THE BLOOMSBURY RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF: INDIAN ETHICS 9781472587770, 9781474295031, 9781472587756

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THE BLOOMSBURY RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF

INDIAN ETHICS

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BLOOMSBURY RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN ASIAN PHILOSOPHY Series Editors: Chakravarthi Ram-​Prasad, Lancaster University, UK. Sor-​hoon Tan, National University of Singapore.

Editorial Advisory Board: Roger Ames, University of Hawai’i; Doug Berger, Southern Illinois University; Carine Defoort, KU-Leuven; Owen Flanagan, Duke University; Jessica Frazier, University of Kent; Chenyang Li, Nanyang Technological University; Ronnie Littlejohn, Belmont University; Evan Thompson, University of British Columbia.

Series description: Bringing together established academics and rising stars, Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy survey philosophical topics across all the main schools of Asian thought. Each volume focuses on the history and development of a core subject in a single tradition, asking how the field has changed, highlighting current disputes, anticipating new directions of study, illustrating the Western philosophical significance of a subject, and demonstrating why a topic is important for understanding Asian thought. From knowledge, being, gender, and ethics, to methodology, language, and art, these research handbooks provide up-​to-​date and authoritative overviews of Asian philosophy in the twenty-​first century.

Other titles in the series: The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender, edited by Ann A. Pang-White The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies, edited by Sor-​hoon Tan The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti

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THE BLOOMSBURY RESEARCH HANDBOOK OF

INDIAN ETHIC S Edited by Shyam Ranganathan

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc



50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Shyam Ranganathan and Contributors, 2017 Shyam Ranganathan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editor. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​4725-​8777-​0 ePDF: 978-​1-​4725-​8775-​6 ePub: 978-​1-​4725-​8776-​3 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy Cover design: Clare Turner Cover image © Bridgeman Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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CONTENTS

Preface vii P art I:  W estern I mperialism , I ndology ,

and

E thics  

1 Moral Philosophy: THE RIGHT and THE GOOD  Shyam Ranganathan

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2 Philosophy, Religion, and Scholarship  Shyam Ranganathan

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3 The West, the Primacy of Linguistics, and Indology  Shyam Ranganathan

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4 Beyond Moral Twin Earth: Beyond Indology  Shyam Ranganathan

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5 Interpretation, Explication, and Secondary Sources  Shyam Ranganathan P art II: M oral T heory (M etaethics

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N ormative E thics ) 

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6 The Scope for Wisdom: Early Buddhism on Reasons and Persons  Jake H. Davis

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7 Jaina Virtue Ethics: Action and Nonaction  Jayandra Soni

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8 Patañjali’s Yoga: Universal Ethics as the Formal Cause of Autonomy  Shyam Ranganathan

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9 Nyāya Consequentialism  Kisor K. Chakrabarti

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10 Mindfulness and Moral Transformation: Awakening to Others in Śāntideva’s Ethics  William Edelglass

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11 Three Vedāntas: Three Accounts of Character, Freedom, and Responsibility  Shyam Ranganathan

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P art III: A pplied E thics  

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12 Medical Ethics in the Sanskrit Medical Tradition  Dagmar Wujastyk

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13 Toward a Complete and Integral Mīmāṃsā Ethics: Learning with Mādhava’s Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons  Francis X. Clooney, S. J.

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P art IV: E thics

P olitics  

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14 A Study in the Narrative Ethics of the Mahābhārata  Edeltraud Harzer

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15 Ethics of M. K. Gandhi: Nonviolence and Truth  A. Raghuramaraju

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16 The Ethics of Radical Equality: Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan’s Neo-​Hinduism as a Form of Spiritual Liberalism  Ashwani Peetush

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Glossary 

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Index 

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PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to bring together the best of contemporary research into Indian ethics—​“cutting edge” was how it was described to me. I hope it approximates this ideal. This topic was initially a curiosity for me—​one that had to do with philosophical interests in metaethics, the philosophy of thought and translation. My South Asian background made more sense to me in my moral philosophy classes as a North American, nineteen-​year-​old undergraduate (where we read Kant, Mill, and Aristotle) than in my philosophy of religion classes, where the topics of conversation (the problem of evil, divine foreknowledge, the compatibility of science and scripture) were far from what was familiar to me given my family’s background. My family God, Vishnu, was prone to giving moral philosophy lectures on battlefields and elsewhere and the topics of my moral philosophy classes (of practical rationality, the principles of choice, whether we should take consequences or rules seriously) were the very substance of what was our religion. And yet, I found it amazing that the common view among scholars is (and hopefully now merely was) that Indian philosophers were not interested in ethics, but were they ever religious! Over time my interest in Indian ethics evolved from mere metaethical concern to a substantive interest. Indian philosophy has some interesting contributions to make to moral philosophy, but we have to be open to philosophy in the Indian tradition to appreciate them. This book is the result of several scholars’ work. But as the editor, it was my task to see it to completion, and there are several sources of inspiration and guidance that I wish to acknowledge. My teachers in the study of Indian philosophy are overwhelmingly my philosophy professors, who, without exception, had no specialized knowledge of Indian philosophy and were by and large immersed in projects connected with Western figures. They were philosophers trained in the analytic or continental traditions. They taught me about Indian philosophy because they taught me about philosophy. When one gets over the fact that Indian philosophy is written in Indian languages like Sanskrit, it is just philosophy. If one does not understand what philosophy is, no amount of attention to the details of Sanskrit grammar, provenance of manuscripts, or anthropological insight will help the study of Indian thought. And if one does not know what philosophy is, one will confuse this with the study of Sanskrit, manuscripts, and Indian culture (as is often the case in Indology). I am hence quite grateful to their generosity in sharing their disciplinary knowledge of philosophy with me. I want to thank my colleagues at York’s Philosophy Department who have supported and encouraged my teaching and research interests—​ all of them.

