Category Archives: Foundations of Ethics

Being yourself in the medieval era

07 Sunday May 2023

Posted by in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Politics, Self, Western Thought

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Along with rethinking the term for expressive individualism, I’ve also lately been rethinking the history of the phenomenon. The idea that one should be one’s own true self is part of the air we moderns breathe: we don’t think about it because we assume it. (Some of the deeper thought on the matter comes from Christian conservatives, because they need to think about expressive individualism in order to oppose it.) Very few expressive individualists do the work that they should to defend the ideal philosophically. More attention has been paid to the idea’s history – but this, too, is something that I think we often get wrong.

The big question I want to revisit today is: when does expressive individualism begin? When do people first start thinking that every person has her own unique purpose in her individuality, and that following that purpose is a proper ethical ideal? I’ve argued there are metaphysical precedents for the idea in John Duns Scotus‘s distinction between whatness and thatness, but I don’t think there’s any inkling of individualist ethics in the pious thirteenth-century monk Scotus. Expressive individualism comes later – but how much later?

Continue reading →

A hymn to Ecclesiastes

26 Sunday Mar 2023

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, God, Happiness, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I don’t remember when I first read the book of Ecclesiastes. I first taught it at the Catholic Stonehill College. There we were free to teach Intro to Religion however we wanted, so to follow my own intellectual curiosity I made it “God in the West”. The one thing we were required to teach was the book of Exodus, which I suspect the department had selected for an uplifting social-justice message in which God acts to free a people from slavery. But the Hebrew Bible, let alone the whole Christian Bible, has never spoken with a single voice, and I selected Ecclesiastes to teach alongside Exodus because the contrast between them is so remarkable.

Much like the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), which it immediately precedes, Ecclesiastes is a book you don’t expect to find in the Bible. It makes you wonder: what is this book doing here? The Song of Songs bears the most obvious contrast with what we think we know about the Bible: here is a text that is obviously about a young couple having sex, seemingly celebrating it, and they don’t even appear to be married. That’s not the sort of thing that we are led to imagine would appear in the Bible. But it’s in there.

Ecclesiastes’s contrast to the rest of the Bible is a little subtler, but it’s still notable. Exodus, and other prophetic books, give you a God who acts in the world with righteousness, freeing his chosen people from slavery with terrifying wonders. Ecclesiastes gives you a God who does not.

Continue reading →

Honing in on a disagreement

01 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Monasticism, Morality, Self, Virtue

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

Continue reading →

Video debate: “Śāntideva: utilitarian or eudaimonist?”

15 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Happiness, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Supernatural

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

Lele handoutDownload
Goodman handoutDownload

The goods of lay life

13 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Modernized Buddhism, Monasticism, Pleasure

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.

Continue reading →

The Buddhist oxygen mask

15 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Health, Mahāyāna

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your oxygen mask on first, and then assist the other person.

Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline has heard this instruction; anyone who flies frequently has heard it so often that it becomes background noise, though relatively few of us have ever had the chance to put it into practice. If the plane cabin depressurizes and the oxygen masks drop, one has only seconds before running out of oxygen oneself; if one tries to put the oxygen mask on a child first, hypoxia may inhibit one’s ability to put the mask on the child correctly, to say nothing of the risk to oneself. One can best save both people by attending to oneself first – running against any parent’s natural instinct to protect his own child.

I’m not the first to see this advice as a metaphor for other forms of ethical conduct in relationships: “the oxygen-mask principle”. Often we can take care of others most effectively by taking care of ourselves. What I also see, though, is that this principle is deeply Buddhist.

Continue reading →

The Sigālovāda’s vicious mean

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Early and Theravāda, Faith, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Monasticism, Play, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Work, Zest

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

The Sigālovāda Sutta might be my least favourite sutta in the Pali Canon.

There is relatively little that the Pali texts say on “ethics” in a modern Western sense of interpersonal action-guiding; much of the specific instructions on action are found in vinaya, legal texts for the conduct of monks. The Sigālovāda is relatively unusual in providing guidance for action to lay householders. For that reason, a number of secondary writers on Buddhist ethics regard it as as a valuable guide for Buddhist ethical conduct.

I do not.

Continue reading →

Among the MacIntyreans

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Work

≈ Comments Off on Among the MacIntyreans

Tags

, , , , ,

I’ve had the good fortune in the past couple years to attend multiple events held by the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME). (To answer the question that is most often asked when I first mention the ISME: yes, it exists!) The 2020 and 2021 events (the second of these happening last week) were virtual, for the unfortunate reasons of the COVID pandemic, but that virtual status did give me the ability to attend. Previously in summer 2019 I had a wonderful time at a conference called To What End?, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. It was only unofficially the annual ISME conference, held in honour of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 90th birthday: unofficially on both counts, apparently because the guest of honour did not want to attend a conference named after himself.

Attend he did, and it was my first (it could well be my only) chance to see MacIntyre in the flesh. But perhaps the more interesting phenomenon was to be in several rooms full of MacIntyreans. (And to find out that apparently others pronounce it “mac-in-TEE-ree-an” rather than the more obvious “mac-in-TIE-ree-an”.) It was a lovely opportunity to think and discuss more about the living thinker I have probably learned most from in my lifetime. And, perhaps, to observe the sociology of my fellow admirers of him: something MacIntyre would likely approve of, since his philosophy has always had a sociological bent.

Continue reading →

The path corrects the mind

23 Sunday May 2021

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Politics, Psychology

≈ Comments Off on The path corrects the mind

Tags

, , , , , ,

This week I continue my response to Patrick O’Donnell’s comments disputing my claim that in classical Indian Buddhism “the causes of suffering are primarily mental”. The discussion last time was abstract and theoretical, but it has practical consequences – which bring us back to Engaged and Disengaged Buddhism. Patrick has an interesting discussion here which I think is unfortunately confused by terminological problems. He says:

If the problem is in our heads, what about the story of the poisoned arrow? One removes the arrow without inquiring into who shot it, why, etc. Of course we may inquire into such things later, after the fact (the metaphysics and psychology if you will).

The thing is, the Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta’s story of the poisoned arrow is not a warning against seeking an understanding of “metaphysics”, let alone of psychology. The “questions that tend not to edification” in that sutta are largely cosmological questions: about the eternality or finitude of the cosmos, whether a Tathagata exists after death. The unedifying questions are described as “positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One” – which psychological questions pretty clearly are not. The craving and ignorance in our heads are the poisoned arrow that we have to get out first, before we can worry about the cosmological questions of who shot it.

Continue reading →

Let us not define ourselves by biological categories

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by in Biology, Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Human Nature, Politics, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

In my mind, one of the most important implications of qualitative individualism is that we human beings should not be defined by bodily or biological categories. I think that point has done a great deal to underlie various liberation movements of the past century. I think it is perhaps most visible in Simone de Beauvoir, who detached gender roles from biological sex and warned us against an “essentialism” that tied sex and gender so closely together. The increased acceptance of people being transgender, I think, is the next step in a process that began with Beauvoir: my biological genitalia do not define my gender identity. I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are. Continue reading →