freedom, caring and buddhist philosophy
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Freedom, Caring and Buddhist PhilosophyMark Siderits aa Department of Philosophy , Illinois State University , Campus Box 4540, Normal, IL,61790–4540, USA E-mail:Published online: 20 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Mark Siderits (2005) Freedom, Caring and Buddhist Philosophy, Contemporary Buddhism: AnInterdisciplinary Journal, 6:2, 87-116, DOI: 10.1080/14639940500435521
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FREEDOM, CARING AND BUDDHIST
PHILOSOPHY
Mark Siderits
Lecture 1: ways of being selfless
My visiting professorship in the Philosophy Department at Liverpool came
about thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded a grant in
connection with the development of the new MRes program in classical Indian
philosophy. This program represents something of a departure in philosophical
studies in the United Kingdom. The Indian tradition is more commonly studied by
philologists in language and culture programs, and by scholars in religious studies
programs. What I would like to do in these lectures is explore some of the reasons
why it might be important to include the study of the Indian tradition in
a philosophy program—for it is not completely obvious that this is important.
Perhaps we all recognize nowadays that Europe has not had a monopoly on the
systematic use of reason to address the perennial problems of philosophy. Still this
does not necessarily mean that philosophy has been done better elsewhere.
And given the complexity of any philosophical tradition, there is something to be
said for studying just one—perhaps one’s own—tradition in depth, instead
of dabbling in several. One response to this is that the study of a distinct tradition
serves the important pedagogical function of putting one’s own in proper
perspective. But there is an additional benefit that also deserves our attention.
It has been my experience that when two distinct traditions treat the same
problems using similar methods, it can sometimes happen that one will explore
solutions that are neglected in the other. This makes the study of a tradition other
than one’s own a source of potential insights that can be of help when a tradition
has reached an impasse. I shall try to illustrate that here in these lectures.
From among the many schools of classical Indian philosophy, it is the
Buddhist tradition that I have chosen to discuss. And the problem I want to explore
is how to ground values that we care about. We agree that people ought to have
concern for the welfare of others. And we believe that people should have more
rather than less freedom in their lives. The question is what reason there is to believe
these things. But before I begin to address this question, I should immediately
clear up a possible misunderstanding. Buddhism is widely thought of as a religion.
Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2005ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/05/020087-116
q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940500435521
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And religions are often seen as holding dogmatic positions, positions based on faith
or on feeling, particularly on normative questions. So there might be the
misapprehension that since I propose to talk about Buddhism and values, I shall be
proselytizing on behalf of some exotic creed. I want to assure you at the outset that
nothing could be further from the truth. First, what I propose to talk about is
Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist philosophers were like all other philosophers in their
dedication to the use of rational methods. For them, the fact that the Buddha made
some claim is not, by itself, a reason to accept that claim. For them, the question is
precisely whether there are good reasons, reasons that anyone can appreciate, for
accepting the central tenets of Buddhism. Second, all I wish to persuade you of is
that this tradition contains insights that might be useful for us in our distinctly non-
Buddhist lives. Buddhists believe that the exercise of philosophical rationality has
soteriological consequences. But this does not preclude the possibility that the
products of its exercise may be useful elsewhere as well.
Part I
Buddhist philosophers claim that we should care about suffering regardless
of where it occurs. They also agree that freedom is of considerable value. The value
of caring and of freedom derive, they would claim, from facts about the nature of
persons. In this lecture I would like to discuss the view about persons that is the
basis for their normative views. Then, in the second and third lectures,
respectively, I shall discuss some Buddhist views about caring and freedom.
For Buddhists the fundamental fact about persons is that they lack selves. It is
because I lack a self that, they claim, I should care equally about the welfare of all.
The fact that persons lack selves can also help explain why persons are best
thought of as autonomous. Before we can investigate these claims, we need to
understand what a self might be, and what reason there is to deny that selves exist.
What Indian philosophers like the Buddha have meant by the claim that there is a
self is that there is some one part of the person that is the essential part, the part
without which that person cannot continue to exist. So if there were something
within the psycho-physical complex—some part of my body or my mind—that was
my self, then I would continue to exist only as long as that part continued to exist.
If it were to go out of existence—even if it were immediately replaced by another
part just like it—then I would cease to exist. And so any person who existed after
that could not be me, they would have to be someone else.
Buddhists deny there is a self because they claim that no part of the person
exists for as long as the person does. The existence of a person consists of
a continuous series of impermanent events: first an experience, then a thought,
then a desire, then an action, and so on. There is no denying the existence
of these things. There are experiences, thoughts, desires, actions, and so on.
What Buddhists deny when they say there is no self is that there is something that
has the experiences and desires; that there is a thinker of the thoughts, an agent
of the actions. Descartes famously said ‘I think, therefore I am’. And he took this
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‘I’ to be the thinker of the thoughts, what has the experiences. Buddhists say there
is no such thing. What Descartes should have said is ‘Thinking is occurring’.
And from this, they hold, we cannot conclude that there is a thing that is doing the
thinking. The episode occurs—there is the thinking. But there is no reason to
supply an extra something, the thinker. For by a thinker Descartes meant
something that endures, something that has first one experience and then
another. And, Buddhists claim, all the evidence points to there being nothing that
endures like this. A self would have to be permanent, but all the parts of a person
are impermanent.
Now here you may feel inclined to side with Descartes—as well as with the
many other Indian philosophers who held there is a self. You may think that there
must be an enduring experiencer. Buddhists are well aware that many of us
believe this. But why? Because we are aware of something that first has a feeling,
then thinks a thought, then has a desire, then formulates a plan? Are we ever
actually aware of any such thing? Or are we rather aware of just the feeling, the
thought, the desire, and so on? The Buddhist says that when we look carefully at
the evidence we will realize we are never actually aware of anything other than the
fleeting episodes. It may feel to us as if there is something constantly there behind
the thoughts and feelings. But when we try to pin it down, in our experience
it turns very slippery and elusive, as if it were forever just outside our grasp.
Perhaps this sense we have of an enduring thinker is like the feeling we have when
we watch a film and see a character move from one place to another. It seems to
us that what is being shown on the screen is an enduring figure who moves.
What we actually see is a succession of distinct images, each at a different location
on the screen. It is we who supply the enduring figure who moves from one
location to another. For the reality of the motion picture is that, each second,
24 distinct still photographs are projected in rapid succession.
Perhaps, then, we are not actually aware of a self. But, comes the objection,
must we not still suppose there is such a thing? For otherwise how are we to explain
the continuity in our lives? For instance, right now I can remember an experience
I had last month when I visited Venice for the first time. I can remember seeing the
water shuttle to the airport pull away from the berth while I was running down
the quay trying to hail it. If there is no enduring self, if there is only a succession of
impermanent events, who is it that remembers this past experience? We all agree,
after all, that I do not remember your past experiences, and you do not remember
mine. But if the experience is one event and the remembering is another event,
and there is no common thinker that first did the experiencing and then does the
remembering, will this not mean I am now remembering someone else’s
experience? And do we not agree that this is impossible?
Here the Buddhist will remind us that we are now performing an inference.
We are no longer claiming we can see the self when we look within. Instead, we
are saying a self must exist because otherwise we could not explain the
phenomenon of memory. And it is worthwhile to examine just how this inference
goes. For it is possible there is another way to explain the phenomenon, one that
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does not involve supposing there is something we cannot actually perceive. It is
usually a good policy to avoid positing things we cannot perceive unless we are
sure there is no other way to explain what we observe. Our ancestors thought that
plants have souls, even though they could not perceive them, because they
thought otherwise we could not explain why a plant’s leaves change their
orientation to stay aligned with the sun. Since we now know how to construct
such an explanation, we no longer believe in imperceptible plant souls.
