The essay by Dr Mohan Kanda, Making Ethical Sense of Moral Values (THI, 8th May 2025), is interesting; however, it overlooks the fact that moral and ethical issues can differ significantly across cultures. This implies that ethical values cannot be considered uniform across all societies. The fundamental categories that define moral domains are specific to each culture, encompassing concepts such as “selfhood”, learning processes, and the experiences of “body”, “space”, and “time”, among others.
An “agent” in Western culture basically connotes an “inner core” in each person, separate and different from all the outer coverings. In Indian culture, an organism’s “actions” during evaluation by another entity serve as its “agent” and nothing more. Thus, one can be a good father and a good son but a bad husband at the same time. In Western culture, the peeling of the outer layers reveals the “true” agent standing independent, which needs to be “discovered”; in Indian culture, such peeling reaches an emptiness. This has extremely profound consequences in morality in Western and Indian cultures, says philosopher SN Balagangadhara (Cultures Differ Differently).
Any domain of knowledge, including morality, never has a terminus because the universe is complex. Western culture, obsessed with moral discussions, feels that morality can have a terminus and there can be some fundamental moral rules that are universalisable too. As Balagangadhara states, contemporary ethical discussions, which consist of rules that require a foundation, are secularised interpretations of theological beliefs. Christianity admits only one Sovereign, and His Will is the Law of the universe. “Being moral” means obeying this law, as there are no other moral laws or sovereigns. The way Christian theology framed the question has resulted in secular concepts that are considered “definitionally true”, “intuitively obvious”, and universal to all cultures.
Indian culture references numerous “sovereigns” when discussing morality. The most fundamental moral judgement category in Indian traditions is appropriateness. Actions lack meaning outside of their contextual interpretations, and moral actions gain their “appropriateness” within specific contexts. As articulated by various Indian traditions, the highest form of appropriate action is one performed without any desire, without pursuing a particular goal, and without attaching intentionality to human actions. This represents an attitude that transcends both good and evil.
Western culture, obsessed with morality and pinning ethical behaviour to some golden universal rules, has indulged in many “chilling” deeds: crusades, jihad, inquisitions, witch hunts, colonisation, the genocide of American Indians, Nazism, world wars, and transforming continents and cultures into slaves. It takes an enormous amount of goodwill to entertain the possibility that these cultures are not intrinsically “evil”, says Balagangadhara. Indian culture does know of tortures, wars, or cruelties, but they are insignificant in comparison. Thus, the knife cuts both ways: against the backdrop of the Western conception of ethics, Indian traditions “chill the blood”, as the colonials felt and our academia perpetuated it after independence. Against the background of Indian traditions, the West appears equally chilling.
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