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A special thanks is owed to Alice MacLachlan who encouraged me to include some Indian philosophy in my survey courses, such as Introduction to Philosophy, or Introduction to Ethics. Even in my third year Ethical Theory course, I now reserve the last week for Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra, after having reviewed the spread of issues from analytic moral theory starting with Moore and Ayer, through normative theory and some applied issues. Eric Scarffe, my research assistant, patiently read over drafts of my work and provided feedback, which was useful at a time when many of my arguments had not seen the light of day. To the hundreds of students that I have taught each year at York I am most grateful. In teaching them and responding to their questions and quizzical expressions, many of the issues that bear upon the study of Indian ethics have become clear to me. My students have shown me that philosophy is the most tolerant and inclusive of disciplines: when we focus on the argument and immerse ourselves in the task of explication, our own background stops being a barrier to understanding what was alien to us. I would like to thank the Philosophy Graduate Student Association at York for inviting me (at the last minute) to deliver a paper at their graduate conference in 2012. The occasion forced me to come up with a paper in a week, and the result was the kernel of my Planet Ethics thought experiment. I similarly owe Colleen Coalter, my editor at Bloomsbury, a debt of gratitude. Toward the very end, she asked me to rewrite my introduction into smaller parts. That forced me to be more explicit than I expected to be, and hence was born my analysis of explication, which features prominently in my introduction. I am especially grateful for the friendship, encouragement, guidance, or (virtual) support (via the Internet), of the following scholars whose contact and feedback helped me along my way with this project: Ajay Rao, Amod Lele, Ashwani Peetush, Brian Black, Brian Huss, Chad Meister, Chakravarthi Ram-​Prasad, Chandan Narayan, Claudine Verheggen, Clinton Debogorski, David Slakter, Dermot Killingley, Elisa Freschi, Evan Thompson, Gordon Davis, Ian Whicher, Ithamar Theodor, (the late) Joseph O’Connell, Joshua Moufawad-​Paul, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Karen Wendling, Kristen Andrews, Matthew Dasti, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Nathaniel Roberts, Nell S. Hawley, Purushottama Bilimoria, Richard Gombrich, Robert Myers, Tom Angier, Vasudha Narayanan, and Vishwa Adluri. The “or” here is inclusive. The contributors to this book were a pleasure to work with: I am grateful to them for their wonderful contributions. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my family who have supported me as I explored the unglamorous research projects of a philosopher. I am especially grateful to my wife Andrea, who supported and encouraged my research and writing. Finally, I am most grateful to our readers for taking an interest in Indian Ethics.

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PART ONE

Western Imperialism, Indology, and Ethics Indian moral philosophy, Indian ethics, is moral philosophy or ethics written by Indians. Insofar as it is philosophy, studying Indian ethics should be a function of applying best disciplinary practices to it. This requires being clear about what such practices amount to. Yet, very little has been written on the topic. There are few factors that explain this lacuna. One factor is that philosophers transmit this disciplinary knowledge to their students via practice, and not by theory. It is a disciplinary know-​how, not a know-​ that, which structures the possibilities of research in philosophy and one that will be unapparent in interdisciplinary contexts such as Indology—​without special effort to make it apparent. It, the discipline of philosophy, is logically prior to what we discover via philosophical research and is rarely treated as the object of inquiry itself. Unlike most research findings that depend upon our research interests, the basic disciplinary knowledge is something we can practice from multiple perspectives and tends not to be reported in the findings of philosophers. It constitutes pedagogy in philosophy. A second factor is that as it is logically prior to philosophical research, it is easy for philosophers to believe they are writing about it, while they are in fact confabulating. We confabulate when we endorse false memories. This occurs when we identify the consequences (such as our favored philosophical theory, or the scenery) of the implementation of a practice that we can undertake from multiple perspectives (such as philosophy or driving) with the practice that generates these impressions. Confabulation is most tempting as the consequences of one’s own practice will seem most reasonable and compelling. The error can be avoided by affirming the importance of third party perspectives in corroborating first party findings. The distinction between first-​and third-​party perspectives is essential to any discipline, such as driving or philosophy. The third factor is that the contemporary continental and analytic traditions with their roots in ancient Greek philosophy

