"This philosophical study offers a representation of the logical structure of classical Hindu ethics and argues for the availability of at least the core of this ethical system to Westerners."--Page [4] Cover.

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 40-59, March 2022.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Book Information Hindu Ethics. By Roy Perrett. University of Hawaii Press. Honolulu. 1998. Pp. xi + 105. Paperback, US$28.00.

Hindu ethical studies, as a discipline distinct from religious and philosophical studies and as a field of descriptive ethics within comparative ethical studies, is a relatively recent venture. Scholars have focused upon classical Sanskritic texts for the basis of their studies, ignoring, for the most part, the rich source of commentaries on Hindu scriptures that form what Smith has called "the cumulative tradition." Furthermore, the most urgent need in the field of Hindu ethical studies is to (...) establish definitional and methodological clarity. Putting aside problems of method for later consideration, this paper explores the richness and variety of sources for the study of Hindu ethics and emphasizes the importance of integrating the study of theoretical ethics with the "lived" moralities that continue to dominate Indian society. (shrink)

This is a breakthrough work expanding the debate of the dilemmas of life and death in contemporary American society by carrying it beyond the insights of Western religious and philosophic thought to include ethical perspectives of the Hindu tradition. The topics covered are the timely ethical issues that concern both Americans and all people of the world — abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and the environment. A lively East-West dialogue probes the roots of each issue in its native setting, and the (...) fruit of this historical approach is a clear-cut analysis of up-to-date cases, giving their current status in terms of ethics, religion, philosophy, medicine, and law. Unlike traditional textbooks that concentrate on a theoretical analysis to the exclusion of practical issues, this book does justice to both theoretical and practical ethics. (shrink)

This descriptive exposition of Hindu ethics in the "Rāmāyaṇa", India's most celebrated people's classic, analyzes the Vālmīki version in terms of four ethical questions about mores, ethos, societal structures, and forms of ethical validation. The epic's life-affirming ethos, together with its moral education and esthetical persuasion through model characters, is viewed as a pluralistic alternative to forms of Hindu ethics more known in the West. The latter are those implied in Hindu non-dualistic philosophies, mysticism, and (...) an ascetical ethos of world-denial. Two appendices are provided: one on the classic's historical impact and related textual matters; another on the role of women in Indian society. (shrink)

Is it accurate to speak of ‘Hindu virtue ethics’? Or would that amount to forcing the tradition into a conceptual framework it does not fit? The answers to these questions will depend upon (1) what one means by “virtue ethics”, (2) how one restricts the scope of the term “Hindu ethics”, and (3) whether one is construing the question as about the “external” or “internal” history of Hindu ethics. We consider three accounts of (...) what it means to be “an ethics of virtue” and use them to identify senses in which it is reasonable to speak of Hindu virtue ethics and senses in which it is not. We close with a look at one Indian philosophical school whose ethical commitments appear to fit within a virtue ethical frame, namely, the Yoga school. We argue that Yoga ethics offers the resources for developing a Hindu example of agent-based virtue ethics. The paper will be of value both to those with an interest in Hindu ethics as well as to those from other traditions who wish to understand the underlying structure of virtue ethical theories, in general, or of agent-based forms of virtue ethics, in particular. (shrink)

In the 13th and 14th centuries CE the Śrīvaiṣṇava Hindu community of south India struggled to integrate the traditional values of the older brahmanical hierarchical system with the devotional egalitarianism that had come to the fore with fresh force in the Tamil vernacular tradition in the 7th and 8th centuries and thereafter. One of the most vexed aspects of this integration pertained to caste, and whether devotionalism foreclosed a continuation of traditional caste distinctions: do divine love and grace mandate (...) radical egalitarianism? Śrīvaiṣṇava theologians were divided on the issue, some more conservative, some more radical in their rhetoric about continuity and change. Yet, as this essay argues, none were willing to go to the extremes either of dismissing caste structures entirely or of entirely subordinating devotion to caste. New values were to take primary place, while old norms were to be reinterpreted and given new meanings. Analyzing well-known examples from the tradition they argued instead a balance between norms and exceptions, treating violations of caste as occasions to glorify the power of devotion but without predicting the end of caste altogether. Attention to this case sheds light on caste and devotion in the Hindu context, the nature of ethical debate in India, and consequently too ways in which rhetoric functions more widely in ethical analysis. (shrink)

Advancement in science may represent a headway in procreation, but ethicists and theologians have anxieties about the future uses of such procreative technologies. The procreative advancement often involves the use of a human embryo. There is widespread moral and theological disarray concerning the use of embryos. The Hindu ethics presented in this chapter presumes the sanctity of human life of all sentient beings. The Hindu belief does not recognize that a human embryonic formation is an inconsequential and (...) hence discardable tissue, nor is it a developed adult being. Destroying an embryo is said to incur karmic consequences in Hindu thought. This being so, Hindu ethics would object to the creation of embryos and foetuses for the sole purpose of experimentation. The chapter focuses on the ramifications of Hindu ethics with respect to its application to interventionist or intrusive embryonic research and of debates thereto. (shrink)

The book contains elaborate notes, two appendices, critical textual matter, a diagram of topical parallels, a bibliography, and an index.

