Roy Perrett

Ashoka University · Department of Philosophy

Many environmental ethicists believe that any adequate environmental ethic should attribute ‘direct moral standing’ (often glossed in terms of intrinsic value) 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 confl...

This essay is concerned with Indian Yogācāra philosophers’ treatment of the problem of other minds in the face of a threatened collapse into solipsism suggested by Vasubandhu’s epistemological argument for idealism. I discuss the attempts of Dharmakīrti and Ratnakīrti to address this issue, concluding that Dharmakīrti is best seen as addressing the...

The Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) has been widely described as an "animated documentary". But this plausible description seems incompatible with a particular philosophical approach to defining documentary: namely, the trace theory advocated by Gregory Currie. I argue that this tension can be resolved once we modify the trace the...

Mahatma Gandhi’s thinking about religion and modernity both continued and broke with the Hindu tradition he inherited. His seminal work Hind Swaraj (1909) presents a radical moral critique of modernity, a position he explicitly continued to affirm for the rest of his life. Many (including some of Gandhi's admirers) have found his views on these mat...

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 “e...

While classical Indian philosophy is incredibly rich in rigorous discussion of topics in epistemology, logic, and metaphysics, comparable discussions in ethics were not as extensive as might be expected. Certainly, ethics was not a distinct field within Indian philosophy in the manner of pramāṇavāda (the part of Indian philosophy that corresponds r...

There is an apparent tension between two familiar platitudes about the meaning of life: (i) that ‘meaning’ in this context means ‘value’, and (ii) that such meaning might be ineffable. I suggest a way of trying to bring these two claims together by focusing on an ideal of a meaningful life that fuses both the axiological and semantic senses of ‘sig...

Is There Hindu Moral Theory?Two Maps of EthicsImplications

Many philosophers have supposed that while most of the objects in our immediate experience are composed of parts, at some point we must come down to those fundamental impartite objects out of which all partite things are composed: the metaphysical simples (usually conceived of as enduring, even eternal, entities). I consider what reason we have to...

In this essay I defend both the individual plausibility and conjoint consistency of two theses. One is the Intentionality Thesis: that all mental states are intentional (object-directed, exhibit ‘aboutness’). The other is the Self-Awareness Thesis: that if a subject is aware of an object, then the subject is also aware of being aware of that object...

Our present actions can have effects on future generations - affecting not only the environment they will inherit, but even perhaps their very existence. This raises a number of important moral issues, many of which have only recently received serious philosophical attention. I begin by discussing some contemporary Western philosophical perspective...

Essential to certain familiar and attractive ways of thinking about value is a distinction between an agent's recognition of a value and her reaction to it. This distinction has recently been rejected by James Griffin, who claims that recognition and reaction cannot be so separated, at least when it comes to prudential values. Griffin's main argume...

Philosophical defenders of animal liberation believe that we have direct duties to animals. Typically a presumption of that belief is that animals have the capacity to experience pain and suffering. Notoriously, however, a strand of Western scientific and philosophical thought has held animals to be incapable of experiencing pain, and even today on...

2002 by University of Hawai‘i Press hence survival) is a matter of degree because the psychological relation that constitutes identity (Relation R) itself admits of degrees. Moreover the same relation that imperfectly unifies the self over time also connects us with other people. Second, he infers from the imaginary branching cases that ‘‘what matt...

Associated with the successful development of computer technology has been an increasing acceptance of computational theories of the mind. But such theories also seem to close the gap between ourselves and machines, threatening traditional notions of our special value as non-physical conscious minds. Prima facie, Sāmkhya-Yoga - the oldest school of...

Associated with the successful development of computer technology has been an increasing acceptance of computational theories of the mind. But such theories also seem to close the gap between ourselves and machines, threatening traditional notions of our special value as non-physical conscious minds. Prima facie, Samkhya-Yoga - the oldest school of...

What have modern Buddhist ethicists to say about abortion and is there anything to be learned from it? A number of writers have suggested that Buddhism (particularly Japanese Buddhism) does indeed have something important to offer here: a response to the dilemma of abortion that is a 'middle way' between the pro-choice and pro-life extremes that ha...

1. If Okin’s argument is sound, it is indeed a striking result for feminist philosophy, for it would amount to a demonstration that an influential view in social and political philosophy can be demolished just by requiring that it be explicitly extended to women as well as men. Accordingly we can view Okin’s argument as a special instance of a gene...

A thought that we all entertain at some time or other is that the course of our lives might have been very different from the way they in fact have been, with the consequence that we might have been rather different sorts of persons than we actually are. A less common, but prima facie intelligible thought is that we might never have existed at all,...

The lack of interest in history in ancient India has often been noted and contrasted with the situation in China and the West. Notwithstanding the vast body of Indian literature in other fields, there is a remarkable dearth of historical writing in the period before the Muslim conquest and an associated indifference to historiography. Various expla...

Naiyāyikas are fond of a slogan, which often appears as a kind of motto in their texts: "Whatever exists is knowable and nameable." What does this mean? Is it true? The first part of this essay offers a brief explication of this important Nyāya thesis; the second part argues that, given certain plausible assumptions, the thesis is demonstrably fals...

Soulevant le paradoxe de l'audition de la musique non pas comme un tout mais comme la succession de notes individuelles, l'A. etablit une analogie avec la signification d'une phrase, dont on comprend que les mots qui la composent. L'A. interroge ce qui, dans l'unite musicale comme dans l'unite propositionnelle, excede la comprehension de chacune de...

Māori are disproportionately represented in current Aotearoa-New Zealand crime statistics. One recent controversial suggestion is that the New Zealand criminal justice system should be reformed in various ways to include the establishment of a separate criminal justice system for Māori offenders. I seek not only to lay to rest some popular misgivin...