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assumes (without critical awareness) the interpretive model of thought: accordingly, the thinkable is one’s perspective especially as encoded in one’s idiolect (what seems true to oneself), not a discipline (such as philosophy, mathematics or science) that coordinates multiple perspectives. In practice, this model of thought collapses the distinction between first-​and third-​party perspectives. The Eurocentric starting point of this tradition of understanding on the model of interpretation is the West: it not only understands thought as a perspective, but also treats the European experience as the universal frame as a result of its European heritage. Interpretation is imperialistic as it depicts autonomous third-​ party perspectives as incompatible with thought and as something to be appropriated. Scholars with only a passing understanding of philosophy derived from the West will hence be misled about what philosophy is by the West. The West’s imperialism is hence at play in the obfuscation of Indian ethics, as it relies upon a model of thought that does not tolerate third-​party perspectives. In the first chapter, “Moral Philosophy: THE RIGHT and THE GOOD,” I draw a distinction between best practices in philosophy—​explication—​and compare this with interpretation. Explication draws a clear boundary between first-​and third-​party reasons. This opens up an appreciation of the basic concept of “ethics”—​THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD—​as also the basic concept of the Indic term “dharma.” Interpretation, given Eurocentric assumptions about ethics, generates the familiar distinction between secular moral philosophy and religion, while explication does not. Explication depicts the rationality of an ethical theory as internal to a perspective, and the differences across ethical theories as the objectivity of the disagreement. This is the concept ETHICS itself. Interpretation identifies the rationality of ethics with a Eurocentric perspective, and problematizes everything else as mysterious and confused. In “Philosophy, Religion, and Scholarship,” I respond to a host of objections but I also address the common myths about the lack of ethics in Indian thought and the correlative view that India is the land of religion. Interpretation attempts to treat the reasons of the interpreter as beyond reproach, and the religification of what cannot be derived from first-​party reasons is a strategy employed to preserve the incontrovertible status of the first party’s reasons. The usual associations with religion—​that it is a faith, tradition bound and non-​philosophical—​is the projection of the failure of interpretation to understand a dissenting perspective onto the dissenting perspective. Religion is merely moral theory (or moral theories) that disagrees with Eurocentric ethics. In “The West, the Primacy of Linguistics, and Indology,” I explicate the history of philosophy and argue that interpretation derives from, and constitutes, the basic model of thought in the Western tradition of philosophy stretching back to the Greeks. This model of thought identifies a perspective with a thought, and thereby attempts to explain everything (including alien perspectives) in terms of first-​party reasons. It is immortalized in the thematic Western theory of thought: thought is linguistic meaning. The primary importance given to linguistics in Indology is not only motivated by this dominant Western account of thought, but also applies the account of thought to India that is responsible for Western imperialism.

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In “Beyond Moral Twin Earth: Beyond Indology,” I take the standard thought experiment in the literature to explain moral communication across cultures a step further and assume a context of radical moral diversity. I call this world “Planet Ethics.” Against this backdrop I test models of thought from the Western tradition against models of thought based on explication. The standard Western models result in tyranny and imperialism, while the explicatory account allows for free discussions on morals across languages. I consider responses to this argument based on Donald Davidson’s interpretive recommendations. I note that the strategies that Davidson recommends accord with what is common practice in Indology, but this includes treating Indians like Archie Bunker—​a loveable bigot who does not know how to speak language. None of these interventions bring us any closer to appreciating moral disagreement on Planet Ethics. In “Interpretation, Explication, and Secondary Sources,” I summarize the findings, draw attention to the differences between the explicator and interpreter, and summarize the contributions of the authors to this book as it helps us understand Indian moral philosophy. Understanding the role of ethics in Indian philosophy is very much like the challenge of understanding the movement of stars in the heavens. No new data is required: we need to give up the idea that our perspective is privileged. The rejection of the privilege of our perspective results in a yogic approach to thought that fulfills the requirement of inquiry and cross-​ cultural communication. The basic systems of Indian philosophy are moral philosophical, and the failure to appreciate this is akin to Geocentrism: the undue importance given to our own perspective in knowledge.

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CHAPTER ONE

Moral Philosophy: THE RIGHT and THE GOOD SHYAM RANGANATHAN

1. INTRODUCTION Moral philosophy is an important part of philosophical research but is poorly understood, in part because philosophy as a discipline is popularly misrepresented as an objectless inquiry of speculation. Ethics, concerned with our values and expectations, seems especially troubling as a form of philosophical inquiry, for what we want and expect out of life seem emblematic of subjectivity. Ethics would hence have little to do with what is objective, but intrinsically with what is subjective or intersubjective. In the effort to give ethics some content, it is often misrepresented as the study of shared values or customs. Ethics is thus confused with social-​scientific and ethnographic concerns, just as philosophy is popularly confused with the psychological project of studying and exploring one’s own thoughts. In this chapter, I account for philosophy as a discipline that determines the content of moral philosophy. Philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, is objective. The idea of objectivity is commonplace. Objects are not only what we converge on from differing perspectives, but also what explain our disagreements. When you and I look at a mirror from differing perspectives, we know it is an object because its asymmetry relative to our perspectives explains why we disagree about its appearance to us. Objectivity contrasts with illusions, such as reflections in mirrors or perhaps pictures of mirrors taken from differing angles. We cannot converge on illusion from differing perspectives, because the asymmetry of the observer explains what is experienced in the case of illusion. Truth is often conflated with objectivity, but if truth is not to be a redundant notion, no different than objectivity, then it is not what explains our disagreements. Rather truth is the property of a representation that corresponds or fits what it represents. In explanation we have a choice: to prioritize objectivity or truth. My plan in this chapter is to contrast the methodology that prioritizes truth—​ interpretation—​with the prioritization of objectivity—​explication. Explication—​a concern for objectivity—​is the cornerstone of philosophy. Explication allows us to identify the basic concept ETHICS and DHARMA as what theories of ethics and dharma

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disagree about: THE RIGHT OR THE GOOD. This is the concept expressed by not only the English terms “moral” and “ethics,” but also “dharma” in Indian philosophy. This sets the stage for a very general explication of four moral theories: Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, Deontology, and Yoga/​Bhakti. I draw examples from the Indian and Western traditions. In the penultimate section, I reflect on the findings. A careful explication of moral philosophy provides no grounds for distinguishing between secular European ethics and non-​European religion: Indian theories of dharma are as much theories of ethics as theories of ethics from the Western tradition are theories of dharma. Interpretation creates the distinction between ethics and religion via the imposition of one’s own values on an alien perspective. Via interpretation, the difference between the two perspectives is reified as the religious component of the alien perspective. Explication only reveals moral theory in the case of dharma.

