Rawls's Aristotelian principle & Political conceptions of Justice

In his first and most famous book, Rawls sought to show that Justice as Fairness was also part of the 'Good' by appealing to the following 'Aristotelian Principle' which states that every mugger naturally wants to become a Moriarty, every con-man wants to become a Bernie Madoff, and, by the magic of Metanoia, every Prof. of Political Science wants to end his days spouting shite more obviously shite than he did at the commencement of her career- i.e. a person's good consists in wanting to do qualitatively more and more of what they are good at and actually that's a good thing coz Moriarty is more interesting than a mugger (because he teaches us something about hidden linkages in our Society) Madoff less morally interesting than  a two bit hustler(hence, better for mechanism design) and it's always good to know that Professors- who, after all, are only a superior  type of child-minder- end up with their own nappies full of shit.

The Evolutionary Stable regret minimizing multiplicative update algorithm essentially says that we should want to live in a Society where the Aristotleian principle is enabled for everybody- i.e. Aumann agreement is disabled- such that every Sherlock has a Moriarty- i.e. no randomness is distinguishable from two quite different types of pseudo randomness- and, anyway, Moriarty, as we all know, was actually a Professor.
So was Rawls- worse luck.
In 'Justice as Fairness reconsidered', Rawls restricts the scope of his idea to the sort of Political Philosophy being done in certain sorts of Liberal Democracies where, coz people haven't yet read Sen's 'Idea of Justice', 'ideal type analysis' is still cool. In other words, Rawls basically says 'guys, I got it wrong. Justice as Fairness is nothing but a textual availability cascade and the only reason not to junk it is because it happens to be the most ubiquitous junk food for thought of our time- at least if you are a pretentious little turd from a highly specific and Entitled coterie of fuckwitted assholes.'
The paradox here is that Rawls' own 'life- plan' seems to have obeyed the Aristotelian principle. His restriction of Justice-as-Fairness to Political Philosophy of a certain wholly Credentialist and in-utile type- i.e. his refusal to identify it with Evolutionary Game Theory or Mechanism Design- leaves him safe in his play-pen from the perils of thought or the patripassian pangs proper to a progenitor of the Cavalry of the Capabilities Approach which has nailed Left Liberalism to the Cross of  Steady State Stupidity.
Early Rawls can shade into mystical theodicy- it illuminates such dark sayings as 'can two walk the same road- save they are agreed?' whose dual is 'Can there be Evil in the City, and the Lord has not done it?- but later Rawls- stuff like 'overlapping consensus' & 'reasonable pluralism'- is exhausted committee room jargon long after the rending of the Veil, the day of wrath, has come and gone, and the only outcome is that all language has been unified but only to show the true Apocalypse is Disenchantment- nothing is left of the City save its futile Utopian philosophizing whose practice is punitively enforced by the impossibility of hemlock.

Amia Srinivasan's 4 questions for Free Marketeers

Dr. Srinivasan poses 4 questions for Free Market wallahs.

1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

No. Free Market theory says people will be better off if they can freely exchange goods and services under the following conditions; there is perfect information & perfect competition, with independent preferences, no non-convexities or externalities or uncertainty. .
If you say yes, then you think that people can never be coerced into action by circumstances that do not involve the direct physical compulsion of another person. Suppose a woman and her children are starving, and the only way she can feed her family, apart from theft, is to prostitute herself or to sell her organs. Since she undertakes these acts of exchange not because of direct physical coercion by another, but only because she is compelled by hunger and a lack of alternatives, they are free.

Question. Can this woman and her children, at some future point, earn enough to repay a loan taken out today? If yes, then they can borrow if there is a free market in credit. If no, then they can either ask for charitable assistance or an arbitrage opportunity for a moral entrepreneur is created. Provided there are some people with means who would prefer to see them fed rather than starving, then their needs will be met in that way. Suppose, the majority of people in the area don't like looking at starving children. They can create a fund to maintain the indigent under a Tiebout model. Furthermore, if people feel prostitution or organ sales are morally repugnant, they can take collective action by making such activities illegal. Alternatively, by stipulating that all organ sale contracts be 'balanced' (i.e. equitably divide gains from trade) and such as would prevent the development of a 'repugnancy market' then that may be a superior alternative.

In any case, the woman in the hypothetical is never really free even if the choices facing her are of the following kind- either buy Chanel and send the kids to Eton while flying round the world as a super model OR teach Eco-Feminist philosophy at Oxford while sending the kids to the local Comp.-quite simply because we might still suspect her of being the prisoner of gender roles or some such shite.

The point about the market is that it increases the number of options from- (starve or get fucked) to (starve or get fucked or get a low paid job)  to (starve or get fucked or get a dead end low paid job or get a low paid job which leads to something) etc, etc.

