Category Archives: Western Thought

Why was gay sex considered misconduct?

28 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Family, Monasticism, Roman Catholicism, Sex

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José Cabezón has an interesting article on Buddhism and sexuality in the latest (summer 2009) issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. The article examines the tricky concept of “sexual misconduct” (kamesu micchācāra in Pali); one of the basic Five Precepts is a vow to refrain from “sexual misconduct.” But what exactly counts as misconduct? A fellow student asked me this when I took a Goenka vipassanā course. Goenka, in keeping with his general emphasis on non-harming, himself listed only rape and adultery as examples. But premodern Buddhists have typically gone further than this.

Cabezón probes the point that the present Dalai Lama, while defending the “full human rights” of gay people, nevertheless treats male homosexual sex (and oral and anal sex more generally) as a form of sexual misconduct. Continue reading →

My story: a break with utilitarianism

21 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Politics, Social Science, Work

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I’ve noticed that the “About me” page on this blog has so far got more views than any other. So I hope it won’t be overly narcissistic of me to wax autobiographical for a moment, and expand (in this post and the next) on the story that I tell there, of how I came to the kind of philosophy I have now.

Philosophy intrigued me a lot in high school. My first real exposure to it was in grade 9, in 1990, in a mini-course at Queen’s University offered to precocious high-school students in my home town; I came to really enjoy it in a philosophy course that my high school offered in grade 12. What appealed to me most at the time was ethics, in a conventional sense (as opposed to the expanded sense that matters to me now): explanations of why we should do what we should do. But what those courses taught me above all was that I was a committed utilitarian; everything came down to acting for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first philosophical book I ever read in the original. It’s no coincidence that I was also a dedicated political activist at the time, participating in every left-wing cause I could get my hands on.

I started having philosophical qualms about utilitarianism soon afterwards, as I began my undergrad years studying sociology and urban geography at McGill; I couldn’t find a satisfying philosophical justification for it. I hadn’t read John Rawls at the time, but if I had, I probably would have become a worshipful devotee of his. (As I noted last time, while Rawls isn’t a utilitarian as such, and devotes much of his energy to attacking utilitarianism, the resulting worldview looks very much like utilitarianism’s: a life spent in political action to uplift the most deprived people.)

But while I saw problems with a utilitarian worldview, there wasn’t much to replace it, and during those years I remained more or less a utilitarian by default. Things really changed after graduation, when I went to work for the United Nations in Bangkok, trying to edit works that would help coordinate efforts for people with disabilities in Asia and the Pacific: a supremely utilitarian or Rawlsian job, aiming to help out millions of people in the direst of physical conditions.

And I found there was that I was terribly unhappy. Small things, like paper jams on printers, drove me to desperation. I wasn’t all that much more unhappy than I’d been in the previous years, but I was noticing it more. My unhappiness posed a significant problem for a utilitarian worldview, a problem that standard critiques of utilitarianism usually don’t get at. Namely: in the name of the greatest happiness, I was trying to help ensure that all these poor and deprived people could have the kinds of opportunities I’d had in my own privileged upbringing. But what good is it do to that, if someone with all these opportunities and privilege can still end up miserable?

Rawls the utilitarian

19 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, Happiness, Morality, Politics

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John Rawls is widely recognized as one of the most important critics of utilitarianism. In some respects he is; utilitarianism per se became much less popular in analytic philosophical circles after the publication of Rawls’s work. Yet in another respect, Rawls’s work is fundamentally a continuation of the utilitarian project – softening John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in something very much like the way that Mill had softened Bentham’s. Continue reading →

Taking back ethics

09 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Flourishing, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Virtue

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In the past few years, especially since the publication of Damien Keown’s The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, there has been a small academic cottage industry devoted to the question of how one might best classify Buddhist ethics. Which of the three standard branches of analytical ethics does it fall under: consequentialism (à la J.S. Mill), deontology (à la Kant) or virtue ethics (à la Aristotle)? The debate has generally been a tussle between virtue ethics (Keown’s position) and consequentialism (Charles Goodman). My friend (and contributor to this blog) Justin Whitaker suspects that a deontological interpretation of Buddhist ethics is possible, but he’s a voice in the wilderness so far.

At the SACP, Michael Barnhart proposed a way of sidestepping this debate entirely. As far as ethics itself goes, he says, Buddhism is particularist; it doesn’t adhere to any real theory, it just responds to particular situations. Where it does have a theory isn’t in ethics at all, but in something else entirely: the question of what we care about, or should care about. (Specifically, he argues, Buddhists claim we should care above all about suffering.)

