ABSTRACT
A study of metaethical aspects of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's moral ideas faces a methodological challenge. Samiksha Goyal's chapter examines this challenge, which is posed by a limited availability of primary and secondary philosophical texts on Gandhi's moral ideas. The primary texts are such that even though Gandhi's scattered writings indicate an intuitive moral framework, his concepts are insufficiently elucidated for undertaking a metaethical inquiry. In the absence of proper texts from Gandhi, most secondary literature takes Gandhi's life and his historical context as ‘text’. The chapter illustrates how, due to the specific methodology of using historical context as text, some of the secondary literature misinterprets and misrepresents Gandhi's moral ideas. In the end, the chapter discusses some recent secondary literature to show how a metaethical study may extract some theoretical lessons from this literature based on the methodology they use.