2.  WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? Here is a crude approximation: philosophy is to ideas and thoughts what mathematics is to numbers. This might be a crude way of putting it as mathematics moves beyond numbers, but it is a useful starting point as it approximates how philosophers view their own discipline and their own work. The ordinary way of classifying philosophy as a discipline within the Humanities is misleading. Philosophy is not about our humanness. We could be Martians and engage in philosophy. Moreover, the study of human beings is anthropology—​philosophy is a distinct discipline from anthropology. Philosophy is often popularly conceived as the effort to describe or grasp how we think. That is not philosophy either—​that is psychology or perhaps sociology. Anthropology, sociology, and psychology are social sciences. The social sciences are empirical sciences. Philosophy is not an empirical science—​neither is mathematics. However, both are relevant to life in ways that go beyond what can be empirically studied. Today it is not uncommon to apologize for philosophy’s lack of empirical support. Some believe it is a problem that philosophical claims are not empirically grounded (cf. Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich 2001). But this is a confusion (cf. Cappelen 2012). The value of mathematics cannot be reduced to its empirical content: 2+2=4 is not true because of our experiences in counting—​nor is it the kind of thing that is subject to empirical testing, as though if we do the experiment and find out that 2+2 turns out to be 5, then we have to revise arithmetic. In the case of arithmetic, we are largely concerned with how we should think about quantities, and if our practice departs from the advice of arithmetic, so much the worse for actual practice (Frege 1980; Husserl 2001). Insofar as philosophy is concerned with thought it is related to how we should think about various topics—​not necessarily and not usually with how we do think—​ and in this respect it is similar to mathematics and departs from social scientific inquiry. Its value is not reducible to its conformity to sociological and cultural expectations. Rather, the value of philosophy consists in rendering philosophical

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commitments—​widely or narrowly shared—​transparent so that we can objectively judge and compare them on their merits. A package so judged is often called a “philosophy.” The most plausible of philosophies are formulated to a high degree of abstraction and generality such that the abstractions are general and the generalities are abstract. Such philosophies have a higher degree of relevance across contexts, and are not bound to the contexts that they were initially developed for and in. How does philosophy help us render our precritical ideas transparent so that we may judge them on their merits? Philosophical research breaks down this challenge into two parts. The first necessary activity of philosophy is the explication of a perspective. (The perspective might be of a historical figure or a fictional character in a dialogue, or one of many perspectives of a character or figure over time. It may even be what is articulated in an anonymous text or it may be a fictional interlocutor invoked by a real author.) The second activity of philosophy is to contribute to the diversity of philosophical options. This can either take the form of assessing the merits of an explicated perspective, or it can take the form of a new philosophical package that excels where alternatives fail. The second activity begins the moment we have succeeded in explication, for then we are in an objective position to compare alternatives that can explain the disagreements. The line between the two activities is logical, not temporal.

2.1.  Explication versus Interpretation To explicate a perspective P—​augustly called a “philosophy”—​about topic t, is to E: • discern the reasons rP that constitute P, which explain P’s use of “t” and to arrive at a systematization of rP that explains the uses of “t.” The systematization of rP that entails P’s t-​claims is P’s theory of t. The reasons rP may be what P explicitly says, or what is entailed by P. Note, the result of E is a theory of t, but the theory of t does not entail E. The reasons that explain the use of P’s t-​claims are (usually) everything that constitute P aside from its t-​claims, for these ancillary reasons function as premises or theoretical explanations of P’s t-​claims. To read texts as philosophy is to read them as articulating perspectives P that provide arguments for their various t-​claims. The goal of the explication is to provide the simplest (abstract and general) account of t-​claims, entailed by the set of reasons r constituting a particular perspective P: this is to arrive at P’s theory of t. If I follow this procedure, I can converge on your perspective P, its constituent reasons rP, and your theory of t with you—​though I may not agree with your P or your reasons rP. For instance, if you are a philosopher concerned with morality, then when I explicate your perspective P, I identify your reasons rP (explicit or entailed by what you say) that explain your use of the term “morality.” In this case, the systematic explanation of your use of the term “morality” would simply be your theory of morality. This is what it is to understand your perspective on morality. But as I relied on your reasons to explain your use of the term “morality” in my explication, I do