The modern environmental movement has a tradition of respect for indigenous cultures and many environmentalists believe that there are important ecological lessons to be learned from studying the traditional life styles of indigenous peoples. More recently, however, some environmentalists have become more sceptical. This scepticism has been sharpen...

We (relatively few) Western analytic philosophers who also work on classical Indian philosophy commonly encounter puzzlement or suspicion from our colleagues in Western philosophy because of our Indian interests. The ubiquity of these attitudes is itself revealing of Western conceptions of Indian philosophy, though their origins lie in cultural his...

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. The chapter titles are: (1) Facts, Values and the Bhagavadgīta, (2) Saints and the Supramoral, (3) Living Right and Living Well in Hindu Ethics, and (4) The La...

What is the traditional relation of religion to politics in India? Recent scholarly debate has generated at least two divergent answers. According to one view there is a long standing traditional opposition between religion and politics in India because its highest value (moksa) is renunciatory and asocial. According to another view a separation of...

Damien and John Keown claim that there is important common ground between Buddhism and Christianity on the issue of euthanasia and that both traditions oppose it for similar reasons in order to espouse a "sanctity of life" position. I argue that the appearance of consensus is partly created by their failure to specify clearly enough certain key not...

I believe that there is no intrinsic moral difference between killing and letting die. That is, there is no difference that depends solely on the distinction between an act and an omission. I also believe that we can reasonably establish this thesis by appeal to the Bare Difference Argument. The form of this argument involves considering two imagin...

[E]conomists have to assess the value of human lives in order to decide how much ought to be spent on matters like road improvements, safety measures, health costs and pollution controls. These economic measures of the value of a life are the subject of this paper. When I first heard of the attempts of economists to put a monetary price on the valu...

The concept of omniscience is prominent in both Western and Indian philosophy of religion. A comparison of the different treatments accorded the notion in each tradition reveals some interesting parallels and divergences. I begin with the traditional Western treatments of omniscience as one of God’s attributes and then go on to offer a general char...

With a few notable exceptions, analytical philosophy of religion in the West still continues to focus almost entirely on the Iudaeo-Christian tradition. In particular, it is all too customary to ignore the rich fund of concepts and arguments supplied by the Indian religious tradition. This is a pity, for it gratuitously impoverishes the scope of mu...

Traditional Western conceptions of immortality characteristically presume that we come into existence at a particular time (birth or conception), live out our earthly span and then die. According to some, our death may then be followed by a deathless post-mortem existence. In other words, it is assumed that (i) we are born only once and die only on...

One of the interests of comparative studies is the manner in which features mistakenly assumed to be essential are often shown to be merely accidental. Similarly, one of the characteristic features of philosophy is that it often calls into question our complacent presuppositions. Thus comparative philosophy can be doubly illuminating in this way. T...

One traditional conception of immortality involves the notion that we survive death in a disembodied form. In Western thought this is familiar as the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. This doctrine (which entered Christianity from Greek philosophy) is one of the two major versions of immortality presented in the Western Christian tradition;...

Is it reasonable to fear death? In this chapter I want to consider two ancient Epicurean arguments to the conclusion that it is not. The first maintains that death cannot be an evil for a dead person because that “evil” could have no subject. The second maintains that to fear the prospect of one’s future nonexistence is unreasonable because no one...

In Western thought the other major traditional conception of immortality involves the notion that after death we shall be reanimated through a divine reconstitution of the bodily person. In Christianity, Judaism and Islam this is familiar as the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Unlike the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the doctri...

The obvious place to begin our inquiry is with an examination of the concept of death. As it happens, in recent years there has been considerable discussion in medical and legal circles about the definition of death.1 Of course, physicians have always been concerned with the matter of a reliable sign of death. However, until recently their chief co...

Would personal immortality have any value for one so endowed? An affirmative answer would seem so obvious to some that they might be tempted to go so far as to claim that immortality is a condition of life’s having any value at all. The claim that immortality is a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of life seems untenable (as we saw in the...

The belief that the notion of one’s own death is somehow problematic is a widespread one, quite apart from any purported analogy with the other minds problem. It is frequently supposed, for example, that there is some special difficulty involved in a person’s attempt to conceive of or imagine his or her own death. Indeed it is sometimes maintained...

Questions about the meaning of life have traditionally been regarded as being of particular concern to philosophers. However it is sometimes complained of contemporary analytic philosophy that it fails to address such questions. This charge is not really fair for there do exist illuminating recent discussions of these questions by analytic philosop...

The research for this work was undertaken during my tenure of a Senior Tutor­ ship in the Faculty of Arts and Music at the University of Otago (1983-85). Versions of some of the chapters herein have already been accepted for publication in the form of journal articles in Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, Sophia, and Religious Studies. My thanks...

We argue that if a terminally ill patient wants to know the truth about his or her condition, and the patient's doctor possesses that information, then the doctor is morally obliged to tell the truth. The argument is not based on any supposed right to information (even information about oneself); nor on any supposed moral obligation to tell the tru...

Would personal immortality have any value for one so endowed? An affirmative answer would seem so obvious to some that they might be tempted to go so far as to claim that immortality is a condition of life's having any value at all. The claim that immortality is a necessary condition for the meaningfulness of life seems untenable. What, however, of...

Questions about the meaning of life have traditionally been regarded as being of particular concern to philosophers. It is sometimes complained that contemporary analytic philosophy fails to address such questions, but there do exist illuminating recent discussions of these questions by analytic philosophers.1 Perhaps what lurks behind the complain...

Without Abstract

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Otago, 1986. Bibliography: leaves [234]-259.