Coming to Terms with the Ethical

Indian scholars have not made adequate attempts to establish a relationship between the concept of ethics and the practice of formal politics—the politics based on instrumental reason to capture political institutions through elections. As a result, we have not addressed the question: What are the constitutive conditions that configure the relationship between ethics and such politics? In order to comprehend the question in its complexity, we need to make a collective sense of the two aspects of ethics and instrumentalised politics. The need to explore the relationship between the two, therefore, has become all the more important, particularly in the context of the lockdown occasioned by the outbreak of COVID-19.

In this regard, what bearing does the current state of lockdown have on the relationship between ethics and politics? The language of ethics of caring for the poor, and the elderly, and the official appeal that was made to philanthropic organisations to reach out to the needy was distinctly present in the extension decision of the central government. In the event of such a decision, coupled with the official appeal to the people of India, the element of responsibility and duty tends to bring enormous pressure on people’s moral capacity to filter out their accumulated sense of anxiety to reunite them with their respective families.