This paper identifies the different normative ethical arguments stated and suggested by Arjuna and Krishna in the Gītā, analyzes those arguments, examines the interrelations between those arguments, and demonstrates that, contrary to a common view, both Arjuna and Krishna advance ethical theories of a broad consequentialist nature. It is shown that Krishna's ethical theory, in particular, is a distinctive kind of rule-consequentialism that takes as intrinsically valuable the twin consequences of mokṣa and lokasaṃgraha. It is also argued that Krishna's teachings in the Gītā gain in depth, coherence, and critical relevance what they lose in simplicity when the ethical theory underlying those teachings is understood as a consequentialism of this kind rather than as a deontology.A common way of construing the portions of the Bhagavadgītā that pertain to normative ethics takes Arjuna to be appealing to consequentialist considerations in defense of his view that he ought not to wage war against his kinsmen, and Krishna, by contrast, to be staking out a deontological position under which Arjuna has a moral duty to wage that war regardless of the consequences of his doing so.

Since certain temporal aspects of the relation between duties, rights, and the interests that rights protect have not been fully theorized, a puzzle arises when we come to consider whether and how entities such as members of future generations, fetuses, deceased persons, and unconscious persons are able to possess rights. This paper evolves a unified structure for attributing the ability to possess rights to such entities. It demonstrates that while, under any cogent theory of rights-attributions, rights and duties must be strictly contemporaneous, the interests that rights protect need not temporally coincide with those rights.The ascription of rights is not solely a matter of moral reasoning. Rights possess not merely an evaluative component but also a specific conceptual structure, and all rights that we wish cogently to ascribe must demonstrate their conformity to that structure. But while most of us believe, for instance, that members of future generations have a right to live in a safe environment, that fetuses have a right not to be avoidably injured before birth, that deceased persons have a right not to be defamed, and that temporarily unconscious people have the same rights as conscious people, the conceptual framework that enables us self-consistently to attribute these rights has not been fully worked out. A puzzle arises due to a trait that these entities share, namely, that they are unable to take an interest, in the full sense of that term, in the objects of their rights at the time at which those rights are attributed to them. To solve this puzzle, we must either abandon the idea that such entities possess such rights or discard certain features of rights deemed essential by the interest theory of rights, or, far less drastically, provide a clear specification of the various temporal relations that may obtain between rights, duties, the interests that rights mark and protect, and the value of those interests. This paper provides that specification, in the hope that this will make sense of our attribution of rights to such entities without compromising upon certain essential features of interest-theoretical rights. In other words, the specification here offered is not a prescriptive theory that tells us how we ought to modify our ascriptions of rights; rather, it is an analytic description of what we are actually doing, and must be seen to be doing, when we attribute, as we usually do, various rights to a certain range of entities. bs_bs_banner