2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?
No. Fraud is not permissible. Actions in restraint of trade are not permissible. Provision of goods or services which change the preferences of the consumer too may be either praiseworthy or punishable- it depends.
If you say yes, then you think that any free exchange can’t be exploitative and thus immoral. Suppose that I inherited from my rich parents a large plot of vacant land, and that you are my poor, landless neighbor. I offer you the following deal. You can work the land, doing all the hard labor of tilling, sowing, irrigating and harvesting. I’ll pay you $1 a day for a year. After that, I’ll sell the crop for $50,000. You decide this is your best available option, and so take the deal. Since you consent to this exchange, there’s nothing morally problematic about it.
You are a local monopsonist- that's restraint of trade plain and simple. Your laborer should hire a lawyer and get a penal settlement out of you. Alternatively, if the legal code in your country is not in line with current Free Market thinking, an arbitrage opportunity for a Social Entrepreneur exists such that the system decreasingly oscillates around the 'repeated game' optimum. 
3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?
No. What we think people deserve has nothing to do with what they have or what they are able to get. 
If you say yes, you think that what people deserve is largely a matter of luck. Why? First, because only a tiny minority of the population is lucky enough to inherit wealth from their parents. (A fact lost on Mitt Romney, who famously advised America’s youth to “take a shot, go for it, take a risk … borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”) Since giving money to your kids is just another example of free exchange, there’s nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few. Second, people’s capacities to produce goods and services in demand on the market is largely a function of the lottery of their birth: their genetic predispositions, their parents’ education, the amount of race- and sex-based discrimination to which they’re subjected, their access to health care and good education.

It’s also a function of what the market happens to value at a particular time. Van Gogh, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Vermeer, Melville and Schubert all died broke. If you’re a good Nozickian, you think that’s what they deserved.
Either you have a theory of what people deserve or you don't. I suppose a person who believes in an Occassionalist God, or a believer in Karma, might say 'whatever people get is what they deserve' but this is independent of the sort of economic system obtaining at the time. Srinivasan may not have a full fledged theory of what people deserve but she does think that some people get more and others less than what they ought to do. She is welcome to do a bit of 'Mechanism Design' such that the outcome she desires arises out of the operation of the market. To persuade us to adopt this Mechanism she might, thanks to her brilliance, throw in some new piece of technology she has invented to sweeten the pot.
4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?
Yes! MORAL obligation arise solely by one's free choice and commitment- anything else is Kantian heteronomy.
If you say yes, then you think the only moral requirements are the ones we freely bring on ourselves — say, by making promises or contracts. Suppose I’m walking to the library and see a man drowning in the river. I decide that the pleasure I would get from saving his life wouldn’t exceed the cost of getting wet and the delay. So I walk on by. Since I made no contract with the man, I am under no obligation to save him.
Clearly, you felt no moral obligation to save him because you didn't save him. I might say 'you should have felt a moral obligation' but that judgment is an expression of the Moral code to which I have chosen to subscribe. I might go further. I might say 'I'm going to cut pieces out of your brain till your bad moral code is removed. Then I will insert pieces into your brain till you voluntarily choose a moral code similar to mine'. However, most people would feel that my moral code is just as bad, if not worse, than yours.  The Market Solution is not lobotomies or lectures but Mechanism Design so that Incentives and Penalties line up with the sort of outcomes we value.

As

Mario Rizzo Says:

1. There is a long tradition in the common law that refuses to recognize a legal duty to help strangers in emergency situations: the so-called Good Samaritan duty. It is not because the common law judges were heartless and did not recognize moral duties. It is because they recognized that state compulsion or legal liability should be used sparingly. They also recognized a whole host of practical problems in enforcing Good Samaritan duties.

   Not to recognize a distinction between the moral obligations of individuals and the role of the state is an error of profound consequences.

   The liberal wants a society in which people who do not share the same moral values can live together and prosper.
2. Vivek Iyer Says:

   
   October 23, 2013 at 2:23 pm
   

   Quite right. India has an activist Supreme Court which is stretching constructive due process in precisely this very dangerous manner such that innocent third parties can be jailed simply because they were ignorant of something which the Court decides it was their duty to know about.
   In ancient times, entire communities were held jointly accountable for any thing bad that happened in their locality. Far from preventing crime and destitution and so on, this merely gave rise to a corrupt form of tyranny.

   The philosophical argument Srinivasan presents hinges on an assumption of agent homogeniety.
   Actually, a Positive Duties argument, obeying the rules of what we would recognize to be a deontic logic, which stipulates that there is at least one general duty of benificence binding upon all possible agents is also an argument that either nullifies or forbids its own use.
   This is because a possible agent may interpret the general duty as entailing the making of this very argument. Either this is a legitimate or else an illegitimate entailment. If it is legitimate, then the argument has neither intentional nor intensional content because it is uttered only because it is a binding duty. On the other hand, If it is an illegitimate entailment then deontic logic forbids its use.
   In ordinary life, we recognize that agents are diverse. We expect more from some than others. Positive Duties are enjoined on people we deem ‘respectable’ or ‘virtuous’ or ‘capable’. We expect less of a person of impaired judgment, reputation or character.
   Economic theory explains how and why heterogeneous agents get canalised, some towards ‘repugnancy markets’ others towards ‘merit goods’. The benefit of offering contracts which are ‘balanced’ rather than exploitative- in the sense of equitably sharing the gains from trade- is reputational and dynamic. Some agents gain more by taking this ‘high road’ while others, by reason of entitlement defect or pathological preferences, remain confined to the ghetto of ‘repugnancy markets.’
   Thus, the sort of deontic logic that matches with a sophisticated ‘Whig’ type of theory (like that of Ken Binmore) is not going to suffer the defect of the argument put forward by this lady.

