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.

Narrative verses Awareness in Buddhist Ethics

(cross-posted at American Buddhist Perspective)

While I was in China this summer I tried to explain my ph.d. thesis to one of my travel mates.

"I am examining the underlying structure, philosophically speaking, of Buddhist ethics. I seek first to understand the Buddhist worldview or cosmology -based roughly in the dualism of samsara and nirvana- and then spell out the various injunctions found in the texts that purport to lead one from the former to the latter."

"That doesn't seem to have much to do with people's lives... or ethics," he replied, obviously a bit disappointed.

I realized then that my doctoral thesis will leave out a potentially significant source of Buddhist ethics, namely narrative. If I had said something like, "I'm going to study why Buddhists in Sri Lanka justify war or what the stories of the Jatakas tell us about morality," I have a feeling he would have been more satisfied. This snippit from a recent BBC article about politics helps show why:

Stories not facts

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."

Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

"I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

Unfortunately for me, I love Al Gore - and numbers, and structures, and metaphysics. Stories and sound bytes tend to bore me, especially when they tend toward mere gratification of the speaker or listener. There are of course plenty of exceptions: I do love Buddhist stories and sound bytes like "just let go" or "return to the breath" can be quite powerful when properly applied.

I think my distrust or dislike of narrative comes from how easily it can be misapplied and/or distorted. So when we wish to examine the potential distortion of Buddhism or Buddhist ethics, perhaps narrative is the place to look, as in In Defense of Dharma: Just-war Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka. By Tessa J. Bartholomeusz.

In Chapter 1, "Narrative, Ethics and War," Bartholomeusz follows Stanley Hauerwas's approach to ethics, focusing on the power of religious narratives to shape individual moral decisions. She finds his approach highly appropriate for Sri Lanka, where she finds religious stories take a prominent place in public debate due to a type of "Buddhist secularism" that interweaves religion and politics.

(reviewed by Annewieke Vroom)

Facts, on the other hand, tend to be pretty stable. Sure you can argue them, or push them this way or that, but fundamentally they do not lie.

When I think of "just the facts" of Buddhism, my mind immediately goes to the three marks of existence, the ti-lakkhaṇa: impermanence, not-self, and dissatisfactoriness. It is these three that we seek to "see" clearly or awaken to via insight meditation. The fact that we do not see these (experientially, not intellectually) is what keeps us trapped in samsara. Awareness is the path and the practice and the goal.

This may, however, be an extreme interpretation of Buddhism.

The other extreme would be to say that whatever Buddhists do or say is de facto "Buddhist." If Buddhists justify a war, then the war is "Buddhist." If Buddhists say you don't need to meditate or that there is a permanent existing Self, then these ideas are also "Buddhist." In this extreme there is no legitimate ground for saying a Buddhist has misunderstood "Buddhism" or that this or that Buddhist's practices are in fact not "Buddhist." All forms of criticism (read "critical thought") and that dualistic thing called logic are thrown out the window.

Taṃ kiṃ maññatha, majjhimo maggo hoti?

What do you think, is there a middle path?