It’s a great question, and one I’ve asked myself a number of times. Being anti-political is a position I’ve flirted with a lot, especially over the course of writing my dissertation, and my personal views are closely entangled with the ideas I address there. In many respects I see the dissertation’s main contribution to Śāntideva scholarship as pointing out the strongly anti-political nature of Śāntideva’s thought, and the underlying reasons for his anti-politics. Śāntideva is, I think, often thought of as a great friend to the Engaged Buddhist program of Buddhist political activism, since he is probably best known as the favourite thinker of that noted activist Tenzin Gyatso, the present (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; I claimed in the dissertation that such a placing of Śāntideva is mistaken.

The dissertation explains this point in great detail (mostly in its fourth, fifth and seventh chapters), but I haven’t yet said much about it on the blog, and I probably should. Briefly: Śāntideva says very little about political action, but what he does say (in the Śikṣā Samuccaya) indicates that he rejects it. He gives a list of genres of information that are not worth knowing or learning about, and includes law and political science (daṇḍanīti) on this list. When he gives advice to kings, it is that they give their kingdoms away.

Why is this? I argue that it’s because Śāntideva rejects or devalues most of what Martha Nussbaum (following Aristotle) would call “external goods”: things not under our control which we would normally want, including relationships, social status and (above all) material goods. For him these things are neutral at best, and most often actively harmful (as I discussed here.) Śāntideva does say that one should give these things to others – one of the reasons why Engaged Buddhists like Stephen Jenkins see him as arguing for political action on behalf of the poor. But Śāntideva’s reasoning for giving things to others, I argue, is not that they benefit from possessing the gift – indeed, they may be harmed. But such harm is worth it when they receive a gift from a bodhisattva, because it produces esteem (śraddhā) toward the bodhisattva – it makes the recipient more likely to listen to the bodhisattva’s dharma teaching. A crucial feature of this gift encounter, however, is that the gift come directly from a bodhisattva. Donations from a government or NGO will not do the trick. And this, I argue, is why Śāntideva does not care about governments; action to help others in politics has no genuinely beneficial effect.

I came to these ideas slowly. When I first presented on Śāntideva at a graduate student workshop, I was excited to talk about what Śāntideva could teach us in a contemporary context; a respondent claimed that if he urged political quietism, we could not be able to accept such a worldview in the present age. (I mentioned this response in this early post.) I was a little cowed by this response at first, and it took me a while to figure out an appropriate reply: but then I realized that that political quietism was, in many respects, itself one of the most important things that Śāntideva has to teach us. Whether we agree or disagree with it, his anti-politics is a profound and impeccably Buddhist idea, one that challenges us in a way we must think about and respond to.

For me, it was intoxicating to discover such an idea at a time when I needed to get away from politics, when caring about politics brought nothing but pain. I felt validated in my search for a better, happier life outside politics. The seventh chapter of the dissertation juxtaposed Śāntideva’s ideas against Nussbaum’s more politically charged philosophy, effectively defending Śāntideva against Nussbaum’s objections.

What the dissertation did not do was take up my own substantive, constructive position on the question at hand – for such constructive positions are largely frowned upon, if not scowled upon, in academic religious studies. But such a lack of attention to constructive views allowed me to get off the hook too easily, to defend Śāntideva’s anti-politics without thinking too hard about whether I really believed it.

For in the end I don’t reject external goods; on that basic question I do stand closer to Nussbaum than to Śāntideva. Again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have got married; the logical practical conclusion from Śāntideva’s thought is the monasticism which he himself practised. Some external goods are genuinely good. They can indeed be negative, as in the case of the hedonic treadmill; and in some cases their absence can strengthen us, as Śāntideva also claims and as I noted in an earlier post. But I do not think that this negativity is the norm – especially at the lower end of the social ladder, where governments are most likely to direct their help. External goods are often genuine goods, especially when they are what we often call “basic needs.”

