Gandhian and Existentialist Ethics: Means, Ends and Responsibility

Two traditions insist that how you act matters as much as what you achieve. One is Indian, one is European, and together they answer most questions about means and ends.

Most ethical theory asks what you should do. These two ask who you become in the doing of it, and they are the ones most often quoted in this paper because both put the burden squarely on the individual. Neither offers a procedure. What they offer is a standard against which a procedure can be judged, which is why they tend to appear in the case studies rather than the definitional questions.

Gandhian ethics: the unity of means and ends

Gandhi‘s central claim is that means and ends are not separable stages but a single continuous thing. As the means, so the end. An impure method cannot deliver a pure result, because the method becomes part of what is produced — a country won by violence is a violent country. This is not idealism about tactics; it is a claim about causation, and it is falsifiable in the ordinary way. Ask whether the habits a movement or an administration acquires while pursuing an objective survive the achievement of it, and the historical answer is usually that they do.

The administrative translation is direct. An officer who clears a genuine backlog by quietly relaxing verification has not merely bent a rule; he has built a section that now knows verification is optional. The method is the institution being made. This is why Gandhian reasoning is the strongest available answer to the utilitarian temptation, which characteristically prices the end and ignores what the means are teaching everybody who watches.

Satyagraha, trusteeship and the talisman

Around the central claim stand three further ideas worth naming precisely. Satyagraha is holding to truth through open defiance, willing acceptance of the penalty, and complete non-violence; the openness and the acceptance of punishment are what separate it from ordinary lawbreaking, because the satyagrahi appeals to the conscience of the opponent rather than seeking to escape him. Trusteeship holds that what a person possesses, whether wealth or office, is held on behalf of others — an idea that maps exactly onto the fiduciary character of public service. And the talisman: recall the face of the poorest person you have seen, and ask whether your decision will be of any use to him. It is the most portable test in the syllabus because it needs no theory to apply, only honesty about who a decision actually reaches.

Chauri Chaura: the claim tested

The decisive illustration is Chauri Chaura in 1922. When a protesting mob burned a police station and policemen died, Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement at its height. Colleagues thought it a catastrophe of timing, and in tactical terms it plainly was. He would not accept a victory purchased with those deaths — the clearest available demonstration that for him the method outranked the momentum. Whatever one concludes about the politics, the episode shows the doctrine is not decorative: it cost him the thing he most wanted, at the moment he was closest to it, and he paid.

Existentialist ethics: the weight of choosing

Sartre and Camus begin from a harder place: there is no external authority that will settle the question for you. You are, in Sartre’s phrase, condemned to be free — and therefore fully responsible for what you choose, including the choice to follow orders. Bad faith is the pretence that you had no option: the official who says he was only implementing policy is, on this view, hiding from a decision he in fact made. Obedience is itself a choice, renewed each time it is exercised, and calling it a duty does not transfer its authorship to somebody else.

This is the most administratively uncomfortable theory in the syllabus, and the most useful in a case study, because it removes the defence that has protected functionaries throughout history. Camus adds the humane corollary — that one must act decently anyway, without any guarantee that the universe rewards it. That matters for candidates who find existentialism bleak. Its conclusion is not that nothing counts; it is that nothing external will do your counting for you.

Bad faith in the file noting

Take a familiar situation. A junior officer is directed orally by a superior to process a clearance despite an unresolved technical objection. He does it, and later says he had no choice. The existentialist reply is that he had several: he could have asked for the direction in writing, he could have recorded his objection on the file and complied under protest, he could have referred the matter upward, and he could have refused and accepted the consequences. He chose the option that felt like no choice because it was the one requiring no courage, and the language of compulsion arrived afterwards to furnish the alibi.

Gandhi arrives at the same place by a different road. The clearance may well be defensible on its merits; the objection may be technical and the project genuinely useful. But a clearance obtained by suppressing an objection has made suppression a working method of that office, and the next objection will be suppressed more easily. Notice how differently a consequentialist would read the same file: the project proceeds, the public benefits, the objection was minor, and no measurable harm occurred. That divergence is worth staging explicitly in an answer, because it shows you understand that theories are not decorative labels but competing accounts of what the facts even are.

Where the two traditions part company

They are not versions of each other, and a careful answer says so. Gandhi believes there is a truth to be held to, external to the person holding it; his ethics is demanding precisely because the standard is not of his own making. Sartre denies exactly that — for him, the absence of any such authority is the starting point, and the individual authors the values by which he will be judged. Gandhi therefore has an answer to the question “why non-violence rather than something else”; Sartre, more austerely, insists you must answer it yourself and own the answer.

How they fit together in an answer

Used together rather than merged, they cover the two commonest exam situations. Gandhi supplies the standard for the method; existentialism supplies the accountability for the choice. The first meets the officer tempted to reach a good end by a bad route; the second meets the officer tempted to escape responsibility by pointing upward at whoever gave the instruction. Neither escape survives contact with these traditions, and an answer that closes by naming both escapes and refusing both is doing precisely what the paper was designed to test.