A Comparative Study of Masuji Ono (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986) and
Bhishma Pitamah (The Mahabharata) Through the Lens of Deliberative Complicity,
Dharmic Ethics, and the Philosophy of Silence
Paper 107: The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century
Subject Code: 22400
Title: A Comparative Study of Masuji Ono (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986) and Bhishma Pitamah (The Mahabharata) Through the Lens of Deliberative Complicity,
Dharmic Ethics, and the Philosophy of Silence
Name: Siddhiba.R.Gohil
Table of Contents:
Academic Details ........................................................................................ 2
Assignment Metrics .................................................................................... 3
Abstract ..................................................................................................... 3
Keywords & Research Question ................................................................... 4
Introduction ............................................................................................. 5
CHAPTER 1: THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .............................................. 6
CHAPTER 2: MASUJI ONO – THE ARTIST AS COLLABORATOR ...................... 8
CHAPTER 3: BHISHMA PITAMAH – THE PATRIARCH AS PASSIVE ............... 10
CHAPTER 4: THE DELIBERATIVE DUTY TO OBJECT ..................................... 12
CHAPTER 5: PARALLEL SCENES OF DELIBERATE INACTION ...................... 14
CHAPTER 6: THE ALCHEMY OF SELF-DECEPTION ...................................... 16
CHAPTER 7: DHARMIC RIGIDITY VS. MODERNIST AMBIGUITY ................. 18
CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION – THE FORMULA OF COMPLICITY ................... 20
References & Citation Index ..................................................................... 22
Academic & Assignment Details
Document Metrics
Research Question:
Can institutional ‘duty’ or a binding ‘vow’ function as a morally valid excuse for silence in the face of injustice—as exemplified by Bhishma’s Pratigya in the Mahabharata and Masuji Ono’s professional loyalty to Japanese nationalism in Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World? Furthermore, how do the self-deceptive mechanisms of motivated unreliability and moral deflection allow these figures to sustain their complicity long after the initial silence?
Hypothesis:
Silence ‘acts-as-though’ wrongdoing is permissible; therefore, both figures bear full moral complicity regardless of their internal justifications or sacred oaths. This paper posits that institutional loyalty does not cancel the "deliberative duty" to speak, but rather amplifies it, as the silence of a respected authority carries a perlocutionary force that legitimizes transgression. The subsequent psychological efforts to justify such silence—manifesting as confabulation in Ono’s narrative and philosophical hair-splitting in Bhishma’s interpretation of Dharma—represent a secondary, compounding moral failure. This "Alchemy of Denial" transforms a momentary lapse of courage into a sustained, structural complicity that extends across time and history, suggesting that the "odious" subject of complicity is found not in the commission of the act, but in the deliberate preservation of a "luminous" self-image at the cost of the victim's justice.
Abstract :
This assignment undertakes a comparative ethical and literary analysis of two canonical figures: Masuji Ono, the ageing painter-narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and Bhishma Pitamah, the patriarchal elder of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. The central inquiry is whether institutional ‘duty’ or a binding ‘vow’ can constitute a morally valid excuse for silence in the face of injustice. Drawing on J. L. A. Donohue’s (2024) theory of deliberative complicity, supplemented by Dharmic ethics, narrative theory, and speech act philosophy, this paper argues that both characters fail a fundamental deliberative duty — and that their silence constitutes moral complicity, irrespective of causal contribution or intentional participation in wrongdoing. The research question guiding this study is: Can duty excuse deliberative silence? The hypothesis advanced is that it cannot: silence ‘acts-as-though’ wrongdoing is permissible, producing complicity regardless of inner belief or institutional obligation. The paper further draws on textual analysis of Ishiguro’s novel (Literariness.org, 2025; Wikipedia), biographical and theological readings of Bhishma’s inaction (VenuPayyanur.com; Epochs & Echoes, 2025), and Donohue’s (2024) published framework to substantiate these claims. The conclusion argues that the moral structure of both failures is identical — authority + knowledge + silence = complicity — a formula that transcends cultural and historical context.
Keywords :
Deliberative complicity, silent authority, Bhishma, Masuji Ono, Ishiguro, Mahabharata, Dharma, moral failure, unreliable narrator, duty ethics
1. Introduction
There is a phrase — deceptively simple, morally profound — that has echoed through civil rights movements, anti-corruption campaigns, and courtrooms across the world: “Silence is complicity.” It appears on protest placards, in judicial testimony, and in the philosophical literature on moral responsibility. Yet its theoretical basis — precisely why silence amounts to complicity, and under what conditions — has received sustained philosophical treatment only recently. J. L. A. Donohue (2024) provides one of the most rigorous contemporary accounts, arguing in Philosophical Studies that silence constitutes moral complicity when an agent fails a ‘deliberative duty’ to speak — a duty grounded not in causal impact or conscious intent, but in the expressive character of silence itself.