In short, Śāntideva’s position on external goods – and therefore on political action – cannot be mine. So where do I stand? Well, I haven’t settled that yet. This is part of the reason I’ve lately been trying to explore the concept of altruism: the value of politics depends a lot on who we are ultimately trying to benefit. Should we aim for an enlightened self-interest, for the good of those close to us or whom we identify with, or universally for the good of all? Śāntideva takes the latter, universal position, in no uncertain terms. But I suspect he may be only able to do this because he devalues external goods, because the good of all is identified as their spiritual liberation. To value external goods and still seek the good of all is basically to be a utilitarian, a terribly frustrating and perhaps ultimately counterproductive way of life.

For Wilber, one of the most fundamental philosophical debates is that between Ascent and Descent: between a spiritual view that aspires to transcendence of the everyday material world, and a materialist view that embraces it. (Like the intimacy-integrity distinction – on which more shortly – the distinction is particularly interesting because it embraces theoretical as well as practical philosophy, metaphysics as well as ethics.) Some of Wilber’s sharpest criticisms are directed against ecological philosophies of interdependence, which suggest that what we ultimately need is to embrace our mutual dependence in the natural world. In Wilber’s eyes, such a view leaves us scarcely better off than the mechanistic individualism it aims to replace, for both views remain squarely within a materialist tradition of “descent,” neglecting the spiritual realm. I have noted before that, while Yavanayāna Buddhists often embrace such views of interdependence, they are wildly at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism, for reasons similar to those noted by Wilber.

Upheavals of Thought, the weighty tome that I would consider Nussbaum’s magnum opus, employs such a distinction through its third, longest and final part – entitled “Ascents of Love.” This part of the book explores a strikingly wide range of Western perspectives on partial love (as opposed to universal compassion), and especially erotic or romantic love – from Spinoza’s Ethics to the Kindertotenlieder songs of Gustav Mahler. They are all “ladders” of love in a certain sense, in that they attempt to reform the way we see love. And they are arranged in a dialectical or phenomenological manner, with each one identified as (in Nussbaum’s eyes) responding to the inadequacies of the view before it, and in that respect providing a more adequate view. Such an attempt at dialectical progress is close to the way Wilber understands his project as well, and to the Chinese Buddhist idea of pan jiao 判教 (classification of the teachings) as I understand it. ^*

So far Nussbaum’s text sounds itself like a ladder of sorts. However, the order in which Nussbaum ranks these views is unusual for a philosophical ladder. She begins with Plato and Spinoza as the most inadequate positions, going through Augustine, finding herself after a while in Walt Whitman and ultimately in James Joyce. Why? Because Plato tries too hard to ascend above love’s imperfections; his love is too far removed from the world. Joyce’s Ulysses, on the other hand, takes us down the ladder, lovingly embracing the world with all its imperfections. Likewise in her previous work Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum had described her vision of an ideal transcendence as a “transcending by descent” (379, italics hers). [EDIT, June 17: part of this paragraph was missing when I first made this post yesterday.]

It would be too simple to describe Wilber as an ascent thinker and Nussbaum as descent; both see value in the two different sides and want to incorporate both. (For a pure ascent tradition we might do better with the Yoga Sūtras or the Jains’ Tattvārtha Sūtra; for a pure descent we might look to pragmatism or to Paul and Patricia Churchland.) But I think it’s useful to juxtapose the two because they both use the language of ascent and descent while taking quite different positions on it.

The ascent-descent distinction particularly interests me because of the way it can interact with other distinctions I have used to classify philosophies, especially Thomas Kasulis’s aforementioned distinction between intimacy and integrity. What’s always struck me about the integrity-intimacy distinction is that the integrity side captures something in common between two very different kinds of philosophies: ancient Indian views like the Yoga Sūtras in which the human subject aims to abide in a pure transcendental aloneness, and modern individualist philosophies of which Ayn Rand’s is perhaps the epitome, in which the rational individual aims for mastery of the material world. There’s even a certain rough correspondence here with the three ways of life classification I’ve employed before: “asceticism” is integrity ascent, “libertinism” is integrity descent, and “traditionalism” is intimacy.

But could the distinction be pushed further, so that intimacy too is divided between ascent and descent? I suspect that it can. As luck would have it, on my way to India where I was to have these thoughts, I was accosted in LAX by a group of airport Hare Krishnas. When I told them (perhaps inadvisably) that I knew Sanskrit, they pushed very hard for me to take a copy of their teacher Prabhupada’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. I read some of the introduction on the plane, and it stayed with me. As I thought through these categories, I realized: Prabhupada’s thought is the perfect example of intimacy ascent.