The inference of a self starts with the phenomenon of remembering a past
experience, so it is useful to try to describe this phenomenon carefully. When I now
recall my Venetian experience, there occurs a sort of inner image of the shuttle
boat pulling out onto the canal, accompanied by a sense of annoyance at my own
stupidity, and these are felt as replays of earlier events. Why do I take this as
evidence for the existence of a persisting self? There are two possibilities. The first
is that we think there has to be something that held the memory trace from
the time of the experience last month until its activation now. So if we think of the
experience as a snapshot, and the remembering as image retrieval, we are
imagining that in order for this image to be the retrieval of that snapshot, there
must be some enduring thing in me that stored the data from that snapshot
between then and now. But this is false. We know that with a digital camera we
can transfer the files that hold our photographs from one storage device
to another. This is why it is possible to view our photographs on our computers.
All that is necessary in order for the image on my screen now to be a picture of my
Venetian adventure is that there be the right kind of causal connections between
the jpg file being run by my computer and the data that were stored on the
memory stick of my camera that day in Venice. Why could memory not be like
this? Why could it not be the case that memory traces get passed along from one
storage device (one brain state) to another from time to time? As long as the
copying process is accurate enough, remembering can still occur without
the need for something that endures from the time of the experience until
the time of the remembering.
The second possible reason why memory might seem to require a persisting
self is that we think of it as my remembering what I experienced. This suggests
that in order for there to be memory there must be this one thing, the experiencer,
that first had the experience and then later recalls it. But this depends on the
assumption that an experience requires an experiencer. If we assume that for every
conscious state there must be something that has that state, then we can say the
following: there must have been an experiencer that had the Venetian experience,
there must be an experiencer that is now doing the remembering, and these must
be one and the same experiencer. But what justifies the assumption that every
experience requires an experiencer? What we were looking for is evidence that in
addition to the experiences themselves there is a self that has those experiences.
We cannot just assume this if this is what we are trying to prove.
It begins to look as though there may not be a way to prove there is a self.
Still most people remain unpersuaded. Despite the lack of evidence, they remain
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convinced that within each of us is an enduring essence that is the true me, the
thinker of my thoughts and the doer of my deeds. They are sure that a person is
not a series of experiences, the person is the subject that has those experiences.
To most people it seems absurd to suppose there can be experiences without
someone who has them. The Buddhist must do more than just poke holes in the
evidence for a self. They need to explain why it seems so obvious to most people
that there is such a thing if there really is not. They do this by suggesting that our
convictions derive from the way that we talk. And the way that we talk is not
always a reliable guide to what actually exists. We say ‘It is raining’ but the ‘it’ refers
to nothing, it is just a dummy subject supplied for grammatical purposes. There is
more than this to the semantics of ‘I’ in ‘I remember’ on the Buddhist account,
but the basic idea is the same: the sense of an enduring subject comes from
the way that we talk. Only because we have all learned to talk and think in a certain
way does it seem obvious that there could not be experiences without an
experiencer, thoughts without a thinker, acts without an agent, and so on.
Part II
Up to this point, everything that the Buddhists say about the self has also
been said by Western philosophers. David Hume pointed out that we never
find a self when we ‘look within’. More recently, Derek Parfit has shown the
fallaciousness of the standard arguments for the existence of the self.1 It is the next
step in the Buddhist account that is interesting and novel. We might ask why we
all talk in a way that suggests there is a self if there is no such thing. After all, if this
way of talking is ubiquitous, there might be some reason for it. Perhaps the reason
is that there is a self. The Buddhist response is that just as the word ‘forest’ is a
useful way to talk about a large number of trees, so the word ‘I’ is a useful way
to refer to a causal series of bodily and mental entities. Strictly speaking there is no
forest, there are just the trees. But because it is useful for us to talk this way, we
may end up believing in a forest as something that exists over and above the trees.
By the same token, while there are just the psycho-physical elements and their
causal connections, our useful way of talking leads us to suppose there is an
enduring thing, the person whose bodily and mental constituents they are.
The forest is not real, the Buddhist will claim, because there is no acceptable
account of its relation to its parts. Suppose we agree that the trees are real. If we
suppose that the forest is also real, and in just the same way in which they are,
then we may ask whether the forest is identical with or distinct from the trees.
The forest cannot be identical with the trees, since the forest has a property that
they lack: the forest is one, while the trees are many. But if the forest is distinct
from the trees, something that exists over and above them, then it must possess
autonomous causal powers: there must be some fact pertaining to the forest that
cannot be explained wholly in terms of facts about the trees. And the Buddhist will
deny that any such fact is to be found. The coolness of the forest, for instance, is to
be accounted for in terms of the shade cast by individual trees and by the cooling
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effect of their respiration. Since we do not need to suppose the forest is real in
order to explain the phenomena, it seems plausible that it is a linguistically
induced fiction.
The same result may be obtained by thinking about conditions for the
persistence of the forest over time. A forest may endure far longer than any of its
constituent trees. The natural history of a forest involves individual trees dying and
others growing up in their place. Now consider Case 1: we cut down one beech tree
and replace it with a pine sapling. We would agree that our action does not bring
about the original forest going out of existence and a new forest arising in its place.
We would agree that this is the same forest as the forest that was there before we
cut down the beech tree. And now consider Case 2: we clear-cut the forest, harvest
all the timber and establish a pine plantation. Here we would agree that our action
does destroy the original forest. The pine forest that grows up is not the forest that
existed before we came in with our logging equipment. In Case 1, the original
forest endures; in Case 2, it does not. But between the two cases there are very
many intermediate cases. How many trees must we remove and replace before
it ceases to be a case of continued existence and becomes a case of destruction and
replacement of the original forest? Which is the very first case where we must say
that the old forest has gone out of existence? Reflection shows that there is no such
first case. There is no clear line dividing those cases where the forest continues to
exist from the cases where it is destroyed and replaced by a new forest. But if the
forest were itself a real thing, then there should be no indeterminacy about
the conditions under which it continues to exist. Since it is easy to imagine
borderline cases, it seems plausible that the forest is a fiction we construct for ease
of communication—a shortcut way of referring to all those trees.2
Now belief in forests is not like belief in fairies. Both might be fictions, but
fairies are a fantasy while forests are not. You can get lost in a forest, but you
cannot get lost in the land of the fairies. We may mark this difference by calling
the forest a convenient fiction. It is generally useful for us to behave as if there
really were such a thing as a forest. Given that it would be hard for us to name
each and every tree, it is easier just to use the one word ‘forest’ and gloss over all
the details. Our use of the word gives rise to the relatively benign fiction that there
is such a thing as a forest. Of course the same reasoning may be applied to the
trees that make up the forest. A tree is, after all, a whole made of parts: roots, trunk,
branches, leaves, and so on. So it must likewise be just a useful fiction. But at the
end of this analytic process there must be impartite things.3 Buddhist
philosophers disagreed among themselves as to the nature of the impartite
physical entities that compose ordinary physical objects such as trees, chariots and
the human body. But they did agree about what kinds of impartite mental entities
go to make up what we think of as the mind: particular pain sensations,
occurrences of such desires as hunger and thirst, the awareness of a blue patch,
and the like. It is these, plus whatever the impartite physical things are, that
constitute the psycho-physical elements. And on the Buddhist account, the word
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‘person’ functions as a convenient designator for a very large collection of psycho-
physical elements.