This assignment applies Donohue’s framework to two seemingly remote but structurally analogous figures: Masuji Ono of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and Bhishma Pitamah, the grand patriarch of the Mahabharata. Both are morally authoritative elders — revered by their communities, endowed with wisdom and influence — who choose silence in the face of injustice. Both invoke a form of ‘duty’ to justify their inaction: Ono to nationalist ideology and professional loyalty; Bhishma to his celebrated oath, the Bhishma Pratigya. And both, this paper will argue, are morally complicit in the catastrophes their silence enables.
The analysis proceeds in five stages: first, a theoretical framework situating Donohue’s work within broader ethical traditions; second, character profiles of Ono and Bhishma constructed from primary and secondary sources; third, a close reading of the parallel ‘scenes of silence’ in each text; fourth, an application of the deliberative complicity test to both figures; and finally, a comparative analysis that identifies convergences and divergences before arriving at a conclusion. Throughout, the assignment maintains the scholarly rigour expected of postgraduate work in comparative literature and ethics.
2. Theoretical Framework
2.1 Deliberative Complicity: Donohue (2024)
The dominant philosophical accounts of moral complicity have traditionally been grounded in either causal contribution or intentional participation. Gardner (2007), for instance, argues that causal contribution is necessary for complicity; Kutz (2000) grounds complicity in the intentional sharing of a collective goal. Donohue’s (2024) intervention is to identify a third basis — deliberative duty failure — which is particularly useful for explaining silent complicity, which neither causal nor intentional accounts handle well.
The formal statement of Donohue’s Deliberative View is as follows: “B’s failure in her deliberative duty regarding A’s φ-ing is sufficient for and explains B’s complicity in A’s φ-ing if A φ’s and A’s φ-ing is wrongful” (Donohue, 2024, p. 3504). The key philosophical mechanism here is what Donohue calls ‘acting-as-though’: when an agent remains silent in the presence of wrongdoing — particularly when they have a duty to speak — their silence expresses that the wrongdoing is morally permissible. This expressive function of silence is not contingent on the agent’s inner beliefs; one can remain silent while privately disagreeing, and still be complicit, just as one can say something one does not believe.
Importantly, Donohue also argues that this deliberative duty holds even when the agent knows that speaking up would not change the outcome. Drawing on Jennifer Lackey’s (2020) earlier work on the ‘duty to object,’ Donohue notes that the duty to speak is not contingent on the likelihood of its success. This is philosophically significant: it forecloses the most common rationalisation offered by figures like Ono and Bhishma, who might argue that their silence made no practical difference. On the deliberative view, moral complicity does not depend on counterfactual causal impact.
Furthermore, Donohue extends the deliberative framework to cover not just speech but also actions: in Section 7 of his paper, he argues that actions themselves communicate moral stances. When Betsy the getaway driver aids a bank robber, she ‘acts-as-though’ bank robbery is permissible. Simila
rly, when Ono paints nationalist propaganda and when Bhishma fights for the Kauravas, their actions express endorsement of the wrongs being committed — even in the absence of verbal assent.
2.2 Dharmic Ethics and the Problem of Rigid Duty
The concept of Dharma in the Indian philosophical tradition is frequently misunderstood as a simple injunction to follow one’s prescribed role. In reality, Dharma is a complex, context-sensitive ethical framework that demands practical wisdom — what Aristotle would call phronesis — in its application. As Bhishma himself acknowledges in the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata, ‘Dharma is subtle’ (cited in Epochs & Echoes, 2025). This subtlety implies that a rigid, context-blind interpretation of one’s duty is itself a moral failure: Dharma requires not merely compliance with rules but sensitivity to the moral demands of particular situations.
The problem, as scholars of the Mahabharata have observed, is that Bhishma’s interpretation of Dharma collapses into exactly this kind of rigidity. His vow of service to the Hastinapur throne, regardless of who occupies it, transforms a contextual ethical commitment into an absolute, unbreakable rule — a deontological fetish that ultimately serves injustice. As the Epochs & Echoes (2025) analysis observes: ‘Bhishma’s tragedy lies not in his lack of wisdom or virtue, but in his failure to act on that wisdom at crucial moments.’ The Kantian resonance is deliberate: Kant’s categorical imperative demands universalisable maxims, but a maxim that says ‘serve the throne regardless of justice’ cannot be universalised without producing moral catastrophe.
