Philosophical Background of Ethics in Governance and Society

Abstract

Ethics, morals, values and attitude are the guiding force of our behaviour; they are also the building block of human character. Ethics is also central to stability and continuity of any society. This article is first in the series of article on ethics which we collectively try to put forward. This article deals with philosophical background of strong ethics covering treatises of both western and Indian thinker, social reformers who contributed immensely to the domain of ethics and draws a comparison between them as ‘Socratic gesture of Gandhi’, ‘Gandhian impression on Mandela and Martin Luther king junior’, and their point of convergence and divergence and their implication on administration. Present paper concisely brings about the meaning, nature and scope of ethics and morality in public life, their interrelation, theoretical underpinning of ethics and its determinants, challenges and measure to overcome them. It highlights the need of strong internal locus of control i.e ethics, morals in public life. It also touches upon the relevance of strong institution of restraints like police, judiciary etc. The major identification that ethics pertains to are also focused such as, Ethics as fairness, Ethics as justice, Ethics as equitable distribution of resources. To further elaborate them, article briefly mentions Rawls theory of justice, entitlement approach of Amartya Sen, Rights based approach, Ending all forms of discrimination approach. It builds the theoretical base by defining ethics, its determinants and how not only ethics but sound ethics should be the building block of society based on just values like liberty, equality, accommodativeness, openness to all culture and eradicating the traditional institution like sati, purity-pollution, child marriage etc.  Further this paper also touches upon the governance underpinning of ethics which will be exclusively discussed in our series of article. The paper tried to bring out the issues of society, social justice, and internal security challenge along with governance in consideration with omission and commission of ethical conduct. Further the article delves insight upon the relationship between ethics and morality, their contradictions and dialectical relation, temporal and contextual relevance of one over other. The utility of ethical principles and morality is essential in various dimensions of public life, like social justice in society will be reflected if robustness of integrity is observed and repeated over generations. Good governance and social capital would be natural outcome of observing and maintaining robustness of ethics and morality in public life. Lastly it tried to link the national and international occurrence in consideration with ethics and integrity like recent killing of George Floyd in USA which display the prejudice and stereotype which exist in structurally stratified society which lead to discrimination, inequality and further social exclusion which leave the segment of society humiliated, subordinated and alienated. Hence, the purpose of the paper is to reflect that the strong ethics in society can reduce the social challenges, improve the governance, bring effectiveness in social justice measure, and further reduce the threat to internal security.