We saw earlier that none of the psycho-physical elements endures an entire
lifetime. This is why it was said that none could be the self. But the person does
endure at least a lifetime. How is this possible? Like a forest, a person can survive
the replacement of individual parts. But not any manner of replacement will do.
It must be the case that new psycho-physical elements come into existence in
causal dependence on old ones. This is how the cells of our bodies are replaced.
The claim is that similar processes govern all the impermanent psycho-physical
elements. At any one time what we call a person consists of a very large number
of psycho-physical elements. Over time there are many such sets of elements.
But the members of any one set are the effects of members of earlier sets. What we
call a person is actually a hugely complex causal series of sets of psycho-physical
elements. Rather than bother to describe all the psycho-physical elements and all
the causal interactions among them, we just use the one word for the whole
series. This then gives rise to the fiction that there is such a thing as a person,
something that is the subject of the different states in the causal series. This is why,
even though we can never find the experiencer when we look within, we believe
there must be one whenever there are experiences. We take the fiction too
seriously. It is as if, hearing how much the average British employee earns, we were
to ask what firm they worked for.
Part III
This is important for the following reason. I said earlier that the idea of the self
is the idea of some part of the person that is the essence. I explained this as
meaning that the continued existence of the self would be what the continued
existence of the person consists of. So if I had a self, it would be the fact that that
self existed within a certain baby that explained why that baby (in so many ways
unlike the present me) was me. For this reason, denial of the self is often taken to
mean denying that a person lasts very long. It is thought that when Buddhists deny
the existence of the self, they are saying we should not identify with past and future
elements in the causal series. So Buddhism is seen as recommending that we live in
the present moment. This is the conclusion that Tom Tillemans once drew from the
Buddhist doctrine of non-self.4 He asked what it would be like to believe that I have
no self. To answer this question he turned to neurologist Oliver Sacks’ description
of patients with extreme forms of Tourette’s Syndrome. Such people are said to
lack any notion that their actions have consequences for them—that their past
choices affect their present situation, or that their present acts will have
ramifications for their future. Instead, they exist wholly in the present and give no
thought to what might come tomorrow. Indeed it seems inconceivable to them
that they will have a tomorrow. Now the reason why Tillemans thought this is what
it would be like to believe oneself to be without a self is that over the course of
a lifetime all the observable parts of our bodies and minds go out of existence and
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get replaced. So if I thought there was not a self holding all these parts together,
then I might think that the person tomorrow who is thinking different thoughts
and has a few less hairs would be somebody else, not me.
Now the Tourette’s Syndrome patients Sacks describes are pathological. So if
this were what it is like to believe that there is no self, then anyone who believed
that would be in a pathological state. But the Buddha did say that in order to attain
Nirvana we have to abandon the fiction of a self. And Nirvana is clearly not
supposed to be a pathology. So something must be amiss here. But to think this is
to forget that while the Buddhist denies the existence of a self, they also say that
the person is a convenient fiction. This means that it can be useful for us to be able
to collect together all the states making up a causal series and think of them as
if they made up one thing. We think there is an ‘I’ because we talk in a certain way.
And that way is said to be useful. It is not generally useful for us to talk as if there
were fairies. Those who believe there are such things have been deceived by
a certain way of talking that bears no connection to reality. Those who believe
there are forests might also be said to have been misled by a certain way of
talking. But that way of talking is grounded in things that do genuinely exist.
For this reason it can be useful. The Buddhist claims that the same is true of those
who think there are persons.
The Buddha described his view as a middle path between two extremes.
To equate the Buddhist denial of the self with the pathology of Tourette’s
Syndrome is to identify it with one of the two extremes. It is to fail to see how
there could be a middle path with respect to the existence of the person. But here
is a way to open up such a space. It might be said that the following represent
three quite distinct views:
. Non-Reductionism—persons are ultimately real (i.e., belong in our final
ontology); this is so either because there is a self, or because the person non-
reductively supervenes on the psycho-physical elements.
. Reductionism—persons are conceptual fictions; a person just consists of a series
of suitably related psycho-physical elements.
. Eliminativism—persons are utterly unreal; the belief that there are such things
results from accepting a false theory.
If we think that the only options are Non-Reductionism and Eliminativism,
we will naturally identify the Buddhist non-self view as a form of Eliminativism.
But perhaps the Buddhist view is better thought of as a kind of Reductionism.
To see this as a third possible position we must see the dispute over persons
as involving not just one dimension, but two: metaphysical and semantic.
The metaphysical dispute concerns what ultimately exists. Here Reductionism and
Eliminativism agree against Non-Reductionism that persons are not ultimately
real. But then there is the further question of why it is that we believe we are
persons. Reductionist and Eliminativist appear to agree about this as well: we do
so because we accept a certain theory. But they disagree about the status of that
theory. The Reductionist holds that while it is not ultimately true, it is nonetheless
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useful. The Eliminativist denies this; in their eyes it is no different from our
ancestors’ belief that disease is caused by demonic possession. On this question
the Reductionist sides with the Non-Reductionist against the Eliminativist. On the
semantic question of what theory we should accept, Reductionist and Non-
Reductionist agree that we should think of ourselves as persons. What they
disagree about is why.
The Non-Reductionist holds that we should think of ourselves as persons
because we are. Their position on the semantic dispute derives from their position
on the metaphysical question. The Reductionist says instead that the personhood
theory is a useful fiction. Ultimately there are just impermanent psycho-physical
elements making up a complex causal series. But it is useful—that is, results in less
overall suffering—if such a series thinks of itself as a person. It is better, all things
considered, for there to be a tendency in each such series for the present set of
elements to identify with and appropriate the past and future elements in that
series. To see why the Reductionist might claim this, think about flossing one’s
teeth or getting a flu shot. Neither action is particularly pleasant, so the present
elements receive no reward for performing them. But if they do not get
performed, eventually there will be a great deal of pain that might have been
prevented. The best way to prevent that pain turns out to be getting the elements
in a causal series to identify with and appropriate the past and future elements in
that series. This is what I do when I think that I should now floss my teeth in order
to prevent the future pain of gum disease that will happen to me if I do not. Pain is
a bad thing, and should be prevented. There will be less overall pain if each causal
series learns to identify with the past and future stages of that series—learns to
think of itself as a ‘person’.
According to the Buddhist, the difficulty only comes when we take this idea
too seriously—when we start thinking there really is such a thing as ‘me’, and not
just the impermanent states making up the series. That is when we start blindly
putting ourselves ahead of others, and also start worrying about what will happen
to this ‘me’ in the long run. Here is the source of the suffering of which the Buddha
spoke.5 The trick is to recognize that there ultimately is no such thing as this ‘me’,
and yet at the same time recognize that much of the time it can be very useful to
act as if there were. This balancing act is what the Buddha meant by a middle way.
Some people believe that the true ‘me’ is eternal, and that we should seek out that
way of life that properly expresses the true nature of this eternal entity. Others
believe that we cease to exist at the end of this life, or perhaps even sooner, at the
end of a stage of a life. They conclude that we should take solace in whatever
transitory pleasures we can manage to attain. The Buddha’s middle way rejects the
common assumption both share: that there is a ‘me’ whose existence might have
meaning or purpose. The idea of a ‘me’ can be a useful device for preventing
unnecessary pain and suffering. But when we forget that it is no more than a useful
device, we fall into the trap of searching for something that can never be found—
an answer to the question, What is it all about?
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Lecture 2: reasons for caring
In the first lecture we explored the Buddhist doctrine of non-self. I claimed
that this doctrine might yield a novel way of grounding values that we share.