Srinivas's argument boils down to this- 'You, the reader, believe a Positive Moral Duty exists which conflicts with the Negative Rights of the Free Market.' Thus either you are immoral, in ignoring your own moral intuition, or stupid.'
It's basically a 'gotcha' argument of a puerile sort so the proper way to combat it is to accuse her of advocating the use of tax payer dollars to subsidize the environmentally unsustainable sodomisation of ethnic minority fetuses which is what Obamacare ineluctably entails- at least on her premises. This is because everybody has the Positive right to terminate the genetically cloned fetus with high sodomization preference and ethnic minority status, which the State had to provide for them, as part of their Positive right to happiness, and the fetus has the Positive right to be kept alive and regularly sodomized as per its genetically programmed wishes, all at the State's expense. This is clearly environmentally unsustainable because everything is.

The Non Aggression Principle says Violence is a Virtue Ethics

Is any argument calling for the initiation of aggression (defined by the Non Aggression Principle as violence or the threat of violence against a person or her legitimately owned property) inherently self-contradictory?
No. Everything depends on whether the status quo is considered to be good in itself or having moral legitimacy simply by virtue of its existence. Any larger theory of the world which holds the status quo to be degenerate, or Fallen or Barbaric, also posits some hidden violence, of a more invidious and destructive kind, as already occurring and militates for the initiation of a visible violence that can surgically excise the danger represented by the 'hidden' violence.
   But, what if we introduce a further axiom such that Providence always ensures that the status quo is free of hidden violence and is the morally most perfect state possible? Surely, under those circumstances, it would be self-contradictory to argue for initiating aggression against any person or her legitimately owned property? 
Once again the answer is no. It may be that initiating Violence is a skill which, once mastered, brings some great benefit to Society such that a benign Providence would itself ordain that act of aggression. In other words, in addition to the axiom of the Providential nature of the status quo, we would need to add a second axiom- viz. that benign Providence can never ordain any initiation of aggression. But, now, we don't have any intellectual argument at all, just arbitrary assertions about the nature of Providence which, unless one subscribes to pure Occassionalist Theism, really does involve one in self-contradiction.
  An alternative tack is to deny the possibility of 'hidden violence', to dismiss the reality of unspoken intimidation, as a phantasm merely. By this account, the fact that I don't go and confront my hooligan neighbor when she turns up her hi-fi is evidence not of  the 'hidden violence' by which she intimidates me but my enjoyment of the horrible, probably Lesbic & obscene, lyrics of her favorite singer- M.S. Subbalaxmi.
  In this case, once again, an intellectual argument has been displaced by an arbitrary assertion about the facts of the World- one which collapses under Micro-Sociological appraisal.
Randall Collins, author of Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, writes-
 'Humans confronting each other come up against a wall of confrontational tension/fear (ct/f), a tension arising from the hard-wiring in humans that makes us especially susceptible to rituals of mutual solidarity, Interaction Rituals in the specifically sociological sense...Successful instances of human violence come from getting around the barrier of ct/f, sometimes by chance, but also by techniques that persons skilled in violence learn to use. ' (Randall Collins)
Rene Girard developed a theory of mimetic desire which highlighted the role of the scapegoat- the human sacrifice- in rituals of mutual solidarity. Social Interaction, it seems to me, tends to be ritualized along lines of alterity whose borders are defined by the 'pharmakos' or scapegoat who no longer has to be killed in proportion to the capacity for coercion the Social sub-unit believes itself to possess.
The problem here is that Violence is a skill that has to be learned and, once learned, constitutes a type of Human or Social Capital which commands a rent even absent its exercise. Small groups, which cultivate that skill, can become decisive over much larger nomological rubrics, or unities, such as that under which Libertarians operate. Fortunately, Violence can only function as a 'Virtue Ethic' where it evokes a 'balanced game' so the Libertarians, or Gandhians, or Rousseauians or whatever are saved despite themselves.

