1

Chapter Five

Philosophic Foundations of Human Rights: Amartya Sen’s Idea of “Empathy” as a Core

Universal Value in the Formulation of Indian Human Rights

Abstract:

My study evaluates the problem of relationship between the cognizing individuals and the real

world of the abused in terms of the notion of inter-subjectivity. A dominant thinking about the

East/West philosophical conflict is spelled out by Arthur Schlesinger, who claims that the noble

idea of human rights is purely Western in origin and uses his claim to cast doubt on the value on

non-Western cultures in general (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 1991). However, many passages in the

Upanishads are engaged in demonstrating that Brahman (absolute reality) is not on mind, space,

or god, but debates, a concept dear to Amartya Sen (The Argumentative Indian, 2005), who

insists that arguments are not and could not be caused in the narrow, atomic, linear sense

implied in the term, “argument.” To appreciate philosophical arguments about human rights, we

have to invoke the notion in an explicit purpose, which pulls us toward the objectives the

thinkers and Indian “seers” themselves envisage and articulate for social justice, which is at the

core of Sen’s idea of human rights. In contrast to the sources of European Enlightenment with

institutional values, he argues that Indian various strains of old and new philosophies are in a

position to develop and diffuse a modern discourse of human rights. The debate is about whether

on an international level, Sen’s theory of empathetic ethical judgments can be adequate in a

functioning universal system of human rights. Knowing that empathy gap is difficult to bridge,

this article asks if Sen is able to connect people’s capricious emotional reactions to our distinctly

viewed priorities to enhance human rights.

Inward Empathy and the Possibility of Good Life

Lyn Hunt argues that human rights rely upon our ability to empathize with others, and

this extension of empathy would address a problem posed by individualism. Her chief question

is: Should we valorize a definition of empathy that centers on the ability to see others like

ourselves? This is one of the prime concerns of analysts who interpret empathy mostly in terms

of logical reasoning.1 Being a social epistemology, empathy, is well related to knowledge in at

least two ways: (a) empathy helps to offer evidence for emotional validity, and so, solidify our

knowledge, and (b) empathy helps to broaden our knowledge by allowing the ability to gain

access to what others have constituted and known. Both are in play in the formulation of

philosophical ideas for human rights, which demand a rigorous and objective account of life.

Positivism and empirical science can at best apprise us of “facts” but not of “essential being.”

Self, being an essential entity, has a significant implication for the understanding of non-dualism,

which reverses the self/other dichotomy. Eventually our biases are removed and we find the

means to undo social injustice. Of course, measuring the inner world remains a huge issue in any

empathy-related action.2 Robert Reich argues that empathy encourages us to reach out and want

1 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

2 Kevin Hermberg, “Empathy and Knowledge: Husserl’s Introduction to Phenomenology” (January 1,

2003), Dissertations (1962-2010), paper AA13093144, http;//epublicatins.marquette, edu/disserations

2

to help people, who are not in our social group, even those who belong to stigmatized groups,

such as the poor and socially excluded.3 Research shows that inequality can reduce empathy,

because people show less empathy when they attain higher social status.4 This empathetic

identification is likely to create on a moral order that happens to erode particularistic moral

order.

Cognitive empathy, developing after three or four years of age from birth, helps in

understanding other people’s experience, and some studies show even a child can develop

relationship with other people around him. However, neuroscientists argue that the activity

should be intense enough to break a notional threshold of awareness. 5 Being mindfully aware of

our surroundings is crucial to our spirit for empathy. Despite the existence of vast wealth and

opportunities in most societies, many are perennially and habitually abused, and this reality

presents a continuing paradox at the core of human rights policies. Despite oneself being an

embodied being, one has an ambiguous two-pronged “perceived-perceiver” nature, and this calls

for inter-subjectivity that is normally expressed through words. Since language, being far from a

self-activity, is a phenomenon in-between, and the language provides dynamics of relationship

between empathy and others.

Ego-centric word is a phenomenon of the transition from the inter-psychic to the intra-

psychic functioning, i.e., from the social and collective activity of a child to his more

individualized activity, a pattern of development common to the higher psychological functions.

Relationship between language and thinking appears variously in inter-subjectivity in the

philosophical discourse about human rights. 6 Taking a different approach to inter-subjectivity

in Indian personality development, Saha remains critical of Sudhir Kakar’s “weak

differentiation” of the super-ego and the ego priority of the empathetic Indian “communal

consciousness,” which misleadingly generates a depressing “pathology,” which, Kakar insists,

provides an adversial community relationship.7 In addition to shifting social perception to group

attributes, our group commitment coupled with emotion is likely to implicate collective esteem

and motive behavioral differentiation. 8

(accessed on 2/12/2013). J. D. Trout, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Society (New Viking: J.D. Trout, 2009. For self-other dichotomy and status of embodied self, see Ramesh Kumar Sharma, “Embodiment, Subjectivity, and Disembodied Existence,” Philosophy East & West, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 2011). 3 Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991). Reich asks, “Who is Us?” which he answers not in terms of ownership but in terms of personnel, as does Michael Porter (1990) who sees donors as the source of needed skills. 4 “Global Ethics Network,” Ethics and International Affairs (2014).

5 Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwnitis and The Misrepesentation of Humanity (London:

Acumen, 2011), pp. 107-108. 6 Franson Manjal, “Dialogics, Or The Dynamics of Inter-subjectivity,” International Journal Dravidian Linguistics, vol.

2, no. 2 (1999), pp. 127-134. 7 Santosh Saha, “Sudhir Kakar and the Socio-Psychological Explanation of Hindu-Muslim Communal Riots in India,”

Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 55, no. 4 (2009), pp. 565-583. 8 Naomi Ellersmers and associates, “Self and social Identity” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 53 (February 2002),

pp. 161-186.

3

However, since the historian’s “empathetic” capacity has to “enter the spirit” of an age, it

is conditioned by the spirit of his own age, an inevitable relativity infects the historical

understanding.9 J.S. Stuart Mill, a positivist, ignores that general property of “Life” that gives

shape and identity to the very parts in terms of which he hopes to arrive at an overall picture. It

must then be through something similar to empathy or intuition that is the basis for the atomic

parts.10

Beginning in the fourteenth century, Indian realist philosophers of the “self” commence

a fascinating examination of the problem of one and many selves, and introduce the notion of

emotion as a tool. Thus, we need to consider the extent to which emotions like shame, guilt and

repentance, help constitute our sense of self. Skeptics differ as to the usefulness of emotion in the

analysis of human rights, because the field of human rights theory is also mired in debates that

seem to support the human rights theory industry, more than human rights activism. The reason-

emotion opposition, which lies at the heart of the prevailing legal regulatory model, is

scientifically unsustainable; even to assume that this is the paradigm that guides law disregards

as a whole body of law that in fact handles emotions without repressing or ignoring them.11

W.V. Quine’s argues that philosophy has a limited role in an empathetic action, because we can

neutralize our knowledge by many other factors. He denies the distinction between knowledge

that can be acquired through conceptual analysis and knowledge that could be acquired through

experience.12

In other words, the issue is between the a priori and the empirical, meaning that

there can be no existence without identity.

In the human rights literature examining universalistic values, there is an increasing body

of scholarship in economics, social sciences and psychology that intends to rehabilitate human

emotion (empathy) and review human behavior relying on models of “cognition” where

emotions are at least equal partners in human judgment.13

Derek Parfit interprets this connection

as between physical and mental events. The very “one-ness” of the relationship thus is

constituted by the longitudinal unification of experiences. 14

In this respect, emotions are inputs

of experience starting with the sense organs and appear to be unending and sustained causal

chains, linking inputs and outputs. The quality of inter-personal relationship turns out to be the

question of identification of values and their guiding principles, because our actions are neither

simply free nor simply unfree. Human action is complex and medley of neutral activity realizing

it may be inevitable, or yield to “detours.” How can we know that some of the behaviors we

supposed we had desired, we in fact had not? The answer is to observe examples of “counterfeit”

desires in which we have the intuition feeling that we desired an action but could not have done

so due the sequences of events. However counterfeit, the subjects’ stories about help, carry a

9 David E. Cooper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), p.210.

10 J.S. Mills, The System of Logic (London: Longman, 1986).

11 Andras Sajo, “Empathy and Human Rights: The Case of Slavery,” Constitutional Sentiments (Yale University Press,

2011). 12

W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60 (1950), pp. 20-43. 13

Shibajiban Bhattacharyya, “Some Indian Theories of the Body,” in P.K. Sengupta, Freedom, Transendence and Identity (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 988). 14

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 210-214.

