Monday 3 May 2010

Was the Buddha Guided by Evil?

(as posted at American Buddhist Perspective)
Or "Don't kick the baby!"

I found myself very happily re-submerged in philosophy today thanks to the excellent and argumentative work of Charles Goodman's Consequences of Compassion, a book on Buddhist Ethics. I love the book because it's well-written, well-argued, and highly readable for scholars and non. I highly recommend it and will be writing more about it in the coming weeks.

I think he's wrong, of course, because he's a consequentialist and thinks Buddhism is too. But more on that another time.

For now I want to switch topics and books a bit. Reading Goodman forces you to reexamine the foundations of ethical thinking (bravo!). So I cracked open another book, Deontology, edited by Stephen Darwall. In it we find a chapter on "Agent Relativity and Deontology" from Thomas Nagel's book The View From Nowhere.

In that chapter, Nagel presents us with a thought experiment. (paraphrased):
You and some chums are on a backroad in Montana at night (thus alone). You crash. Your friends are in bad shape. You run along the road until you reach the only house for miles. Inside is an old lady taking care of a child. You plea for help but she freaks out and locks herself in the bathroom, leaving you alone with the baby. There is no phone in the house (yea, that's Montana for ya), but there is a car outside that you could use to go get help. You just need the keys. You realize that you might get her to help you if you harm the baby (just a little) outside the bathroom door. Should you do it?
You just need to cause the baby a little pain, enough to get him/her to cry, and in the end you'll be able to help your friends. To a consequentialist it seems to be a no-brainer. Of course you kick the baby (softly)!  It's just a tiny bit of pain and your friends are relying on you - suffering much, much more. It's the right thing to do.

But the thing is, for most of us, there's just something wrong with that. There is an intuition that makes our gut turn a bit at the thought of harming an innocent person, even if it relieves much more pain for others. If that intuition is strong in you, you're likely to fall on the deontological side of the fence and say, "no, I'm not gonna kick the baby" even if it means further delay and suffering for your friends.

Darwall, earlier in the book, gives another experiment. We all generally agree that betraying our friends is wrong. A consequentialist might argue that this is because fidelity leads to a good society and happy people. A deontologist sees something intrinsic to the nature of friendship and honesty that in itself demands our fidelity. Darwall asks us to imagine a situation where you know two people will soon betray their best friends. Suppose that you know that if you betray your best friend, these two people will be so horrified that they won't go forward with their betrayals. Given the option, would you choose to betray your best friend?

The net effect if you act is fewer betrayals, so a consequentialist would urge you to betray your friend. (Note, there are as many flavors of consequentialism as Baskin Robbins has ice cream; I'm only dealing here with the bare-bones "the morally right thing to do is that which gets the best consequences" version.)

We could take it a notch further and suppose that you knew that your best friend actually was about to betray someone herself! So now you are to betray a friend who is about to betray someone else. Does that feel a bit better? Now we're not so much dealing with an "innocent" person. But for a deontologist this still doesn't seem right. We have a duty to fidelity based on our relationship to this person. We should not betray her even if that is the only way to avert multiple betrayals.

For Nagel, to betray our friend or kick the baby is to intentionally cause harm (evil), and in his words to "aim at evil, even as a means, is to have one's action guided by evil."

What do you think? And do you see where I'm going with this?

There is a key Mahāyāna text, the Upāya-kauśalya Sūtra, (see Tatz) in which the Buddha is faced with a much more daunting situation. Here, in a past life and thus a Bodhisattva, he is a sea captain who discovers that a robber is on his boat that will kill his 500 passengers and steal their goods. If the robber does this, not only will 500 merchants lose their lives, but the robber will end up in hell for a long, long (x 84000) time. He could alert the merchants, but then they'd kill the robber and reap bad karma themselves. His best option, it seems, is to kill the robber himself.

Hold it there.

A consequentialist reading would not only fully agree with the Bodhisattva's reasoning here, but would find him fully justified in killing the robber. For a consequentialist, murdering the robber would be doing the right thing.

A deontologist would disagree. Murder is right at the top of the list of morality's no-no's. Even to murder a would-be murderer is still, well, murder. Now, just as there are many flavors of consequentialism that allow certain rules and whatnot into the system, a deontologist can just as well occasionally allow overriding circumstances in which doing the wrong thing may be necessary. Here is one such case. But it's still wrong; it is still, in Nagel's words, being "guided by evil."

