Jain Moral Doctrine

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

Page 24

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RELIGION AND MORALITY
temper and actions'; and at another place he says: 'to preside and govern from the very economy of the constitution of man belong to it'. Butler's important conclusion is that from the supremacy of Conscience, the human nature clearly appears as a system or constitution, a system or constitution adapted to virtue. Unfortunately, this inner constitution of man which is thus adapted to virtue is not always kept in view, in its entirety, while explaining the basis of moral judgments. We have seen how the school of Hedonism, including its supporters in modern times emphasised the affective aspect of the human nature in this connection, how the extreme biologists, fixing upon the exercise of the fund of organic energy in man, laid exclusive stress on the conative side of a moral act, how again, Aristotle and the Stoics and others looked upon the perfection of man's pure rational character as the supreme goal of all truly moral activities. The human nature, not being restricted to any one of these three of its aspects, these views are necessarily but one-sided and to that extent, inadequate. We have seen how Hutcheson and his school of Intuitianism held that the power of morally judging an act was intuitive in human nature.
The moral sense is 'an immediate sense of right or wrong', which accompanies right or wrong action or disposition, 'without any view of further natural advantage from them'. Moral sense, aco them is 'reflex affection', aroused by “the very objects of the affection,” without any other consideration intervening. Moral judgments, emanating from the essential nature of the agent, thus fix upon its perceptual aspect alone, and the intuitionists do not take any account of the fact that a judgment regarding an act as a truly moral one is dependant not only upon its immediate recognition of it as such by the immediate perceptional faculty of the agent but also upon its consistency with the perfections of the cognitive, the affective and the conative powers in him as well. The theory of the intuitionists also accordingly suffers from an inherent one-sidedness in this respect. The test of the goodness or the badness of an act does not consist in the verdict of any one of the four essential faculties of the moral agent taken singly but lies in the fact whether or not, it involves all the four characteristics of the self viz. the rational, the volitional, the apprehensive and the affective taken together and as such, whether it leads to an all-round harmonious perfection of all of them, to a development, that is, completely free from the hindrance from any factors, external to the self.
To say, however, that morality or the passing of moral judgments on acts done is intuitive with us, is not to suggest that a truly moral life is actual with all the people. A moral judgment
15