While acknowledging that Vinit Haksar and others have in several ways fruitfully brought Rawlsian thought and Gandhian thought into dialogue with each other, I would claim that insofar as Rawls’ implicit strategy for favoring the poor depends on standard economic ideas like those of Smith in the passage quoted, his discourse and Gandhi’s are incommensurable. Dharma draws its meanings and uses from the context of villages where people are born with duties to others, and into a wide social network where others have duties to them.

Gandhi’s ethics of duty has been compared to the minority voice in western ethics of Bernard Bosanquet. For Bosanquet, as for Gandhi, ethics is about duty. To do one’s duty is to correctly play the role one has been assigned in the social order.

I believe that these considerations tend to explain Gandhi’s support of caste. In a caste society, every baby is born with a vocation, with a role to play for the good of the community. If the community is well-organized, then if all the people follow their dharmas there will be a satisfactory adjustment of culture to ecology. In Marx’s terms, there will be a satisfactory exchange of matter and energy with the environment.

It can correctly be argued that when Gandhi proposed that children follow the callings of their parents, he undermined the moral autonomy of the individual that in other respects he championed. But there is a question prior to the question what one’s vocation will be. It is the question whether one will have any vocation at all. Caste assures that everybody is born into a social role which is meant to serve the community in some way. Faced with the (in his view) tragic spectacle of adharma western society in which babies were daily being born without having attributed to them any membership at all in a bonded community larger than a nuclear family, and with no obligation at all to serve society, Gandhi was understandably reluctant to give up the Varnashram traditions of India.

Consider the alternatives. Suppose that caste as it existed back at the time Gandhi wrote about it (the 1920s and 1930s) had some desirable qualities, some undesirable qualities, and some neutral qualities. Suppose that a better institution might exist that had only desirable qualities. Gandhi might well prefer caste to the better institution because, unlike the better institution, it existed. Improving caste by reforming it would be a more practical way to move toward the best result than starting from scratch, and it would also be a way more respectful of the way of life that people were accustomed to, and therefore more respectful of the dignity of the people. (9C)