Again, what do you think?

Well, the Buddha (to-be), out of "great compassion and skill in means," kills the robber.

And then? According to contemporary tellings of the story, he is born in hell - but only for a while. And the sūtra itself says that he steps on a thorn in his final life (as the Buddha) as a result of that past deed. The point in both is that he suffers the repercussions of having committed a wrongful deed. This suggests that Buddhism clearly isn't consequentialist. We can imagine a culture or religion in which the murder of the robber would have brought the Bodhissatva great glory, health, fame, and rebirths in heaven. It might take us a while, but I'm sure we can come up with some religion that says that killing a 'bad guy' is okay or praiseworthy...

But in Buddhism, even killing a bad guy is wrong. It may be necessary at times, but the karma's gonna get you. So we have in the tradition itself something of an admission that the Buddha (to-be) did something wrong, and faced the karmic results of it: a rebirth in hell and later getting a thorn in his foot.

Yes, the Buddha was guided by evil (to use Nagel's dramatic wording).

Going back to our first thought experiment, we might thus conclude that the Buddha would kick the baby if he knew this was the only way to get the keys and save his friends from the coyotes and badgers sure to be lurking along the back roads of Montana. And perhaps you should too. But it would still be wrong and there would still be moral (karmic) repercussions.

23 comments:

  1. So...... Karma has its own ethical system that is contrary to a more practical one?

    I would like to fully understand the Karma ethical system. Is there an instruction booklet, which also might show me the mechanism of the repercussion machine that, someone, impliments revenge?

    I tend to think that Karma is a rather inexact system but works very understandably like this: We are all interconnected. The karmic payback for the pain inflicted on the baby is the pain the baby feels and the distress the Old Lady suffers. Positive Karma comes from quickly aiding your injured friends in the form of the suffering that doesn't occur since they are more quickly helped than otherwise.

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  2. Hia Tom, I think karma here, from the Bodhisattva story, invites us to reconsider what we'd consider most practical. Or at least to consider that what we, in our relative ignorance, consider to be the whole story is in fact limited.

    Traditionally, to fully understand karma (which means simply to fully understand intentions/actions and their consequences) you'd need to be a Buddha.

    I think you're on to something with interconnectedness and karma and I think later (East Asian) Buddhism emphasizes this quite a bit, but there is little in early suttas to suggest such an understanding of how karma (kamma) works.

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  3. Thanks, Bud Phil.

    I think that it is very probably true that the impact that each of us has on the network of life is greatly more profound and widespread than we suppose.

    The impacts, guided by our intentions, but resulting from our actions, can end up being far out-of-kilter with the results we foresee.

    Still -- it seems to me -- we must mostly act in ways that produce what we believe results in the best overall outcome. Thus, I am consequentialist, I suppose.

    I am reading "The Politics of Happiness" which weighs in on some of what you write about, here. Sometimes there are other, seemingly-unrelated principles that have to be considered. Happiness might seem to cover everything we're looking for in life, but liberty and justice and other principles must also be considered in setting up a 'system' to get us to "the right thing," whatever that is.

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  4. Tom, I'm not sure you're a consequentialist just yet. If you think our moral intuitions about what is right/wrong are completely reducible to 'best overall outcome' then I'd say you're probably a consequentialist.

    But if you do think that things like liberty and justice are NOT reducible to outcomes or happiness, then you have at least a little deontologist in you and we're left to ask why we treasure these things - even if upholding them can make us or others apparently less happy.

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  5. Is a bodhisattva who suffers in hell a short time for killing a robber and thereby saving many lives really less good than one who does nothing but escapes the karmic consequences of acting? I don't thinks so. True altruism may mean putting oneself in the path of suffering for the benefit of others.

    This argument, it seems to me, equates ethical behaviour with 'good karma' ie. if I do bad stuff, bad stuff eventually happens to me in this life or the next. If I don't then I will escape such consequences. In other words, that which is good is the same as that which is good for me. It is based on self-interest.

    It seems questionable that most people would agree that goodness is really just long-term self-interestedness.