4

bonus for their self-esteem, because they allow themselves to believe that they are always “at the

helm of their consciousness.”15

Egalitarian liberalism as explained by Fraser, Honneh, and Young argue for a

reconciliation of re-cognitive and redistributive justice, mostly relying on the need of

entitlement. John Rawls (1971) combines individual liberty and social equality into one ideal but

he minimizes the emotional aspect in reshaping the priorities.16

Our debate is about whether

society insulates people from the damages of bad fortune or social neglect and yet may not act.

How do we identify the centrality of the mind-body action and reaction? There is a growing body

of literature dealing with complex consciousness that permits planning, deliberation, and flexible

behavior allowing possible courses of action to enhance human rights of various sorts. Bjorn

Merker argues that consciousness stimulates real world for the control of goal-oriented

activities.17

Controversy is about the identification of complex elements that needed to be

verified to examine the quality of empathetic action.

First, we cannot be the same person over time in the presence of human rights abuses; (b)

Separated body or mind or brain alone cannot provide elements of virtues; (c) Identification

depends on our psychology providing continuity between our inner self and the outer aspect;

mere joining like an engine may not be adequate in any empathetic gesture. Personal identity is

something that begins with the awakening of the conscious human body to itself, and thus, there

is a gradual development in emotion culminating in intervention. These assertions go against

Kant who erroneously generalizes by writing “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany

all my representations.” The standard account of “knowing” should enable in terms of

justification must enable one to understand its sensibility to causal factors. Again, one’s knowing

in terms of causal factors must enable one to understand its sensitivity in terms of justification of

the aspects concerning rights. Since these tasks are not nominal, my argument is that the gap can

largely be narrowed by a philosophical and informational interventions. Amartya Sen’s politico-

philosophical prescription argues that well-being involves more than income. All things being

equal, a person with a poor public education is worse off than one with a high-quality public

education. Some goods are more central to our well-being than heated cars seats.18

Thus, there is

a scope for the empathetic intervention. Of course, we need to avoid thinking that conflicts

within conceptions of human rights can easily be resolved into higher theoretical syntheses.

“Self” and Empathetic Interaction for Human Rights

15

J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society (New York: Viking,2009), pp. 70-71, 16

S.A. Hamed Hosseini, “Global Complexities and the Rise of Global Justice Movement: A New Notion of Justice,” The Global Studies Journal (Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground Publishing, 2009). 17

Bjorn Merker, “The Liabilities of Mobility: A Selection Pressure for the Transition to Consciousness of the Animal Evolution,” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 14 (2005), pp. 115-118. For further detailed analysis see, Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, pp. 176-178. 18

Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, pp. 272-273; E. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, N. Kemp Smith (trans.) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003); Amartya Sen, “Rights and Capabilities,” in A Sen (ed.), Resources, Values, and Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 307-324; Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 40-41; J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap, p.12.

5

An empathetic “self” is difficult to estimate objectively, although several sociologists

including Charles Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Erving Goffman, view self as the concept

of symbolic interactionism. This symbolic interactionism, arising from the Chicago School of

Sociology, is concerned with the development of the self with regard to the interaction of that

self with others. An understanding of self and its action relative to others has been

operationalized in two ways: First, in terms of the summed discrepancies between subject’s and a

close associate’s, or group’s, trait ratings of an individual. Second, in terms of the summed

discrepancies of a person’s actual ratings of himself and the subject’s presumption of how the

person would rate himself. Even if empathy in both cases here are of low-order, correlations are

normally found across instruments as well as across individuals, suggesting that a factor,

however small, like empathy may exist.19

Because of psychological variables in -self-

confidence, values, anxiety, and collective atmosphere, some objections to the procedure has

been raised. Here, the social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978) and self-categorization theory (Turner,

1978) emphasize the interaction between social identity as a perceiver factor implicating

different aspects of the self, and social contextual factors that either enhance or diminish the

meaningless of personal as well as social identities. Freud sees this process as a path leading

from identification by way of imitation to empathy. A seminal study finds that people, who

rescued Jews during the Holocaust had been encouraged at the young age to take perspective of

others.20

The social-cognitive “self” standing for inter-subjectivity offers an agentic perspective in

which self is a self-organizing, proactive, and self-regulating (Bandura). In Bandura’s estimate

self is human agency which an individual agency can only be expressed through society’s

structure. The view of behavior presents us with a distorted picture not only of behavior but also

of the mind. In that case, an empathetic approach constitutes an assumed phenomenological

approach to inter-subjectivity. Sen’s assumption is that empathy discloses rather than establishes

inter-subjectivity. Unless self-experience is embodied and embedded inter-subjectivity, it is

neither possible nor comprehensive. Rather than first establishing inter-subjectivity, empathy

may disclose an inter-subjectivity already at work. The shift from the priori of a transcendental

knowledge to the communicational a priori involves a transformation of the transcendental

idealism of Emmanuel Kant.21

The idea, “Justice must be seen in order to be done” can be traced

as far back as Cicero, through Kant, Mill, as well as Rawls, and now Sen. Habermas’ discourse-

theoretic interpretation of human rights may displace the basis of rights from qualities of the

rights-bearing subject to our presupposition of a prior higher inter-subjectivity.22

Do these theories of empathy constitute the base and center of a theory of inter-

subjectivity? In most cases, the relation between self and others becomes merely a contingent.

19

Victor B. Cline and James M. Richards, Accuracy of Inter-personal Perception: A General Trait? Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 60 (1960), pp. 1-7. See also, “Sympathy and Empathy,” International Encyclopedia of Social Science (1968). 20

Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jewish and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 357-358. 21

Karl-Otto Apel, cited in Franson Manjali, “Dialogics or The Dynamic of Inter-subjectivity,” International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, vol. 28, no. 2 (1999), pp. 127-134, 22

Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), chapter three.

6

The encounter with the alien other is often turned into a mystery.23

Amartya Sen argues that “the

conceptual doubts must also be satisfactorily addressed, if the idea of human rights is to

command reasoned loyalty and to establish a secure intellectual standing.” He further insists that

there is a “relationship between the force and appeal of human rights, on the one hand, and their

reasoned justification,” on the other.24

As Nagel points out, a necessary requirement for

justification and coherent reductionism is that the entity to be reduced is duly understood.25

Sen’s

arguments for more empathetic strategies with several stances have three features.

First, since being aware that individual reasons and emotions are not always free from

conflict, Sen observes the means of carrying us from empathy for an individual to an empathetic

social policy. Second, since in any interaction the optimistic bias and unreasonable calculations

stand in the way, he resorts to suppositional reasoning or tarka (debate), which gives

knowledge of the universalization by grounding extrapolation. The Nyaya logic claims that

doubt is infectious. Suppositional reasoning supports one’s means of acquiring evidence but is

not itself a source of evidence. Its role is pragmatic and as such situational; to change the

standard of evidence, we need to examine the specific context. Third, in addition to the physical

and cultural worlds, there exists the human person, who almost constantly attempts to restructure

the world according to the needs of the socially excluded, but the connection between empathy

and realization is not straight. For Sen, language, infused with emotion, is not mere one, but

several, expressing the relational nature of human person to have good life, as civilization

demands. Here, “self” regards its condition as more privileged than that of the socially excluded,

and so, the otherness of the other is reconstructed in the face of encounter with the alien other.