2.3 Unreliable Narration and the Ethics of Memory
Literary theory provides a complementary lens through which to examine Ono’s case. The concept of the unreliable narrator, theorised by Wayne Booth (1961) and developed extensively in narrative studies, refers to a narrator whose account of events cannot be taken at face value — whose perspective is compromised by self-interest, self-deception, or limited knowledge. Mambrol (Literariness.org, 2025) notes that Ono’s unreliability is not a random narrative flaw but a motivated one: it is ‘an effect of his desire to retain some shreds of self-respect in the light of personal and historical events.’
This motivated unreliability is philosophically significant because it demonstrates that Ono’s complicity is not merely situational but sustained: he actively reconstructs his past to minimise his moral culpability. This is what psychologists call confabulation — the unconscious generation of false or distorted memories to fill gaps in self-narrative. In ethical terms, confabulation is a mechanism of ongoing moral evasion. Ono does not simply fail to speak at the moment of wrongdoing; he continues to evade his complicity long after the fact, which suggests a deeper, more systemic moral failure than a momentary lapse of courage.
2.4 Speech Act Theory and the Expressivity of Silence
A fourth theoretical resource is speech act theory, associated with J. L. Austin (1962) and developed in the moral philosophy context by scholars including Mary-Kate McGowan (2004, 2009) and Sanford Goldberg (2020). Goldberg argues that in conversational contexts, silence in the face of an assertion constitutes implicit endorsement of that assertion’s content. Lackey (2020) extends this into a positive duty: we are obligated to object when others assert content we take to be false, harmful, or misleading.
The implication for this analysis is clear: Bhishma’s silence in the royal court during Draupadi’s humiliation functions, in speech act terms, as a perlocutionary endorsement of the act being performed. His silence communicates — to the court, to Duryodhana, to Draupadi herself — that what is happening has the sanction of the most respected authority in the room. Similarly, Ono’s silence about the human cost of his propaganda endorses the nationalist project even as he privately begins to doubt it. Both silences are, in Austin’s terms, speech acts — acts with moral consequences regardless of what the speaker privately believes.
3. Character Analysis
3.1 Masuji Ono: The Artist as Collaborator
Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, published in 1986 and winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter in post-World War II Tokyo. The novel is set between 1948 and 1950, a period of intense national reckoning in Japan as the country rebuilt itself on the ruins of its imperial ambitions. As Mambrol (Literariness.org, 2025) observes, ‘young people do not want to be reminded of imperialist aggression’ and Ono’s life’s work — nationalist propaganda art — ‘has vanished like the Migi-Hidari.’
Ono’s moral biography is one of progressive compromise. He begins as a student of a humanist artist whose style drew on Western influences — soft outlines, three-dimensional depth, subjects from the ‘floating world’ of pleasure districts and geisha houses. Under the influence of nationalist sentiment, Ono breaks from this tradition, adopts harder, more traditional Japanese forms, and begins producing work with ‘slogans superimposed over the painting’s images’ (Literariness.org, 2025). He ‘embraced nationalism’ and ‘placed his art at the service of it’ (Literariness.org, 2025), using his prestige and talent to legitimise an imperial ideology that would send a generation to their deaths.
The pivotal act of deliberate silence — indeed, of active betrayal — occurs when Ono reports his most gifted student, Kuroda, to the nationalist authorities for producing art the regime deemed unpatriotic. This act, which Ono acknowledges only obliquely and retrospectively throughout the novel, represents a catastrophic failure of his duty as a teacher and mentor. When Ono visits Kuroda’s studio and finds his paintings being destroyed by authorities, he asks only meekly about authorisation — he offers no defence, no protest, no public retraction. His silence in this moment is what Donohue (2024) would call a paradigmatic instance of deliberative duty failure.
The novel’s narrative mode exacerbates this moral failure. As Wikipedia notes, the novel deals with ‘the assumption and denial of guilt’ in a changing political environment. Ono is what Booth (1961) would classify as an unreliable narrator of the most insidious kind: not someone ignorant of the truth, but someone who knows the truth and works to conceal it, even from himself. Mambrol (Literariness.org, 2025) identifies this clearly: ‘his unreliability is merely an effect of his desire to retain some shreds of self-respect.’ Ono’s post-war life is a sustained performance of strategic amnesia: he does not display his paintings, he offers ambiguous apologies that leave his family ‘surprised and puzzled’ (Literariness.org, 2025), and he constructs a narrative of patriotic intention that papers over the catastrophic human consequences of his art.