One such value is that of caring or benevolence. We agree that people ought to
promote the welfare of others. But when people fail to do so and act solely out
of narrow self-interest, we do not know what reasons we can give to persuade
them to act differently. In this lecture we shall examine the possibility that the
Buddhist doctrine of non-self might supply a way to close the gap between our
aspirations and our actions. We shall explore the claim that we should act to
prevent the suffering of others because we are empty persons—persons devoid of
selves.
Part I
It is widely held that persons are by nature self-interested, and that this is
the source of the gap between our aspirations and our actions. One hears it said
that human nature involves the innate disposition to promote one’s own interests
(and those of one’s nearest and dearest). Since we know that Buddhists deny the
existence of a self, we might expect the Buddhist to ground the value of caring in
an alternative view of human nature. Might they not claim that, once we realize
our lack of a self, we will stop being so selfish and naturally become more selfless?
Could it be that belief in a self, with its consequent egoism, is to be replaced by
belief in non-self and consequent altruism? Is this the source of the Buddhist value
of compassion? While one sometimes encounters this way of looking at it, things
could not be so simple. For the Buddhist view excludes the possibility of any
substantive theory of human nature that might serve to ground the value of
caring. To say there is no self is to say there is no human essence. Empty persons
cannot be essentially egoistic or altruistic. What is devoid of essence is not
essentially any way at all. Its being the way that it is can only be due to causes and
conditions.
The Buddhist proposal for closing the gap is best understood by contrasting
it with its more familiar alternatives. Perhaps the most common general approach
to promoting benevolence is the sort that appeals to self-interest. This appeal to
‘enlightened self-interest’ can take a variety of forms. There is, for instance, the
claim that we promote our own interests by having concern for the welfare of
others, since this makes it more likely that others will take an interest in our own
welfare. This may have been a sound piece of advice when most of one’s
interactions were with known others falling under a limited number of
determinate social relations. Under conditions of modernity this is no longer the
case, however. We interact each day with countless others who are, and shall
remain, utter strangers. The likelihood is low that a strategy of ‘reciprocal altruism’
will enhance one’s welfare under such conditions. What is needed to make
this a successful gap-closer is some mechanism for ensuring that one’s good and
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ill treatment of others affects one’s welfare in the appropriate ways. Theists
commonly supply this in the form of divine judgment, and reward and
punishment, in an afterlife. The Indian variant on this uses the doctrine of karma
and rebirth in much the same way. According to this doctrine, the world adheres
to a set of moral causal laws such that morally good acts naturally bring
about pleasant rebirths, while morally bad acts naturally cause painful rebirths.
And, of course, the acts that count as morally good turn out to be ones that
involve promoting the interests of others, while those that are morally bad
generally involve harming others for one’s own gain. The Buddha is said to have
taught this idea to those lay followers who were not yet prepared to take the
decisive step of abandoning the householder’s existence and seeking nirvana.
It, and the theist’s claim about judgment, might succeed in closing the gap for
those who accept the existence of the underlying mechanism. The difficulty is that
many people are quite skeptical about such theories. Such skepticism is fuelled
not just by the paucity of empirical evidence in their favor. There is also the fact
that theories of this sort have often been used to justify oppressive social
arrangements.
There is another form of the ‘enlightened self-interest’ approach to be found
in the Indian tradition. It is sometimes claimed that in order to attain liberation
from suffering, it is necessary that one cultivate an attitude of equal concern for
the welfare of all. Such claims are to be found not only in some of the orthodox
Indian schools, but in the Buddhist tradition as well.6 We can see how this might
be if we think of what it is that all Indian emancipatory projects have in common:
the view that suffering is the result of our ignorance about our true identity.
Since self-interested action is based on a view concerning who we are, it will tend
to reinforce this ignorance. Thus cultivation of concern for others might be a
useful way to disrupt the processes that perpetuate our ignorance. There is one
glaring problem with this approach, however: it requires that we be motivated to
embark on the project of seeking liberation. What we want is an approach that will
appeal to all, and not just to those few who have set out to attain the cessation
of suffering.
There are two other common approaches to closing the motivational gap
with respect to benevolence: the divine command theory, and the ‘universal
siblinghood’ view. The difference between the divine command theory and the
divine judgment approach is not always appreciated. The divine command theory
need not rely for motivational force on fear of divine judgment; it need not be
construed as a self-interest theory. Instead, it may rely on the devotion the theist
typically feels toward that being they acknowledge as divine. It will then use this
devotion to motivate compliance with the divine commands—and thus behavior
that is other-regarding. The difficulty, of course, is that the theist must persuade us
that they have correctly grasped the commands of their divinity. The theist might
instead seek to motivate other-regarding behavior by appealing to the claim that
all persons are equally related to God in some important way. This is one form of
the ‘universal siblinghood’ approach. But this approach need not take a theistic
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form. The basic idea is to get us to extend to others the regard we have for the
welfare of ourselves and our nearest and dearest (such as our siblings). This is
often done by claiming that we are all equally ‘children of God’, so that the
stranger is more properly thought of as my brother or sister. But it may also be
done in a negative way, by suggesting that there is no reason to support
a preference for the welfare of oneself and one’s nearest and dearest. We see
an instance of this in the Bhagavad Gıta, where it is claimed that, because each
self is devoid of all qualities save that of being a sentient witness, there is no
reason to prefer one person over any other.7 From this it is said to follow that
exclusive regard for oneself and one’s nearest and dearest is irrational. We might
call this the ‘negatively established universal siblinghood’ approach. It comes
quite close to the approach the Buddhist will adopt. Its chief drawback, from the
Buddhist perspective, is that it relies on a view about the nature of the self. As we
saw in the first lecture, the Buddhist denies we have any reason to believe there
is such a thing. In that case, and in the absence of a transcendent being on
whom all are equally dependent, it is difficult to see how it could be established
that all persons are equally deserving of the regard we typically have for
our siblings.
Part II
As we saw earlier, Buddhists, together with other Indian philosophers, claim
that benevolence is instrumentally valuable in the pursuit of liberation. But there is
also a Buddhist argument to the effect that an obligation to exercise altruism
follows from the truth of non-self. This argument is most clearly articulated by
Mahayana Buddhists, but it is one that can be endorsed by the Abhidharma
schools as well. Here is Santideva’s formulation of the argument, from Chapter 8 of
Bodhicaryavatara:
101. The continuant and the collective are unreal, like the queue, the army, etc.
There exists no one whose suffering this is, hence of whom will there be the
owning of this?
102. Ownerless sufferings are all devoid of distinction [between ‘mine’ and ‘other’].
Because it is suffering, it is to be prevented; how can this be restricted?
103. If it were asked why suffering is to be prevented, it is agreed upon without
exception by all [that it is].
Thus if it is to be prevented, then also all [of it is to be prevented], if not
then one’s own case is also like that of [other] persons.
As v.101 makes clear, the argument rests on a Reductionist view of persons, the
view that we discussed in the first lecture. Buddhist Reductionists deny that
the person is ultimately real on the grounds that it is both a continuant and
a collective. Santideva’s examples of the queue and the army are instances of
both. A queue such as the one at the ticket window is a collective, a whole made
of many parts in the form of the persons who stand in it. And it is a continuant,
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something that can continue to exist over time—namely by adding new persons
at the end as people at the head get their tickets and leave. The queue is
a temporally extended collective, the parts of which are themselves collectives
of co-occurring entities. It is a whole, the parts of which are themselves wholes.
As such it is, like the forest and the chariot, a conceptual fiction that is not
ultimately real.