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not have to agree with you about morality to converge with you on your theory of morality. I can hold a completely differing theory of morality, and yet accurately converge on your theory of morality with you. Explication is the gold standard of philosophical research and also the primary skill in philosophy as it allows us to determine the possibilities of philosophical debate, which we can converge on from all possible perspectives in the debate. Explication is hence theory neutral, and can thereby be used to study all philosophy. But it can also be employed to arrive at the same results regardless of the substantive commitments of the explicator because these do not figure in the evidence that goes toward an explication. Explication is hence theory neutral with respect to both what it explains and the substantive commitments of explicators. What we explicate plays a pivotal role in explaining our philosophical disagreements. We can converge on them from differing disagreeing perspectives. Hence, what we arrive at in philosophy via explication is objective, as objects are what we can converge on from differing disagreeing perspectives. The reason that what we arrive at are objects, and not illusions, is that their asymmetries relative to our vantage explain our disagreements. In the case of philosophy, the peculiar features of perspectives, their reasons, and the resulting theories that explain their t-​claims relative to our substantive vantages explain whether we agree or disagree with each other. Explication is an objective research methodology that transcends our mind—​ our perspective, reasons, opinions, and experiences—​for it leads us to objects of philosophical inspection that we can converge on from differing perspectives. If we want our perspectives to be accurate about objectivity regardless of our orientation, we need them to be abstract and general. Hence, candidate philosophical theories are expected to be formulated to a high degree of generality and abstraction. We can explicate any term usage relative to a perspective. But certainly the interesting terms that invite explication are those whose usage differs significantly across perspectives. This difference in usage is evidence of a theoretical disagreement. The reason that explication seems so interesting in these cases is that simple social scientific explanations about what is meant do not work. The social scientific approach treats such interesting terms as having their meaning filled out by something social and observable. In this interesting case, the descriptive expectation proliferates meanings (usually relative to each context of use) and cannot provide a unified explanation for why one word is used in so many ways. In philosophy, these are the central terms: “reality,” “knowledge,” “good,” “right,” “ethics”—​the terms that first-​year philosophy students want to understand by dictionary definitions to the chagrin of their philosophy professors. The alternative to explication is subjective: interpretation. Interpretation is often confused with translation. The two concepts are often treated interchangeably—​ particularly in the hermeneutic (“interpretive”) tradition (Heidegger, for instance, was reputed to have held that every translation is itself an interpretation, cf. Lilly 1991: vii; Gadamer 1996: 384, 387)—​but there are important differences between the two. Translations and interpretations are

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easy to confuse, for both function as proxies for original texts. However, an interpretation is an explanation: it seeks to explicitly shed light on a distinct corpus. It is an intermediary. A translation, in contrast, takes on the literary identity of the original (Ranganathan 2007, 2011). To interpret some package P is for the interpreting subject S to I: • use S’s reasons (or if you prefer, “premises,” “assumptions,” “beliefs,” “truths,” and even “tradition”) rS in the explanation of P (cf. Gadamer 1996; Davidson2001a, 2001b). Note that the result of I is I: the result of an explanation of P in terms of rS is rS. The results of an interpretation are nothing logically different from the conditions of interpretation. If it turns out that in explaining P in terms of rS one arrives at something else, rNot-​S, then something has gone amiss in interpretation: one has transcended the bounds of one’s explanatory resources. I would have to either revise my original reasons used in explanation to accommodate the discovery, or reapply the original stock of reasons. If I revise my reasons, I bring my perspective closer to what I am explaining. If I reimpose my reasons, I would have to reify what cannot be explained by my reasons as inexplicable as the definition of the differentia. This would render the findings consistent with and entailed by my reasons. The former is the strategy of domestication, and the latter the strategy of religification. Both ensure that the results of interpretation are logically equivalent to the conditions of interpretation. The two strategies are often concurrent. If I interpret your perspective on morality, then I am committed to understanding your views on the topic by my reasons. But insofar as our perspectives are different, this differentia forces me to revise my views to accommodate your views, or to decide that some of your views on the topic are inexplicable. But I can domesticate these inexplicable views by correlating them to my conceptual scheme. So some of your views that you articulate on “morality”—​the inexplicable ones—​will be redescribed by me as “legal,” or perhaps “ritual” insofar as they correlate with what I am inclined to call legal or ritual. Your one term “morality” will then correspond to several concepts in my scheme. Your term “morality” will seem religious (mysterious yet traditional) to me as it corresponds to many things, some of which are ethical, and the logic that connects these various ideas are under the surface of my domestication, inexplicable by my reasons.

2.2.  Why We Should Reject Interpretation Interpretation is deeply troubled as a procedure for understanding. First, it is often presented as the default approach for understanding because knowledge requires truth, and interpretation is a criticism of method without any concern for truth. This is often taken to be a lesson of Gadamer’s famous Truth and Method: “The idea of a formal method is indeed convincingly criticized by Gadamer” (Ramberg and Gjesdal Winter 2014). But interpretation, and the prioritization of truth in explanation, is a formal method. It is not the truth plus a method. So interpretation cannot take

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credit for being correct because it is true. It is in no sense the default methodology of understanding. Second, it trades on a conflation between two different senses of reason. We often define reasons as our own opinions. But the reasons that lead us to a conclusion may be someone else’s opinions—​and we can disagree with the reasons. Failing to clearly distinguish the two senses of a reason leads to believing that any reason that you have for a conclusion—​even if it is someone else’s—​has to be your reason. A third problem is that interpretations are always subjective. An interpretation is the explanation of some perspective P by virtue of the interpreter’s reasons—​not in terms of what is objective. Change the perspective of the subject who is interpreting, and one derives a different interpretation. Explanation of a perspective in terms of what is objective is explication—​this does not make use of the subject’s reasons in the explanation. Hence, the explicator can change their mind about what they believe is reasonable and arrive at the same explication of a perspective P. Indeed, people with differing substantive positions on a common controversy can converge in explication, though they disagree with each other and what they are explicating. Interpretation renders this impossible. The associated problem here is that interpretation conflates truth and objectivity: because interpreters fancy themselves as relying on true beliefs in explanation, they think that their explanations are objective. But this is not the case: even if one’s reasons are true, interpretation is subjective for the outcome of interpretation depends on the beliefs of the interpreter—​not on what is being explained. The fourth problem with interpretation is that it is the structure of begging questions. The question begging nature of interpretation has long been affirmed poetically in the hermeneutic tradition in Western philosophy as the hermeneutic circle. The standard description of the circle is the mutual informing of the understanding of the part and whole of a text (Ramberg and Gjesdal Winter 2014). Interpreters use the term “valid” loosely to mean correct or right (cf. Ramberg and Gjesdal Winter 2014). In logic, we distinguish between valid arguments and sound ones. Valid arguments are those whose conclusions follow from the premises. We identify these conclusions as what must be true if the premises are true. We can identify valid arguments without needing to agree with the premises or without the premises being true. Valid arguments are objective: we can converge on them without agreeing and the premises of a valid argument need not be true. At times, we have to disagree with them: P and Not-​P, therefore P and Not-​P. This is valid, but you would be foolish to agree with the argument as its premise and conclusion are contradictions. The argument also begs the question: it is viciously circular and hence fallacious—​the premises entail the conclusion and the conclusion entails the premises. Yet the contradiction that is the premise is the reason that takes me to the conclusion, and the conclusion in turn depends on this reason. If you do not distinguish between a reason for a conclusion and taking this reason to be true, you confuse reasons with what you take to be your reasons. You would have to believe this argument if you did not draw the appropriate distinction. Sound arguments are the valid arguments with true premises, and while we might converge on the validity of an argument, we often do so while disagreeing