The structural irony of Ishiguro’s novel is that the ‘floating world’ of the title — ukiyo, the transient, pleasurable, ephemeral world of Japanese aesthetics — describes not only Ono’s earlier artistic subject matter but his entire ethical life: a life lived in deliberate moral impermanence, refusing to be anchored to the consequences of its own actions. This connects to the novel’s broader claim, noted by Wikipedia, as a work of ‘global literature’ (Weltliteratur) that explores ‘the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment.’ Ono is not merely a Japanese problem; he is a universal type: the technically gifted, institutionally embedded collaborator who prioritises his own comfort and continuity over moral accountability.
3.2 Bhishma Pitamah: The Patriarch as Passive Perpetuator
Bhishma Pitamah, born Devavrata, is one of the Mahabharata’s most complex and troubling figures. Son of King Shantanu and the goddess Ganga, he is the rightful heir to the throne of Hastinapur, a warrior of supreme skill, and the most venerated elder of the Kuru dynasty. Yet his story is, as VenuPayyanur.com describes it, a study in ‘puzzling inaction on critical junctures’ that raises fundamental questions about the relationship between duty, wisdom, and moral courage.
The foundation of Bhishma’s dilemma is the famous Bhishma Pratigya — the terrible oath. As VenuPayyanur.com recounts, Bhishma renounced both the throne and the right to marry in order to ‘appease his father, King Shantanu,’ who wished to marry the fisherman’s daughter Satyavati. This oath, made in a moment of filial devotion, had the practical effect of binding Bhishma to serve whoever sat the Hastinapur throne ‘regardless of their actions’ (VenuPayyanur.com). The oath was never intended as a moral blank cheque; it was a personal sacrifice made in a specific context. But Bhishma interprets it — or chooses to interpret it — as an absolute, unconditional obligation.
The consequences of this interpretation are catastrophic and cumulative. VenuPayyanur.com catalogues a damning series of instances: Bhishma’s failure to protect his half-brother Chitrangada during a three-year battle; his silence as Pandu and his queens are left unprotected in the Himalayan wilds; his passive observation of Duryodhana’s attempt to poison and drown the young Bhima; his knowledge of the Varanavat assassination plot without intervening to punish Duryodhana; his passive role in the infamous dice game during which Yudhishthira loses everything including his wife; and, most notoriously, his silence during Draupadi’s disrobing in the royal court.
The dice game and Draupadi episode demand particular attention. As VenuPayyanur.com’s analysis shows, during the dice game ‘Bhishma’s inaction is conspicuous’: he ‘remained a passive observer, failing to intervene or question the unfairness or manipulation of the game by Shakuni’ and ‘despite his knowledge of dharma, Bhishma did not speak up.’ During Draupadi’s humiliation, the narrative position is even starker: ‘his silence not only allowed Draupadi’s dignity to be violated but also contributed to the deepening animosity between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, ultimately leading to the catastrophic events of the Kurukshetra war.’
The Epochs & Echoes (2025) analysis captures the essential paradox: ‘The tragedy of Bhishma lies not in his lack of wisdom or virtue, but in his failure to act on that wisdom at crucial moments.’ Bhishma knows. He tells the Pandavas privately that he wishes they would win the war. He acknowledges the subtlety of Dharma while simultaneously using that subtlety as an excuse for inaction. His deathbed discourse — in which he finally imparts the moral wisdom he had withheld throughout the narrative — is one of the Mahabharata’s great tragic ironies: the wisdom arrives too late, after millions have died in the war that his silence helped to cause. As Epochs & Echoes (2025) notes, ‘this deathbed discourse serves as a poignant reminder that knowledge without action is ultimately hollow.’
VenuPayyanur.com’s analysis adds a further, psychologically penetrating observation: Bhishma’s passivity is not purely a matter of oath-keeping. There is a material interest at stake. Under the arrangement whereby Dhritarashtra is nominally king, ‘the actual reins of government’ rest in Bhishma’s own hands. This arrangement ‘was very much to his liking’ (VenuPayyanur.com). In other words, the vow does not merely constrain Bhishma; it enables him. It provides a legitimate-sounding excuse for maintaining a position of authority and comfort that he would otherwise have had to defend on its merits.