Now certain orthodox Indian philosophers hold that wholes exist over and
above their parts. But Buddhists claim that the whole is a mere conceptual fiction,
something whose existence we grant solely for practical purposes such as ease of
communication. For instance, it is easier to say that there is a queue in front of the
theater than to enumerate all the individual persons in the queue. We may then
say that the queue is conventionally real. But it is ultimately unreal; only its partless
constituents are ultimately real. By the same token, according to Buddhist
Reductionism, persons are only conventionally and not ultimately real. They are
mere useful fictions. For at any one time what we call a person consists of a large
collection of psycho-physical elements in complex interaction. And over time the
members of this collective undergo replacement, so that a part making up
a person at one time is unlikely to be a part of that person at some later time. What
we call a person is really just a complex causal series of impermanent elements.
The two-tier ontology of Buddhist Reductionism is important to Santideva’s
argument. Ultimately there are only the impersonal elements that make up
the psycho-physical complex: the bits of matter that make up the body, and the
mental events (such as feelings of pleasure and pain, desires, etc.) that make up
the mental stream. But conventionally we may say that there are persons.
While some collectives, like an army, are useful fictions, other collectives, like the
land of the fairies, are not. There being no fairies, there is no such collection of hills,
dales, streams, and so on; therefore it is not useful to have a convenient way of
referring to such a place. A person is like an army in this respect: given the facts
about what is ultimately real, it turns out to be useful for a causal series of psycho-
physical elements to think of itself as one enduring thing.
This is important because it is crucial to Santideva’s argument that the
usefulness of the personhood fiction has a basis in ultimate reality. This comes out
most clearly in 8.97–98ab, where he discusses the ultimate truth that underlies
the case of a person acting to prevent themselves from feeling pain in the future.
Suppose that in order to prevent my getting the flu this winter, I now get a flu
shot. Strictly speaking this involves two distinct sets of psycho-physical elements:
the one that is now getting vaccinated, and the future set that benefits by
enjoying good health. The ‘person’ who unites these sets of elements is a fiction,
just like the ‘queue’ that is thought to unite the 9:00 collection of moviegoers and
the 9:30 collection. So strictly speaking there is no person, ‘me’ who will later
benefit from this present action. Does this mean there is no reason to get a flu
shot? No. There is a reason. But the reason is not that I will later benefit from my
present action. The reason is rather, ‘Because it is suffering, it is to be prevented’
(8.102cd). The pain that would occur in the absence of the flu shot is bad, and
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should be prevented. It is because of this and countless other facts like this that
the fiction of the person is useful. It is useful because it is a way of bringing about
less overall pain. I have learned to think of the psycho-physical elements that
occur later in this causal series as ‘me’ because the earlier members of a causal
series are often in a good position to prevent pain in the later members of the
series. We have all learned to think of ourselves as persons because this turns
out to be a good way to prevent a great deal of pain that would otherwise occur.
The personhood convention is a useful fiction because collecting together all the
parts of a causal series under this concept helps to minimize overall suffering,
which is to be prevented. Pain is ultimately real, and its occurrence is ultimately
bad. There is, however, no one whose pain it is. It is a mere useful fiction that
makes me think of some pain as mine and some pain as someone else’s. The pain
is quite real, but its owner is not.
Once this point is grasped, it is relatively easy to see how the rest of the
argument goes. Suffering is ultimately bad, but persons are not ultimately real, so
ultimately there is no reason to discriminate between my pain and that of another.
I have just as much reason to try to prevent another person’s pain as I do my own
pain. If some action I can now perform will result in less overall pain in the world,
then I should perform it. It is more common for me to be able to prevent future
pain in this causal series than in others. But when I am able to prevent pain
in another causal series, I have precisely the same reason to do so: ‘because it is
suffering, it is to be prevented’. Most people fail to see this only because they take
the useful fiction of the person too seriously.
According to the Buddhist Reductionist, the personhood convention is
a kind of algorithm or handy shortcut method that we have learnt because it has
proven effective at preventing a great deal of unnecessary pain—the pain that
results from imprudence. But like any algorithm it can sometimes be misused.
Buddhists identify two mistakes that stem from taking it too seriously: we come to
believe that there is a self, a true ‘me’, and then become excessively concerned
about its fate after death; and we come to feel that our only reason for action is
concern for our own welfare and that of our nearest and dearest. In this respect
the personhood convention is like belief in another fiction, the nation. That fiction
can also serve a useful purpose. For when people see themselves as members of
a nation, it can motivate them to act in ways that benefit all. But when the fiction
is taken too seriously it leads to the excesses of nationalism, with such evil
consequences as militarism and revanchism. It is for this reason that the Buddhist
urges we follow a middle path between the extremes of eternalism and
annihilationism. The eternalist takes the fiction of the person at face value, and falls
into the two errors just described. The annihilationist completely rejects the idea
of a person, and so lives only for the moment; they thus lose the benefits that
come from avoiding imprudent acts. The Buddhist middle path means that we
continue to employ the useful fiction of the person, but recognize it for what it is—
no more than a handy shortcut to the goal of preventing suffering. In that way we
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can continue to derive the benefits that come from our use of the fiction without
falling into the errors that stem from taking it too seriously.
Part III
We can now see how the Buddhist proposal for grounding care differs from
the more familiar proposals we surveyed earlier. Those all sought to motivate
concern for others’ welfare by trying to link such welfare with a concern that was
taken as antecedently given. This strategy is clearly visible in the various forms of
the ‘enlightened self-interest’ approach. They all begin with the assumption that
each of us is supremely interested in our own welfare (and, by extension, that of
our nearest and dearest). But devotionalist approaches may likewise seek to build
on the devotee’s concern to glorify God. In any event, the common pattern is to
start with a concern for the welfare of some person that we are assumed to already
possess, and try to show that taking an interest in the welfare of others would
serve that interest. It is taken as given that there are persons, and that these are
the proper objects of our concern. The effort is to move us from what is taken to
be a natural attitude of partial concern toward a more universal regard for all
persons and their welfare.
The Buddhist proposal begins with the claim that ultimately there are no
persons. This is why any attempt to close the motivational gap through appeal
to enlightened self-interest must fail. It is not the case that we are innately self-
interested. Self-interest is interest in the welfare of a person. And persons are not
ultimately real; they are not natural occurrences. Persons, and their interests, only
come on the scene as a result of processes of social construction.
We can see how this might be if we reflect on how we socialize small
children. It takes considerable training before the small child understands the
reason for brushing their teeth. Children do not naturally identify with and
appropriate the future pain that results from failure to brush. Coming to feel
anticipation of its future states—viewing them as its own—is something the child
must learn to do. Likewise, the small child typically views punishment for its past
misdeeds as the gratuitous infliction of pain. It is only through socialization that
the child comes to identify with and appropriate past actions in the causal series.
Only in this way does the child come to take responsibility for its deeds. Of course
we teach the child to think of itself as a person because we believe that it is.
We believe that each causal series is a person, and that the supremely rational end
for each person is the promotion of its own welfare, timelessly construed. Thus, in
socializing the child we see ourselves as merely helping him/her to realize a nature
that is already present within. This teaching usually works. But the fact that it
succeeds should not be seen as vindicating the view that persons are ultimately
real. This may well be a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On the Buddhist view there are no antecedently given interests that can
serve to motivate an interest in the welfare of others. We must look elsewhere
for help in closing the motivational gap. But we do not have far to look. That we
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consider ourselves to be persons with interests at all can only be explained, they
hold, if it is ultimately true that pain and suffering are bad. Pain and suffering are
ultimately real. But ultimately there are no persons. So while there ultimately
are occurrences of pain and suffering, these are not the states of persons.