Barnhart based this idea on Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “The importance of what we care about.” I didn’t comment on his paper right after the SACP, because I wanted a chance to read Frankfurt’s piece first. Having read it, I would now say that Barnhart and Frankfurt both run into a common problem: an unreasonably narrow definition of ethics. Continue reading →

Ethics without morality

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Anger, Free Will, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Morality

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There’s been a debate in the past couple of years between Mark Siderits and Charles Goodman over Śāntideva’s attitude toward free will. In his chapter condemning anger, Śāntideva says a number of things that sound completely determinist:

Even though my stomach fluids and so on make great distress, I have no anger toward them. Why do I have anger toward sentient beings? Even their anger has a cause…. Certainly, all the different crimes and vices arise out of causes; we can’t find an independent one…. Therefore, when one sees an enemy or a friend doing unjust acts, one should think “it has causes,” and remain happy. (Bodhicary?vat?ra verses VI.22-33) Continue reading →

Neither career nor hobby

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by in Family, German Tradition, Social Science, Work

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I wanted to link here to a wonderful post I just found on Livejournal, though it appears to be a couple months old. The author, an artist, has written eloquently on something I’ve been finding vitally important but had not yet managed express. Namely, there is a concept missing in our vocabulary about work: we have a serious blind spot for what is between “career” and “hobby.” A career is what you do for money; anything you don’t do for money, gets relegated to the status of an indulgent pastime, a mildly pleasant but unserious way to while away the hours until your real work begins anew.

There’s a hidden, and I think pernicious, assumption underlying such a dualism: that anything not done for money is just not that serious. Feminists have rightly criticized the effects of such an assumption when it comes to childrearing and homemaking; but I think we’ve yet to seriously think about its effects for other kinds of unpaid work.

I do not plan on this blog ever making me any money. Nor do I plan on it advancing my academic career. If either of those happens, great. But those are not the point; I feel an inner drive to do a kind of writing that I can’t make money off of, and that’s more important to me than the kind of writing that does pay. This is something central to my life, and it makes no sense to relegate that to the category of “hobby.”

The original post’s author (who goes by the alias haikujaguar) suggests that we should refer to our meaningful unpaid work with the honourable names of “vocation” and “calling.” I’m less certain about this, because for so long these terms have had the connotation of paid work. The term “calling” comes from the German Beruf, which now simply means paid work. (Was sind sie von Beruf? is German for “What’s your job?”) Continue reading →

Intimacy and integrity

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, East Asia, Epistemology, Jainism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self, Truth

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I’ve found Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity to be one of the more helpful ways to think through the significance of culture in philosophy, especially when dealing with East Asia. To help Westerners understand East Asian thought, Kasulis portrays it as having an “intimacy” orientation, as opposed to a more familiar “integrity” orientation.

Now Kasulis is aware enough to realize that there are exceptions to all such generalizations, and some of his examples of “intimacy” come from the West too. The distinction is supposed to function more like one of Max Weber’s ideal types. That is to say: one may never encounter intimacy or integrity orientations in their pure forms; any actual culture or person or book will probably contain some mix. Nevertheless, by thinking of the two as relatively coherent extremes, one is better able to understand what’s going on in the middle.

When applied to ethics and politics alone, the distinction is not particularly original and could even come across as something of a cliché: basically, the modern West is individualistic and oriented toward individual rights and the integrity of the individual, while East Asia focuses on the intimacy community and the ensuing responsibilities of interdependence. Where Kasulis’s work gets interesting is when he applies the distinction to theoretical philosophy. Continue reading →

Why computers don’t understand

22 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by in Consciousness, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science

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My previous post on consciousness, responding to Ted Slingerland’s views, attracted great responses that deserve a more detailed explanation. Ryan Overbey addresses my claim that scientific experiment cannot disprove consciousness because such experiments depend on experience and perception:

You say “experience and perception” presume consciousness. In that case, consciousness for you seems to be defined as any system of taking in sensory data, storing information about that data, and processing that information. Am I reading that correctly? We have computer programs that can do these things. Would they fit your criteria for consciousness. If so, cool! If not, why not?

The answer to the question here is: absolutely not. Taking in empirical data and processing it, in the way that a computer program does, does not count as experience, perception or consciousness. Why? Continue reading →

The God that matters

21 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by in Deity, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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You believe that there is no God? Well, what is God? Suppose that God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Now even if you don’t think that such a being exists, you can still understand the idea of such a being; you can still conceive of it. Therefore, whether or not such a being exists in reality, it must at least exist in your mind. But a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that existed only in your mind. Therefore, for such a being to exist only in your mind, and not in reality, would be a contradiction in terms; for if it existed only in your mind, it would both be the greatest being that can be conceived (that’s what you’re conceiving of) and not be the greatest thing that can be conceived (because the same being existing in reality would be greater). So the greatest being that can be conceived – this being must exist in reality as well as in thought.

This is a simplified version of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, often called the “ontological” argument. I’m not sure whether it really works; I’m inclined to say it doesn’t, although it’s hard to say where the logic goes wrong, especially in the more sophisticated version presented by Anselm himself.

Nevertheless, I consider it the best and most important of the proofs of God’s existence, even if it doesn’t work. Why? Continue reading →

When is a philosophy a technique?

18 Thursday Jun 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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A question that I saw recurring throughout the SACP was technique: when is philosophical reflection about our ends or goals, and when is it just about means to those ends? I’d previously thought about this question with respect to S.N. Goenka’s vipassanā meditation: the word Goenka uses most frequently to describe it is “technique.” The webpage describing vipassanā refers to it as a “non-sectarian technique”: thus Goenka’s claim that people from “any religion” can practise vipassanā – as long as they don’t bring any religious symbols into meditation practice.

This question of technique came up at least three times at the SACP. Continue reading →