Philosophically, reflection about human conditions is not a kind of empathy, but a kind of self-

awareness that is characterized by an internal division.26

Indian philosophy of empathy is based on knowledge-sharing deals with the transfer of

world knowledge from one individual to another by following specific patterns of inferences

using reasoning procedures. Reasoning system performing analysis over the represented

knowledge may apply the style of knowledge representation based on Indian philosophy to

imitate human inferencing. Taking clues from Indian philosophical interactive

transcendentalism, Sen insists that human “selfs” act as maps for organizing physical systems in

time and space where selfs are entities but they do not co-exist with material entities. Whereas a

popular rendering of dualism holds that incongruous entities, such as mind and body, cannot

interact, Descartes claims that they do. With his usual practical understanding of philosophy in a

comparative vein, Sen invokes ancient “progressive” Buddhism that is a conception of

individuals that preserves liberty without grounding it in a domain of interiority of private

access, making a cleat-cut distinction between individual private wills. Buddhist “no self” is a

complete rejection of these residually Cartesian notions of interior private wills of space,

however individuated. In this instance, it is one’s status as an individual which is the basis of

23

D. Zahavi, “Alterity in Self,” in S. Gallagher and associates (eds.), Ipseity and Atterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Inter-subjectivity (Rouen: Universities Press, 2004), pp. 137-152. 24

Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development, vol. 6, no. 2 (2005), pp. 151-166. 25

T. Nagel, “What is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, vol. 83 (1974), pp. 435-450. 26

Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investing the First-Person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 91.

7

one’s claim to human rights and respect; the affirmation of those rights rests only on one’s

common ground with all other individuals, and arises from anything that makes one unique

among them.

We arrive at our inner empathy, which views our emotions, interests, and wishes, as if

from nowhere, without selfish involvement.27

The Buddhist proposal implies that philosophy

must be supplemented by techniques that achieve transformation of stance that philosophy only

announces, techniques of contemplation under the direction of a spiritual teacher. Discarding the

view that the post-modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged, Sen shows how individuals

can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of inner tensions and external pressures.

Empathy, he adds, provides a moral burden which implies lifting up and it is the minimum pre-

requisite for human rights, an idea demanding justification. For Chalmers, an epistemic

possibility is a maximally specific way the world might be, for all we know a-priori. As we

collect evidence, we rule out epistemic possibilities.28

Idea of Liberty: Human Rights

A plural space comprised of many local campaigns demanding the relevance of

particular-localized modes of social justice into practice calls for a cohesive global, if not

universal, movement for human rights. The “Buddhist values” per se are not antithetical to

notions of liberty, “human rights,” human dignity, autonomy, and responsibility. In contrast to

the Western philosophy, the Buddhist key is to dismantle the concept of dualism as a stance,

where cognitive theory extends the concept of human agency to collective agency, which is often

the only way an individual can achieve success. These types of narratives have an important

function in providing a “stable center,” which according to Chakarvarty-Spivak, reflects people’s

common desire for mastery away from the fixed moral center. A sense of deconstruction may

take a step toward emancipation.29

In the dialectic of cause and effect, the notion of belonging

reaches the fullest development in the concept of reciprocity. Its primary goal is to deal with

power of reflection, reflecting social responsibility. Our local empathetic social action becomes

global in its reach, and generates processes that affect the world of the excluded.

Nevertheless, the state and socioeconomic elites have a dominant power base, and thus, it

necessarily demands a special countervailing social responsibility that becomes a remedial

power, which must develop strategies to attain human rights of various kinds. Inter-subjectivity

requires an interactive turn. The mainstream of Greece-based deduction-centered discipline is

concerned with systematization of valid modes of deductive inference, but logic in India

although concerned with the problem of validity of inference as a mode of justification of

knowledge claims, focusses on the relation of pervasion (vyapti),30

which is the invariable

relation between what is inferred and the reason from which the inference is made. The vyapti as

27

Jonardon Ganeri, “The Hindu Syllogism: 19th

-Century Perceptions of Indian Logical Thought,” Philosophy East & West, vol. 46, no. 1 (1996), pp. 1-16. 28

Shamik Dasgupta, “Inexpressible Ignorance,” Paper presented at the Syracuse Conference (November, 2013). 29

David M Boje et al., “Deconstructing the Narrative-Story Duality-Construction a Space For Ethics,” Paper at a Symposium (May 14-16, 2008), University of Leicester, UK. 30

Sara L. Uckelman, “Indian Logic and Medieval Western Logic,” Paper presented at “A Day of Indian Logic,” Amsterdam, Holland (November 2009).

8

the universal proposition must be the conclusion not of inference, but of an induction that

depends on perception. In that sense, knowledge, as both Advaita Vedanta and Mimamsa argue,

knowledge by vyapti is instrumental in attaining liberation from ignorance as well as human

sufferings. Going beyond instrumental means, Sen adds that any real society as a care-giving

society, must discover ways of coping with facts of human sufferings and dependency that are

compatible with dignity.

Many of ordinary citizens, explains J.D. Trout, have only bad options in the first place or

“are ambushed by unconscious cognitive bias,” and thus, we are left with an empathy gap

between people separated by personality and culture. Putting a face on desperation makes the

ignored victims seem familiar, but we do not know just how powerful an identification could be

and how passionless the reaction to statistical victims. As Sartre pointedly argues, the problem is

not to find examples of pre-reflective self-awareness, but to understand how one can pass from

this self-awareness that constitutes the being of consciousness to the reflective knowledge of self,

which is founded upon it. Thus, both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty question the absolute power of

reflection. Differing with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty calls into question whether a transcendental

motive informs us of what philosophers claim it is. He takes self-confidence and the relation with

another to be mutually incompatible determinations. However, both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

argue for inter-subjectivity to have a place in the intestinal relations to the world. Because the

structure of the world contains essential references to others, subjectivity cannot be understood

except as inhabiting a world that necessarily shares with others.31

Nevertheless, Davidson asks

how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of

our own minds without resorting to observation or evidence. It is a mistake to collapse these into

two, or taken in isolation. 32

Then another questions arises. How much can a liberal society

expect a citizen to sacrifice for the good of others; we should not expect a healthy youth to give

his life so that his heart might be donated to an aging individual. So we expect some natural

sympathy from others. Still, there is a gap. A new question remains to be answered: how can we

expect people to risk their income being distributed to others who might need it more?33

Nevertheless, these theories of knowledge-sharing and the Buddhist non-dual vision face

some interpretive problems. First, if we narrowly focus on empathy, our line of investigation

may be promising, but it tends to belittle the relevance of the concrete face-face encounter.

Second, we also ignore the significance of the transcendence of the other, and that is

unsatisfactory. Third, we lose the significance of motivation as well. Existence constitutes have

three elements: substances, qualities, and motions. An individual substance such as a pot can be

bearer of diverse qualities and motions. That the pot as property-bearer is distinct from its

multiple elements is also said to account for its inter-subjectivity, that is, one and the same

thing’s perceptibility by different perceivers as well as by the same perceiver at different times.

Lower animals can perceive and desire, and so they have mind; they behave in goal-directed

ways, but they have no consciousness. This mental process, using consciousness, carries with it

multiple motivations. Anthropologists report that Indian acquaintances express the “the idea that

31

Dan Zahvai, Subjectivity and Self-hood, pp. 165-17. 32

Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 208. 33

Trout, The Empathy Gap, pp. 75-76, 178.

9

most people need to be protected from their own vulnerabilities,” and reject “the idea of

autonomous functioning and self-sufficient voluntarism.”34

Many of these behaviors are culturally motivated. Social formation has a cultural role as

well. For Anti-psychologism, inter-subjective understanding results from the exercise of practical

perceptual knowledge-how, and thus, this “knowledge-how” is derived through processes of

socialization that builds on pre-rational dispositions to react and perceive other human beings in

certain ways. Anti-psychologism holds that the practical knowledge at play in our everyday

realistic interactions with one another can be genuinely cognitive and expressive with

motivational aspects of everyday reality. 35

Sen insists that motivational aspect must take care of

central capabilities of the agents, who should be capable of getting various capabilities as the

basic right. A woman cannot function well in office due to her carrying heavy burdens at home.

Sen’s focus implicitly shifts from the empathy of the privileged to the outrage of the excluded.

Motivation and Empathy

If interaction were a cause only, the cause itself could engineer action, but there is

obviously something more than a cause. “The idea of myself as a cause of my actions, or even as

“cause of my actions, or of my actions as an expression of myself” seems close to the “idea of

freedom.” The locus of free will is a field of intention, rooted in the self and its world, setting

actions look like events that happen to the actors.36

The implication is that reasons are a forward-

looking affirmation of an expression of myself, and actions cannot be caused by a narrow linear

sense implied in the term, cause. We often ignore the hinterland of “self if we observe the cause

of the context. In short, behind the voluntary action, there are huge internal interactions to

generate a deliberate motive. Even the unity of the conscious moment eludes neural material

explanation.