They occur in conjunction with other psycho-physical elements in particular causal
series. And a causal series may come to think of itself as a person. It will then think
of occurrences of pain and suffering as its states. It will also think of itself as having
a reason to prevent these states. And this is indeed conventionally true. But why?
Because, the Buddhist claims, it is ultimately true that pain and suffering are bad.
That is, it is better that there be less rather than more occurrences of pain and
suffering. It is because this is ultimately true that it is conventionally true that we
are persons with interests. If it were not ultimately true, then there would be no
reason to adopt any particular convention, such as the personhood convention,
over any other. It would not be conventionally true that we have an interest in
promoting our welfare timelessly construed. This is conventionally true only
because it is ultimately true that all suffering is bad, regardless of when and where
it occurs. The personhood convention is a useful shorthand device for seeing to it
that there is less rather than more pain and suffering. The difficulty is just that
we take it too seriously. We thus fail to see that our coming to have an interest
in promoting our own welfare is just a particular way of bringing it about that
there is less overall pain and suffering in the world. Taking self-interest to be
a fundamental fact about persons, we fail to see how concern for the welfare
of others could be anything else than derivative.
When we acknowledge a need to be more concerned about the welfare of
others, we usually think that the cure for our parochial concern lies in learning
to identify with others. We think we must learn to see the world through another
person’s eyes, walk a mile in their shoes. Now this is like what the child learns to do
when they learn to think of themselves as a person: having one set of psycho-
physical elements imaginatively project itself into some distinct set of elements.
Thus we train children into personhood by getting them to think of the being who
will feel the pain in the future as themselves. And we try to become more caring
persons by trying to think of other persons as if we were them. But this is difficult.
After all, that other person is not me. And what if I do not already have some
reason to care about them? Suppose they are utter strangers with whom I shall
never have any personal interaction. And what if their lives are very foreign and
alien to me—what if they do not have any shoes? When we try to expand our
circle of concern for others in this way, the road seems very difficult, and failure is
easy to understand. But what we learn from Santideva’s argument is that the
strategy of learning to identify with others is just a way of putting to novel use
a convenient fiction that we have already mastered. To identify with someone
is, after all, to imagine that we are that person. And persons are mere fictions.
Our many failures at using the strategy of identifying with others come from our
taking this fiction too seriously. Perhaps what we should be doing instead is
learning how not to identify with anyone—others or ourselves. Then the badness
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of pain that happens elsewhere will become obvious. And then perhaps it will be
easier for us to be more caring and compassionate than we presently are.
There is an experience that is not uncommon among people who have
become vegetarians that may have a bearing on this. Sometimes people will go
for years with a vague sense of discomfort about their meat-eating. They will
acknowledge that the animals we raise for meat feel pain, and that it seems
morally problematic to inflict this sort of pain for our own gratification, when
there are alternatives that do not involve causing anything to feel pain. Still, the
habit is deeply entrenched, and somehow the pain of livestock and poultry and
fish seems distant and alien. It is singularly difficult to imagine what it would be
like to be an eel or a turkey. But if the meat-eating habit is disrupted for any length
of time, something interesting happens. It is not that it gets easier to imagine that
one is a frog or a bonito—but somehow their pain comes to seem much more
vivid and real. And so it becomes more difficult to go back to eating meat. Perhaps
what is going on here is this. We have learned that the way to motivate ourselves
to care about other beings is to identify with them. And this strategy may work up
to a point. But it may actually serve as a kind of defense against having to think too
much about what happens to other beings who are very different from ourselves.
(And, of course, this might play a role in explaining such phenomena as racism and
sexism as well.) When the meat-eating habit is disrupted, however, the need to
maintain this defense diminishes, and it becomes easier to recognize the intrinsic
badness of the pain we inflict. This is why it is easier to become a vegetarian by
simply going without meat for some time, rather than by trying to act on a moral
resolve. The thought that other animals are persons too, that they feel pain like us,
seems not to work. It is a mistake to try to think of other animals as persons; they
are not. But then, neither are we.
Lecture 3: ways of being free
In our previous lecture we saw how the Buddhist view of persons might
be used to ground the value we place on care and concern for others. Freedom is
something else that we hold to be of great importance. We do not want for
proposed explanations of its value. But these bring various problems with them.
Can the Buddhist tradition be of any assistance here? Are there fresh approaches
to grounding the value of freedom in the Buddhist account of persons?
Part I
Of course there are different kinds of freedom, and it is important to keep
them distinct. There is political freedom, which has to do with the degree of
autonomy from outside interference that individuals enjoy in living their lives
under a form of social organization. Then there is the sort of freedom, sometimes
called free will, that is required for responsibility and desert. To say that someone
is free in this sense is to say that actions may appropriately be attributed to them,
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that what they do is done ‘of their own free will’. Only when a person is free in this
sense are they thought to be responsible for their actions, and so deserving
of reward and punishment, praise and blame, for what they do. The two kinds of
freedom are connected in various ways. We may say, for instance, that the second
is a prerequisite for the first. Or we may note that arguments for the expansion of
political freedom are often based on the view that the second kind of freedom,
individual autonomy, is of great value and should be given wider scope in which
to operate. But we will have little to say about those connections here.
Buddhist philosophy has had relatively little to say about political freedom.
It has generally been more concerned with questions of individual welfare
than with questions of social arrangements. So if we are going to tease out
a distinctively Buddhist position on the value of political freedom, it will have to
come by working out the consequences of their stance on individual autonomy.
It is not immediately apparent that they have much more to say on this topic.
But reflection on their claim that persons are conventionally real will turn out to
provide some interesting insights. Before coming to this, however, we should look
briefly at the sort of account of the value of freedom that our culture usually offers.
Political liberalism is the view that the ideal society maximizes the degree of
allowable individual freedom. Allowability is usually understood to be subject
to the constraint of equality or ‘like liberties for all’. Individuals should be granted
a liberty provided its exercise does not prevent others from enjoying a like liberty.
Why, however, is the maximization of freedom thought of as a good? The most
common answer is that the ideal society promotes human flourishing, which
comes about through realization of the human essence. And it is held that humans
are essentially rational autonomous ends-choosers. In the liberal society persons
enjoy ample opportunities to develop and cultivate their capacity for making
reasoned choices. They are encouraged to formulate their own life-projects,
thereby expanding the sphere of individual autonomy to include the realization
of individual talents and skills.
The thought that the capacity for rational autonomy sets us apart from other
animals is widespread. In Aristotle’s hands, however, it did not lead to political
liberalism. Perhaps this is because Aristotle’s understanding of our autonomy did
not involve attributing to us the ability to be unmoved movers. Descartes in effect
does so when he describes the will as infinite in scope. Likewise for the common
tendency among modern thinkers to contrast the intellect’s capacity to be moved
by reasons with the motion of bodies, which is thought of as coming about only
through causation understood mechanistically. Such thinking can easily lead to
the notion that what is uniquely valuable in humans is precisely the ability
to choose ends by standing outside the causal nexus and appreciating the force
of reason’s dictates. This can in turn make the liberal state seem ideally suited to
realizing the human essence.
Such a conception of human nature obviously coheres well with the
assumptions necessary for capitalist economic institutions to make sense. All that
is needed to turn the rational autonomous ends-chooser into homo economicus
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is the assumption of self-interest. Given that additional assumption, the defense
of market mechanisms as the ideal solution to problems of distribution can be
made to go through. What is not so easy is squaring the resulting picture
with the value we place on caring. Concern with the welfare of one’s
nearest and dearest is accommodated easily enough, as just an extension of self-
interest. But concern for the welfare of the faceless stranger is another matter.