This paper argues that Weber ought to be read as a comparative ethicist who brings his German intellectual inheritance, especially Schopenauer and Nietzsche, to a dialogue with ethical traditions in India and China. It shows that Weber not only had a supple understanding of the tensions within Hindu ethics, his own account of value often closely corresponds to Hindu axiology and was enriched by an encounter with it.

As we develop a global ethic in the context of diseases, we need to reconsider the wisdom of the religious traditions, for there is more to ailments than their material causes. In the Hindu framework, aside from the Ayurvedic system, which is based on herbal medicines and a philosophical framework, there is the insight that much of what we experience is a direct consequence of our karma (consequential actions). Therefore, here one emphasizes self–restraint and self–discipline in contexts that are (...) conducive to self–hurting behavior. (shrink)

This Open Access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, (...) yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu--particularly Vaishnava Hindu--animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti--the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja--can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities. (shrink)

The book is a philosophical treatise on the Hindu, Bauddha and Jaina morals meant for the University students of Indian Ethics as well as for the general readers interested in the subject.

Many environmental ethicists believe that any adequate environmental ethic should attribute ‘direct moral standing’ to plants, animals, and the rest of nature. But certain interpretations of Hindu environmental ethics apparently attribute only instrumental value to nature. This places them in direct conflict with the purported adequacy condition on an environmental ethic. So, is such a Hindu ethical view really inadequate? In his recent book Hinduism and Environmental Ethics, Christopher Framarin claims that it is because Hindu (...) instrumentalism about nature is either viciously circular or unacceptably arbitrary. I argue, however, that Framarin’s claim founders in virtue of his misconstruing the logical structure of instrumental value. (shrink)

Extant scholarship on Hindu war ethics uses the term dharma yuddha as a synonym of the term, just war, as conceptualized within Christian theo-ethical frameworks developed primarily in the Western academy. Dharma in the term dharma yuddha is presented as equivalent to the term just in just war, and an antonym of adharma or kuta, i.e., unjust. I track the documentary origins of the term dharma yuddha by surveying the usage of this and similar terms in ancient (...) class='Hi'>Hindu sources, including the Mahabharata, the Arthashastra, and selected Dharmasastras. I find that the usage of the term dharma yuddha in primary Hindu sources is markedly different from how it is used in contemporary scholarship: the texts mention a range of types of war that are closely related to, but not the same as, the concept of dharma yuddha; this taxonomical richness and complexity is not captured by a binary analytical framework of just versus unjust. In addition, the relationship between dharma and war remains under-explored and merits a more nuanced study than a one-to-one comparison with Christian just war ethics. I, hence, offer a taxonomical model for dharma yuddha, which places it as part of the yuddha family; the model presents attributes of dharma yuddha that are necessary and/or sufficient and which bear conceptual similarities with attributes of other members in the yuddha family. The model presents these attributes in a hierarchical fashion as is reflected in the texts surveyed. The paper makes two types of contributions: firstly, theoretically, it fills a lacuna in the scholarship on Hindu war ethics by presenting a taxonomical and constructive framework to study war that draws from a systematic survey of wars as presented in the Hindu canon; secondly, methodologically, it seeks to decolonize studies on Hindu ethics by studying the texts on their own terms, as opposed to seeing them through the eyes of Christian and, primarily, Western, analytical categories of war. (shrink)

The notion of the “manly Englishman” and the “effeminate Bengali” was a recurring theme in nineteenth-century colonial discourse, and has now become the subject of extensive scholarly discussion in various academic disciplines. Both the colonizer and the colonized produced varied, com plex and ambivalent images of each other and their religious traditions. This paper looks at how the colonized reacted to the colonizers’ versions of Hinduism, focusing particularly on how Swami Vivekananda, a nineteenth century Bengali Hindu saṃnyāsi, responded to (...) colonial and missionary representations of Hinduism as an effeminate religion. In doing so, the paper draws attention to how Vivekananda drew on resources from within and outside the tradition, in order to forge a distinctive style of Hinduism— “a man-making religion”—a robust kind of Vedantic spirituality that combined both physical and spiritual manliness. (shrink)