Movements and thoughts rooted on knowledge and empathy could not be achieved by

biological drive or motives that are themselves seen as quasi-material causes. Indeed, wishes,

intentions and other propositional attitudes are not simply caused, nor simply causes. Motives are

portions of a self-world that is more or less of a piece with other parts of the self and its world.37

If motives are not biologically driven, then we must recollect the origins of the theory in the

problem of moral motivation. The objection to the usefulness of the doctrine of karma,

understood as an account of moral motivation, is that the doctrine appears to foreclose the

possibility of altruism, genuine moral concern for the interests of others. If my only interest in

good action is prudential, what reasons can there be for furthering the well-being of suffering

others, which is also a concern for the karma ethic? One way to reply to this would be to show

that each of us benefits from the existence of public goods, like peace and security, and general

trustworthiness of others in need. If giving way to another car may not get me home faster, but if

it encourages a general practice of considerate driving, that would be better for me in the long

run. In this sense, respecting the Dharma is conducive to the “crossing over.” In the hands of the

34

Stigler R. Schweder and G. Hardt (eds.), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development (New York: Cambridge university Press), pp. 130-204. 35

William Hasselberger, “Human Agency, Reasons, and Inter-subjective Understanding,” The Royal Institute of Philosophy (October 2013), pp. 135-160. 36

Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, p. 250. 37

Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind, pp. 250-251.

10

Buddha, the doctrine of karma, the denial of self, and the Upanishadic “universalization” of self

may partake in a common diagnosis of the origins of sufferings, the roots of which in both cases

are viewed to lie with the erroneous idea that minds have real borders.38

These moral

observations raise a difficult question: When is the representation of suffering and degradation

an act of empathy and when is it simply exploitative?

Thus, the power of our inward motive does not emanate from the elaborate logical

architecture of first principles or abstract theories of justice, but from a natural sense of common

humanity, our empathy, which is other-oriented for a projected good life for many others. For

both Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, this relationship is transformed into the relationship

between physical capabilities and human rights, defining a partial account of social justice. Sen’s

notion of quasi optimality, being a motive, is its world, generated by categorical preference

relations in a way which makes it coincide with optimality in cases where all finite subsets have

quasi-optimal elements, and it is generated by relations of revealed preference, which yield

conditions for admissibility. On another occasion, Sen calls the optimal options as his

“maximal.” For Herzberger, “liberal” conception of optimality may be interpreted easily in terms

of categorical preference relations.

What is crucial here is the criterion for determining the set of options from which an

agent is allowed to choose in cases where decision-making is under unresolved conflict. This

calls for some methodological innovations relating to identification of appropriate mode of

understanding and ascertaining social choice for the implementation of elements of rights.

According to Sen’s account of social choice, groups do choose from among the social states in

an environment. Arrow thinks that in a social choice, we have choice without a choosing subject

and preference without preferring subject just as, for Popper, in science, we have knowledge

without a knowing subject, a variety of Buddhist “no self.” Popper maintains that theories that

have been corroborated should not be treated as true or even highly likely; instead it is merely a

rational choice to accept and utilize these theories until better scientific theories are presented.

However, this may lead a reader of Popper’s analysis about inductive logic and science –

scientific knowledge itself is merely an infinite regress of inductive knowledge, which constantly

replaces one theory with a newer, more encompassing one that also hinge on inductive logic. At

the inductive stage, one evaluates the rival hypotheses in order to identify which of them are to

be rejected on the basis of the evidence so that the disjunction of the survivors can be added to

the background knowledge. At the inductive phase of inquiry items may be added to the

background knowledge. What counts as evidence matters, and too much or too little is counted

as evidence, inductive principles will be misapplied.39

An affective empathic resonance is thought to be based on automatic motivational

perception-action processes and almost mirror neutron system-aligns individuals’ internal states

with those of others. If famine management and distribution of life-saving goods and supplies

become merely a government initiated “foundational” concept, then we miss intuitive social

interactions. If the distribution “after famine” or during the famine results from our foundational

sympathy, then being foundational, it does not constitute an empathic concern, and as such,

38

Jonardon Ganeri, The Concealed Art of The Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.232-235. 39

C.G. Hemppel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 63.

11

sympathy is not sufficient to motivate our pro-social behavior. Sen argues that an emotion, like

Adam Smith’s “sympathy,” or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “pity,” is laudable but it still egoistic for

“one is pained at others’ pain,” such as in seeing a child tortured, and “the pursuit of one’s utility

is helped by “sympathetic action.” Instead, Sen proposes “commitment” coupled with empathy

as a better option since “it does not make you feel personally worse off but you think it is wrong

and you are ready to do something to stop.”40

He argues that our empathy is not a foundational

fixed quality that we can born with or without.

Our understanding of the abused is affected by how it is cast and the patterns of

connection suggested by the cast. J.D. Trout calls for information sharing, public deliberation,

and empirical evaluation of interventions to go beyond foundationalism.41

More positively, we

may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the

traditional problem of the regress of justifications – what justifies the justifiers? Thus, Sen is

critical of the interpretation of the famine management in Bengal because analysts fail to

recognize that the authorities’ intentionality is not simply something that is ascribed. It must be a

basic feature of human consciousness as it begins with perception. Thus, Sen’s considers the

famine management not only as institutional, but intuitional as well. As Sen repeatedly insists,

the simple idea of capabilities as a space within which any comparison is made and inequalities

evaluated cannot be adequate for human rights.

Economics and Empathy

Economists inform us that the people often choose the option that promotes their well-

being, but that is pretty hard to prove by the decisions they actually make. Even though people

may report valuing a particular economic option, choice and price-setting invoke different

cognitive processes. The discovery of a preference is in part a constructive process. Economic

preferences in favor of a policy formulation are not monolithic, stable, and unchanging entities

whose presence can be uncovered with the appropriate equipment or policy. In most cases

economics work in progress, and appears as psychologically messy and complicated in all the

ways classical economists desired to avoid. In some Western countries, including the US,

invoking Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” as the least intervention, is apparently helpful to all,

including the poor. But, the invisible hand, well reflected in Milton Friedman’s case against

government intervention, is wrongly interpreted. Economists now arguing for free markets and

limited government try to have both ways. They claim that their doctrine is a deep insight

derived from first principle, but dismiss as relevant the overwhelming evidence that these

assumed principles do not hold in practice.

Adam Smith uses the famous phrase “invisible hand” only once in his The Wealth of

Nations, and he does not probably mean to declare what most people now think he says. Yet,

today, currently the phrase is almost always used to mean the proposition that market economies

can be trusted to get everything or almost everything, including economic relief to the socially

excluded, right without more than marginal government intervention. Friedman’s elegant

mathematical models showing that under certain conditions an unregulated “free market”

economy will produce an efficient “general equilibrium” in the sense that nobody can be made

better off without making anyone worse off. These assumed conditions, including the assumption 40

Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 6 (1977). 41

J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap, p. 34.

12

that people are intentional decision-makers, and that they have all the price and product

information they need, are manifest.

An empathetic imbalance can be corrected, but it will take emotion as well as science.42

An economist by training, now a liberal philosopher by choice, Sen suggests that since the

economic policy by intuition and impressionistic judgment has had it run, now the high priority

of human rights needs support from a plausible connection with basic human values, and

powerful international considerations, demanding a conscious empathetic action. Sen shares with

Myrdal the criticism and rejection of mechanistic development models, since meaningful

development depends on more than just manipulation of capital-output ratios, and thus, Sen

writes that the role of values cannot but be crucial. His notion decidedly affirms relationships

that combine various trends of philosophy, side by side, or one after the other, to bring these

thoughts into one unifying notion of empathy that demands inward contacts between societies or

individuals.43

As an Indian philosophical dictation suggests, to preserve his transcendence

authority, man must shun the kings, including his gifts, so that he can live on his purity and real

transcendence.