    There is also a can of worms that could be opened with regards to whether, in Buddhism, a future person who inherits my karma, is the same person as me, since there is no survival of a permanent atman. It may even be questionable whether 'me' in 20 years is the same person as 'me' now or 20 years ago.

    If we say it is the same person then we're reducing altruism to long-term self-interest. If we say it isn't, then it becomes a matter of having compassion for the 'future person'. And then it doesn't seem to do the job it's supposed to do. Then it's a matter of whether we happen to have compassion or not. And if we do then why not just have compassion for the robber or worm or who/whatever it was we wronged.

    This seems to suggest that ethics are independent of (or at least not the same as) the laws of action and consequence (karma). For me the core of ethics is not long-term karmic self-interest, but compassion. Are we driven by egotistical self-interest or by something more expansive and inclusive - compassion?

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  6. Or rather, I don't believe that there is an objective/transcendent ethics, however for most people ethics does not map directly onto their own long-term self-interest even if there is some overlap.

    Ethics is a complex (and ever-changing) system based on universalisable principles and emotional responses.

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  7. Also, I'm reminded of the Mahayana account (don't ask me the origin) of the Bodhisattva who deliberately dives into hell to help others.

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  8. Thanks, this has cleared up quite a bit for me.

    Do you feel that one way or the other is in any way better?

    I find pure consequentialism a little, well, cold.

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  9. Shonin, many good points! Thanks.

    Your first question points to the moral nature of the person "is [he]... less good than" as opposed to the moral nature of his action. Was killing the robber in any way 'wrong' according to the tradition? I think yes, because he is said to go to hell. Is his act permissible? Yes, clearly. But the fact that he does go to hell tells us that something in his action generates bad karma.

    Claims of selfishness vs. altruism, as you seem to point out with the can of worms of personal ID, tend to resonate poorly with the ways of thinking in early Buddhism.

    Yes, ethics goes beyond karma, as Buddhas are said to generate no new karma and still fall within our field of ethical acts. But traditionally karma has been at the heart of considerations around what we call ethics. Ethics, after all, has to do with what we *do* (from intention through consequence) and that is karma. I'm not sure how we could think of ethics 'independent' of action... Perhaps you could say more about that.

    Karuna/compassion fits in, no doubt, as a key component, but must be paired with wisdom.

    The Bodhisattva you're thinking of is Kṣitigarbha/Jizō. He's big in East Asia (China in/after the T'ang and Japan after around 1000 CE), but he's relatively obscure before that and never gains prominence in Theravadin or Tibetan Buddhism. He's interesting indeed, but a bit outside my area of studies at present.

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  10. Thanks Jim, I'm glad to here it cleared some things up :)

    It's hard to say one way is better than the other in practical terms. Consequential reasoning, when we do it, can be very cold (that is, detached). But this is often a good thing. We need to be consequentialist about things like resource use.

    But indeed we shouldn't be consequentialist about things like human rights or many of the duties we take up in our various relationships.

    In the end I'm mostly a Kantian, who strove for a 'kingdom of ends' (i.e. best consequences) via cultivation of virtues and the recognition of the universal moral law.

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  11. Say I want to take an express flight to paranirvana. How should I understand karma in order to get to The Big Ultimate N in a minimal number of lives?

    If avoiding karmic downfalls isn't being right-minded and doing the proper things in the ways my magnificently-good and within-a-skosh-of-being-fully-enlightened self supposes, what else is it?

    Where is the Good News of Karmic Dogma in paperback book form? I want to read up on it. I'm a mostly practical-minded fellow who doesn't want to waste time and must have a map.

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  12. Justin

    "Was killing the robber in any way 'wrong' according to the tradition? I think yes, because he is said to go to hell."

    Well that's just it isn't it. What is hell in Buddhism? Hell refers to a state of reaping unpleasant consequences of certain actions. Is it morally wrong to suffer? No. Is it morally wrong to create future suffering for oneself in order to help others? No.

    That is - unless you are implying that karma is not a purely naturalistic law of cause and effect and rather involves some sort of cosmic moral judgment?

    Is his act permissible? Yes, clearly. But the fact that he does go to hell tells us that something in his action generates bad karma.