Prabhupada follows in the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition of Caitanya, according to which the purpose of human life is to abide in the love of the god Krishna. Prabhupada makes it clear that this love is far superior to any merely human love, which is impermanent and will fade – the ideas of an ascent tradition – while at the same time arguing for a radically dependent view of human beings, according to which human beings can never be viewed as solitary or independent (in the way that Rand and the Yoga Sūtras both do). But rather than depending on each other, as we do in Nussbaum’s thought, we depend on a higher, eternal being. Here intimacy is an ascent. (I suppose Augustine’s view, which Nussbaum also sees as inadequate, is of a very similar kind.) Nussbaum’s thought, on the other hand, takes us to an intimacy by descent – as does Alasdair MacIntyre’s world of “dependent rational animals,” and the relationship-centred world of Confucius.

Two axes, then, to classify philosophies (both theoretical and practical): a vertical axis of ascent and descent, and we might also say a horizontal axis of intimacy and integrity. How robust is it, how well does it work? I’m not sure yet. But it seems like a good start.

* I’m trying to begin learning Chinese characters, and how to produce them online. Please, any readers who know Chinese, correct me when I do this wrongly in this post or any other – as I’m sure will happen along the way.

Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)

Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.

And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.

I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.

And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.

A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.

For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.

But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.

Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.

I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)

What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.

Turns out it wasn’t always so. The title of Rawls’s thesis would have appeared a little drab at the time, but it’s striking to those who have read Rawls’s later philosophy. While the thesis deals heavily with questions of community and interpersonal relations, it says very little about Rawls’s later concern for the organization of the state. And soon after he wrote it, Rawls would go off to fight in World War II, and the horrors he saw would turn him agnostic. But what’s far more striking in the thesis is the continuity between the old (devout, pious) Rawls and the new (secular, political) Rawls. For my part, I have previously thought of Rawls as a philosophical foe – associating him with the utilitarianism that I rejected – and the thesis confirms to me that, in the most important respects, Rawls was thinking in all the wrong directions.

Fundamental to the thesis is a rejection of Greek philosophical thought from Plato and Aristotle onwards. In a line of Christian thinkers going back at least to Tertullian, Rawls rejects the influence the Greeks have had on Christianity from Augustine onward. Why? Because Greek thought is what Rawls eccentrically calls “naturalistic”: it asks what the good life is for humans, what humans do desire and what they should desire. But for Rawls all desire is part of the problem. We cannot see God as truly ultimate if our relation to him is one of desire – as it is in Augustine’s longing for God, let alone in the erotic longings of medieval women mystics like Teresa of Ávila. Augustine sees the heavenly life as the best life – and that’s the problem. We shouldn’t be thinking about the best life for ourselves, or even for others. We should be thinking about God as a person who is not an object of our desire at all. Ironically, Rawls’ later exclusion of religion (as “comprehensive conceptions of the good”) has its precedent in his own Christian views. Things would have been very different had Rawls been a Buddhist, in a tradition where so much is founded on our desire to end suffering.

Rawls does not argue for Christianity itself, taking it merely as a given starting point – and thereby anticipating his later attempt to debate politics without allowing religious debate to enter into it. Rawls never seemed to want to talk about religious foundations, early or late in life, even though the middle of his life had given him reason to change the roots of his own convictions from Christian to agnostic.

But the connection that strikes me most between the young Rawls and the mature Rawls is the opposition to ideas of merit or desert. Along with the Greeks’ striving for the desired good (eudaimonia), the later Rawls rejects Aristotle’s idea that social goods should go to the most deserving. In the early Rawls, this idea takes on a theological underpinning. He passionately rejects the Catholic doctrine of merit, which states that good works receive supernatural award. (This is why you will sometimes see the Buddhist terms pu?ya and p?pa, “good karma” and “bad karma” respectively, translated as “merit” and “demerit.”) Rawls rejects merit with a passionate fire rarely found in his later, more analytical writing:

The human person, once perceiving that the Revelation of the Word is a condemnation of the self, casts away all thoughts of his own merit. He sees that the givenness of God is everywhere prevenient, and that he possesses nothing that has not been given. He knows that what he has received has been given by some “other,” and that ultimately all good things are gifts of God. Therefore in the face of this givenness of God, in the face of His perfect and righteous mercy, he knows that he has no merit. Never again can he hope to boast of his good deeds, of his skill, of his prowess, for he knows that they are gifts.