Violence as Virtue Ethics

    Dipping into a book by Nicholas Gier got me thinking- you heard me right folks, I said thinking not drinking- has there ever been a philosopher or prophet or politician or any other sort of fuckwit whatsoever who has actually advocated Violence?
   Hilter? No he denounced violent opposition to himself in very vehement terms. Genghis Khan? No, he greatly disapproved of violent opposition to himself and delivered great masses of people from this detestable vice.
    Hitler never used violent means to secure his aim- viz. the end of violent opposition to himself. He never actually shot anybody or slapped anybody or even knifed them a little bit. Those who were already violent removed others- violent or not- whose counsel, example, or relative sanctity such as is conferred by mere continued existence, might have led those same men of blood to like mebbe one day violently oppose Hitler or something. In other words Violence used itself as the means to come to the particular state of absolute and eternal non-violence that Hitler enjoined.

    It may be true that a good end can not be achieved by bad means. But, nothing enjoins an officious striving to prevent a bad end frustrating itself by bad means such that a good end is achieved, albeit with little or no assistance from good means.
    We can turn any historical figure, no matter how brutal or blood-soaked, into a champion of non-violence by positing him or her to be a mere Kagemusha, or shadow warrior, to the true protagonist, occulted by the chronicles, who wills that non-violent end state which violence aims at.
   Assuming brain modularity, Principal Agent hazard (of the sort mentioned above) arises in even a one person, one time period, model- one can be violent to oneself by reason of preference falsification or Kavka's toxin. Any argument against what I'm saying here is going to have to admit that it assumes, and thus only has relevance to, a world where brains didn't evolve or look nothing like our own. But, even so, such arguments are wasted words coz of the Thomas Nagel Bat problem.
    What about a theory of Violence as a Virtue Ethics? What would a philosopher of violence look like? No, not Nietzche- give the guy a break, he was a syphilitic lunatic, not to say German philologist, and thus mentally incompetent to impose a poset on what he valorized- but maybe Merlin's King Arthur or some such mythical beast who insists every moral, that is deontic, or non alethic issue or question be settled only by violence. This would need to be a violent agon, otherwise there is no partial ordering of states of the world signified by the word Violence. To see why consider the following case- I cut your throat after you have stuck your head under a guillotine and let fall the blade. If you did this to escape my knife, I still am credited with a lot of violence. If however you did it for some other reason and neither knew or cared about my plan to cut your throat- the amount of violence I have actually perpetrated is considerably diminished. Essentially, the more causal chains having bearing on us both, the more difficult it will be to establish a partial ordering of states of the world such that Violence can be measured or states of the world ranked with respect to its criteria. In practice, the only tractable way to establish a Violence metric is to recast every interaction as a 2 person violence agon- even if it is both multi-agent as well as diachronous- with some ad hoc weighting formula for working out the contribution of each agent at different times. (This is Newtonian substantivism as opposed to the mirage of Leibnizian relationism.)
     But even with a pure two person violent agon the problem arises that I won't fight unless I get a positive Expected value for the Outcome- so there has to be a reward and a threshold probability of winning that reward. You may say, well, I'll kill you if you don't fight. But, all that then happens is, I choose the option that minimizes my own pain and suffering, not the one that maximizes the amount of violence I do and/or provoke. So, if Violence- as opposed to a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits arising out of perceived tastes and potentials for violence- is going to be in a position to actually to decide anything of moral or non alethic import- i.e. if it is to be a virtue ethics- it has to ensure two things
1) Symmetry and 'Balanced Gaming' ( Notice Non-Violence does not demand Symmetry for its practice- thus it throws away information and is dissipative) Formally this means  all violent conflicts must have random outcomes- assuming all agents are risk neutral.

   However, suppose Iyers are more cowardly than Iyengars- this is empirically true of Iyer males when matched against Iyengar females- then Iyengar women must be suitably handicapped (I suggest they not be allowed to pull my hair or punch me in the fatty portion of my arm) and Iyer men properly armed and armoured.
2)  Impredicative Pareto efficiency- the setting up of the conflict situation must involve an outward shift in the production possibility frontier such that both parties to the violence can, at least theoretically, be made better off. In other words the purse for the prize fight must always exceed the sum of losses on both sides. Suppose, the reverse were the case- e.g. if I say 'you and your sister must fight each other to the death to decide who gets the hush money you are extorting from me for not telling your Mum and Dad that I let you stay up with me to watch 'Frightnight' even though they'd specifically said I wasn't allowed to watch it coz it makes me pee the couch and what sort of babysitters are they sending us nowadays anyway?'
    The problem is, to make sure you and your sister actually fight each other to the death, I have to import extra violence into the scenario. There has to be a credible threat that you will both die more painful and lingering deaths by refusing combat. But, from the first principle (viz Symmetry) this extra violence can't arise. Thus, unlike Non-Violence or Justice as Fairness or other such pi jaw, Violence as Virtue Ethics is impredicatively Pareto efficient.
   But, if these two conditions are satisfied then- for the first time in its life- Ethics would actually yield something Ethical. Thus, not only is Violence (as opposed to non-violence) a Virtue Ethics- it is the only Virtue Ethics which don't fuck things up big time.
 