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about the truth of the premises. This is very easy in philosophy where the premises are themselves controversial. The argument is objective—​ what we identify in explication—​ and it explains our philosophical disagreements. This means that understanding someone else’s argument is not the same as trying to understand how they are right or how they could be right—​a matter that fans of interpretation get confused about (Gadamer 1996: 292; compare also Davidson’s various conflations of understanding others as understanding them as believing truly or reasonably as you see it: Davidson 1996: 66–​67; 2000: 23–​24; 2001b: 136, n. 16; 2001c: 27). Whether an argument is right has to do with the truth of the premises. Understanding is accomplished when we appreciate whether someone’s argument is valid, whether we agree or disagree. This is enough for us to understand their reasons for their conclusion. Yet, in interpretation, the result of I is just I: employing rS in explanation results in rS. Here, the conclusion and the premises entail each other. Begging the question is a fallacy. The problem here is not that question-​begging arguments are invalid. They are all valid. The problem with it is that we can use this trick of begging questions to change invalid arguments with true premises, into sound arguments by rendering the inferential relationship between the premises and conclusion bidirectional. If you do not know how, just repeat your reason as your conclusion. This is begging the question. If your reason is true, you have a sound argument all of a sudden. That is easy, when all you are doing is describing what you believe—​these descriptions will be true of you. The problem is that you have established nothing objective by begging questions. This is the problem with interpretations: they do not actually contribute to knowledge. They merely repackage what we already believe as the explanation. It is the illusion of reason and objectivity. This sounds strange, as though interpretation is a kind of prejudice or bigotry uninterested in what transcends our minds. But indeed, this is what defenders of interpretation claim (Gadamer 1996: 270). It is to understand others in terms of what one believes is true as determined in advance of the facts (Davidson 1986: 316). Prejudice on this account is unavoidable and an essential part of understanding. This view is the philosophical version of original sin. The sin of prejudice is the coefficient of knowledge, and at best we can be aware of it but we cannot get rid of it. Of course we can get rid of it if we allow for the conclusions of our reasoning to not count as evidence for our reasons. Valid, non-​question-​begging arguments show that the reasons that we employ even when they lead to a conclusion are inessential to the conclusion of research as the conclusion does not entail the reasons. Interpretation is the effort to avoid this risk of criticizing our reasons as part of the project of research by rendering the reasons essential to the conclusion. The fifth problem with interpretation is that it is imperialistic, and its efforts to accommodate secondary perspectives is colonialist. When we think about imperialism, we think about political arrangements where policy and the right opinion are determined by a center of power that has authority over other distal perspectives. Insofar as all explanation has to be in terms of rS, and the result is just

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rS, interpretation imperializes what it attempts to understand. Any perspective P at all has to be explained in terms of rS, on the interpreter’s account, which means that there can be no autonomous perspective from the interpreter’s subjectivity. There are several reasons why these errors are not obvious to interpreters. First, as they can see an issue only from their perspective, they are never aware of imposing their views on autonomous perspectives—​this requires some appreciation of the autonomy of the secondary perspective, which interpretation denies. Second, interpreters can interpret by deference to third parties, and this seems complimentary. Interpretation can present in two ways. In the primary case the interpreting subject S defers to her own reasons rS in explaining perspective P. In the secondary case, the subject S differs to an authority A to interpret a philosophy P: the reasons rA of the authority A are called on to explain P. Those who are alarmed by the apparent narcissism of interpretation might opt for the second variety of interpretation, for it seems to downplay the importance of the interpreter’s opinions. But because the primary interpreter S has reason to defer to authority A, rA become a subset of the primary interpreting subjects S’s reasons rS The difference between the two versions of interpretation is superficial for, ultimately, it is the primary interpreting subject S’s reasons rS that make for an interpretation. On this score, others are allowed to have opinions about what you are interested in interpreting, so long as they are also your opinions. Colonialism is the imperial practice of acquiring control over alien perspectives (countries, peoples, for instance). In this case, the secondary approach to interpretation is not merely imperialistic (like the first case), but is also colonialist, as the authority’s perspective is subsumed under the imperial subject. The sixth problem with interpretation is that it is solipsistic. If all perspectives P have to be explained and subsumed by the reasons of S, then the mental content of S (which consists in part of the reasons of S) have to subsume and explain every other perspective. In the end, no one can have an opinion that is not the opinion of the interpreter—​their mental independence is denied. But more strikingly, there is nothing outside of the subject on the interpretive account—​ nothing objective. Anything intelligible has to be explained by the subjectivity of the interpreter. If interpretation is so irrational, why does it persist? Interpreters like explanations by virtue of truth. The truths in question may be actual truths, or propositions that interpreters believe are true. This is why interpreters take their reasons rS so seriously: these are the claims they take to be true, and hope are true. They want these to figure prominently in explanation. This is a mistake, as truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for good reasoning: witness valid arguments, which are valid independently of the truth of their conclusions or premises. But one reason for wishing for truth to figure prominently in explanation is a confusion about inquiry. The goal of inquiry is certainly truth. Interpreters are apparently so excited about this goal, that they want truth to be the means too. This is wrong, for if truth is the means of inquiry, we will fail to identify new truths, while conservatively sticking to our old ones. This defeats inquiry, ironically, by getting our ends and the means

