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knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil is to be acquired afterwards, moral life is to be practised. Thus the conviction of the Jaina is that the knowledge of value and obligations is tied up with our feelings and that in their absence we are ethically blind. In fact, our feelings and knowledge are so interwoven into a complex harmony that we have never a state of mind in which both are not present in some degree. So the claims of cognitivists and non-cogintivists are one sided and are very antagonistic to the verdict of experience. Blanshard3 rightly remarks 'Nature may spread before us the richest possible benquet of good things, but if we can look at them only with the eye of reason, we shall care for none of these things; they will be alike insipid. There would be no knowledge of good and evil in a world of mere knowers, for where their is no feeling, good and evil would be unrecognisable. Again 'a life that directs itself by feeling even of the most exalted kind will be like a ship without a rudder'. Thus the nature of ethical judgement according to the Jaina is cognitive-affective. "The achievement of good is a joint product of our power to know and our power to feel". 4
The next question in meta-ethics is to ask how our ethical judgements (value and obligation) can be justified. That the ethical judgements are objectively true need not imply that their justification can be sought in the same manner as the justification of factual judgements of of ordinary and scientific nature. The reason for this is that value cannot be derived from fact, ought from is. In factual judgements our expressions are value-neutral, but in ethical judgements we cannot be indifferent to their being sought by ourselves or by others. That is why derivation of ought from is, value from fact is unjustifiable. The value judgements, according
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Spiritual Awakening (Samyagdarśana) and Other Essays
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