Joshua Greene & Kant's sick joke

Kant’s Joke—Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

This is a link to Joshua D. Green's very well written paper 'The secret joke of Kant's soul'.  I don't know if any Economists have commented on it but I imagine the point they'd make is that 'following rules'- i.e. something which looks deontological- may be optimal from the 'Consequentialist' point of view and, equally, that contested, or competition between, rule-sets militates for meta-rules which aim to maximize the information set and subsume all consequentialist calculi under that rubric. In other words, though the Socio-biological considerations Green highlights may indeed be illuminating in their own right, what they don't have any bearing on are the 'distinctions without differences' that constitute Philosophy's realm of discourse.
To see why consider
a) the Trolley problem- you can either let a trolley kill five people or divert it such that only one person dies.
 A moment's reflection will show that both the consequentialist and the deontologist should seek to maximize loss of life by their action because this will
1) prompt the Railway company to spend more on safety thus saving more lives in the long run.  Or if the accident was a one off, then in any case the Investigation is likely to expand the Social Information set in such a way that all Consequentialist decision making is advantaged.
2) Highlight the importance of deontics and prompt a debate that might lead to exciting breakthroughs in the subject etc- for the higher duty is to duty itself & promoting deontics is the most pressing duty incumbent on deontologists.
Since both Consequentialism and Deontology, by always counseling the most reprehensible action possible (thus attracting the interest of the hoi polloi the way Freakanomics does), always arrive at the same conclusion, they can be unified under the rubric of optimal decision theory over some fitness landscape.
More generally, both continue to be central to Ethics- i.e. the project to 'shit higher than your arsehole' (Wittgenstein) in the manner that maximizes public nuisance.

b) The Footbridge problem- ought you to throw a fat man off a footbridge to halt the trolley from killing 5 people?
 Clearly, you have to shove the other guy off the footbridge before he works out that he has to shove you off the footbridge. Which of you actually splatters on the ground is determined in a Darwinian way- which is good for the species.
The objection may be made that, assuming Muth Rational Expectations and equal physical endowment, you and the other guy instantaneously realize that the Nash equilibrium is to shake hands, smoke 'em if you got 'em, and video the carnage on your respective camera phones.
However, Ethics must never counsel a course of action that doesn't maximize avoidable loss. Hence it is enough for there to be some probability, even if everybody has Rational Expectations and perfect information, that a person might suddenly act in line with Ethical thinking for both of you to do your damnedest to grapple with each other such that both of you are likely to go off the bridge either
1)  not in time to avert the carnage but to add gratuitously to the body count.
or else
2) one or both of you go over the bridge but the Railway company is able to avoid implementing Safety procedures because the motivation for your fight is not known- the angle the Press play up is that it was some random fight between two strangers which led to a fatality.
  Thus, assuming the other guy hasn't yet started trying to throw you off the bridge- in which case anything you do is either instinctive self-defense or panicked cowardice and thus outside the scope of Ethics- you can't be certain he will fight you and so you have to try to at least try to throw him off the bridge, assuming you are a moral person. Information asymmetry means you can't be sure he's a moral person, so you don't know for certain if he'll try to throw you off the bridge. This holds true even if he is thin and you are fat. He may not try to throw you off the bridge till you attack him.

The problem with existing Consequentialist and Deontological theories is that either
1) they fail immediately if all agents act upon them. Either someone has sacrificed you before you got a chance to sacrifice someone else or the Human Race died out in a Concurrency deadlock long ago. As the Indian proverb has it- in 'after you', 'no, after you', both missed the train.
2) they don't fail immediately.
But theories which don't fail immediately have two properties
1) they have mischievous consequences because they become availability cascades.
2) they undermine deontics because a duty is not a duty if it is known to have the pleasing property of being logically consistent or sensible in any way.

This yields Iyer's Iron Law- 'A theory only counts as part of Ethics if it robustly counsels good people to do the very worst thing possible under any and all circumstances'.

Gier on Matilal on Virtue Ethics

This is Gier on Matilal's 'Epic and Ethics'-

'Matilal finds a caricature of Kantianism in R¹ma, whose inflexibility with regard to duty leads to absurd and/or harsh decisions.  As Matilal quips: "Rama's dharma was rigid; Kant's was flaccid."[35]  Even though he was encouraged to do so by the sage Jabali, Rama was not going to break a promise, even if it meant that he could regain his kingdom and avoid 14 years of exile. One of Rama's lame excuses for shooting Valin in the back was that a person has no duties to animals, Valin being a member of Hanuman's monkey army. (Kant held that mistreatment of animals was blameworthy at least as a reflection of the person's character.) Rama's extreme interpretation of a wife's duty to her husband has led generations of Indian women to conform to an impossible ideal. Following Sati's example, Indian women are required to stay with their husbands no matter what they ask of them and no matter how much they are abused.'

