Jain Moral Doctrine

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

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BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RELIGION AND MORALITY
which under any given circumstances is objectively right is of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all whose happiness is affected by the conduct". It is apparant that the acceptance of a distinction between different kinds of pleasure as also between the individualist and the social goal of pleasure, as made by the utilitarians, has the implication that the affective feelings of sensuous pleasure in an individual agent cannot be looked upon as a standard of moral value.
If then in the nature of the agent, we are to look for the basis of all moral judgments and if, further, the purely affective aspect of it does not yield a safe indication of it, we are left to the examination of the calmer and the more stable side of the human nature, its disposition'. While the importance of disposition in the moral valuation of acts is expressly acknowledged, some, however, deny the psychological reality of the dispositions. According to them, dispositions are only generalisations of affective feelings of the moment. They can at best be taken to express possibilities or probabilities of 'worth-reactions', and these thinkers support their theory by an appeal to the doctrine of 'value-movement. Values are said to change in accordance with the modifications of dispositions, due to suggestions, associations, habit, transference of feeling, development of powers of intelligence and abstraction and other such laws of value-movement. Dispositions are accordingly denied any real permanence and looked upon as artificial abstractions from transitory feelings and conative activities. Dispositions being devoid of real stability, they can. yield what is an instrumental value only,-a value true for the particular occasion, and no intrinsic value. It is true that two classes of values are generally made-viz. values of "condition', determined by desires and feelings of the moment or exigencies of circumstances and higher values of the person' and the community. But both these forms of value being subject to mutations in accordance with the laws of value-movement, no moral valuations of any real intrinsic worth can be justifiable.
It is, however, debatable whether all dispositions are genetically dependent on and derivable from the affective and conative experiences of the moment. Besides the values of "condition' and values 'personal (including social)-noted above, an important third form of valuation has been recognised which is termed 'overindividual'. In this last class of values, the moral worth of an act is not judged from its conduciveness to individual pleasure or to social welfare. Dispositions at the back of valuation in such cases appear to be clearly original and underived from the passing mental
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