Moral is Political

Context: In an age of increasing “globalisation of selfishness”, there is an urgent need to understand and practice the moral leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and re-evaluate the concept of politics.

Gandhi’s view on Politics: Role of Ethics and Morality in Politics

• Politics is shaped by moral power: For Gandhi, violence was a sign of failure of a legitimate political power. 

• The critic of a modern state: For Gandhi, the modern state contained forces that threatened, rather than enhanced liberty. 

• Democracy as a value and not as a political regime: needs to be created and cherished.

• Act of consciousness: Gandhi justified politics not based on institutions of a liberal constitutional state, but as an act of consciousness.

• The Gandhian appeal to the ethical in politics was not only a way to seek Truth, but also of coming to know oneself in ever greater depth.

• A basic condition of political action is the elimination of violence: by shorting the circuit of resentment, hatred, and coercion; Gandhi did not see the goal of political action as the immediate capture of office. 

• Life of excellence as a transformative force: Gandhi showed that a life of excellence is an agency and a transformative force, an experience of conscience underpinning the harmony between ethics and politics.
• Politics of non-violence: used as a method to mobilise collective power in a manner that attends to its own moral education in an exemplary and innovative way. 
• The Gandhian effort for non-violent politics was the cultivation of one’s capacity for ethical citizenship. 

• Ethics of Responsibility: underlined Gandhi’s non-violent politics, and he further argued for a dedicated and committed political ethos, which did not accept the necessity of “dirty hands” in politics. 

• Ethics tells us what it ought to be. It enables man to know how he should act. 

• Ensuring long-term social stability among nations: Gandhi gave importance to move from violence to politics. This transition could not take place without the intervention of ethics in politics. 

• Inwardly empowering the Society: Human beings are capable of love, friendship, solidarity and empathy. 

• Morality in Politics: Gandhi’s view of morality is not a denial of politics.

• Politics as a work of heart and not merely of reason: Gandhi believed that the heart, and not reason, is the seat of morality. “Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts”.

• Gandhi insisted on the autonomous nature of the moral act. 

• Gandhi’s moral idealism was completed by a political realism which sought the construction of a democratic society. 

Gandhi’s view on Shared Humanity:

• Gandhi advocated awareness of the essential unity of humanity: Non-violence is an ontological truth that followed from the unity and interdependence of humanity and life. 
•  That awareness called for critical self-examination and a move from egocentricity towards a “shared humanity.” 

• Shared humanity needs to remove its ethical imperfections: and making itself able to live with global challenges.