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whereas their conscience sanctions general moi al duties as having greater moral value.
A set of concepts like the concept of disuterested action, thc concept of Law of Karma, inmortality of soul etc. are offered to guide aul individual to nesolve the conflict in favour of svadharma.
VI Conclusion
The relationslup among morality authority and society is highly complex. Certain nornis and values govern human practices. Tliey aic then codified at a certain stage of history in the sacied texts. To that extent textual authority depends upon society for its moal contents. On the other hand, once texts are accepted as authoritative the morality of new social practices is deterruined to a large extent by the authoritative texts. In this sense social structures and their functions get their sanction from textual authority. But once again, social forces lead to changes in the nornis sanctining certain practices and they are then codified in the new texts. Textual justification thus become less and less -rigid ini this process of continuous interaction between the text and the context. Any philosophical discussion of values and morality concentrating only on the categories of the individual and his development of moral character fails to realize that historical changes in the authoritativeness of the sources of morality reveal a trend towards 2011-textual sociologically sanctioned morality or scheme of values, to which an individual. is exposed.
Most of the recent discussions on Hindu ethics have taken into account only the moral ideas, values and duties and have hardly attended to the problem of the valid sources of the knowledge of the good and thic right. Once this epistemology of Hindu ethics is taken into account, a number of philosophically interesting points emerge. For example, it emerges that the relation between reason and revelation is not just a pioblem of theology: it is a live issue in ethics and sociology also.16 Similarly, we may make a new distinction between the non scriptural and scriptural prescriptivisor in ethics, which would lead to niore comprehensive discussion of the nature of moral language and inoral reasoning.
Knowledge of values, like knowledge of facts is organized differently during different periods of society. Explanation of facts and justification of values are not isolated cognitive phenomena. They are worked out