This is the source of the common perception that the demands of rationality and
morality are difficult to reconcile. In the previous lecture we discussed various
strategies for bringing about such a reconciliation. We also saw how the Buddhist
reductionist view of persons sought to dissolve the difficulty by showing self-
interest and concern for the welfare of others to spring from a common source.
Does this view suggest anything useful about the value of freedom?
We begin with the sort of freedom that is required for responsibility and
desert. We can see the Buddhist commitment to the existence of this kind of
freedom in an interesting exchange in the text The Questions of King Milinda.
There the king, who is inquiring about Buddhist teachings, asks if the doctrine
of non-self does not entail that infant and adult are distinct persons. His thinking is
that given the impermanence of the psycho-physical elements, the absence of a
self means that infant and adult represent two distinct collections of such
elements, and thus two distinct persons. The Buddhist monk Nagasena responds
that, in that case, a criminal would never deserve to be punished for a crime that
was committed earlier. He then introduces the distinction between the two truths
in order to explain how the same person can consist of distinct elements at
distinct times. The ultimate truth is that there is just the succession of elements in a
causal series. But the conventional truth is that there is a person who endures from
the earlier time to the later time. It is conventionally true that the person
now undergoing punishment is the person who committed the crime. So it is
conventionally true that they deserve to be punished.8
Now we know that conventional truth is said to reflect what is useful;
it consists of shortcuts that tend to promote the maximization of welfare
impersonally construed. What this exchange brings out is that the conventional
truth about causal series of psycho-physical elements—that they are enduring
persons—is useful at least in part because it gives rise to the institution of
justifiable reward and punishment. It is one set of elements that commits the good
or bad deed. It is another set of elements that receives reward or punishment.
But when the earlier elements cause the later elements, the personhood
convention requires that each set identify with and appropriate the other. This is
useful for the obvious reason that reward and punishment are thereby seen as
connected to the earlier deeds. The recipient thus sees their present treatment as
stemming from their own past actions. Socialization into personhood also results
in an attitude of special concern for one’s own future welfare. The recipient will
thus want its own future to contain more rewards and fewer punishments. So the
recipient is more likely to engage in behavior of the rewarded type, and less likely
to engage in behavior of the sort that receives punishment. So long as behavior
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that enhances overall welfare is rewarded, and behavior that brings about more
overall pain and suffering is punished, the notion that persons are deserving of
reward and punishment will tend to maximize welfare impersonally construed.
Of course this depends on the assumption that persons are in control of
their actions. Reward and punishment, praise and blame, would have no effect
on future conduct if the recipient were unable to make it more or less likely that
similar behavior occurred in the future of that causal series. This is why it is only
intentional conduct that is said to involve desert.9 Intentions stem from volitions,
which are seen as habitual: the occurrence of a volition on a given occasion
enhances the likelihood that similar volitions will occur under similar
circumstances in the future. It is assumed that a system of psycho-physical
elements is capable of deliberation about future consequences, and that such
deliberation can bring about alterations in the set of volitions that gets replicated
over time. So it is conventionally true that it is up to the person whether or not
their behavior conforms to the norms of ethics and the law. These institutions are
effective at enhancing welfare precisely because the reward and punishment
they mete out are seen, by and large, as just.
Part II
Now all of this may seem perfectly obvious. But if the Buddhist reductionist
account of persons is correct, then things need not have been so. We can imagine
other possibilities than that we think of ourselves as persons, autonomous
individuals who take responsibility for their actions and base their choices on
deliberation about the consequences. Of course, given our cognitive limitations,
there must be some set of conventions or other about the causal series of psycho-
physical elements. The ultimate truth is simply too complex to serve as the source
of information necessary to maximize overall welfare. But we can imagine other
conceptual schemes than the one we happen to employ, the one that makes
it conventionally true that we are persons. Two such schemes that were well
known to Buddhist philosophers are what we could call the Punctualist scheme
and the Weltgeist scheme. Each proposes a different concept to replace our
concept of the person as the subject of experience and the agent of action.
Punctualism proposes that the subject be not a causal series of sets of psycho-
physical elements, but just a single set of simultaneously existing and mutually
interacting elements. Punctualists propose that we think of ourselves in the way of
grasshoppers, as beings of relatively brief duration. Weltgeistism instead proposes
that we think of ourselves more along the lines of the ant and other social insects.
The ant is unlike the grasshopper in being prudent. So on this proposal it is not
just present elements but causally connected elements, past, present and future,
that are to be included in the subject concept. But the individual ant or bee
identifies with the colony as a whole. So under the Weltgeist scheme the subject is
not a single causal series, but all those series that are in significant interaction.
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Thus, conceivably all of what are presently thought of as distinct persons might
constitute a single subject under this scheme.
Now we saw in the previous lecture why the personhood scheme is said to
be better at maximizing welfare than the Punctualist scheme. Under the latter
scheme there is no reason to floss or get a flu shot, under the former scheme there
is. So the personhood scheme is likely to perform better in preventing pain
brought about by imprudence. But the Weltgeist scheme has this forward-looking
feature, plus the additional advantage that actions are chosen on a more
thoroughly impersonal basis. On our scheme it is open to persons to choose
actions that promote their own welfare at the expense of the welfare of others.
The demands of morality and the law represent attempts to make such actions
less likely, but these are imperfect mechanisms at best. Under the Weltgeist
scheme, deliberation is centralized. Its aim is to enhance overall welfare, construed
not just timelessly but impersonally as well. While persons criticize grasshoppers
for their imprudence, ants criticize persons for their immorality—their inability to
consistently promote what persons would call the collective interest but to the ant
is just the self-interest of the deliberating subject. Since we agree that the
conventional truth is to be decided by the tendency of a scheme to promote
overall welfare, why is our concept of the subject that of the person and not the
Weltgeist?
The most probable answer is that the pain caused by immorality under the
personhood scheme is more than made up for by the welfare-enhancing effects of
individual initiative. One major drawback of the Weltgeist scheme is that effective
deliberation requires that information constantly flow between whichever causal
series perform the deliberative function and all other series. In the time that this
information flow requires, opportunities for useful intervention will often be lost.
Greater freedom at the level of the individual series may also lead to more useful
innovation. It may well be that there is an inherent conservatism built into the
algorithms that serve the interests of the Weltgeist well, and that this conservatism
blocks the emergence of more optimific strategies. It must be granted that
adopting the Weltgeist scheme would result in much less of the pain associated
with interpersonal conflict. But the claim would be that the personhood scheme
is still more optimific.10
This would in turn explain why individual autonomy is valued. Freedom of
the responsibility-entailing sort is opened up by adopting the personhood
scheme as the conventional truth. Under the Punctualist scheme there is no
need for deliberation: the grasshopper simply does what it feels like doing at the
moment. Socialization into personhood involves learning to act, instead, on
the basis of the outcome of deliberation. And deliberation involves, in the first
instance, seeing oneself as an enduring entity having a variety of interests that
might be served in various ways. So on a given occasion one must work out which
strategy will best promote one’s welfare, and act on that basis. The introduction
of prudential norms creates a sphere of autonomy as well as a bias in favor of
systems that realize it. At the same time, the stage is set for interpersonal conflict.