    "Claims of selfishness vs. altruism, as you seem to point out with the can of worms of personal ID, tend to resonate poorly with the ways of thinking in early Buddhism."

    Can you expand on that? Are you just referring to the point below?

    "But traditionally karma has been at the heart of considerations around what we call ethics. Ethics, after all, has to do with what we *do* (from intention through consequence) and that is karma. "

    Yes of course, but that which is considered 'good' at least for modern westerners is not the same as that which is good for 'us' in the long-term. Surely a truly good person would be *at least* as concerned about others' short and long-term welfare as about his own 'karmic health'?

    "I'm not sure how we could think of ethics 'independent' of action... Perhaps you could say more about that."

    All I mean is that ethics is not identical to our own 'karmic welfare', 'independent' was not a good choice of word.

    "Karuna/compassion fits in, no doubt, as a key component, but must be paired with wisdom."

    Yes, because otherwise the compassion will be misguided and create suffering.

    "He's interesting indeed, but a bit outside my area of studies at present. "

    All of this is outside my studies, don't let that scare you :) My point there was that this story seems to exemplify compassion (and the wisdom to effectively help all beings) better than the notion of avoiding helping others in order to keep one's own karmic nose clean!

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  13. Let me put it another way: would it be morally wrong for a man to create the conditions of future suffering of serious burns by running into a burning building to rescue others trapped inside?

    No, quite the contrary, this would be seen as a highly virtuous act of self-sacrifice. How does your example of the man who suffers 'hell' for the benefit of others differ in principle from this?

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  14. Tom - perhaps Gethin's "The Buddhist Path to Awakening" - http://amzn.to/aFdYWi ? This is good too:
    http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/karma.html

    But really, there are countless maps. I'd say just find one you can follow with good friends and a good teacher.

    ---

    Shonin, damn, you're fast.

    "Is it morally wrong to suffer? No. Is it morally wrong to create future suffering for oneself in order to help others? No."

    Well, why does he go to hell if he's done nothing 'wrong'?

    Even if we agree that he's done the wrong (killing) out of overall compassionate reasons and it all works out in the end, we're dealing with a text that tells us that he still goes to hell. That is, the law of karma (no cosmic judgement implied) seems to dictate that no matter how compassionate you are or how many people you save, killing has its (negative) repercussions.

    Suffering itself is simply a fact of life in samsara, so can't say that it in itself is morally wrong. But its cause, craving/thirsting, I would say is morally wrong.

    To my mind, in Buddhism the distinction between self/other (selfish/altrustic) breaks down as we cultivate compassion and wisdom; so my karmic health is shared by all (most obviously by those who interact with me closely) and conversely the welfare of others impacts me. I suppose some early Mahayana texts do attribute a 'lesser' status to Arahants for failing to vow to save all beings, but more and more this is recognized for the mere rhetoric and 'one-upmanship' that it is.

    The Kṣitigarbha/Jizō story is good if you're concerned for beings in hell, which, I suppose, is nice. :) It played out nicely in societies where filial piety was a primary concern. On the other hand is Amida/Amitayus and his Pure Land for us to get into with faithful chanting.

    For those who take these stories and grow in their own wisdom and compassion, I say all the better. But both take us away, I think, from the basic path/moral cultivation model laid out in early Buddhism and maintained in aspects of later (Indian) Mahayana and Tibetan thought.

    The burning house example seems amiss, as -in the sutra- he goes to hell not in order to help beings but as a RESULT of killing another person.

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  15. Ok, Shonin. After going to tidy the kitchen, I had a random 'ah-ha!' moment regarding your example that may go to prove my point.

    V1: As you say, we would see the act of rushing into the burning building to save people as highly virtuous.

    V2: Likewise we'll grant that the Bodhisattva, by killing the robber has done something virtuous.

    But, perhaps a child asks you why our person in V1 is now suffering after his/her virtuous deed. You answer: that's the nature of fire, it burns. Even though X did a great deed, s/he still encountered fire and now as a natural result is burned.

    Likewise, our child would ask: why is the Bodhisattva in hell after his virtuous deed? We must answer that this is the nature of karma, it ripens for you in terms of suffering of joy based on your past actions. And (beginning to feel a bit like Batchelor here) in Buddhism rebirth in Hell is a result of bad actions. So, we'd say to our child, the Buddha-to-be had to do something a little bit bad in order to create an overall good, but (finger raised) it was still bad. Just like saving people from a fire doesn't take the burn away, saving his passengers doesn't take the immorality of the act of murder away.