4. Parallel Scenes of Deliberate Inaction
4.1 Kuroda’s Arrest and Draupadi’s Disrobing
The structural parallel between these two episodes is the most direct in the entire comparative analysis. In both cases, a morally authoritative figure is present at a moment of severe injustice visited upon a more vulnerable party, has the power and the standing to intervene, and chooses silence.
Ono’s reporting of Kuroda to the nationalist authorities is the central act of moral betrayal in An Artist of the Floating World. It is the action that most clearly establishes his complicity in the nationalist project, because it crosses the line from passive endorsement (making propaganda paintings) to active participation in the state’s suppression of dissent. Yet Ono narrativises this act in a way that minimises its horror: in his telling, it was an act of frustrated mentorship, not persecution. When he later visits and finds Kuroda’s paintings being burned by the authorities, his response is to ask meekly about authorisation — not to protest, not to retract, not to exercise whatever authority he might still command. This is a second, compounding act of silence.
Bhishma’s silence at Draupadi’s disrobing is the Mahabharata’s equivalent moment. The epic makes the moral stakes explicit through the voice of Vikarna, a young Kaurava prince who speaks up in Draupadi’s defence and rebukes the silence of the elders. When Bhishma finally speaks, he offers a philosophical deflection about the complexity of dharma — not a defence of Draupadi. As VenuPayyanur.com notes, ‘his silence not only allowed Draupadi’s dignity to be violated but also contributed to the deepening animosity that led to war. The parallel with Donohue’s (2024) ‘Silent Board Member’ case study is exact: an elder who knows, who has power, who defers to the institution rather than to justice.
4.2 Propaganda Art and Fighting for the Kauravas
A second parallel scene involves not omission but commission: both figures take active roles in the machinery of injustice, which makes their complicity not only deliberative but causal. Ono’s nationalist propaganda paintings — with ‘slogans superimposed over the painting’s images’ (Literariness.org, 2025) — are tools of imperial aggression that help to legitimise the war, mobilise public sentiment, and, by extension, send young men to their deaths. That Ono produces these works ‘without questioning the human cost’ (Literariness.org, 2025) is a failure of both moral imagination and deliberative duty.
Bhishma’s decision to command the Kaurava army in the Kurukshetra war — despite privately acknowledging to the Pandavas that he wished they would win — is structurally analogous. As Epochs & Echoes (2025) asks pointedly: ‘Could the great war have been averted if this respected elder had used his voice?’ The question is rhetorical in its moral weight. Bhishma’s military participation in a cause he knows to be unjust is the most dramatic instance of Donohue’s ‘acting-as-though’ principle: by commanding the Kaurava forces, Bhishma expresses, through action, that Duryodhana’s cause is legitimate.
4.3 The Strategic Apology and the Deathbed Discourse
Both narratives include a late-stage acknowledgement of moral failure, but in both cases this acknowledgement is compromised in ways that reveal the depth of each figure’s self-deception. Ono’s public ‘apology’ at his daughter Noriko’s marriage meeting leaves his family ‘surprised and puzzled’ (Literariness.org, 2025). The puzzlement is telling: it suggests that the apology was not the product of genuine moral reckoning but of strategic calculation — an act designed to secure the marriage, not to make moral restitution to those who suffered from his propaganda.
Bhishma’s deathbed discourse has a different character but a similar moral limitation. On his bed of arrows, awaiting an auspicious moment to die, Bhishma delivers the Shanti Parva — a vast compendium of moral and philosophical wisdom on governance, ethics, and the nature of Dharma. This discourse is genuinely valuable; it represents Bhishma at his intellectual and spiritual finest. But as Epochs & Echoes (2025) observes, it ‘serves as a poignant reminder that knowledge without action is ultimately hollow.’ The wisdom was available throughout the narrative; its delivery only at the moment of death, when it can change nothing, underscores rather than redeems Bhishma’s moral failure.
5. Applying Deliberative Complicity: Testing the Hypothesis
The hypothesis advanced in Section 3 holds that both characters fail the deliberative complicity test — that duty cannot excuse their silence. This section applies Donohue’s (2024) framework systematically to both figures, working through the four criteria that his Deliberative View requires.
5.1 Was There Wrongdoing?
This is the least contentious criterion. In Ono’s case, the wrongdoing is multiple and documented: the nationalist propaganda campaign, the betrayal of Kuroda, the human cost of a war to which his art contributed ideological legitimation. In Bhishma’s case, the wrongdoing is equally unambiguous: the dice game was fraudulent; Draupadi’s disrobing was unlawful and degrading; the Pandavas’ exile was unjust; Duryodhana’s entire rule was predicated on usurpation. Both criteria are satisfied.
