Nonviolence as a civic virtue: Gandhi and reformed liberalism

Abstract

In my book The Virtue of Non-Violence: From Gautama to Gandhi, I reformu late Mohandas K. Gandhi's ethics of nonviolence from a virtue perspective and argue that he can be seen as a constructive postmodernist. I propose that virtue ethics is the best choice for a constructive postmodern social and political philosophy. Gandhi follows postmodernists in dissolving modernist distinctions between the inner/outer, private/public, religion/state, means/ends, rights/duties, and values/facts. Gandhi cannot be allied with the French postmodernists because he does not believe in the decentering and fragmentation of the self,