In other words, the very insolubility of the tension provides a dynamic that opens up the

world of moral reality, invites new ways of handing it, and favors pluralism, as expressed in the

concept of Vaudhara kutumbaka (the entire world is my own).44

As Amartya Sen states, the

verse, originally found V.3.37 of Panchatantra (3rd

century B.C.) is also observed in

Hitopadesha (12th century A.D.). The Nobel Laureate Rajendra Panchuiri used the phrase during

his acceptance speech in an effort to preserve the environment. His propositional attitudes are

between interlocutors, mutually influencing many in terms of declarations and responses. Sartre

takes inter-subjectivity to be foremost question of conflict and confrontation rather than peaceful

co-existence.45

Of course, this downplays the difference between self and other, and,

consequently, do not respect the otherness of others. This is a task on sense-taking, gathering

description of experiences, places, people, and activities, interpreting the significance that these

play in any situation which are observed, a process known as Kohl’s DIE (Describe, Interpret,

and Evaluate).46

Empathy in Indian Transcendentalism

Inspired by a “Unitarian” spiritual approach to social evils, Gandhi accepted the “other

West” of Ruskin, Tolstoy, Emerson and Tolstoy to bring the downtrodden from the fixed social

conditions. Indian transcendentalists, in line with the American transcendentalists, such as

Orestes Brownson and Margaret Fuller, stand for more universalistic perspective. For Emerson,

42

Trout, The Empathy Gap, p. 12. 43

The Meaning of Hegel’s Logic,” http://www.marxist.org/reference/archive/hedge/help/mean03.htm (Accessed on 1/29/2014). 44

The Hitopadesha, 1.3.71 goes a step further, and not once but twice demonstrates its usage by subversionists, as well gullible to fall for it. In the Panchatantra, 5.3.37, which is collection of animal fables, the verse is uttered from the mouth of a declared fool who is killed by his naivety, suggesting it as a symbol of impracticability. Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasudhava_ Kutumbakam (Accessed on 2/24/2014. 45

Zahavi argues that Sartre’s theory of subjectivity differs from the higher-order theory by its firm commitment to its one-level account of consciousness, see Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, pp. 5-6. 46

R.L. Kohls, “Survival Kit” (1996), in http://sportlimguistic.com/2010/05/18/how-to-observe-guideline-for-an-open-min/ (accessed on 1/28/2013).

13

unity with “Over-Soul” means an emphasis on intuition and self-consciousness, but it is

impossible to both preserve that “sense of self” and become convinced that intuitively there is no

such self. Either “I” function with the illusion necessary for perspectival functioning or radically

the self-consciousness here reconfigure its entire global model of what it is to be phenomenal

and thus, enters a cognitively lucid way of functioning in which there is no self-ascription of

existence at all. It is the latter possibility in India that suggests that there are similarities in

transcendentalists’ notions of freedom or Asian enlightenment. Indian transcendentalism not

only reduces away the social dimensions of “personhood,” but also says that “I”-ness of

consciousness is just a model and not real by which it means not a metaphysical object.47

No

doubt, Gandhi’s anti-tax movement resemble Thoreau’s “no poll tax” movement, but there is a

difference. American transcendentalists, including Emerson, dealing with the term “polarity,”

mistakenly argue that nature is full of dualism, and claiming that Indian dualism hinders the

union between the individual soul and the “Over-Soul.” Emerson’s belief was that a union of our

individual soul and the “Over-Soul” is the way of liberation (mukti).48

Indian transcendentalism

calls for a pluralistic solution to human sufferings whereas Emerson’s seeks a dualistic path.

Kabir, born near the Hindu holy city of Benares in 1440 A.D., of Muslim parents, became

a disciple of the celebrated Hindu ascetic Ramananda, who had brought to northern India the

religious revival initiated by philosopher Ramanuja. The impassioned poetry and deep

philosophy of the great Persian mystics, Attar, Sadi, Jalalu’uddin Rumi, and Hafiz, exercised a

powerful influence on religious thought of Kabir in India. In Kabir’s public teachings by means

of poems, we observe apparently antagonistic streams of intense spiritual culture generating an

empathetic soul. In these poems, he makes immortal appeal to love for humanity, lofty

abstractions, the passion for the Infinite, to the most intimate and personal realization, and

illustrations drawn from religious symbols of the Hindus and Muslims.

His love for humanity is repeatedly expressed in poetic words such as: “O Servant, where

dost thou seek me? Lo! I am beside there. I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in

Kaaba nor in Kailash: Thou shall meet me in a moment in time.” Like St. Augustine,

Ruysbroeck, and the Sufi poet Jalauddin Rumi, Kabir achieves a synthesis with the Infinite with

a synthetic vision of existence that disregards religious differences.49

He writes: “The Yogi, the

Sanyasis, the Ascetics, are disputing one with another: Kabir says: “O brother! He who has seen

that radiance of love, he is saved.” His key pronouncement about empathy is reflected in these

words: “The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who considers all creatures on

earth as his own self, He attains the Immortal Being, the true God is ever with him.” His final

words are: “All men and women of the world as His Living forms interactionism or any other

personal model of mind; he is free to develop a philosophical theory of the self and its relation to

human brain.50

He equates the words, spiritual and non-material, in contrast to Cartesian

dualism. The differences are based on the theory of doubt in testifying to knowledge. For

47

The idea is developed by T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), pp.626-627. 48

Sardar M. Anwaruddin, “Emerson’s Pasion for Human Thought,” International Journal of Literature and Arts 1(1) (2013), published online (June 2013). 49

Rabindranath Tagore Omnibus, 1X: Letters to a Friend: Poems of Kabir (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2012), pp.339-341. 50

Rabindranath Tagore Omnibus, pp.434-437.

14

Descartes, in performing an act we still may have doubt. But we do not act until our doubt is

resolved. For Descartes, doubting is a habit. A universal doubt is a psychological impossibility.

Matilal argues that Nyaya theories of disputation and debate first solves the means to clear the

no-sense of doubt, and then goes for creating knowledge. Doubt is not a perpetual problem.

Doubts are expressed only in terms of a question. The very possibility of doubt entails, not the

existence of the self (Descartes), but some object to serve as the focal point of doubting.

Kabir’s poems seek knowledge by examining the meaning of doubt. His teachings can be

summarized under the concept of “Unity:” a universe of three orders: Becoming, Being, and that

which is "More than Being," i.e., God. God is here felt to be not the final abstraction, but the one

actuality. He inspires, supports, indeed inhabits, both the durational, conditioned, finite world of

Becoming and the unconditioned, non-successional, infinite world of Being; yet utterly

transcends them both. “We can speak no more of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but only of One

Being, the very substance of the Divine Persons"; so Kabîr says that "beyond both the limited

and the limitless is He, the Pure Being." However, in Kabir’s version, we cannot really set aside

the possibility of transcendence, one cannot take the problem of social suffering as the be-all and

end-all of moral endeavor, and then get much worth of Kabir’s poems, or the sermons and sutras

of the Buddha. One has to struggle very hard indeed to make sense of such exalted texts.51

On the other hand, in India, unlike Persia, transcendentalism of a nature of self that seems

to be the concept of “original logic” (Brenan, History, 109), and “energetic connections”

(History, 113) along with “eco-feminism” (Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy, 2006) in which

“ego-transcendence” does visualize the exclusive nature of internalism. It does not argue on the

structural grounds that envisages separation of internal and external factors which is impossible.

This non-separation is projected by Sen as well. Thus, Khasnabish categorizes Amartya Sen’s

adherence to this philosophy of transcendental ethics as the “political sublime, practicing

conscious behavior.”52

Here the physical governance of human consciousness requires a hidden

structure to connect those states with physical elements of the body, just as the logical

governance of such states requires a hidden structure to connect them to abstract logical forms,

but the outcome may not have an inevitable causative factor.53

The internal does not play a

distinctive role in the explanation of action that internalism predicts. The causing of one’s

present action is here and now. Only narrow conditions intervene on the here and now. Like

other Indian transcendentalists, including Tagore, Sen’s sublimity does not isolate the narrow

condition by subtracting from the broad mental condition that permits unity with the universe in

a sublime mode.

