Why Virtue Ethics Comes Closest to Indian Moral Praxis

Right from its inception, Indian Ethics has been dharma-centric which can be justifiably translated as virtue-centric. Yet, in most of the global ethical literature, ethicists have been found to engage in Greek ethics and Chinese ethics in discussions of virtue ethics where Indian ethics is conspicuously absent. So, the first objective of my paper is to highlight the nature of Indian ethics as a virtue ethics. Drawing on the resources of the Dharmaśāstra-s, the Vedanta literature and the Bhagavad Gita, I would like to establish that though Indian theorists have laid down definite sets of rules of conduct, moral prescriptions and prohibitions, yet these have always been subservient to the goal of attaining a kind of excellence, i.e., being a certain kind of person by realizing the divinity already existing in man. The second objective of the paper is to show that Indian ethics is a genuine brand of Virtue Ethics and not merely a Virtue Theory though many interpreters of the Gita have often placed its ethics within consequentialist or deontological frame.