It was a motley group that had gathered in Adyar at 10 am on a Sunday, to discuss the philosophy of Kant, of all things. There were teenagers, young adults, and dignified, enthusiastic senior citizens. More than one of the 20-something-year-olds had skipped breakfast to be on time, but was their doing so predestined, or was it a conscious decision?
This was one of the more mundane questions brought up at the session. Less mundane ones were: would you kill off one man to save six? Would you drug a healthy person and harvest his organs to save five of your critical patients — numerically, it’s the “greater” good, after all. And, was the Machiavellian villian in superhero movie Watchmen justified in destroying an entire city, in order to stop a global nuclear war?
How do you decide what cost is too big a cost for “the greater good”? How do you know if ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are clear ideals, or change, depending on the context and situation? More importantly, how do you decide your own, personal moral code, if forced into a dire situation? As the 21-year-old workshop conductor Bharath Balaji pointed out, “It’s very easy to be a good person when things are going well.”
As you may imagine, there were no clear-cut answers. Balaji guided his audience through the thoughts of different philosophers on the subject, using examples from popular culture to explain them. From Batman to Interstellar and Groundhog Day, a number of films that explored ideas of right-and-wrong, determinism, and greater good served as intriguing props in his one-stop class on Deontology and Utilitarianism, and the philosophies of Edgar Wright, Aquinas, Humes and, Immanuel Kant. He even called Dumbledore a Machiavellian, backing it with reason.
But there’s only so much philosophy you can learn in a matter of two hours. Balaji and his team of nine don’t claim to be experts, just enthusiasts. Their authority on philosophy is sketchy at best. Balaji clarifies, “None of us has studied philosophy. I graduated in Economics; a bunch of us did Engineering. You would get an academic perspective if you go through a college, but there is so much content that is freely available to us. But even online, looking for good content is like looking for a needle in a haystack, in a room full of haystacks. Even on platforms such as YouTube or Wikipedia, they give you citations and starting points for research. We go through academic papers and published research papers for our material.”
“That’s how we break it down, and creatively show it in a way that makes it more consumeable to people,” he says.