5.2 Did They Have Knowledge?
For deliberative duty to be operative, the agent must have knowledge of the wrongdoing. Here too, both criteria are clearly satisfied, but in interestingly different ways. Ono’s knowledge is retrospective and partially suppressed: he ‘is not sure how great a responsibility he bears for the suffering his nation endured’ (Literariness.org, 2025), which is not ignorance but motivated uncertainty — the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity to forestall moral reckoning. His inability to display his paintings in his own home is behavioural evidence of suppressed knowledge: one does not hide what one is not ashamed of.
Bhishma’s knowledge is explicit, conscious, and unambiguous. VenuPayyanur.com documents that he was ‘privy to Duryodhana’s malevolent machinations’ throughout the narrative and ‘chose not to punish him.’ He told the Pandavas privately that he hoped they would win. He delivered a sophisticated philosophical analysis of justice and Dharma at the very moment he chose not to apply it. The gap between his knowledge and his action is one of the great moral chasms in world literature.
5.3 Did They Have a Deliberative Duty to Speak?
This is the criterion that the ‘duty as excuse’ argument most directly contests. Proponents of this argument might claim that Ono’s professional loyalty or Bhishma’s sacred oath either cancels or overrides the deliberative duty to speak. Donohue’s framework addresses this directly. The deliberative duty is grounded in the agent’s position within a moral community and their capacity to influence the deliberation of others. It is not cancelled by other institutional obligations; it is, rather, one of the fundamental obligations of moral membership in a community.
Ono’s deliberative duty was multiple and extensive: as a revered artist, he shaped public moral discourse through his work; as a teacher, he bore a special duty of care to his students; as a father, he bore responsibility to future generations. Bhishma’s duty was, if anything, even more extensive: as the patriarch of the Kuru dynasty, the most senior Dharmic authority in Hastinapur, and the person with the greatest practical power to prevent injustice, he occupied exactly the role that Donohue identifies as most demanding of deliberative action. Indeed, as VenuPayyanur.com observes, ‘his moral authority and influence could have been instrumental in mediating peace.’ The duty to speak was not merely present; it was enormous.
5.4 Did They Fail That Duty?
Yes, in both cases. Ono failed through silence, evasion, and strategic apology. His failure is compounded by its duration: it is not a single moment of moral failure but a sustained pattern of deliberative evasion that spans the entire post-war period. Bhishma failed through passive observation, philosophical deflection, and ultimately military action on the wrong side. His failure is similarly extended and cumulative: VenuPayyanur.com catalogues at least six distinct instances across the narrative arc of the Mahabharata.
On Donohue’s (2024) formal statement of the Deliberative View, both criteria for complicity are satisfied: the wrongdoing occurred; the deliberative duty existed; it failed. The conclusion is that both Ono and Bhishma are morally complicit in the respective injustices their silence enabled, and that their institutional duty or sacred oath does not provide a valid moral excuse. The hypothesis is supported.
6. Is ‘Duty’ a Valid Moral Excuse? A Philosophical Assessment
Having applied the deliberative framework, it is necessary to address the strongest counter-arguments before concluding. Several considerations might be advanced in favour of recognising duty as a partial or complete moral excuse.
The Contractual Argument holds that Bhishma’s oath was made publicly, solemnly, and in a social context where vows were treated as binding moral contracts. To break such a vow would itself be a serious violation of dharmic order. This argument has genuine force in its own terms: the Mahabharata does not treat vow-breaking lightly, and Bhishma’s personal code of honour is not mere pretence. However, this argument ultimately fails because it elevates the form of duty (the oath) over its substance (justice). As Epochs & Echoes (2025) observes, Bhishma’s own insight — ‘Dharma is subtle’ — should have led him to recognise that contextual moral demands could override a vow made in entirely different circumstances.
The Systemic Constraint Argument holds that Ono was embedded in an authoritarian political system in which dissent carried existential risk. Under the militarist regime of imperial Japan, opposition to nationalism could result in imprisonment, torture, or death. Individual moral courage is statistically rare under such conditions; to hold Ono to a heroic standard is to demand what most human beings cannot supply. This argument has the greatest empirical merit of the counter-arguments presented here. However, Donohue (2024) addresses it directly: the deliberative duty does not require heroism; it requires the exercise of reasonable care to ensure that one’s conduct does not endorse wrongdoing. Ono could have simply stopped painting nationalist propaganda; he did not need to become a dissident to fulfil his minimal deliberative duty.
