MAHATMA GANDHI’S PHILOSOPHY ON NON-VIOLENCE

This paper demonstrates that the political theory of Mahatma Gandhi provides us a novel way to understand and arbitrate the conflict among moral projects. Gandhi offers us a vision of political action that insists on the viability of the search for truth and the implicit possibility of adjudicating among competing claims to truth. His vision also presents a more complex and realistic understanding, than some other contemporary pluralists, of political philosophy and of political life itself. In an increasingly multicultural world, political theory is presented with perhaps it’s most vigorous challenge yet. As radically different moral projects confront one another, the problem of competing claims of truth arising from particular views of the human good remains crucial for political philosophy and political action. Recent events have demonstrated that the problem is far from being solved and that its implications are more far-reaching than the domestic politics of industrialized nations. As the problem of violence has also become coterminous with issues of pluralism, many have advocated the banishing of truth claims from politics altogether. Political theorists have struggled to confront this problem through a variety of conceptual lenses. Debates pertaining to the politics of multiculturalism, tolerance, or recognition have all been concerned with the question of pluralism as one of the most urgent facts of political life, in need of both theoretical and practical illumination.