my station and its duties

[Radhika Gulati]

Each individual must do all his duties, honestly and efficiently, in accordance with the place he has been assigned in society.  However, in Bradley‟s social scheme, every one has right to choose his own place of duties.  That is, he can pursue any course of his liking; but once he selects his place, he must do his work devotedly so that the possibilities of social progress and the areas of justice are expanded in the interest of all.  In Bradley‟s view, this is the right way to achieve individual and social good; and there is no contradiction between the two. Thus, grounded in justice, the moral ideal of Bradley adheres to the idea that a man‟s life, along with his moral duties, mainly completes itself in ordering those perfections, which has been designated as state, and that partly by means of its laws and institutions, even more than this by its own consciousness, provides to man such a life that he lives and                 must live.18   It is, however, different from the ideal of Bradley‟s “My Station and Its Duties”. For in the ideal of Varna Vyavastha, a man has no right to choose his own Varna, but has to accept the Varna where he is born; whereas Bradley‟s ideal gives freedom to choose. The varna has its own mechanism to regulate the rules of justice, which ultimately led the Brahmins to stifle the spirit of justice.