the web of rationality. But this need not perhaps make them irrational.
Mir then considered elements in an alternative vision of the moral life, where the rationality of the moral end is guaranteed, first, by the fact that it is a matter of knowledge and not of free choice, and secondly, by the closely related fact that the moral endeavour is also an epistemic endeavour; it is in its essence a continuous pursuit of the truth. In the context of the moral life, the means and its end must form a continuum such that, in one way of putting it, the means, as it were, lives in the end and the end, likewise, lives in the means. The means-ends distinction here, if there is one at all, is quite radically different from the means-ends distinction that the instrumentalist account of rationality requires, if I might be allowed to call it that. In moral matters, the process and the product are not distinguishable in the way in which, on the instrumentalist account, they must be distinguishable. The product, insofar as ii is a matter of moral concern, has its being in the process; or, which is the same thing, the process must inform the product in its entirety. Rationality here cannot be a matter of calculated matching of means to end, for here there is no room for calculation, in the sense that the means, if that is the proper word, is not dispensable or replaceable.
What about freedom in this vision of the moral life? It is quite clear that freedom here cannot mean the freedom which creates, ex nihilo, moral values, because moral values are not created at all. Nor can freedom be a matter of completely ungrounded decision. Decision to act in one way rather than another may indeed be ungrounded, but this has nothing to do with morality free action, when it is also moral action, must, on the other hand, spring from knowledge. When I have oneself-deceivingly known the other in love and ahimsa, my action towards him flows from this knowledge, and freedom consists precisely in this spontaneous flow of action from knowledge.
The essay titled "Morality and Moral Education" is a two part essay in which the author talks about two kinds of moral education. The first one can be called Aristotelian. It is interesting to note that Aristotle wrote his book on ethics called Nicomachean Ethics for the moral education of his seventeen-year-old son, Nicomachus. The second part deals with the Gandhian way.
In the paper 'Politicians and the Instrumentality of Violence', the move to the sphere of politics and the place of morality in it. For Aristotle as well as for Gandhi, politics is the proper arena of moral practice. But modern liberal, democratic, individualist, secular politics is an area of human practice where morality has an extremely unstable place. It is this instability that the author explore in this paper and try to show how even violence of a radical kind can become a 'legitimate' weapon in the contemporary politician's armory of instruments of governance and statecraft.
The essay title "Gandhi on the Moral Life and Plurality of Religions" can be summed up as follows: It is a surprising but understandable fact that today's world is deeply divided along religious lines. There is, of course, a complex web of motivations behind these divisions, motivations which have little to do with religion itself. In the paper, 'Gandhi on the Moral Life and Plurality of Religions', the author asks the question, 'What ought to be my attitude to another's religion?' as a question firmly within the sphere of morality; and argue that the Gandhian answer to this question, as a serious moral question, is perhaps the most plausible among available answers, which can be seen as follows:
(i) The Author tried to show that modern epistemology is unable to provide a basis for a belief in the reality of values; that attempts at finding such a basis within the framework of modern epistemology do not succeed.
(ii) Indicate that in Gandhi we have an alternative epistemology—an epistemology which can be termed the epistemology of ahimsa or love—one that accounts for the possibility of self-knowledge which is also, at the same time, knowledge of moral truths.
(iii) Show that, given the Gandhian epistemic scheme, the ideal relationship between different religions of the world is one of international fellowship.
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