Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disagreements about ethics, morality, or dharma (as described in the South Asian tradition) are disagreements about the right or the good. There are four basic theories. The teleological options are Virtue Ethics (the Good character causes the Right action), and Consequentialism (the Good outcome justifies the Right action). These options are teleological because they prioritize the Good (the end) over the Right (the means). The commonly known procedural option that prioritizes the Right over the Good is Deontology (the Right considerations justify the Good action). However there is a fourth option unique to the South Asian tradition that is also procedural. This is Bhakti/Yoga (the right action which consists in devotion to the procedural ideal of the Right—the Lord/Sovereignty—causes a Good outcome, namely the perfection of this devotion). This is a theory defended systematically (likely for the first time) in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (YS). There the procedural ideal of being a person, Sovereignty (Īśvara), is defined by the traits of being untouched by past choices (karma) and unimpeded (without afflictions or kleśa-s) (YS I.23–25): and this is approximated by the practice of Unconservativism (Tapas) and Self-Governance (Svādhyāya) (YS II.1). The theory is also explored dialectically in the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, and especially in its chapter 18, the Bhagavad Gītā (Gītā). Here Arjuna (the protagonist) is faced with the prospects of a fratricidal war and articulates three reasons to avoid the conflict. Consequentialism: if he were to fight the war, it would result in sorrowful outcomes for all concerned (Gītā 1.34–36). Virtue Ethics: though the enemy is evil, fighting would render him (Arjuna) no better than the opponent rendering it the wrong, virtue destroying choice (Gītā 1.38–39). Deontology: war undermines good social practice that, among other things, protects women and children, and war, hence, constitutes a wrong consideration in justifying practice (Gītā 1.41). The three approaches to ethics share a commonality: they define Right action in some way by way of the Good, and they constitute Conventional Morality, which gives rise to Moral Parasites (those who wish others to be bound by Conventional Moral expectations, but do not intend to do so themselves). In response, Krishna, who is Arjuna’s charioteer, teaches Arjuna two procedural responses that prioritize the Right over the Good: karma yoga, a form of Deontology that emphasizes the rightness of duty, and bhakti yoga, known as “Īśvara Praṇidhāna” in the Yoga Sūtra. Yoga/Bhakti is unique among the four ethical theories in defining the right by way of the procedural ideal (Īśvara), and not the Good. This allows Yoga/Bhakti to play an instrumental role in resetting the moral order, by abandoning Conventional Morality. Krishna as the figure of Īśvara in the Mahābhārata subsequently leads Arjuna and his brothers (the Pāṇḍava) to victory over Moral Parasites (the Kauravas). Conventional approaches to bhakti that interpret it by way of familiar beliefs of the Western tradition (such as Theism, a version of Virtue Ethics) do not reveal the philosophical controversies that motivate Bhakti/Yoga or its contribution to philosophy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.055 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".