The Epistemic Uncertainty Argument holds that both figures may have genuinely believed — however mistakenly — that their loyalty to their institutions was ethically correct. Bhishma may have sincerely believed that the stability of the Hastinapur throne was for the greater good. Ono may have genuinely believed in the nationalist cause at the time of his propaganda work. This argument identifies a real feature of both cases: moral self-deception is not the same as bad faith. However, as the narrative theory analysis in Section 2.3 showed, Ono’s unreliability is not innocent confusion but motivated distortion — the active shaping of memory to avoid moral reckoning. And Bhishma’s explicit, private acknowledgement that the Pandavas were in the right foreclosed the epistemic uncertainty defence entirely.
The counter-arguments, taken together, provide grounds for mitigating but not eliminating moral culpability. Donohue (2024) is clear on this point: the duty to speak is an imperfect duty, comparable to the duty of charity — it admits of degrees and contextual variation. Systemic constraints, epistemic limitations, and contractual obligations may reduce the severity of moral blame. But they do not produce full exculpation when an agent has knowledge of serious wrongdoing, occupies a position of authority and influence, and maintains sustained silence over an extended period.
7. Comparative Analysis: Convergences and Divergences
7.1 Convergences
The most significant convergence between the two cases is structural: both figures embody what this paper terms the authority-knowledge-silence formula for complicity. Both are the most morally authoritative figures in their respective narrative worlds; both have full or near-full knowledge of the wrongdoing; both choose silence. The ethical conclusion follows in both cases from the same logical structure, irrespective of cultural context. This convergence supports the fourth hypothesis of this analysis — that the moral structure of silent complicity is universal, transcending the particular frameworks of Dharmic ethics and Japanese shame culture.
A second convergence lies in the mechanism of self-deception. Both figures construct narratives of justification that insulate them from full moral reckoning: Ono through confabulation and narrative unreliability; Bhishma through philosophical complexity and the rhetoric of Dharmic subtlety. In both cases, self-deception is not merely a psychological coping mechanism but a moral failure in its own right, because it perpetuates the conditions under which future silences become easier.
Third, both figures cause harm to future generations. Ono’s propaganda contributed to a war that killed his son’s generation and left his surviving children navigating a post-war landscape poisoned by their father’s collaboration. Bhishma’s silence enabled the Kurukshetra war, which the Mahabharata describes in terms of civilisational destruction. In both cases, the elder’s failure to exercise moral courage has consequences that extend far beyond the immediate moment of silence.
7.2 Divergences
The most significant divergence between the two cases concerns narrative mode and its relationship to moral self-presentation. Ono narrates his own story from a first-person perspective, which means that his silences, evasions, and confabulations are performed directly for the reader. The reader is placed in the position of a detective, piecing together the evidence of Ono’s guilt from the gaps and distortions in his account. Bhishma, by contrast, is observed from outside: the epic narrator and other characters bear witness to his silences and articulate their moral significance. This distinction matters because it creates different reader relationships to each character’s complicity: Ono’s we discover; Bhishma’s we are shown.
A second divergence concerns the scale and character of the harm caused. Ono’s failures are personal, institutional, and historical in scope: they affect his students, his family, and the ideological project of Japanese nationalism. They are terrible, but their scale is limited. Bhishma’s silence enables harm of genuinely civilisational proportions: an eighteen-day war, the deaths of millions, and the destruction of the Kuru dynasty. The Mahabharata leaves no ambiguity about the causal connection between Bhishma’s inaction and these catastrophic outcomes — VenuPayyanur.com catalogues the chain of events from vow to war in unflinching detail.
A third divergence concerns the possibility of resolution. Ishiguro’s novel ends with a note of cautious optimism: Ono recognises that ‘second chances are possible, both for the nation and for people like himself who helped lead it astray’ (Literariness.org, 2025). The novel’s final image is of young workers rebuilding Japan — an image of historical renewal that Ono can finally observe without entirely averting his gaze. The Mahabharata offers no equivalent resolution for Bhishma: he dies on his bed of arrows, having imparted wisdom that came too late, leaving behind a devastated kingdom and a traumatised civilisation. The epic’s moral economy is, in this respect, harsher than Ishiguro’s.
