Seven Social Sins

A person cannot do right in one department whilst attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi said that seven things will destroy us. Notice that all of them have to do with social and political conditions. Note also that the antidote of each of these “deadly sins” is an explicit external standard or something that is based on natural principles and laws, not on social values, and are published in his weekly newspaper Young India on October 22, 1925.

Later he gave this same list to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, written on a piece of paper on their final day together shortly before his assassination.

Seven Social Sins is a list that was first uttered in a sermon delivered in Westminster Abbey on March 20, 1925 by an Anglican pries named Frederick Lewis Donaldson. He originally referred to it as the “7 Deadly Social Evils”

The Seven Sins are:

  • Wealth without work.
  • Pleasure without conscience.
  • Knowledge without character.
  • Commerce without morality.
  • Science without humanity.
  • Religion without sacrifice.
  • Politics without principle.