Why is this fucked?
The Ramayana is a widely available text- you might try reading it if you're going to write about it. What was 'Ram's extreme idea of a wife's duty to her husband?'- The answer is that she is free to leave him and then marry anyone or simply fornicate with anyone who takes her fancy.  Ram actually tells Seeta she is free to marry his own brother, Laxman, or the demon King, Vibishina, or the Vanar King, Sugriva (this forecloses the possibility of their appealing against Sita's decision to commit Suttee, because they will immediately be upbraided by that wrathful lady- who, consistent with Universal Dharma- gets the last word and upstages everybody) or that she may just go off on her own wherever she might please, even though Ram had just expended a lot of blood and treasure to get her back. 
Rama is saying a woman whose husband is living can, if he abandons her, marry whom she wills- even his own brother or someone of an enemy race or different status. There is absolutely no evidence that Ram held that a woman's duty is to stay with a husband who mistreats her. Gier, whose personal Virtue Ethic does not include being truthful, says ' , Indian women are required to stay with their husbands no matter what they ask of them and no matter how much they are abused.' I am Indian and though not a woman have a sharp temper and often sing 'main maike chali jaunge, tu dekhte rahiyo' while in the shower to hint at my displeasure with my domestic arrangements. Women are not required to stay with their husbands if they feel someone or other has insulted them or put their nose out of joint or failed to lavish compliments etc. and are constantly traipsing off to their 'maike' for a nice holiday. I recall reading a book by Wendy O'Doniger Flaherty in which she wrote 'The South Indian Brahmin female bites off the penis of her husband before beheading him' - which was the basis of my own refusal to marry within my caste, which was just as well because, ever since the invention of contact lenses, even the vainest of our myopic Iyer girls have been turning up their noses at me. However, Gier's statement that Indian women will stay with their husbands even if they are mistreated is even more misleading- indeed, it is potentially fatal! The husband of that heroine of Hindutva, Rajini Narayan, must have been reading Gier when he called his wife a 'fat, dumb, bitch' when she purified his penis with fire, according to an ancient Hindu custom (invented, presumably, by Wendy O'Doniger) and burnt the fellow to death. 
No doubt, Gier will blame Ram for this and amend his statement to read 'Indian women are required to stay with their husbands no matter how much they are abused because Lord Ram said they have a duty to purify their husband's penis with fire and burn the fellow to ashes- unless, of course, they are South Indian Brahmin females, in which case as Prof. Wendy O'Doniger has pointed out their duty is to bite off their consort's penis before neatly beheading the fellow. This is because Rama had a 'rigid' Virtue Ethics whereas Kant had a 'flaccid' one.'
Gier and Matilal fail to spot that, according to the Ramayana, Rama was God. There was some stuff he had ordained for himself to do, but ordained that he do all unawares, e.g. kill such and such devotee so that devotee might gain immediate union with the Godhead and so on. There is a perfectly coherent philosophical position- Occassionalism- which fully describes the universe of the Ramayana. As for the dramatic portions pertaining to Dharma- this arises from what we may call not just Agency Hazard but Policy Actor Hazard.
But, Matilal and Gier- being philosophers and therefore under occultation w.r.t the text (in Matilal's case) they have read in the original- ignore facts like this and write worthless shite.

Gier is much taken with this 'insight' of his-

 The Buddha once said that "they who know causation know the dharma,"[44] a great example of how dharma, as J. N. Mohanty observes, connects "what one ought and what in fact is."[45] This happy violation of the Humean prohibition of deriving an Ought from an Is demonstrates how virtues are derived from the facts of our personal histories and how this contextualizes all moral decision-making. The famous "mirror of dharma" is not a common one in which individual identities are dissolved, as some later Buddhist believed, but it is actually a myriad of mirrors reflecting individual histories. The truths they discover in their mirrors will be very personal truths, moral and spiritual truths that are, as Aristotle says of moral virtues, "relative to us."

Why is this fucked?
Dharma aint a happy violation of a Humean prohibition on deriving deontics from alethics. Maybe the Professor was thinking of Jack Kerouac's 'Dharma Bums' or something. It does not concern itself with 'the facts of our personal histories' at all. No statement re. dharma or vyavahara takes the form 'reflection on my personal history leads me to hold that such and such is enjoined on me'. On the contrary, we have statements of the order 'the seers have laid down x, y, z' or 'Scripture says x, y, z'  or, as in the story of Yuddishtra and the demon of the pool, a particular question- viz which of the Pandavas is to be brought back to life- is answered by applying a Universal maxim re. 'paro dharma' (the higher duty) such that the King chooses a half-brother rather than a full brother to be brought back to life.

Buddhism is a one period universe- kshanika vada- there isn't any time to discover anything and, no matter how many mirrors are all busy reflecting away, not time to look at them. There's only time enough for an intention to exist-Chetana ham bhikkhave kamam vadami. Chetyitva kammam karoti kaena vacha manasa- nothing else.

Neither an occassionalist not a momentary universe permits the drawing of the sort of conclusions Gier and Matilal arrive at.

