Sarvodaya, Compared With Utilitarianism

In one line

Utilitarianism seeks the greatest good of the greatest number; Sarvodaya seeks the good of all, and Gandhi's objection is that the first will always be willing to sacrifice somebody and the second never is.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Sarvodaya, meaning the rise or welfare of all, is Gandhi's social ideal, according to which the object of social and political arrangements is the good of every member of society without exception, beginning with the last and weakest, which he called Antyodaya; it is contrasted with utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest happiness of the greatest number and therefore accepts, in principle, the sacrifice of a minority whenever the aggregate is thereby increased.

The word and its source

Sarvodaya is formed from sarva, all, and udaya, rise or uplift: the rise of all.

Gandhi coined it as the title of his 1908 paraphrase in Gujarati of John Ruskin's Unto This Last, a book he read on a train journey in South Africa and which he said changed his life. He drew three lessons from it, and the first two are exactly the point of this chapter.

That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all.

That a lawyer's work has the same value as a barber's, since all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work.

That the life of labour, that is, of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman, is the life worth living.

Notice that the first lesson is a denial of the very structure utilitarianism assumes. Utilitarianism assumes individual goods that can conflict and must be traded off. Gandhi's premise is that they cannot ultimately conflict, because one person's good is not separable from everybody's.

Antyodaya, and why it is the operative principle

Antyodaya means the rise of the last, and it is Gandhi's practical test.

His own formulation of it, often called the talisman, is a rule for decision: when in doubt, recall the face of the poorest and weakest person you have seen, and ask whether the step you contemplate will be of any use to them, whether it will restore to them control over their own life and destiny.

Why this is more than a sentiment. It is a decision rule, and it is the opposite of aggregation. Aggregation asks what the total is; Antyodaya asks what happens to the person at the bottom. A scheme that raises the total while leaving the poorest exactly where they were fails the test and passes the calculus.

The resemblance to Rawls is worth noticing and is a strong point in an answer. Rawls's difference principle permits inequalities only where they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, which is a very similar structure arrived at from an entirely different direction.