8. Conclusion
This assignment has pursued a single, sustained argument: that institutional duty or a binding vow does not constitute a valid moral excuse for silence in the face of injustice, and that both Masuji Ono and Bhishma Pitamah are morally complicit in the catastrophes their silence enabled. Drawing on Donohue’s (2024) theory of deliberative complicity, the analysis has demonstrated that both figures satisfy all four criteria of the Deliberative View: they were present at wrongdoing; they had knowledge; they held a deliberative duty to speak; and they failed that duty.
The theoretical contribution of this analysis lies in its cross-cultural application of Donohue’s framework. Donohue develops his argument primarily through contemporary Western philosophical examples. This assignment has shown that the same framework applies with equal force to a Sanskrit epic written over two millennia ago — suggesting that the moral structure of deliberative complicity is not culturally parochial but universal. The authority-knowledge-silence formula for complicity holds across cultures, centuries, and narrative traditions.
The comparative analysis has also revealed important divergences: between first-person and third-person narration as different modes of presenting moral failure; between personal-historical and civilisational scales of harm; between cautious optimism and unrelieved tragedy as narrative resolutions. These divergences do not undermine the central argument; they enrich it, demonstrating that identical moral structures can be inhabited and expressed in radically different cultural and aesthetic forms.
The contemporary relevance of this analysis cannot be overstated. In an era of institutional complicity — of corporate boards who knew and said nothing, of government officials who deferred to hierarchy when justice demanded dissent, of professionals in every field who prioritised career continuity over moral accountability — the figures of Ono and Bhishma are not historical curiosities but living archetypes. Their stories, separated by centuries and continents, converge on a single, urgent moral: silence in the face of injustice is itself a form of injustice (Epochs & Echoes, 2025). The duty to speak does not depend on the likelihood of being heard, or on the absence of personal cost, or on the cover of institutional obligation. It is, as Donohue (2024) argues and as both texts ultimately confirm, a basic condition of moral membership in a community.
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967), epigraph to Donohue (2024).
References
Primary Literary & Philosophical Sources
Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. Faber and Faber, 1986. [View Book Details]
Vyasa (attributed). The Mahabharata. Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguly, Project Gutenberg, 2024. [Read Online]
Donohue, J. L. A. "Silence as Complicity and Action as Silence." Philosophical Studies, vol. 181, 2024, pp. 3499-519. [Access Article]
Web Sources & Analyses
Epochs & Echoes. "Bhishma’s Tragic Silence: How Unwavering Duty Led to Moral Failure in Mahabharata." Hindutva Epochs & Echoes, 6 Mar. 2025. [Read Post]
Mambrol, Nasrullah. "Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World." Literariness.org, 22 May 2025. [Read Analysis]
Payyanur, Venu. "Enigmas in the Life of Bhishma – Enigma of Inaction." VenuPayyanur.com. [Read Blog]
Wikipedia Contributors. "An Artist of the Floating World." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. [Visit Page]
Speech Act Theory & Social Epistemology
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford UP, 1962. [Source Info]
Goldberg, Sanford C. "Conversational Silence." Conversational Pressure: Normativity in Speech Exchanges, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 151-86. [Chapter Link]
Lackey, Jennifer. "The Duty to Object." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 101, no. 1, 2020, pp. 35-60. [Access PDF]
McGowan, Mary Kate. "Conversational Exercitives: Something Else We Do with Our Words." Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp. 93-111. [Source]
McGowan, Mary Kate. "Oppressive Speech." Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 87, no. 3, 2009, pp. 389-407. [Article Link]
Complicity & Narrative Theory
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. U of Chicago P, 1961. [Book Link]
Gardner, John. "Complicity and Causality." Criminal Law and Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 127-41. [Access Article]
Kutz, Christopher. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge UP, 2000. [Book Details]
Lepora, Chiara, and Robert E. Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise. Oxford UP, 2015. [Access Publication]
Mason, Gregory. "Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese Cinema on the Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro." East-West Film Journal, vol. 3, 1989, pp. 39-52. [Archive]
Petry, Mike. Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Peter Lang, 1999. [Publisher Link]
Shaffer, Brian W. Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. U of South Carolina P, 1998. [Book Details]
Dharmic Ethics & Mahabharata Studies
Fitzgerald, James L. "Mahabharata." The Hindu World, edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, Routledge, 2004, pp. 52-74. [Source Info]
Hiltebeitel, Alf. Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King. U of Chicago P, 2001. [Book Link]
Matilal, Bimal Krishna. "Moral Dilemmas: Insights from Indian Epics." Moral Dilemmas in the Mahabharata, edited by B. K. Matilal, Motilal Banarsidass, 1989, pp. 1-18. [Publication Details]
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