Mahavira and his Teaching

Author(s): C C Shah, Rishabhdas Ranka, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: Bhagwan Mahavir 2500th Nirvan Mahotsava Samiti

Page 140

RELEVANCE OF JAINA ETHICS IN THE PRESENT AGE
Shashi Bhushan Prasad Sinha
It is desirable to evaluate the relevance of Jaina ethics in this grand and auspicious year of Jainism. As a matter of fact, ethics, in general and Jaina ethics in particular has to be given its due importance in this age of meta-ethics which is trying to undermine traditional ethics. It is well-known that after 1930 there has been evolutionary developments in the realm of philoshophy due to logical positivistic trends. Not only metaphysics is being dethroned as full of pseudo-statements, but ethical judgments are also being under-rated on the basis of emotivism. According to this view, ethical or moral judgements are expressions of our emotions and so they are like our appreciation of beauty, ugliness etc. They express nothing but our likes and dislikes. This trend in philosophy in general and ethics in particular can be rightly attributed to scientism. This is the view which explicitly or implicitly holds that science sufficies as the basis for our action and belief.
So, it is appropriate firstly to briefly and critically discuss the relevance of ethics in general in this age of science. In other words, it will not be out of place here to show briefly the relationship which we can conceive between the two, namely, science and ethics. In introductory books of ethics, this question has been raised whether ethics is a science and it is seen that rightly it is pointed out that ethics is certainly science if this term is understood in the wider or liberal sense. In other words, ethics is science if science stands for systematic and rational study of a specific subject-matter. But science in the narrow sense means only empirical and natural science. This is perhaps the prevalent meaning of the word and in this sense ethics is obviously not a science. We may add in this context that ethics is rightly regarded as a
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