    I say I'm feeling a bit like Batchelor because of a comment I recall him making about 'having nothing to do with Pure Land' or perhaps it was 'Buddha-nature'... Yes we can properly call these 'Buddhist' in the sense that they evolve from the Buddhist tradition, but it gets hard to call them 'Buddhist' if we are students of the ideas of the Buddha. The same goes with Kṣitigarbha/Jizō; we can slip into some pretty far-out thinking if we believe that he just magically pops into Hell with the goal to help others. This idea follows neither the causal/karmic understanding of hell from the Buddha nor the more modern psychological 'hell is a really bad state of mind' understanding. But I digress... :)

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  16. "Likewise, our child would ask: why is the Bodhisattva in hell after his virtuous deed? We must answer that this is the nature of karma, it ripens for you in terms of suffering of joy based on your past actions. And (beginning to feel a bit like Batchelor here) in Buddhism rebirth in Hell is a result of bad actions. So, we'd say to our child, the Buddha-to-be had to do something a little bit bad in order to create an overall good, but (finger raised) it was still bad."

    In what sense was it 'bad'? Was it bad from the cormic perspective? Bad in a way that transcends the human sense of right and wrong? Where is this right and wrong defined? You may say 'in the law of karma itself' yet the law of karma, being a natural, impersonal mechanism is only a law that produces happiness from act A and unhappiness from act B. We can observe that. We cannot observe on act being defined 'right' and another 'wrong' by those laws. It cannot, by itself, objectively define the production of unhappiness from act B as 'wrong' any more than the laws of physics define burning oneself by putting a hand in flame as 'morally wrong'. Good and bad are judgements, how can nature judge an act good or bad? Nature simply is. From this as a condition, that arises. Where does the moral judgment come in? Personally, I can't make sense of right and wrong without a mind or minds to deem acts right and wrong. Outside of minds, where can we find this rightness and wrongness? What does it look like? How can it be discovered?

    You may be right. Acts producing 'bad karma' may well be seen as inherently 'bad' in early Buddhism, however that doesn't mean it is a coherent philosophy.

    "Just like saving people from a fire doesn't take the burn away, saving his passengers doesn't take the immorality of the act of murder away."

    I'm not suggesting the saving takes the immorality away, just questioning the idea that karmic law would be capable of objectively defining right and wrong in addition to the cosequences of action.

    "Yes we can properly call these 'Buddhist' in the sense that they evolve from the Buddhist tradition, but it gets hard to call them 'Buddhist' if we are students of the ideas of the Buddha."

    We're entering potentially difficult territory here. Perhaps it's best not to exclude everything after the Nikayas from being 'Buddhist' and rather refer to 'early Buddhism' or some such.

    "The same goes with Kṣitigarbha/Jizō; we can slip into some pretty far-out thinking if we believe that he just magically pops into Hell with the goal to help others. This idea follows neither the causal/karmic understanding of hell from the Buddha nor the more modern psychological 'hell is a really bad state of mind' understanding."

    I think it was a metaphor. Later Buddhist developments of thought do not necessarily have to follow all the principles of early Buddhism. They are a little different. Personally a literal reading actually seems slightly less 'far out' than the idea of a cosmic law that sends people to heaven or hell in their next life according to how bad and good they have been.

    But I think it's just a metaphor - a bodhisattva in Mahayana Buddhism is someone who is prepared to get their hands dirty, who is prepared to get worldly, deliberately choosing to experience suffering in order to help others.

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  17. Ah, so it looks like you're wanting to make a metaethical point... something like there is no 'right' and 'wrong' or 'good' and 'bad' in Buddhism? I'm not sure if you're arguing on the grounds of linguistics (they didn't have/use words like these) or some deeper point (the Buddha didn't make judgments about morality) though. You're right that you need a mind to deem such things. But you've slipped on the burning example I think in that we're not saying it's morally wrong, but that burning is the nature of fire, like negative results (such as rebirth in hell) are the nature of bad/wrong actions. We're not moralizing fire, but suggesting that both operate in a law-like manner.