The more he examines his life, the more he looks into himself with complete honesty, the more clearly he perceives that what he has is a gift. Suppose he was an upright man in the eyes of society, then he will now say to himself: “So you were an educated man, yes, but who paid for your education; so you were a good man and upright, yes, but who taught you your good maners and so provided you with good fortune that you did not need to steal; so you were a man of a loving disposition and not like the hard-hearted, yes, but who raised you in a good family, who showed you care and affection when you were young so that you would grow up to appreciate kindness — must you not admit that what you have, you have received? Then be thankful and cease your boasting.” Thus there is no man so upright that the Word of God beside his goodness will not condemn. There is no goodness that beside God’s goodness does not become a “filthy rag.” (239-40)

Rawls here deals with a point I discuss in my dissertation: the partial dependence of virtue on external goods. Martha Nussbaum criticizes the Stoics for distinguishing between virtue, internal to ourselves, and external goods that we cannot control, saying that only the first matters; I argue that this is a point ??ntideva would concede, that our virtues have causes outside ourselves. (He could hardly say otherwise, given his rejection of free will.) The question is, what do we do with this point? Rawls, in his earlier and later phases, effectively takes it as a reason to leave virtue aside entirely, in favour of divine grace or social institutions. In my view, against Rawls, virtue is a crucial component of the human good – and the human good, for ourselves and for others, is what it is most important for us to focus our attentions on.

Nevertheless, there’s a valuable cautionary point in this passage of the early Rawls, one I agree with. Our virtue is not ours alone, in that there are causal conditions that make it possible. It is something we should be thankful for. Other virtues make a pyrrhic victory if they take us to arrogance and away from humility; they are lacking without the gratitude for the things that makes them possible. Here the early Rawls can do us a service by making us more virtuous – despite himself.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: we liberated women. The liberation of women is the singular achievement of the past hundred years.

Before 1900, half of the human race, no matter its wealth or social standing, was guaranteed a life of subservience and disregard. Certainly women could still be happy in those earlier circumstances; happiness depends far more on one’s own mental dispositions than it does on one’s social standing or other external factors. But they received little if any opportunity to make a contribution to the world beyond their own families. A list of the pre-20th century philosophers who rival their greatest male counterparts, for example, could probably fit on the fingers of one hand, if one was being generous.

What the 20th century proved was that, contrary to the views of such great minds as Aristotle, Hume, Kant, the dharma??stra authors and arguably even the Buddha, women are every bit as capable as men when given a realistic opportunity; their lack of achievement had nothing to do with the poverty of their ideas and everything to do with the inability to get their ideas developed and preserved. Martha Nussbaum, Ayn Rand, Judith Butler, Iris Murdoch immediately leap to mind as among the past century’s most capable thinkers; even if one disdains their contributions, as analytic philosophers are prone to do, one can easily point to women among the most distinguished analytical ethicists: Philippa Foot, Christine Korsgaard, Judith Jarvis Thomson.

The technological achievements of the 20th century are a double-edged sword; the colonial empires’ liberation will be a footnote in the history told thousands of years from now, when most of those new nations no longer exist. But women’s liberation – incomplete though it may be – is here to stay. In the Western world, even organizations working against feminist causes accept women’s equality in ways they never would have hundreds of years before. Only in the Islamic world are serious arguments heard against women’s basic equality before the law in a general sense, and those arguments are marginal in much of that world, which has produced a large number of female heads of state. This is no longer a clock that can be turned back. And even in the face of so many shameful atrocities, that’s an accomplishment that should make any century proud.

