‘Ethics is not merely the study of what is good; it is the discipline of choosing between competing goods.’ Examine this proposition with reference to a District Magistrate’s decision on lockdown enforcement during a religious festival.
Subtopic: Section A · Ethics and Human Interface · Essence of ethics
How to structure your answer
Define: ethics as a discipline of practical reason — choosing among competing goods, not between good and evil.
Illustrate: DM weighing public-health, religious freedom (Article 25), economic livelihood and law-and-order during a Kumbh-like gathering.
Apply: Aristotle's phronesis, Ross's prima facie duties, principle of double effect.
Conclude: ethical maturity is the capacity to reason transparently when goods conflict.
Written within the word limit
145 words · target 150 words · 9 min
Definition: Ethics, in Isaiah Berlin's reading, is the discipline of reasoned choice between incommensurable goods — liberty against equality, mercy against justice, public health against livelihood — and not merely the affirmation of right over wrong.
Illustration: A District Magistrate during a COVID-19 lockdown weighs two competing goods: epidemiological containment that saves lives, and the livelihoods of daily-wage migrants who face starvation in transit camps. Kerala's K.K. Shailaja approached this through tiered restrictions and community kitchens; in Mumbai, the BMC's Iqbal Chahal balanced ward-level micro-containment with food-relief convoys to slum clusters. Strict enforcement without livelihood protection violates Article 21; total relaxation collapses health infrastructure. Aristotelian phronesis prescribes the deliberate mean — context-sensitive enforcement, transparent reasoning and revision as evidence accumulates — rather than rule-bound abdication.
Application: The 2nd ARC's Ethics in Governance Report frames public administration as 'competing-goods management' — codifying transparency in trade-offs as the antidote to authoritarian shortcuts.
What an examiner expects to see
- Ethics as critical reflection on conduct, not codification (Defining Ethics, anantamias)
- Right vs right dilemmas: short-term vs long-term, individual vs community (Kidder)
- W.D. Ross — prima facie duties: beneficence, non-maleficence, fidelity
- Article 25 (freedom of religion) vs Article 21 (right to life) — Sabarimala-style conflict
- Disaster Management Act 2005 Section 30 — DM's plenary powers
- Procedural transparency converts a hard choice into a defensible decision
Concrete cases, schemes and judgments
- Mumbai BMC restricting Ganesh Chaturthi immersion processions during COVID-19, 2020-21
- Haridwar Kumbh 2021 attendance protocols
- Bakr-Eid live-stock movement curbs during avian-influenza outbreaks