The truth is talk of Morality and Ethics is worthless shite and has always been recognised as worthless shite. People who talk it are immediately recognized as fuckwits, frauds or murderous fanatics. The only categorical imperative that isn't fucked is to repay cunt pi-jaw gobshites in their own coin. 

Gier says- Matilal's insights now allows me to do something that I thought that I could not do in my own comparative virtue ethics--namely, to add Krishna to the Buddha, Confucius, and Aristotle. The problem of course is that Krishna appears to be the least virtuous person in this list and can hardly be seen as practitioner of the Middle Way.  Nonetheless, Matilal declares that his "dark Lord" as a "paradigmatic person . . . in the moral field," who "becomes a perspectivist and understands the contingency of the human situation,"[49] both necessary elements of virtue ethics.  He also describes him, as opposed to the rigid Rama or Yudhishtra, as an "imaginative poet" in the moral realm: "He is the poet who accepts the constraints of metres, verses, and metaphors.  But he is also the strong poet who has absolute control over them. . . . He governs from above but does not dictate."  This guarantees that Krishna 's "flexibility never means the 'anything goes' kind of morality."[50]

Why is this fucked?

Krishna spends a lot of time telling us that he is the only efficient cause. His Creation is an Occassionalist Universe but he isn't its 'strong poet'. Rather, as he declares, 
muninam apy aham vyasah
kavinam usana kavih
he is the sort of muni-kavi whose Shukra seeds Shuka who, having gone beyond that other Krishna, Vyasa,  already leaves him  behind, though at the morning of the world,  mourning and bereft. 

What actually happens in the Bhagvad Gita, is a discussion of Agency Hazard because, to preserve symmetry and 'balance the Game', both Krishna and Arjuna are Agents not Principals. Ultimately, Krishna offers himself up as sacrifice. He slays himself. The Mahabharata shows that even if a work is so constructed as to conserve karma and dharma as symmetries of the system, that system can't be purely relationist and must cash out as a substantivalism.

Gier proposes a sort of aesthetic autonomy in which virtue ethics has a domain and therefore some content. The problem here is that it really isn't true that any aesthetic degree of freedom is good or bad by itself. Auerbach, in his Mimesis, shows that the opposite is the case. Rasabhasa- the use of low style for high matter or the reverse- drives precisely the same process that Gier valorizes- viz. self-discovery within a relationist field of interacting reals.

the fine arts, I believe, give us a very rich analogue for the development and performance of the virtues. Most significantly, this analogy allows us to confirm both normativity and creative individuality at the same time.  Even within the most duty bound roles one can easily conceive of a unique "making one's own."  Even though the Confucians must have had a set choreography for their dances, one can imagine each of them having their own distinctive style.  The score for a violin concerto is the same for all who perform it, but each virtuoso will play it in a unique way.  The best judges have the same law before them and yet one can detect the creative marks of judicial craft excellence. Even the younger brother who defers to his elder brother will have his own style of performing this duty, his own dharma (svadharma).

Yes, but the point about playing the fucking violin is that, sooner or later, you evolve into a coke-head Nigel Kennedy type and get jiggy with like Spice Girls or summat. For all Art aspires to the condition of Music and Music aspires to banging groupies in your limo while off your head on coke.

As opposed to a rule based ethics, where the most that we can know is that we always fall short of the norm, virtue ethics is truly a voyage of personal discovery.

So true! Virtue ethics is about Harry Potter discovering his wand really is magic if he rubs it. However, this voyage of personal discovery has to end when he finally works out where to put it so it will do most good (I believe it was in Ron Beezley's sister- yuck-eee!) and engender future generations of young wizards who go off to Hogwarts to play with their wands.
Gier, whose oeuvre, like Simmel, is a manic protestation against the universal ontological dysphoria his own project virtuously discloses, ends on this lapidary note- 
'Virtue ethics is emulative--using the sage or savior as a model for virtue--whereas rule ethics involves conformity and obedience.  The emulative approach engages the imagination and personalizes and thoroughly grounds individual moral action and responsibility.  Such an ethics naturally lends itself to Matilal's moral poets and a virtue aesthetics: the crafting of a good and beautiful soul, a unique gem among other gems.'
This reminds me of a T-shirt I saw in the gym the other day- Idaho? No u da Ho!
Says it all really.

Is Dharma a Virtue Ethics?

Suppose we find that everybody who talks about a certain subject is either a fool or a knave or both, what can we properly conclude?
1) Not that the subject has a tendency to deprave or render stupid- it may be that fools and knaves alone are attracted to the subject.
2) Not that only fools and knaves take up the subject- it may be that someone neither a fool or a knave is forced to comment on the subject and only by doing so is shown to be either a fool or knave or both.
3) Not that someone neither a fool or a knave forced to comment on the subject, and thus shown to be a fool or knave or both, is actually commenting on the subject- one may be forced to do something but end up doing something else which suffices to end the compulsion. This would be the case if the force which compels one towards a particular course of action can not itself distinguish between that action specifically and some other action which appears the same to the compelling agent but not so to others.

