Category Archives: Free Will

Do you need anger for respect and accountability?

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Anger, Free Will, Mahāyāna, Morality, Psychology

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I am delighted to announce the publication of my first book, this coming fall, with Shambhala Publications. It is a book project I have been working on for many years, and the topic has veered considerably from the version I discussed five years ago, becoming much more specific than the ambitious project I had imagined then. The title will be After Anger: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Our Culture of Rage. As the title suggests, it will constructively address the Buddhist critique of anger – and then, afterwards, will turn to the deeper mental roots of our anger in craving and resistance. I’ll be saying more about the book in this space as we get closer to publication time.

In the meantime, I have a number of thoughts that had to be left out of the final version of the book, but that I think are nevertheless worthy of publication on this blog. As you can imagine, anger has many defenders, who have a variety of different reasons. I tried to deal with most of those sorts of reasons in the book, but there are a couple that didn’t quite make it in.

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When virtue is not in our control

11 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, External Goods, Flourishing, Free Will, Human Nature, Psychology, Self, Stoicism, Virtue

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I’ve been thinking a lot on a recent exchange I had with Seth Segall, in the comments on my post about terminology to use for karma. Seth’s comment specified a distinction that is important elsewhere in my exchange with Thompson, on how eudaimonism works. This is a distinction between external goods, on one hand, and on the other – what exactly?

The term Seth used in contrast to “external goods” was what one might take to be its obvious opposite, “internal goods”. I used the exact same term, “internal goods”, in my own later post. Yet in response to Seth’s comment I told him we had to be really cautious about using that term. This indicates to me that my own thought on the topic has not yet been sufficiently clear, and I want to take some time to clarify.

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Kant’s quantitative individualism

23 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Politics, Self

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In response to my discussion a while ago of the problems between Buddhism and qualitative individualism, Patrick O’Donnell suggested that J. David Velleman’s Self to Self offered a possibility of bridging the gap between the two. My reaction was skeptical, since Velleman explicitly situates himself as a Kantian, and I have taken Kant as exactly the opposite kind of individualist, a quantitative individualist. I said as much in response, claiming that for Kant “ethically most significant about human beings are those characteristics we all share, not our differences – the right way for one person to act in a given context is broadly the right way for any other person to act in the same context.”

Patrick’s response was where the discussion got really interesting. For this is the first time I’ve seen someone question the very distinction between qualitative and quantitative individualism. Continue reading →

How can you be yourself if there is no self?

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Modernized Buddhism, Self

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The rise of qualitative individualism in the West coincides relatively closely with Western interest in Buddhism. Nietzsche and Emerson, two of the most influential qualitative individualist thinkers, both had an interest in Buddhism stronger than was usual for philosophers of their time. And the greatest flowering of Western interest in Buddhism occured in the 1960s, the same time when qualitative individualism itself became fully mainstream.

Qualitative individualism can be put in many ways, but one of its most characteristic injunctions is “be yourself”. The injunction is often phrased further in terms of one’s true self. Such ideas are of central importance to the LGBT movement. A recent news profile asking Boston University students about the meaning of being transgender finds many of them echoing a common refrain: “discovering your truest self”, “finding one’s true identity”, “being their true selves”, “being truly, completely, unapologetically me”.

None of this seems like a great fit, on the face of it at least, with a tradition that has proclaimed for 2000 years that there is no self. Continue reading →

Existentialism is a qualitative individualism

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, French Tradition, Human Nature, Self

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My first post on qualitative individualism attracted several helpful comments, possibly drawn here by a link from Daily Nous. A couple of these commenters pointed out that that the ideal is not as “invisible” as I made it out to be – not even to philosophers. I hear it expressed relatively rarely in philosophical works now, but this would not have been the case fifty or sixty years ago, when the philosophy that was all the rage was: existentialism. Existentialism is not the only way for qualitative individualism to be expressed philosophically, but it may well be the most influential to date. Continue reading →

Karmic punishment is not a good thing

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Morality, Patient Endurance, Politics, Self

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I’m continuing to examine Justin Whitaker‘s interpretation of Pali Buddhist ethics as Kantian moral law. I argued last time that the concept of dhamma does not serve in these texts as a universal, trans-human moral law. Here I want to take a similar look at the concept of kamma – better known in English as karma.

Justin claims that for Kant “the Moral Law is universal, concerned with all (rational) beings, and is holistic in its conception of morality as a guarantor to a just realm of ends (supported by the moral argument for belief in God).” (47) I think this interpretation of Kant is missing something in that Kant does not view the moral argument as demonstrating that there actually is a guarantee of cosmic justice, only that we must act as if there is (it is a regulative ideal). But I’ll leave that aside here because I want to focus on the comparison to Buddhism. Continue reading →

On the very idea of Buddhist ethics

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Self

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I’ve recently been reading Christopher Gowans’s Buddhist Moral Philosophy: An Introduction. It is an introductory textbook of a sort that has not previously been attempted, and one that becomes particularly interesting in the light of David Chapman’s critiques of Buddhist ethics. While Gowans and Chapman would surely disagree about the value and usefulness of Buddhist ethics, they actually show remarkable agreement on a proposition that could still be quite controversial: namely, that the term “Buddhist ethics” or “Buddhist moral philosophy” names above all a Yavanayāna phenomenon. That is: the way that Gowans and Chapman use the terms “Buddhist ethics” and “Buddhist moral philosophy”, what they name is a contemporary Western (and primarily academic) activity, even if it is one conducted primarily by professed Buddhists. Continue reading →

Goodness as preventing suffering

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in Anger, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Judaism, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Morality, Patient Endurance, Self

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A while ago I referred to Śāntideva’s thought as “ethics without morality” – a deliberately provocative formulation based on Shyam Ranganathan’s eccentric definition of morality as that which conduces to anger. (I don’t agree with Shyam’s definition myself, but putting matters in those terms for the sake of argument helps us to make an interesting and important point.) The idea for Śāntideva is that because everything has a cause, no one is truly to blame for their actions, and therefore we should not get angry at them.

Mark Siderits, in a 2008 article in Sophia, has called this view “Buddhist paleo-compatibilism”: “compatibilism” meaning roughly that while Śāntideva thinks it morally significant that everything has a cause, he still thinks it appropriate to blame people for bad actions.

I don’t think that that is what Śāntideva means, based on a reading of the Sanskrit text of Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter six. I think Siderits reads a great deal into verse 32 that is not actually there, and that is at odds with Śāntideva’s explicit argument in verses 22-33. But I won’t expand on that particular point here, because overall I find the detailed textual argument less interesting than the more general constructive argument. Continue reading →

On the ethics of robots

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Consciousness, Free Will, Morality

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Last week the Economist ran a cover story on a philosophical topic: the ethics of robots. Not just the usual ethical question one might ask about the ethics of developing robots in given situation, but the ethics of the robots themselves. The Economist is nothing if not pragmatic, and would not ask such a question if it weren’t one of immediate importance. As it turns out, we are increasingly programming machines to make decisions for us, such as military robots and Google’s driverless cars. And those will need to make decisions of the sort we have usually viewed as moral or ethical:

Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? (Economist, 2 June 2012)

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What it means to have a reason for action

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Biology, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Social Science, South Asia

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One of the most fundamental things a philosopher does is to ask why. When someone says “you should do x” or “y is good,” it seems to me, the true lover of wisdom needs to ask why this is the case. If someone tells me I should do something and can’t provide a reason, I see this as grounds for questioning whether it really is something I should do at all. Nietzsche, if he does nothing else, shows us that the things we take as obvious may well not be so.

So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.) Continue reading →