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mixed up. Yet, this psychologically explains the peculiar tendency of interpreters to value what they take to be true as the primary evidence in inquiry. One other explanation for the persistence of interpretation is that a certain portion of the population are narcissists. Narcissists have an elevated sense of the importance of their own opinions. Explication does not give methodological or epistemic priority to our opinions—​if the reasons we are explicating turn out to be ours because we are explicating our own philosophy, this is an accident and not a necessary part of explication. Interpretation licenses this elevated sense of the importance of one’s own opinions by giving epistemic priority to the interpreter’s opinions in explanation—​even when what is being explained is someone else’s philosophy. Those with narcissistic tendencies will hence prefer interpretation and find explication offensive to their sense of priority—​as though the world needs their opinions for anyone to have an opinion. These folks have a very difficult time with philosophy. They admit not being able to understand alien philosophy (Gadamer 1990) and will deny that others can have a radically different opinion from them (Davidson 2001a). Interpreters often deflect attention from these unpleasant features of interpretation by suggesting that we have to always revise our background stock of reasons in the face of failed attempts at interpretation: interpreters can invoke the image of Neurath’s Boat, which has to be fixed and rearranged while staying afloat. This looks like learning, yet on this account, ironically, learning only happens when we fail at interpretation. When we succeed, we beg questions. The seventh problem with interpretation is that it violates Ockham’s Razor: it multiplies meanings of terms beyond their means, and complicates matters, because of its narcissism. As an interpreter I treat my conceptual frame and perspective as the very content of the thinkable and correlate meanings of your usage of a term such as “morality” (or “dharma”) in accordance with my conceptual scheme. I hence identify a meaning of “morality” (or “dharma”) in correlation with my conceptual distinctions as I see them. Your term “morality” (or “dharma”) hence grows to have many meanings—​one for each correlation with concepts in my outlook. The more your outlook diverges from mine, the more meanings of “morality” (or “dharma”) I will find in your account as your theory drifts from mine and your usage of “morality” (or “dharma”) correlates with many conceptual distinctions from my perspective. (This is the standard approach to the topic of “dharma” in Indology.) As explication is concerned with the objective and what is objective is what we can disagree about, explication allows us to identify the common concept T as what theories of t have in common while they disagree. Hence, the common concept MORALITY is what competing theories of morality have in common while they disagree. In the next chapter I will respond to objections from interpreters to this line of argument. For now I note that my criticisms of interpretation are not discernible from the perspective of the interpreter. Interpreters are like Geocentrists who view their experience of the stars from their perspective as evidence of their place of privilege in the universe. They fail to see the irrational partiality of their position

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from their perspective. But this is immaterial for there is an important difference between understanding a perspective and understanding from a perspective. If we can draw this distinction, we can be objective about perspectives. Interpretation involves conflating the distinction between understanding a perspective and understanding from a perspective as it undermines the distinction between third-​and first-​party reasons: all reasons are reasons of the interpreter. As a result, interpreters are incapable of being objective about their own perspective and hence their responses to criticisms will be equally unobjective. Explicators—​Heliocentrists—​in contrast, do not have to worry about being unobjective for they distinguish between first-​and third-​party perspectives and reasons. This allows them to be objective about the limitations of their explanations. The limitations of their explanations is objectivity—​ how things seem from our perspective is not the same as our perspective, which means our disagreements about what we see are objective. This is where inquiry should start.

2.3.  Why We Should Explicate Interpretation is the wrong account of understanding because it is not understanding at all. The trap of the interpreter is just interpretation: the idea that anything intelligible has to be intelligible by deference to the interpreter’s reasons. Once you believe this you are committed to explaining everything from your perspective, and it is difficult for you to even imagine an alternative, let alone acknowledge that interpretation is just one model of understanding. You will tend to accept the various failures of interpretation (that it is narcissistic and question-​begging) as inescapable. Stranger still, you will be like a salesperson who buys their own sales pitch. But the negative outcomes of interpretation are only inescapable if you buy into interpretation. This is a choice that rests on conflating the distinction between first-​and third-​party reasons. Explication takes us in a differing direction. (If you find detailed analysis difficult, you may jump to the next section—​2.4 The Evidence: Disciplinary Relativity of Objectivity. If that also is too analytical for you, you may skip again to the next section—​3. Philosophical Concepts and the Right to Disagree.) First, the explication of a philosophy P’s theory of t is generated by explicating P’s reasons for t-​claims and for the theory of t—​the reasons from the start are understood not in terms of what we assent to, but objectively as what we can disagree about as constitutive of third-​party reasons. At no point is begging the question required to insulate the explicator from the prospects of dissent. The theory t that explains the usage of “t” will entail t usage, but individual and collective t usage need not entail the theory t—​especially in the case of reasonable, non-​question-​begging philosophers. (P’s theory of morality for instance will explain P’s uses of “morality” but in the case of reasonable philosophers, the uses of “morality” on the whole will not entail the theory of morality.) Reasons rP that entail or go toward the theory of t might collectively entail the theory of t, but the theory of t need not entail the entirety of the reasons of P—​especially in the case of reasonable philosophers. The explicator in turn is not required to rely on her rS in order to arrive at a theory of t,