Indian transcendentalists construct a preference ordering drawn from old literature as

well. Sen’s conformity to an ancient world-vision, reflected in the life-mission in phrases such as

Vasudhandhra kutambaka, the entire world is one family, is an example of Confucian concentric

rings of instinctive identity that is complementary, not opposed. Privileged and abused are not a

piece. With long-lasting heritage of traditions and knowing the others would not strip out anyone

51

Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 239. 52

Ashmita Khasnabish, “The Theme of Globalization in Kincaid’s ‘Among Flowers’” in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: A Special Double Issue, vol. 7, issue no. 1, Article 8 (2010). 53

Ramesh Kumar Thakur, Embodiement, p. 23.

15

of the concentric rings. In the spirit of concentric empathy the poet Kabir balances the boat,

steadies the ark, fords the waters, weaves the fabrics, and converses with the modern even while

remaining in and around in and out of medieval, allowing us to understand the relationship

between crisis and self-fashioning and instinctive identity with the body politic. He exceeds the

binaries in which the caste ridden society is allowed to stay.54

Kabir’s nirguna-bhakti is an

attempt to take care of both the mode of feeling as the cognizing principle of reality and the

impersonal nature of the ultimate reality. The intellectual advaitic tradition is given up. Kabir’s

bhakti movement is a deliberate attempt to achieve a synthesis of the diverse positions,

reminding us of the process in embodiment. The issue of “embodiment” refers to expression and

empathy, in terms of inter-subjectivity. Dan Zahvi argues that empathy is taken to disclose rather

than to establish inter-subjectivity; there are some elements in inter-subjectivity that simply

cannot be addressed as long as one remains narrowly focused on empathy.

Merleau-Ponty resolves the problem by arguing that subjectivity is not motionless

identity with itself, rather is it essential for subjectivity to go forth from itself and to open itself

to the other for bonding. It means that every aspect of consciousness is impregnated not only

with the present world to which it relates but also with an explicit future and past. If we cannot

make sense of simple qualia in neutral terms there is not much hope of making sense of the rest.

Based on neuroscience, Dennet takes a desperate step of denying the existence of qualia

altogether, suggesting that an analyzed psychology is haunted by Cartesian dualism.55

Indian

spiritual traditions for non-dual reality are testified by ken Wilber (1995, 2000) and David Loy

(1998) who posit a spectrum theory of consciousness in which they integrate all psychological,

philosophical, and spiritual treaties on the development of human beings for the development of

divine enlightenment.

Arguing that Ken Weber does not differentiates between various stages in self-

development, Burton Daniels argue that in Eastern religious philosophy can be traced better

descriptions that found in Jung’s “Self,” Husserl’s transcendental ego, and Sartre’s non-

positional consciousness, and Hegel’s soul, because the self is one which manifests in different

degrees of awareness and self-realization. This non-dual unity transcends any sense of isolation,

or separation.56

Although our multifaceted desires do not reach far into the future, our intentions

display long-range empathy but this empathy usually remains ineffective. Indian

transcendentalism deals with the binding problem, proving an indication of spirit-matter

interaction, although it fails many problems associated with the binding or bonding puzzles. Yet,

as Sartre argues, it determines itself as consciousness of “perception” and indeed perception.57

The eventual integration of the rights and of their holders is based, not on the bonds of

hierarchical exchange and interdependence, but on the fact that the differently distributed rights

and shares rest on the same good, the soil’s productivity. Inherent within the fabric of human

suffering, whether experienced within our personal lives, or expressed by another, is inevitable

54

Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic, p. 248. 55

D. Dennet, “The Origins of Selves,” Cogito, 3 (1989), pp. 163-173. 56

Burton Daniels, “Nondualism amd the Divine Domain, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 24 (2005), pp.1-15. 57

J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, cited in Dan Zahvi, Subjectivity and Self-hood, pp.168-172.

16

reciprocity. It is anchored in the “jural order of rights and shares.” 58

Empathetic language for an

engagement with others replaces calculation in the moral psychology of one’s relationships with

others. As Cohen argues, language is a means for “an ethical openness to the other,” implying

inter-subjectivity.59

However, the internalist conception of mind, and world external to mind are

two variables. For the externalist, knowledge is a function of two variables, not of either one

anole; whether one knows that it raining does not depend solely on one’s mental state, a

condition that is the same for those who perceive that rain and those who imagine it, but also

does not depend solely on the state of weather, a state which is the same for those who believe

the appearances and those who doubt them. The internalist therefore conceives knowledge as a

complex hybrid crying out for analysis into its internal and external components, of which belief

and truth respectively are the most salient. The analysis is expected on general meta-physical

grounds. 60

Social Exclusion: What Does the Message of Non-duality Offer to Suffering Seekers?

“Non-duality” is a translation of the Sanskrit word, advaita that simply means “not two”

and points to the essential oneness, wholeness, completeness, and unity of life, a totality that

exists here and now, before any separation. In the human rights discourse, its main concern is to

provide measurable relief by our empathy, because social exclusion, Charles Beitz observes, is

devoid of any agreement theory, and because socially excluded have no right to be Aristotle’s

“political animal,” and also because socially excluded people devoid of conventional rights are

not explicit animals, who are able to negotiate their relations with others.61

The concept of social

exclusion with its inherent disability syndrome projects an image with a variety of ostracized

condition, caused by both political and social motives, generating a new devastating status

leading to a non-existent condition without human dignity and rights. The varna-jatis, like the

slave-holders, can even now deal with the Dalits according to their particular interests and use

them according to demand without responsibility. For Thomas Aquinas, the leading defender of

Catholic morality in the medieval age, the people, who are poor by birth or by misfortune, are

particularly susceptible to sin because they are greedy for money and other material goods. In

contrast, he adds, the voluntary poor such as monks, friars are safe from this inclination, and

thus, he defends the medieval caste system and consequently morally denounces the socially

excluded class.62

V.S. Naipaul (The House of Mr. Biswas, 1961) describes his father’s circumscribed

detachment to reverse the normal dismal perspectives, and denies the readers at the center of

protective detachment and separation from any society. Naipaul himself feels alienated from

India as well as England because he is incapable of relating to Indian roots while he testifies to

the miseries of indentured people shattered by servitude, colonialism and loss of rights. Naipaul

and his characters including Mr. Biswas, think of themselves as lost properties, persons waiting

58

J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict, pp.190-191. 59

Richard A. Cohen, Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), p. 29. 60

Timothy Wiliamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, p. 5. 61

C. Beitz, “Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development,” Economics and Philosophy, vol. 2 (1986), pp. 282-290. 62

Edmund Weber, Hindu India (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 83, 110-111.

17

to be claimed by society. Some are hopeful to be invited into social life, but many reach constant

solitude before they get there. Anticipation and regret overshadow immediate experience with

miseries. In all of these instances, civil society becomes attached to the notion of undefined civil

liberties of human rights, embodied in formulae such as liberty, equality and fraternity, which

social movements embrace, and the modern state, even the revolutionary state, tends to reject, or

at least to make a compromise. In this way, the notion of civil society becomes a Western

attribute, since the despotic societies of the East are not thought to allow such opposition to

develop.63

Sen raises two interconnected issues: first the question of “identification” between

two or more sets of moral norms, and second, the philosophical/logical justification.

The Anthropological Society of India identifies 4635 identified jatis, who are the socially

excluded subjects of the Indian society and not the individuals. Therefore, the Indian society with

the fixed concept of inclusion and exclusion is not a system of the relations of individuals, but a

system of relations of jatis. Cases of social exclusion, of the tribal people, of Sen’s “missing

women,” and socially discriminated street poor (Partha Chatterjee) are many. In several legal

cases involving the charitable conduct of a Bengali child doctor of Calcutta, another Dr. Sen,

treating the tribal poor in northern India, where corrupt political leaders of higher castes are

given immunity by government courts that are frequently influenced by state officials, despite

the existence of social injustice laws; the innocent imprisonment of poor tribal people have been

imprisoned for “no reasons,” Sen concludes. The civil rights activists, speaking for the

marginalized and powerless, women, children, cultural and ethnic minorities and lower castes,

argue that a unified civil code in India apparently signified the expansion of rights to categories

of persons oppressed by patriarchal, gerontocratic, collective, and oligarchic forms of social

domination and control, but in reality without any specific outcome. Here, legal pluralism is not

only a question of values; it is also a question of power, of “who gets what when and where.”

