Niskamakarma is generally understood nonliterally as action done without desire of a certain sort. It is argued here that all desires are prohibited by niskamakarma. Two objections are considered: 1 desire is a necessary condition of action, and 2 the Indian tradition as a whole accepts desire as a necessary condition of action. A distinction is drawn here between a goal and a desire, and it is argued that goals-not desires-are entailed by action, and that the Indian tradition accepts goals-not desires-as a necessary
condition of action.
The literature on Hinduism and the environment is vast, and growing quickly. It has benefitted greatly from the work of scholars in a wide range of disciplines, such as religious studies, Asian studies, history, anthropology, political science, and so on. At the same time, much of this work fails to define key terms and make fundamental assumptions explicit. Consequently, it is at least initially difficult to engage with it philosophically. In the first section of this paper, I clarify a central, implicit assumption that many of the authors working in this area share-namely, the assumption that a plausible environmental ethic must attribute direct moral standing to individual, living, non-human entities in nature, such as animals and plants. In the second section, I offer a preliminary defense of this assumption. In the third section, I respond to objections, and conclude that the argument is at least initially convincing.
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