Download Same-Sex Relations, Human Rights, Virtue Ethics and Human Values

Same-Sex Relations, Human Rights, Virtue Ethics and Human Values
This course was designed keeping in mind the Ethics and Human Values
criterion. I showed the GLI proposal and the syllabus to Prof. Borgmann who was
one of the primary architects of this criterion, and amended them according to his
suggestions. I attach his letter of support which is specifically geared to the
eligibility of the course for the Ethics and Human Values requirement of General
Education.
This is a GLI course. As Prof. Borgmann notes, global citizenship is an
essential prerequisite for global leadership. Treating the philosophical and ethical
traditions of non-Western societies with full seriousness is important to our
understanding of human values and ethics on a global scale.
The General Education requirement is that a course “focus on one or more of
the specific traditions of ethical thought (either Western or non-Western).” This
course will focus on Hindu traditions of ethical thought. Ethics in Hindu traditions
is inseparable from ontology. The basic concept of rita or the order of things
adumbrated in the Vedas and Upanishads is closely connected to the bedrock
ethical notion of dharma (borrowed by later religions such as Buddhism, Jainism
and Sikhism). Dharma is not translatable into any one English word. It
encompasses the following concepts, among others: duty, justice, virtue, and the
nature of one’s being. Every person has various types of social dharma or duties to
fulfill, such as, for example, duty as a child, a parent, a spouse, a worker, a student,
a citizen and so on. These duties are to be fulfilled in a just and virtuous manner.
However, the overarching dharma of each person is twofold in nature: the
innate species-dharma (the dharma of wood is to float and of iron to sink, is an
example often cited), and the individual dharma composed of one’s own past
actions (karma) and attachments from earlier in this life as well as carried over
from former lives. Together these constitute samskara (innate predilections and
tendencies). These tendencies are to be worked out through further action, the aim
in one school of thought being to move beyond attachment, and in another school
of thought to transfer the attachment from material to spiritual things, but in any
event to attain liberation from the ego and from the cycle of rebirth.
Ethical questions arise when different types of dharma conflict with one
another (as seen in the BhagavadGita, on which I teach another course) or when
innate tendencies and attachments appear to conflict with justice, with duty or with
the social order. In this understanding, no action conflicts with the natural order
because everything that exists is part of the same one order.
In the narrative texts we read in this class, one type of ethical standard
applied to evaluate any relationship is that of virtue, that is, whether the
relationship merely gratifies the individual’s selfish desires (for pleasure, wealth,
power, possession and so on) or whether it benefits the individual, the couple, and
also larger units such as the family, the community, the species and all beings.
Virtuous action and virtuous relationships often entail sacrifice of some kind.
Second, at the metaphysical level, a person must inevitably work through his
or her attachments. Inexplicable attachments, even socially disapproved ones, are
often explained, both philosophically and in narrative, as resulting from
attachments in former lives, and as therefore irresistible. They must be worked
through and understood, not repressed. If likely to be harmful to others, they may
be elevated through sacrifice but if not harmful to others, they may be expressed
through action.
The other ethical tradition that we will touch upon is the virtue ethics of
Plato’s Symposium, both in the text itself and as developed by Martha Nussbaum.
In the Symposium, several speakers evaluate the worth of a relationship on the
basis of whether or not it enhances virtue and whether or not it is motivated by
concerns for virtue – at the individual level the virtuous erastes is motivated not by
the love of the body alone but by love of the mind and spirit, the virtuous eromenos
is motivated not by the temptations of wealth or power that the erastes may
possess, but by the wisdom that the erastes can impart. At the social level, that
love is virtuous which is conducive to civic virtues such as courage and honor, and
inimical to tyranny. This way of evaluating a relationship by its contribution to
virtue is not very different from one Hindu approach; ancient Greek and ancient
Indian civilizations spring from a common Indo-European source so the
convergence is not surprising.
Nussbaum points out that the abstract ethics of virtuous love in the
Symposium is both exemplified in and tested by Alcibiades’s love for Socrates, and
that the Symposium demonstrates that the ability to appreciate virtue and to love it
in a particular embodied individual is crucial to the everyday practice of virtuous
love (although Alcibiades falls tragically short of such practice).
In Hiding from Humanity, from which the students will read an extract,
Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the role that emotion
plays in the public realm, in order that laws may be ethically constructed. It is
essential, she argues, that we recognize that our own opposition to particular
actions (to take Montaigne’s example, eating a human body that is already dead)
may not be entirely logical or rational but may in fact spring from a visceral
emotion like disgust. Such recognition would enable us to consider whether it is
ethical for visceral (and therefore “natural”) but irrational responses to function as
the unacknowledged basis for making laws that curb the civil and human rights of
others.
This course is about human rights. Students will evaluate the way in which
prescribed texts discuss and evaluate the ethical nature of relationships, and will
also consider how the approaches adumbrated above might be applied to today’s
human rights debates, for example, the debate about marriage equality.