I don’t know how conscious a choice Taylor made to avoid philosophy departments and analytic philosophy. I do think, however, that she made the right choice. Analytic philosophers model their precision after natural science – which means that watching analytic philosophers think is typically like watching scientists work, but without any of the funky lab equipment. It can be fascinating, if you already know the extended implications of the things they’re talking about, the reasons why their carefully delineated topics matter. If not, even if you understand what they say, they’ll look dull as dishwater. As such, they don’t make great subjects for a set of 10-minute interviews.

The limitations of “continental” philosophy, on the other hand, are generally the same as the philosophical limitations of the film itself: a lack of argumentative rigour, and a consequent difficulty in sorting truth from falsehood. This is particularly apparent in the early interview with Avital Ronell, the one thinker I wasn’t familiar with. Ronell throws out claims like “If you feel you know another person fully and completely, you want to kill them” – a view that makes some sense if you’re familiar with the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, on whom Ronell’s arguments are clearly based. If you don’t know Lévinas, however – and presumably the film’s target audience doesn’t – it comes off sounding bizarre. At best it’s a perplexing claim you want to investigate more, but you have no reason to take it as true.

It’s difficult to make a really compelling argument when one has so few words with which to do so, though, and most of the thinkers in the movie come across as deep rather than true. Singer does the best at convincing, mostly by rehashing what he himself notes is the same argument he had already made 37 years ago; but even there it’s hard for him to be convincing without the cut and thrust of debate, of objections and replies. One could have made a very different film – perhaps one somewhat more suited to analytic philosophy – out of dialogues, the dramatic form that Western philosophy took at its beginning. The trick there, though, is that dialogues among philosophers today are often unintelligible to the uninitiated, and a movie that watched these thinkers talk to each other could have been disastrous.

The movie’s “continental” approach wound up reminding me of one of my own choices for the blog, which I hadn’t yet articulated but have found myself generally sticking to: I strive to be “continental” in the posts and analytic in the comments. The posts are the space where I can stake out the big issues, draw out the relevance of the issues I’m examining and make what I hope are the most stimulating and insightful claims. The comments, on the other hand, are the place to make clearer arguments and examine the truth or falsehood of the post’s claims in more detail. I’m fortunate that, a few months in, I already have a solid group of commenters who are unafraid to take me to task on my claims. I couldn’t write the blog this way without them. (Thank you all!)

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that ??ntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.

Of course Indian Buddhists made room for householders – they’re the ones who kept the monks fed and clothed. But the classical Indian renouncer traditions, Jainism and Buddhism above all, make it very clear that the householder’s path is a lesser one, a path for those who are not as well developed. It may well be best for certain people – probably most people – to choose a householder’s life, but that’s because those people are weak, their bad karma too strong. There are echoes here of Paul in the New Testament saying “better to marry than to burn” (meaning “burn with lust,” not “burn in hell”). On the logic of classical Indian Buddhism, if marriage is the best path for me, it’s because I’m weak and unvirtuous, not good enough.

Now I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of my weaknesses. It’s not the characterization of myself as weak and unvirtuous that I object to; I can see a lot of that in myself, which is one reason I see such appeal in chastened intellectualism. Nevertheless, I do ultimately disagree that the monk’s life is the best life a human being can aspire to. Don’t get me wrong, I have an enormous degree of respect for monks. Overall, I suspect most lifetime monks are better off and more virtuous than the rest of us – they spend so much time cultivating themselves that they can be far less wrapped up in self-destructive behaviour than most. And yet, I do think that ultimately, the best, most fully human life is one that partakes of the pleasures of love and friendship, probably even of sensual pleasures like food and sex – while still being aware of the dangers of excessive attachment to them. Ultimately, on the question of external goods, I do end up closer to Martha Nussbaum’s worldly view than to ??ntideva’s. I have defended ??ntideva against Nussbaum many times, in my dissertation and elsewhere, and will continue to do so, because I think his side of the story doesn’t get nearly enough of a hearing; it’s worth listening to and there is a lot to learn from it. But in the end, I do not stand with him.