“Universality” in the law, favored by enlightenment liberals and Fabian socialists, remain a

strategy of political centralization to the detriment of the excluded.64

Sen’s social exclusion theme raises conflicting kinds of rights and entitlements in Indian

metropolitan cities. Chatterjee advances and problematizes the question of rights in building

constructions, and argues that a conceptual move, which tries to “reorder” many ad hoc and

paralegal solutions in a metropolitan area, is the difference between “rights” and modern concept

of “development.” In his context, “rights” belong to only those, he insists, who have legal title to

the lands or buildings in dispute.65

Chatterjee’s reformulation of social exclusion has similarity

with Sen’s capability approach in respect of the policy evaluation, embodying a set of

substantive “freedoms” rather than utilities or primary goods, as advocated by John Rawls.66

63

Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Posibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), p. 154. 64

Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Living with Difference,” in Gerald James Larson, Religion and Personal Law in Secular India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 25-36. 65

Partha Chatterjee, The Nations and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 66

Amartya Sen and J. Dreze, India: Development and Participation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Simon Batterbury and Jude L. Fernando, “Amartya Sen,” in Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin (eds.), Key Thinkers, pp.359-366; Sen, The Argumentative Indian (New York: Picador, 2005).

18

Partha Chatterjee observes a sustained, if not permanent space that help us realize the potential

source of counter power from geographically placed “depressed areas” in mega cities, such as

Calcutta. He argues that the autonomy of an agent’s action is decreased even to the point of

being nullified by the actions springing from an attitude that conflicts with certain other elements

of the agency’s psychology.67

What is interesting here is that Chatterjee, like Sen, seems to assign agency to the very

idea of rights. The balanced legal formula is part of the “warp and woof of India’s basic legal

rights” but the pattern and outcome are “rigorously unclear.”68

Deprived tenants or fluid

personalities in the slums are often torn between the excitement of creating new identity after

“development” of lands and the frustration of knowing they are suddenly stuck with their same

old selves. Different thoughts come from religions, academics, scientists, social and political

movements. Hume recognizes the centrality of the background in explaining human cognition,

and Nietzsche sees with anxiety that background does not have to be the way it is.69

Although the goal is achievable rights, the means are different. The experiences transcend

our subjectivity, which explains why it can be shared by the communities. 70

With Wittgenstein,

we may reserve the word “interpretation” for cases where we actually perform a conscious act of

interpreting; our background structure consists of consciousness as perception that comes from

philosophy. In short, in the debate between cognitive individualism and cognitive universalism,

we note that there are exceptions, some elements of our thinking are neither solely personal nor

universal. Defenders of cognitive sociology argues the presence of inter-subjectivity, an

intermediate perspective of social cognition, which provides a balanced view between personal

and universal views on our social cognition. Sen argues that instead of being occupied with the

difference between individual and universal thinkers, empathy allows us to subscribe to thoughts

of collective communities, differing in both ideas and argumentation.

By bringing together both hierarchical and planning structures, we are able to describe a

complex range of ways in which higher order intentions and policies can structure phenomena of

agency and will.71

One possible motivation for belief-based accounts of assertion is the idea that

what warrants assertion should be a mental state of the asserter. The rule of assertion is not the

only kind of Euclidean space; in principle, it might consist of several disconnected regions. We

need a further assumption to generate an argument against luminosity, or lucky guess. Saivas

develop the Advaita Vedantin concept of self-luminosity (svaprakastva) to explain how Lord

Siva always has a non-dual realization of Himself.72

The Vishnu Purana asks, “How can that

67

Laura Waddell Ekstrom, “Autonomy and Personal Integration,” in James Stacey Taylor (ed.), Personal Autonomy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter six. 68

William D. Popkin, “Some Continuing Issues,” in Larson (ed.), Religion and Personal Law in Secular India, p.330. 69

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), part Two, section x. See also John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 131-133. 70

Zerubavel Eviatar, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 71

Michael E. Bratman, “Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction,” in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,2002), p. 80 72

Allen Buchanan, “Human Rights and the Legitimacy of the International Order,” Legal Theory 14 (2008), pp. 39070.

19

which was nothing in the beginning and is nothing in the end by anything in the middle?”

Centuries later this became the cornerstone of the school known as Advaita Vedanta. Shankar,

the most prominent scholar of this school, brings this concept near to the Greek philosophy in

syncretism. The closeness of these two bodies of thought should not obscure the difference in the

rate of systematization in Greece and in India. The rate of systematization may have been much

faster in Greece than in India because the Greek schools were not committed to a religious

orthodoxy whose texts and tenets were slow to evolve. However, the doctrine of luminosity,

being the doctrine of absolute “Being”, one without a second, was received from the Eleatic

School by Empedocles, Leucippus, Plato, and other Greek meta-physicians as an unavoidable

condition for their own thought. Uddalaka’s denial that “Being” could have been any admixture

of non-Being left a similar imprint on the part of Indian luminosity which was committed to the

meta-physics of presence.73

Inter-subjectivity in Empathetic Philosophy

Early Sanskrit writings specifically spoke of the responsibility of rulers for the welfare of

people by proclaiming, “No one in his domination should suffer either because of poverty or of

any deliberate action on the part of others.”74

Emperor Asoka (3rd

century B.C.) gave freedom of

worship and other rights to his subjects. During the sixteenth century, Sri Chaitanya of Bengal

argued via his popular form of Bhakti-religion that “there is only caste – humanity.” Because

Bhaktisidhanta believed that consciousness is an inherent attribute of the atman, soul, he

considered that even non-human species could partake of divine association through exposure to

the spiritual sound vibration of the names Lord Krishna. 75

The writings of Bhakti Vinod

contained the seed that could promote a change of consciousness on a global scale. In

Bhkatisiddhanta’s view, the ultimate cause of all human conflict is forgetfulness of one’s true

identity and artificial identification with the domineering tendencies of the temporary body and

mind. This resembles the Baul movement in Bengal after the fall of Buddhism and

Vaishnavism, coming close to the broad ideas United Nations’ ideal of equality. Likewise, the

Sufis practiced full equality between sexes.76

Indian transcendentalism reveals intuition that tends to counter both Unitarian empiricism

and Humean skepticism. Within this network, there is a relational constancy between its

components, which deliver an invariant outcome, crossing national boundaries. Sometimes come

and go, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Such spiritual fluids slowly

transmute as they move within and across space.77

This internal transcendental dialogical unity

is reinforced by a commentary interrelating the fragments. Matilal argues that “the discussion of

the problem of the three-stages is related to the discussion of the examination of inference by

prasanga sangati from which one can deduce that tripartite division of inference has a temporal

73

Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, p. 59. 74

Apastamba-Dharmasutra Two, pp. 450-350, cited in UNESCO, Birthright of Man, p. 94. 75

Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 11. 76

Asghar Ali Engineer, “Indian Cultural values and Human Rights,” Times of India (February 5, 1997). 77

A. Mol and J. Law, Regions, Networks, and Fluids: Anemia and Social Topology,” Social Studies Science, vol. 24 (1994), pp. 641-671.

20

basis.” The end result is a version with thematic coherence and formal continuity, modulating the

representation of the universe by the core sutra rule text.78

By urging people to consult their inner motivations via empathic attitude to promote

common good, Aristotle, Plato and the Buddha provided an important insight into the

psychological pre-requisites for ethical actions in their inter-subjectivity that is transformed into

common empathy, designed to ensure protection from abuses of an authority.79

A Songhai

proverb says, “You should not solicit what is yours by right.”80

At the core of the Indo-Tibetan

Buddhist way of viewing inter-relationships and seeking spiritual awakening is belief that each

person does exist as an individual, but the self, or personal identity, does not exist as an

independent ego that is somehow in control of the body and mind. There are three aspects of this

dependence. First, the “self” arises in dependence upon prior contributing causes and conditions

(parents’ contribution and education). In this way, our existence is invariably intersubjective, for

we exist in causal nexus in which we are constantly influenced by others. Second, the individual

self does not exist independently of body and mind, rather exists in reliance upon many mental

and physical processes. Third, how does the “self” come into existence, if it is not inherently

present either in any singe psycho-physiological process or in all of them combined?81

Whereas

an “I-it” relationship is basically manipulative, an “I-you” relationship is really intersubjective

and therefore based on a sense of “empathy.”82

This idea that transcending the plurality of self to

engage in a relationship that a new sphere of between-ness of self and other can be found in early

Western philosophy of relational existence, with some differences. Both the Pyrrhonist and the

Madhyamika Schools offer a critique of relational existence or of svabhava, or essence.

