The Idea of Justice in Gandhian Philosophy

Abstract

The Gandhian meditation on the principles of justice was a unique ensemble of ethics and praxis, universality and locality, and methods and goals. He successfully avoided the western dichotomy of means and ends. For him, means and end are not separate to each other rather integrally connected. To achieve the peace by a violent means or to search out the truth through criticism defeats the end. He was a great learner as well as un-learner, who unlearnt a great deal after learning, and avoided successfully the awe-inspiring commodification, emanated from the western scientific and philosophical thoughts. Nevertheless, he remained a devoted moral scientist and an exemplary experimenter with truth. In the western philosophy, from Aristotle onwards, the theory of justice was conceived as ‘universalizable principles’ and every autochthonous practice of justice in tribal societies or the polymorphous cultures in the so-called third world countries did not get due respect in the thematic enunciation of justice. The province of positive law expounded in the influence of Roman law by the theorists, like Bentham, Austin, and Hart, proposed to conform the normative demand of formalized state-law and denied the living as well as social and moral characters of legal expressions, found in the ancient and medieval Europe, Asiatic and tribal cultures. In the discipline of Ethics, the Kantian deontological ethics, unlike the Gandhian deontology, was developed as the categorical imperatives, universalized a few moral principles in quest of the categorical-universal appeal. The ‘universalization of right’, a transcendental legal concept, changed the conception of justice, stripping from its moral and social contents. The western philosophical journey has hitherto remained within the confines of ‘master-slave’ morality, whereas nature has been conceived, in modern outlook, as slave as per the method of Hegelian dialectics, which is required to be mastered by the most rational beings of the planet Earth in order to fulfil unquenchable wants and desires! The ‘commodified natural sphere’ has completely changed the relationship between the human species and nature. Gandhi was well aware about the much hyphenated relationship between the colonization and modernization and their reified effects on the human’s moral and political life. He did not accept the ‘methodological individualism’, the utilitarian technology of power and knowledge. His ethical self was an ‘un-alienated subject’, a social being, who interacted with nature and society as an insider. For Gandhi, justice was not a categorical end or instrumentalist means; it was not situated or located in the dichotomy of fact and norm. Justice, for him, was the acceptance of totality, which is more than a ‘justificatory paradigm of legal reasoning’. Justice, in Gandhian thought, is found in duty or in action, and its access is not desired or aspired as if it is nothing more than a will-o’-the-wisp!.