    To my mind the coherence of early Buddhism, if there is one, is in the explanation of suffering as caused by craving, based in the three unskillful roots. All suffering, in some way or another, is based there (it is via our actions that we are born into a world with fire and thus when we get burned it often makes more sense to say the 'fire' is the cause rather than past karma). This is in the 4 Noble Truths, the 1st teaching of the Buddha.

    Calling karma a 'cosmic law' doesn't seem to help; but in early Buddhism it does seem to be the law/mechanism by which our own actions lead us to heaven/hell, human rebirth, and even awakening.

    As a philosopher, I'm drawn to the suggestion that karma, and thus our experience in the world, is somehow law-like (free-will not withstanding). And the Buddha seemed to suggest this. When asked why so-and-so was like this or that, he'd give a cause, often pointing back to the person's previous birth/life. There's no 'it just is that way' or ad hoc explanation (unless you don't believe in rebirth and/or the Buddha's ability to see the karma of others, in which case ALL of it was ad hoc!). Anywho... I'm off on a tangent.

    "You may be right." - the sanest thing you've said in days, no doubt :) Just kidding.

    Returning to good/bad, right/wrong, these are terms that we in the West (Anglophones at least) are grafting into the tradition, sometimes as direct translations, other times in broader conceptual ways. Take for example Keown's classic formulation:

    “Nirvana is the good, and rightness is predicated of acts and intentions to the extent which they participate in nirvanic goodness." (The Nature of Buddhist Ethics, p.177)

    Scholars have tried to move the emphasis this way or that over time, but no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to deny that Buddhism contains concepts of right and wrong, good and bad.

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  18. I know you just gave me that book to shut me up. Me, a bodhisattva who lives in the world, as opposed to someone who constantly vacations in Montana.

    I'm just trying to figure our pretty much the same thing Shonin is: What shapes karmic decision-making? And how is it that it is out-of-whack with the decision-making of a right -thinking and -acting Buddha.

    But now I have to ask if all this inquiry into what it all MEANS is pointless, like having a Seussologist try to determine
    Which is more abundant, the green eggs or ham?

    Is the point 'just' that we should 'do the right thing' no matter what (by taking the pulse of what in-the-moment seems right)? even if a karmic storm brews and there's to be sleet and hail and buckets of woe?

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  19. Yes indeed, with God's speed, end this screed!

    Do what's right, day and night, even despite, karma's flight!

    Ok, not quite up to the good Dr. Seuss's standards; but, as we say in the industry, poetry is a bit outside my area of studies at present.

    In the end for those so concerned with the real world, we'll find that all of these theoretical unpackings of Karma, from the Buddha on down, are just that: theoretical. I don't want to downplay the importance of having a good theory (or map) but as you say it can get a bit Seussish (she saw a sea shell by the sea shore?). How many Buddhas can dance on the head of a pin? In hell? Without suffering?

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  20. Sheesh. Don't kick the philosopher.

    Screed on!, Bud Phil, if you must.

    I was just wanting to cut to the end credits. And get some very practical answers that might be useful in my practical world.

    The sutras, like the Bible, is just stories, stories, stories, going in circles. All is vanity.

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  21. Well, see, that was your mistake - "I was just wanting to ... get some very practical answers..."

    This big white screen is great, like a book, for theory and stories, but a teacher and good fellow students and one's but on a cushion: that's where we (I at least) find most useful practical answers. Sit with some of those sutras, let the theory or story in there unravel and, in doing so, it should change your perception of things - in a good way.

    When you know for yourself that a given behavior reduces greed, aversion, and delusion, when you know that it is praised by wise friends, that it is helpful in your own life, do it.

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  22. This was very thought provoking. The thing that struck me when I read it was how Judeo-Christian it made the Buddha sound. The idea of the Bodhisattva receiving karmic punishment for a necessary evil sounded very close to someone "dying for the sins of mankind." I'm not a religious scholar, but it makes me wonder if all religious traditions involve self-sacrifice on the part of the prophet.

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  23. Why not think creatively?

    *Lock the would be robber in a secure place until you get to port.

    *Kick the bathroom door down rather than the kicking baby.

    Isn't there often a less damaging choice if we think first and act later?

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