This last point saves us from having to conclude that all talk about about Ethics, Duty, Dharma etc, is only indulged in by fools or knaves or both. I'm not saying this isn't empirically true. Indeed, for any possible world one may care to specify, one could, in general, prove that this is a necessary truth. However, once we admit that people who speak of these things may have been compelled to do so and that what we mistake as the usual foolish, knavish or both foolish and knavish verbiage is in fact merely a simulacrum with an opposite illocutionary force- i.e. it is a savage parody and indictment of the brutish stupidity of the sort of fools and knaves who force people to talk about Ethics, Duty, Dharma etc.- then a new vista is opened for us.
Indeed, we now have the possibility of taking a more charitable view of our fellow creatures. We can imagine that their foolish, knavish or both foolish and knavish babble about Morality proceeds, not from their irremediable stupidity and knavishness, but from some brutish and merciless force constraining them to such revolting behaviour.
Obviously, words like Morality, Duty, Ethics and so on only become interesting, only register as something other than phatic, when, in their name, some particularly stupid and knavish action is performed.
Let's say I become friends with some guy and do something nice for him. Well, you might commend me for my friendly character and felicitate me for my deftness in performing some particular pleasing action. What you wouldn't do is uphold me as an exemplar of a higher morality, a sterner ethics, a more than mortal attachment to Duty.
 Well, you wouldn't, unless you were a knave with an ulterior motive or a fool who thought it remarkable that I should find pleasing a friend a source of satisfaction to myself.
On the other hand, if I meet a guy, befriend him and then beat him to death though it causes me pain to do so- clearly I have acted from some motive of Morality, Duty, Ethics or other such shite. To the degree that you are a knave or fool, or both, you are now obliged to hold me up as an exemplar and gas on in philosophical vein.

BK.Matilal has written some foolish or knavish or both foolish and knavish shite on the topic of  'Ethics and  Epics'. Was he forced to do so? Dunno. Maybe. Let us say that being a Professor forces one to do shite  things of this sort. Still his shite on this topic sets higher than mandated standards of stinkiness because he won't even entertain the possibility that the guys who wrote the Epics were forced to drag in talk about Morality, Duty, Ethics and so on.
Let's face it.  Interesting stories are of the form- x liked y but fucked y up something rotten though it hurt x to do so. Boring stories are of the form- x liked y and did something nice for y coz x was a nice guy that way.

What about meta-stories? I mean a story about story telling? The Mahabharata is such a story. We know, in advance, the authors are going to be constrained to talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite- coz. for the heroes to retain our interest they're gonna have to fuck up for some high minded reason every so often-  but we don't know whether the Epic is going to take advantage of its meta-linguistic structure to fuck up the vile and brutish force compelling the mention of Dharma, or whether that fucking black hole is going to turn the writers in to fools or knaves or both - or even only the simulacrum of such scum.

In order to find to determine the outcome of the Mahabharata's meta-story, I'm first going to have to formalize the terms fool and knave.
Briefly, a fool is someone who wastes information. A knave is someone who steals it. The reason that all talk about Morality, Duty, Ethics etc is either foolish or knavish or both is because such talk loses information. But if information is lost, something is no longer being conserved. But if something is no longer being conserved, then a symmetry has disappeared. If a symmetry has disappeared then a Game has become unbalanced.
Let us look again at the Mahabharata- if it is nothing but a chaotic mass of interpolations and priestly longeurs then it can't be preserving symmetries, it can't be conserving any Principles, it's merely a dissipative system- in which case, why read it- unless you're forced to?
Since the Mahabharata can look like a dung heap of precisely this sort, stupid or knavish people- Professors for example- who are forced to read it, are then compelled to say foolish and knavish things about it- e.g. 'It conceives of Dharma as deontological' 'Nope, it's all Virtue Ethics' etc.

However, when the MHb's object language- i.e. what the text says happens-  is looked at as a non-dissipative, highly symmetric, Balanced Game sequence  (which, by reason of its redactive heuristics is precisely what it is) then, it becomes clear that, as meta-story, it achieves the most praiseworthy of objectives- viz. rigorously fucking over that vile and brutish force which compels people to talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite without in any way getting meta-shite upon its own dick.

To summarise- only fools or knaves talk about Morality, Ethics, Duty and other such shite. Why? Because these concepts actually set out to lose information, to conserve nothing, to efface symmetries, to ubnbalance Games. Thus fools, who waste, and knaves, who steal, whatever they get their hands on, are the necessary tools for this foulest of forms of shitting through the mouth.
The Mahabharata, as meta story, by a powerful heuristic which conserves symmetries, balances Games and never throws away information in its object language, so to speak, is able to use its Second Order, meta-linguistic illocutionary force to do the work of sanitizing, by rendering entirely ironic, the obligatory shite about Ethics and Morality and so on.

To, conclude, the correct answer the question- is Dharma a Virtue Ethics?- is shhhhh! I'm trying to watch Svetlana.