Jain Moral Doctrine

Author(s): Harisatya Bhattacharya
Publisher: Jain Sahitya Vikas Mandal

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BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RELIGION AND MORALITY
some of our moral ideas, while innate in a particular generation, were nevertheless produced by circumstances, pressing upon their remote ancestors, which later on became intuitive in their successors by the law of heredity. It would be seen, however, that the evolutionists themselves confess that those external factors surrounding the ancestral individuals brought about the moral judgments in them, not because of themselves but because they were found to be useful or conducive to a happy life, either of those individuals or of the race. Thus the ultimate explanation of the generation of moral ideas involves an appeal to the subjective character of man.
Moral values thus emanate from the nature of man. From this, some thinkers are disposed to attribute their origin to the nervous condition of the experiencing individuals. It is said that the valuing subject has the mastery over only a limited amount of energy, so that a moral judgment is the outcome of that limited nervous energy being well applied. Where the operation of that fund of nervous energy is successful and self-complete, it evokes an idea of goodness about the activity and where the application of that nervous energy is unsuccessful or is hindered, the act becomes neutral and in extreme cases, immoral. It is submitted that even this biological account of an organic genesis of moral judgments, refers to the experiencing subject as the agent who pronounces those judgments and that until and unless those judgments are passed by that conscious agent, the operations of those nervous processes are pure ly un-moral, just like those external circumstances which surround him.
It is thus that the moral worth of an act or activity depends upon the mental state in the doer. Now, while this position is acknowledged, it is generally maintained that the imposition of a moral value upon an act consists in a reaction upon the external phenomena, from within the self. Moral worth thus implies a functional relation between an active subject and an external object. According to Ehrenfels, the process of moral valuation is dependent upon the nature and intensity of desire in one, while Meinong contends that it is determined by the volitional activity, evoked in the agent by the external object. The two views,-one emphasising the affective nature of man and the other, the conative admit, however, that the imposition of moral value is fundamentally the result of relating the agent's desire to its object but that the immediate sense of the moral worth, as determined by the nature of the desire or the affective state is the effect of the immediate applica
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