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and moreover as the result does not entail any of the previous steps, the explicator does not have to beg questions. Indeed, as rS does not play a role in determining the theory of t, the explicating subject is free to criticize the resulting theory of t in accordance with rS. The case of the interpreter who defers to an authority cannot be critical of the authority’s reasons, as these are a subset of her own reasons. The usual stumbling block here is to assume that the explicator’s commitment to explication is one such rS that plays a role in explication. This is interpretation. But to characterize explication this way is to conflate the distinction between first-​and third-​party reasons: the first-​party commitments of the explicator plays no role in the determination of the theory of t: the only reasons that matter for this are those that constitute P or are entailed by P. So, in other words, the explicator is neither deferring to another person to interpret for them nor are they relying on their beliefs including their beliefs about explication to entail a perspective’s theory of t. Put in yet another way, the explicator does not have a reason to defer to P or its author, for the explicator is not endorsing P or its reasons as her reasons. Similarly, the explicator has no reason to defer to her own reasons to figure out P: P is not the object of inquiry. Rather, the theory of t is the object of inquiry. This is not a problem, for the procedure of explication is not evidence in favor of the theory of t of P. Explication is a practice, not a perspective. The evidence is rather the reasons of P. This is why explication is a form of research. To succeed is to learn something new: P’s theory of t. Second, explication allows us to determine the philosophical commitments of a perspective without confusing that with what an author intends. Authorial intentions are superfluous in the explanation of a text: to invoke the idea is to have some prior grasp of what a text is about and hence talk about intentions is downstream (not prior to) a grasp of what a text is about. Moreover, intentions are not objective: authors might intend to write or say something but commit themselves to something else. When we explicate, we look to the propositional commitments of a text—​especially its reasons that explain or entail its use of terms “t” such as “morality.” What this leaves unexplained are mentions of “t.” A mention of “t” is a metalinguistic depiction of “t” as something we can talk about. It might be possible that philosophers mention their views about morality and use the term “morality” in a manner that are at odds with each other, and explication allows us to discern this tension by discerning the theory that explains uses of “t”—​not mentions of “t.” Interpretation, in contrast, has no principled reason for distinguishing between such claims, for the standard is explanation from the interpreter’s perspective. I can also explicate my own P as my interest is objective: my usage of “t,” not my mentions of “t.” This activity of self-​explication allows me to not only converge on my perspective with others, but also entertain my perspective as a third-​party prospect, which I am free to affirm or deny. I might, for instance, come to revise my philosophy P if I believe that my uses of “t” should be brought in line with my mentions of “t.” I can disagree with myself too as my propositional commitments are objective.

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Interpreters will try to understand explication as an elusive version of interpretation because they have difficulty understanding anything that they do not believe—​that is after all their picture of understanding and also a serious intellectual defect. They will mistakenly reason that when the explicator defers to the rp of P, she is really deferring to her own rS, which includes claims such as “I think that P holds rP”. But “P holds rP” is a different proposition than “I think that P holds rP” and hence there are logical differences between the two claims. The explicator’s claim, if true at all, is true of P. The interpreter’s claim is true of herself. One is objective, the other subjective. Evidence that explication is not a version of interpretation is that it is not question-​ begging: you cannot recover E from the resulting theory of t as you can recover an interpretation from the resulting interpretation. Another important difference is that an explicator is under no obligation or pressure to endorse the strategy of domestication: to revise her reasons rS in light of the findings of an explication. Neither is the explicator pressured to endorse the strategy of religification: to define the results of explication as what cannot be derived from her reasons. Third, explication does not rely on truth. This allows the explicator to be critical and even agnostic, as truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for reason. What accounts for this asymmetry that allows interpretation to be question-​ begging and fallacious, but explication to avoid prejudice and bigotry? Interpretation gives explanatory priority to truth (the representational value of descriptions) and it thereby loses a grip on objectivity—​what we can converge on while disagreeing. In contrast, explication gives priority to objectivity. The catch is that we seem to give up a grasp on truth: if objectivity is what we can converge on while we disagree, who is right? Once we voice the question, we are in a position to distinguish between subjective and objective truth, and to uncover the objective truth via inquiry. There are some questions that unrepentant interpreters tend to ask: which of the rP do we defer to in the explanation of t-​claims? Clearly, all of them—​the urge to divide up reasons rP into those that are relevant and those that are not is informed by rS. Do we not need to know what claims of rP are true in order to identify the theory of t? No. They merely need to be objective. Do we not need to know what is true in order to identify an example of rP? No. We need to merely (and nothing more) identify what is objective.

2.4.  The Evidence: Disciplinary Relativity of Objectivity Explication is the cornerstone of the discipline of philosophy. Once we have mastered explication, we as philosophers are in a position to make a contribution to philosophy. Our first contribution is explication itself. But this allows us to be critical of what we explicate. If we can show that the philosophy that we have accurately explicated suffers internal defects or tensions—​inconsistencies—​or that it fails in some way to explain what is at stake in a philosophical debate or to live up to its own stated goals by its own standards—​something that we can also converge on from varying perspectives—​we have discovered objective problems with the philosophy

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in question, and any alternative that avoids these flaws would be thereby shown to be preferable on objective grounds insofar as it avoids objective shortcomings. My argumen