Even prior to our concrete empathic encounter with another subject, especially when that

subject is under the oppressive abused condition, inter-subjectivity is already present as co-

subjectivity. Influential social movement theories such the cycles of contention framework

(Tarrow, 1994) support long-wave theories of collective mobilization (Kelley, 2001). Other

theories support long-wave theories of collective mobilization (Kelley 1998). Other studies step

back from the macro-cycles approach to address issues of associational power. Keck and Sikkim

argue that the activist work entails the construction of cognitive frames as essential components

of networks’ political strategies. Although the investigation of empathy is a step forward

compared to the argument from analogy, the investigation of inter-subjectivity does not end

there. We cannot take our ability to experience others as merely un-analyzable fact. Merleau-

Ponny argues that my encounter with the other, my ability in interact with and recognize another

“embodied” subject as a foreign subjectivity is pre-empted by the very structure of my own

embodied subjectivity.

78

Bimal K. Matilal, “On the Theory of Number and Paryapti in Navya-Nyaya,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 27 91985), pp. 13-21; Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason, pp. 111-113. 79

Asmarom Legesse, “Human Rights in African Political Culture,” in Kenneth Thomson (ed.), The Moral Imperatives of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1992), 123-138. 80

Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Vision Seen, p.12. 81

B. Alan Wallace, “Inter-subjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, no. 5-7 (2001), pp. 1-22. 82

R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. p. 9.

21

A general argument is that basic acquaintance with others is inferential in nature. His

argument is that the self-experience and the relation with others to be mutually incompatible

determinations needs to be empathic. Taking a slightly different angle on the empathetic

motivations that give rise to the Buddhist school, we see that the Buddhists face a difficulty in

the apparent inter-subjectivity of diverse objects in the external world. Objects cannot be

independent of our perceiving, because a religious thesis would be contradicted. Generally, the

assertion of subject-object non-duality is less common in China than in metaphysical India,

referring to their different philosophical interests. Due to Western dualistic tradition in

conceptual ways of thinking, Western philosophers experiences the world as a subject looking

out at an external world and anxious about relationship with the rest.83

In contrast, the Madhyamika School rejects the relational existence as the “sign-post” of

“emptiness.” As Murti writes, “Things that derive their being and nature by mutual dependence

are nothing in themselves; they are real… What is relative is subjective.” Likewise, Nagarjuna

puts this by invoking the same/not-same dilemma. He explains that if there were identical there

could not be a relation between them, because identicality is not a relationship. Plato’s statement

is comparable as he writes the new phenomenon are situated “between Being and non-Being”

that is “square in the excluded middle, which goes back Sextus, who says, “Relatives are only

conceived and do not exist.”84

This stance is aware of the limitation of quantum theory and

contend that sense-categories like the tanmatras of the Samkhya system of creation at the

individual or the cosmic level are essential to understand reality. Freud thinks that a person can

gain access to some of his unconscious mental states through the special technique of psycho-

analysis.

Conclusion: Identification of Consciousness and the Prioritization Question

The concept of Vasudhaive Kutumbakam stands for the new “global village,” which

views all species, including animals, birds, plants, trees, and other organisms in the ecosystem

having atma, or soul, and as such are connected with one another. In the advaitic non-dualistic

empathetic soul, knowledge of this realization is not just limited to codified, objectified

knowledge but integrates multiple ways of knowing, action, experience, contemplation, and

sense-making, all through witnessing of the “self,” because “self” is microcosm of the universe.

Here the assumption is that everyone has the capacity to witness both empirical realities and

subjective experiences and eventually be free of both of them through knowledge that is arrived

at by the pramana or proof theory, which has adhytma-vidya, or meta-physics, and tarka-sastra,

or rules of debate, or logic. As Jonardon Ganeri (The Lost Age of Reason, 2011) argues, right

from the time of Aristotle up to the modern Western philosophies, Europeans were logical in the

presentation of their ideologies, but did not provide the theory of self-realization about the means

to eventual knowledge.

In contrast, logical and epistemological understanding in the Indian logic becomes a pre-

requisite to have a comprehensive analysis of the scriptural texts as well as meta-physical issues.

83

David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New York: Humanity Books, 1997), p.36. 84

Stephen H. Phillips, Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of New Logic (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 48.

22

Here, an “inner logic of human rights” grants rights to some groups leading inexorably to

demands by excluded groups.85

Nyaya allows for some degree of probability in the method in

reasoning. As and when the frequency of observation increases the probability of the universal,

our chief concern in the universality of human empathy, does not make it certain. One could

admit that “fire may occur without smoke, as in hot iron, but this does not lessen the relation if

the analogies work generally (smoke still goes in the kitchen). Nyaya avoids the divorce between

theoretical and practical reasoning by claiming the world is predictable only to a point, a fact that

the Western philosophy has only slowly come to grips with the postmodern logic. Despite the

existence of probability in self-realization via emotion, communities still may share observations

in spite of differing probabilities.86

Amrtya Sen’s empathy-oriented model is in his typical

public-choice setting. When asked to choose between two gambles, people pay special attention

to the “probability” that they will win. And like nearly all of the biases, the effect is robust, and

cannot be reduced by monetary incentives.87

When there are unaccountably many worlds,

probability distribution is regular.

Kisor Kumar Chakarabarti argues that in the West, the science of probability did not

appear until the late nineteenth century. This neglect of probability was due to high presence of

European rationalism making difficult to ascertain a distinction between causes and opinions.

Soon Hume became engaged in the systematic study of probability. The Nyaya account of

doubt, an element in probability, focuses on three kinds of factors: (a) logical factors

highlighted by the relationship of opposition; (b) objective factors represented by the common

and unique features and (c) subjective factors, represented by the lack of uniformity or non-

apprehension. This sheds light on probability for doubt and probability are invariably

connected.

Here, the doctrine of self-realization as to whether there is a statue in front or it is a

statue in front is a useful tool. What follows is somewhat speculative and reflects our perception

of the relevance of the theory of proof in knowledge. One advantage of this broad approach to

probability is that it avoids some seeming pitfalls of the more exclusive approaches. A

conclusion is that probability is expressly made to depend on conditions in the real world.88

We

bet on probabilities because if mistaken, we lose little, while if correct, we gain much. Our

cognitive scientists think that our readiness to see purpose is a strategic adaptation, based on the

logic of Pascal’s Wager, relying on most important probability. Its emphasis is on a direct non-

conceptual relationship with the others, using the present moment as one’s criterion for action,

without intense goal orientation and intense emotional involvement. Sen’s line of identification

resembles the non-judgmental mindless (sati) of Buddhism, again resembling the condition in

85

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, p. 150. 86

Keith Lloyd, “Rethinking Rhetoric from an Indian Perspective: Implications in the Nyaya Sutra,” Rhetoric Review, 26 (4) (200), pp. 365-384. 87

J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap, pp. 96-97. 88

Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti, Definition and Induction: A Historical and Comparative Study (Monograph No. 13, Honolulu: University of Hawaii University Press, 1995), pp. 174-177.

23

probability. We cannot expect to apply a vague concept by appeal to rigorous rule. The use of a

concept is reliable here is a way of drawing our attention to an aspect of the case derived of the

case of relevant to the application of the concept “knows.” The aim is not to establish a

universal generalization, but to construct the counter-examples to proposed analyses of the

concept to one highlighted principle; we are not required to derive our judgment as to whether

the concept applies to a particular case from general principles. Finalizing a project to send

relief to famine affected areas, or providing legal relief to the suffering tribal people in North

India, requires that we understand both the psychological and philosophical field our empathy

traverses. As we feel, we try to bridge the gap between us and them, and in the process we

debate about probability.