I first heard of monks and renouncers when I was quite young, visiting India with family, and I heard the explanation that people would follow this hard path to free themselves from sorrow. I expressed then what was probably my first real philosophical thought: “But if you free yourself from sorrow, you also free yourself from joy!” And this, to me, is a real problem. The classical Buddhist texts would say that even joy is itself sorrow – even sukha is dukkha – because joy comes to an end, because we inevitably lose the things we love, at death if not before. The inevitability of loss is indeed real, and terrible. But it is not clear to me that this loss must be so terrible. Does the pain of grief really outweigh the joys of togetherness? There is something to that idea – happiness researchers like Daniel Gilbert tell us we do lose more happiness from losses than we get from gains – but I don’t think it tells the whole story. Research in the same field also suggests that marriage (unlike childrearing) does do a lot to make you happy. And on death itself – so often emphasized in criticisms of material goods – the loss is itself not necessarily painful. Some of the wisest counsel on death comes from the Roman Epicurean Lucretius: true, when we die, we lose everything. But so what? We won’t be around to mourn the loss!

EDIT (1 November): My fiancée has asked me that her last name not be mentioned on this site, as she’s entering a critical phase of her career, and I post some fairly controversial opinions on the blog.

Savage’s arguments are startlingly poor. Abuse of power, a clear justification for opposing parent-child incest or incest between underage siblings, is hardly an issue between adult brothers and sisters. He says “older or more domineering siblings can hold enormous power over their brothers and sisters” – but so can older or more domineering spouses. And when he adds that the incest taboo “is not an attempt to deny a group of people any and all access to love and intimacy, but an attempt to direct sexual feelings toward healthier, more appropriate targets” – well, that’s exactly what anti-gay people say about their own position. Savage tries to add that people attracted to siblings can be attracted to others in a way that gays can’t; but while that might mean the homosexuality taboo’s effects are more unjust than the incest taboo’s, it still doesn’t give us any reason to believe the taboo against incest is healthy or valid in a way that the taboo against homosexuality is not. (Savage at least doesn’t try to bring up the really lame argument that incest leads to birth defects – on those grounds, we would need to prohibit people from having vaginal sex if they have heritable genetic disorders themselves!)

Now why does all this stuff about incest matter, philosophically? Because the incest taboo tends to be among our strongest preexisting moral beliefs (“moral intuitions”) – so much so that people like Savage will go to bizarre lengths to defend it in the face of all logic. Jonathan Haidt has done some great work exploring this phenomenon, noting how people will keep trying to come up with sillier and sillier reasons for opposing incest even when the obvious holes are pointed out.

Haidt shows us that there is one way to oppose consensual adult brother-sister incest consistently – and that’s to be the kind of conservative who also opposes homosexuality. Leon Kass, for example, likes to speak of the “wisdom of repugnance,” arguing that our disgust reactions are a good guide to ethical truth and we should be ready to follow them. But the same argument, of course, applies to homosexuality. This is what he calls a “conservative” view – one that admits all of our moral “intuitions,” including those based on disgust, rather than trying to reduce our moral views to harm, benefit and fairness.

By contrast, most defences of homosexuality require, as far as I can tell, that disgust reactions be ruled out of court as guides to ethical truth. I’m happy to say that; Martha Nussbaum has made similar points. But once you go to that point, you’re going to have a very hard time opposing incest. I don’t have a problem with this; I accept (as Haidt does) that there’s nothing wrong with consensual adult brother-sister incest. But it remains a problem for those who do want to hold on to “intuitions.”

Again no Sunday entry this week, as I’ll be out of town and away from the Internet.

But contemporary ethicists often go further than this, giving our unreflective “intuitions” a high status they do not deserve. Robert E. Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable is one of the worst examples of this pernicious practice. In attempting to make a particular substantive point about promise-keeping, he notes:

Here again, our moral intuitions are likely to vary, depending on which theory we embrace. Those who are not under the sway of any philosophical theory would, however, surely concur with Kronman’s assessment… To prevent us from ‘cooking’ the evidence upon which our choice between rival theories is to be based, however, let us again focus upon law as the formal codification of our community’s standard moral intuitions. (p. 50)

