Category Archives: Morality

The Confucian obligations of a manager

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Leadership, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics, Work

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I recently passed the examination to be a project management professional. In the Standard for Project Management – the Project Management Institute‘s statement of principles underlying project manaagement – one particular principle caught my eye for its ethical significance. That is the principle they call stewardship.

The closest thing to a definition of stewardship in the Standard is:

Stewardship has slightly different meanings and applications in different contexts. One aspect of stewardship involves being entrusted with the care of something. Another aspect focuses on the responsible planning, use, and management of resources. Yet another aspect means upholding values and ethics. (25)

That definition covers a lot of ground, but the part that struck me in particular was being entrusted with the care of something. That idea resonated with an ethical principle that I’ve found important as a manager – one which I have drawn above all from Confucianism.

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Beyond the Turing test

04 Sunday Jun 2023

Posted by in Compassion, Consciousness, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Friends, Honesty, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Morality, Psychology

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Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now, and for good reason. When ChatGPT first made the news this December, I tested it by feeding it the kind of prompt I might give for a short comparison essay assignment in my Indian philosophy class. I looked at the result, and I thought: “this is a B-. Maybe a B.” It certainly wasn’t a good paper, it was mediocre – but no more mediocre than the passing papers submitted by lower-performing students at élite universities. So at Boston University my colleagues and I held a sold-out conference to think about how assignments and their marking will need to change in an era where students have access to such tools.

As people spoke at the conference, my mind drifted to larger questions beyond pedagogy. One professor in the audience noted she’d used ChatGPT herself enough that when it was down for a couple days she typed in “ChatGPT, I missed you”, and it had a ready response (“I don’t have emotions, but thank you.”) In response a presenter noted a different AI tool called Replika, which simulates a romantic partner – and looks to be quite popular. Replika’s site bills itself as “the AI companion who cares”, and “the first AI with empathy”. All this indicates to me that while larger philosophical questions about AI have been asked for a long time, in the 2020s they are no longer hypothetical.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

Tenets of a new movement

19 Sunday Jun 2022

Posted by in Dialectic, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics

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In the mid-2010s in the English-speaking world there arose a left-wing social and political movement that has become enormously influential, one you are likely familiar with in one form or another. The movement has gone by many names: woke(ness), social-justice warriors (SJW), Progressive Activist, The Elect, Successor Ideology, Tumblr liberalism. What is notable about these names is that all of them have been applied to the movement primarily by people outside it. The only one coined from within the movement is “woke”, and recently many members of the movement have become suspicious even of that.

The movement, in other words, has shown a remarkable reluctance to name itself. What is clear to me is that the movement is a movement, with its own new and radically revisionary paradigm of inquiry, and therefore needs a name to identify it, even though its members seem reluctant to give it one. Perhaps this could be because they believe it is not a movement, it is just common sense. If so, I think a simple reflection on what was considered common sense ten years ago, within the same societies, is sufficient to show that belief false.

But this post is not about the name or lack thereof. Rather, the purpose of this post is to talk and think about the movement’s ideas, whatever it might be called. There are significant aspects of this movement that I agree with, and at least one that I have greatly benefitted from. I sympathize with its aims considered at the broadest level. Moreover I believe that there is truth in everything; I looked for the truth in the rise of Trump, and it is at least as important to do that here.

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There are bad Buddhists and false Buddhist claims

07 Sunday Nov 2021

Posted by in Anger, Early and Theravāda, M.T.S.R., Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics

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Paul Fuller’s thoughtful and well researched new introduction to Engaged Buddhism cites my Disengaged Buddhism article together with an article I hadn’t heard of before, Victor Temprano’s 2013 “Defining engaged Buddhism” (Buddhist Studies Review 30.2). (Fuller has very kind words for both Temprano and myself.) I proceeded to read Temprano’s article and was quite struck by it – and by the fact that Fuller had listed our two articles together, as making complementary critiques. Fuller’s putting our two articles together is striking to me because, while Temprano and I do both make a critique of Western engaged Buddhist scholars like Sallie King and David Loy, we do so for entirely different reasons – reasons that are actually opposed to one another. And indeed, I think my differences from Temprano are larger than my differences from King and Loy.

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The path corrects the mind

23 Sunday May 2021

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

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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.

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In praise of cultural appropriation

28 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Asian Thought, Economics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Politics, Western Thought

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Jay Garfield, Bryan Van Norden, and most of my colleagues on the Indian Philosophy Blog are shamelessly committing massive acts of cultural appropriation. Perhaps I am too. And that’s a wonderful thing.

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On civic virtue and unwritten constitutions

13 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Confucianism, Human Nature, Morality, Politics, Virtue

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One of the more pressing questions in political philosophy is how to prevent the arbitrary use of power. I think Thomas Hobbes and Xunzi were sadly right to diagnose an abiding darkness in human nature: left to our own devices, human beings can easily degenerate into disastrous crimes. Primatology suggests a confirmation: among our closest (or nearly closest) living relatives, the chimpanzees, a jockeying for power and status can lead to vicious rivalries and even murder – even in the idyllic situation where all their material needs are provided for. The evidence of existing human history does nothing to suggest that language or other human capacities have made us better than that.

But Hobbes, as far as I can tell, offers the worst possible solution to this problem: to concentrate power in a single sovereign person. Then that one person becomes able to tyrannize everyone else in a way completely unrestrained, just as he pleases. (It is rarely a she.) The twentieth century gives us too many chilling examples of mass murder and terror from a sovereign given arbitrary power.

A more reasonable approach to the problem asks how we can contain the dark impulses of all people – and of the sovereign leader most of all. It is likely no mystery why I’m asking this question living in 2020 in the United States.

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Is the eudaimonist proposition true?

27 Sunday Sep 2020

Posted by in Death, Epicureanism, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Pleasure, Stoicism, Supernatural

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Evan Thompson’s critique of my eudaimonistic and probabilistic approach to karma has two prongs: that it is not really karma, and that it doesn’t work on its own terms. I addressed the first criticism last time. Now I’d like to turn to the second, which I personally find to be the more interesting and important of the two.

Let us start with the word “probabilistic”, which I use in a non-technical way. My eudaimonism is a probabilistic claim (as opposed to a deterministic claim) in the same sense that “brushing your teeth will prevent cavities” or “running into the middle of a busy street will get you run over by a car” are probabilistic claims. That is, we assert that these causal correlations are likely, not certain. In the case of the busy street, I’m not sure we have a detailed statistical model of how likely you are to get run over by a car, but I don’t think we need one. Everyday observation is sufficient to determine that. In the case of virtue and happiness, I’ve mentioned a couple of ways that Śāntideva says one leads to the other, in this life; there is a lot more to say about it, and I intend to say it in my book – not with a statistical model, but again I don’t think that’s necessary. This is what I mean by “probabilistic”. I’m not wedded to that specific word: so far “probabilistic” has seemed the most appropriate word to express the concept in question and I haven’t been convinced that it isn’t, but I wouldn’t mind expressing the concept just described with a different term if a better one is available.

If I read Thompson’s objections on that point correctly, though, I don’t think they are about a statistical model or its absence. Rather, his bigger concern is this: Continue reading →