Moral Thinkers and Philosophers: India and the World · UPSC Civil Services

What the official syllabus says

General Studies IV (Paper-V):
Contributions of moral thinkers and philosophers from India and world.

Vedas and Upanishads: rta (cosmic order), satya (truth), the unity of all beings.
Bhagavad Gita: svadharma, nishkama karma (action without attachment to results), sthitaprajna (person of steady wisdom).
The four purusharthas: dharma, artha, kama, moksha.
Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the middle path, karuna (compassion), maitri (friendliness).
Jainism: ahimsa, anekantavada (many-sidedness of truth), aparigraha (non-possession), the triratna.
Kautilya’s Arthashastra: the welfare of the subjects as the king’s welfare, duties of officials, checks on corruption among officials.
Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural: virtue, wealth and love; ethics of rulers and ministers.
Bhakti and Sufi saints: Basavanna (dignity of labour, equality), Kabir and Guru Nanak (equality, honest work, sharing), Sufi ideas of love and tolerance.

Swami Vivekananda: service to humanity as service to God, strength and fearlessness, practical Vedanta.
Mahatma Gandhi: truth and non-violence, satyagraha, purity of means and ends, trusteeship, sarvodaya, the seven social sins, his talisman of the poorest person.
Rabindranath Tagore: humanism, freedom of the mind, education.
B. R. Ambedkar: social justice, equality, liberty and fraternity, constitutional morality.
Sri Aurobindo: integral yoga and the spiritual evolution of humanity.
Sri Narayana Guru, Jyotiba Phule, Raja Ram Mohan Roy: equality, reason and social reform.

Socrates: the examined life, virtue as knowledge.
Plato: the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, temperance, justice), the philosopher-king, justice in the soul and the state.
Aristotle: virtue ethics, the golden mean, eudaimonia (flourishing), practical wisdom.
Confucius: ren (humaneness), li (propriety), the ruler’s virtue as an example to the people.
Stoics: self-control, duty, acceptance of what one cannot change.

Machiavelli: realism in politics; the separation of political success from private morality.
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau: social contract theories; the basis of legitimate authority and rights.
Immanuel Kant: deontology, the categorical imperative, treating persons as ends and never merely as means.
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: utilitarianism, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Mill’s harm principle and liberty.
Max Weber: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility; ideal-type bureaucracy.
John Rawls: justice as fairness, the veil of ignorance, the difference principle.
Hannah Arendt: the banality of evil and the danger of thoughtless obedience.
Carol Gilligan and the ethics of care.

Approach	Judges an act by	Typical thinkers
Virtue ethics	the character it shows	Aristotle, Confucius
Deontology	duty and rules	Kant
Consequentialism	its results	Bentham, Mill
Social contract	what free people would agree to	Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls
Ethics of care	relationships and needs	Gilligan

Applying a thinker’s idea to a present-day problem of governance rather than only describing it.
Comparing Indian and Western ideas on the same theme (for example, Gandhi and Kant on means and ends, Kautilya and Machiavelli on statecraft).
Strengths and limits of each theory when applied to administrative dilemmas.

Political philosophies are also in General Studies I (world history), and reformers in its modern Indian history.
Ideas from these thinkers can also be used in the Essay paper.