Let’s leave aside Goodin’s curious assumption that pretheoretical “intuitions,” and not theoretically developed judgements, are codified in law. Even if that were the case, it is difficult to see why such “uncooked” pretheoretical judgements would be a good source for normative moral claims. But this is exactly Goodin’s assumption; elsewhere he refers to certain moral intuitions in a particular case as “hopelessly contaminated by the very moral theories which are supposed to be validated by them.” (p. 45)

I could see advantages to Goodin’s method for purely descriptive ethics. If there were normative judgements “uncontaminated” by general moral theories – a questionable assumption – then an anthropologist studying an alien culture might find such judgements valuable data for making sense of this foreign world. But Goodin claims nowhere to be an anthropologist. He is concerned only with his own society, and takes the “uncooked” and “uncontaminated” judgements he finds codified in law as evidence for the normative claims he wants to make to that society (most generally, that we should attend to special responsibilities because of special vulnerability rather than contracts or consent).

This approach seems curiously anti-intellectual. Surely a judgement unaided by theoretical reflection would be of lesser value than one based on such reflection. It would seem that the whole point of theoretical reflection is to make our judgements more thoughtful, more considered, more reflective. If theoretical reflection “cooks” and “contaminates” our judgements to the point that pretheoretical judgements are more valuable than theoretically informed ones, then that reflection — which Goodin nevertheless engages in — seems a waste of time at best.

You could perhaps defend Goodin’s approach by making an analogy between ethics and an empiricist conception of natural science. Our moral intuitions, on this view, would not be presuppositions to be modified, but data to be codified. Moral theories would be based on induction from intuition data, and one would throw out theories that did not fit the data. As far as I can tell, a method like this seems implicit in Goodin’s approach to “uncooked intuition,” which he does not explicitly defend.

But for moral intuitions to function like sense data in this way would require something like the “moral sense” of Shaftesbury and other eighteenth-century British philosophers, a faculty of the mind comparable to sight or touch which is analogously capable of perceiving the moral qualities of actions. The problem is that few today argue for such a “moral sense,” and Goodin himself is not among the few. On his own account, his method is merely to clarify “the shared moral code of a given society,” which “itself may be no more than a negotiated order” (p. 10) — not something directly perceived, “intuited,” by the society’s members. If particular moral judgements are indeed handed down socially (as I agree they are) rather than intuited, surely we should work from them in their existing, theoretically informed forms, and not try to look for some “uncontaminated” root form.

I suspect that Goodin’s approach rests at least in part on the misleading connotations of the term “intuition.” Recall the uses that this term has outside of ethics. As a philosophical term it often means sense perception (as in standard English translations of Kant: “conceptions without intuitions are empty, intuitions without conceptions are blind”). In popular usage it refers to some special faculty of knowing, extra-sensory or an additional sense (as “women’s intuition”). Given these uses, the term “moral intuitions” implies a strong connotation of a “moral sense,” which I think can easily lead one to confusions like Goodin’s. In short, unless you actually accept the kind of moral-sense theory that Goodin (and most people today) do not, let’s have no more talk of “intuitions.” Let’s speak instead of “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” of “considered judgements” – or better yet, as Gadamer does, of “prejudices.”

(This post draws mostly from a paper I submitted to my PhD advisor, Parimal Patil, based on ideas in a class I audited from Niko Kolodny.)

Nussbaum tends to embrace the most commonsense position: our losses of external goods are real losses, and our strong reactions to such losses are expressing the truth that our lives are poorer. She contrasts this view to the Stoics, who say that we should remain calm and unshaken, confident in our own virtue.

I have a strong sympathy for the Stoic side; it’s been my experience that if one becomes unhappy whenever misfortune strikes, one will never be happy. The most extreme logical conclusion of their view seems to be a single-minded devotion to virtue and inner peace, best expressed in a monasticism like ??ntideva’s; but something does seem to me lost in such a life, a loss that could outweigh the misery from being struck by external losses.

There is a third position on the question, though, which has come to interest me more after the dissertation. Thinkers as far apart as Mencius and Nietzsche tend to support a view that losses do matter, but actually benefit us by strengthening us: “whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.” In some respects ??ntideva is closer to this position than he is to the Stoics; and I’m wondering whether it might be the most sensible position to take.