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What one person chooses on the basis of prudential self-interest may well cause
harm to others. Norms of morality are introduced as a way to try to minimize such
conflict. Adopting the Weltgeist scheme would have eliminated the need for
such norms. The individual ant is never torn between the competing claims of self-
interest and the interests of the fellow members of its colony. For it is not the
individual ant that deliberates; on this scheme, it is the colony that is the subject
of deliberation. The introduction of moral norms further enlarges the sphere
of autonomy in which persons operate. We must see ourselves as able to choose
between the prudent and the imprudent, the morally permissible and the
immoral. And given that the personhood convention is optimific, the autonomy
that is constituted by the adoption of this scheme is indeed of value, for it
promotes the maximization of welfare impersonally construed.
I said earlier that the Buddhists have very little to say about how a society
should be organized, and so have little to say on the topic of political freedom.
But we can now appreciate how a certain view of the value of political freedom
might stand behind their position on the caste system. As is well known, caste
distinctions are not recognized within Buddhist institutions. Of course Indian
Buddhism did not directly challenge the system of caste in the larger society.
But entry into the Buddhist order was open to individuals regardless of caste
status, and governance roles within Buddhist institutions were filled on a more or
less meritocratic basis. Now the caste system places substantial restrictions on
individual liberty. All are constrained by these restrictions, although differentially
of course. And we would call the restrictions imposed on the high-caste Brahman
far less onerous than those placed on the conduct of individuals in the lower
castes. It is for this reason that we would call this a classic case of an oppressive
social order. For oppression consists of the systematic subordination of the
interests of one group to those of another. But suppose we were to take seriously
the organicist defense of the system that was first offered in the Vedas: members
of each caste are best suited to perform a given role that is necessary to the
functioning of the overall social order, so that the general welfare is best
promoted when individuals are confined to their allotted roles.11 We can then see
the Buddhist stance on caste as directly contradicting this claim. For the Buddhist
stance is tantamount to the view that overall welfare is best served when the
individual is free to pursue their own ends.
The Buddhist Reductionist view of persons thus contains resources for the
construction of a defense of political liberalism. Notice, however, that this defense
is not metaphysical in nature. We commonly take oppression to be wrong because
it violates the principle of equal respect for persons. Persons are thought to be
worthy of respect by virtue of their being rational autonomous ends-choosers.
And the capacity for rational autonomy is said to be the same in all, so that each is
due the same degree of basic respect. But this depends on a problematic
essentialism. Pressure may be put on the egalitarian assumption, for instance, by
pointing to differences in educational outcomes. When one group regularly does
better than another, insistence on the equal rationality of all can be made to look
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like mere ‘political correctness’. The metaphysical defense of political liberalism
may then be turned into the classic paternalistic apologetics for an oppressive
order. Perhaps we would do better to eschew such a defense entirely, and depend
instead on the straightforwardly empirical claim that overall welfare is best
promoted by the construction of persons as autonomous individuals, and that this
construction is best achieved by working on the assumption that each causal
series is equally capable of developing the skills involved in individual autonomy.
We could then point to the Buddhist experiment with the lifting of caste
restrictions as evidence in support of this claim.
Part III
To all this it will no doubt be objected that the Buddhist reductionist is in no
position to offer such a defense of freedom. For Buddhist reductionism depends
on a strong form of psychological determinism, the view that every psychological
state is the effect of prior causes.12 And, it will be claimed, if my actions result from
my intentions, then since my intentions are the effects of prior causes, my actions
are not freely performed. None of my acts is genuinely up to me, so I cannot be
said to have individual autonomy, the responsibility-entailing variety of freedom.
Real autonomy requires agent-causation—it requires that there be a real agent
enjoying contra-causal freedom. The Buddhist reductionist denial of the existence
of the self rules out the possibility of a real agent to wield this power. And its
psychological determinism precludes there being the requisite capacity of an
unmoved mover.
The arguments for this incompatibilist view are well known, and I shall not
rehearse them here. Nor shall I discuss the standard array of compatibilist and
neo-compatibilist responses to those arguments. The question is whether the
Buddhist Reductionist position might serve as the basis for any fresh insights on
the subject. The fact that Buddhists have had virtually nothing to say about
individual autonomy might suggest a negative answer. But this should actually give
solace to the compatibilist. As we saw earlier, Buddhists are committed to the
existence of individual autonomy; it is important to their view that persons can be
held responsible for their actions, that they can be deserving of reward and
punishment. As we just saw, however, it is relatively easy to formulate an
incompatibilist objection to their position. Buddhists have had little to say about
individual autonomy because none of their opponents ever raised such an
objection. But Buddhists have not lacked clever opponents. If the arguments for
incompatibilism were as obvious as is sometimes suggested, we would expect this
objection to have been raised. The Buddhist position cannot be properly called
compatibilist, for that would suggest that they articulated reasons in support of the
view that freedom and psychological determinism are compatible. Instead,
we might call their view paleo-compatibilism.
So what insights might be teased out of Buddhist paleo-compatibilism? In the
present state of the debate, there is something of a deadlock. Compatibilists are
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regularly accused by incompatibilists of playing a kind of shell game: substituting
a far weaker freedom for the sort that, according to the incompatibilist, we genuinely
want. Neo-compatibilism at least has the advantage of openly acknowledging that
the subject has been changed. Neo-compatibilists agree that the sort of freedom
that involves a will unconstrained by causal forces is not on offer if psychological
determinism is true. They claim, however, that we should not want such a freedom in
any event, and that something far less grand will do all the work that is needed.13
What a Buddhist paleo-compatibilist approach may offer is a way of more nearly
reconciling the insights of compatibilism and incompatibilism.14 The reconciliation is
brought about by utilizing the doctrine of the two truths. The basic idea is as follows:
1. Psychological determinism is ultimately true.
2. It is conventionally true that persons have free will.
3. That (1) is the case explains why (2) is the case.
4. (1) and (2) are compatible because neither may be asserted at the level at which
the other is true.
Recall that the ultimate truth is thoroughly impersonal. The concept
of a person is the concept of a whole, and no statement about wholes can be
asserted at the level of ultimate truth. So the statement ‘Persons have free will’
is neither true nor false at the ultimate level. All we can talk about at that level are
the psycho-physical elements that make up a causal series. Psychological
determinism is the thesis that all psychological elements are causally determined.
And according to the Buddhist reductionist, this is ultimately true. Now the facts
about causal series of psycho-physical elements are among the facts that explain
why it is conventionally true that there are persons. And, as we have seen, they
also explain why it is useful that persons be thought of as autonomous. But it
would be a mistake to mix the two levels. Just as it is not ultimately true (or false)
that persons are free, so it is not conventionally true (or false) that all of a person’s
psychological states are determined. The person is a whole, and psychological
states are among the parts of which the person is composed. Mixing talk of wholes
and parts leads to trouble. As we saw in Lecture 1, we are beset with innumerable
difficulties when we try to spell out the relation between the forest and the trees.
This account helps us see how incompatibilist intuitions can come to have
such a grip on us. Our usual stance is that of the conventional truth that persons
have individual autonomy. Reflection on the etiology of an intentional action may
begin to erode our sense that the ‘I’ contributed anything to that particular doing.
The doctrine of psychological determinism threatens to erase all sense of
agency across the board. If all of ‘my’ deliberation and choosing represents the
working out of past causes, then nothing seems genuinely up to me, and the
‘I’ drops out of the picture entirely. What we fail to see is that psychological
determinism might just be how individual autonomy is realized. We think the two
facts of psychological determinism and individual freedom must be put together
somehow, when in fact they are best kept separate. For one concerns the parts,
and the other the whole.
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We can see all this at work behind the scenes in an interesting passage from
Santideva’s Bodhicaryavatara. He is discussing the cultivation of the virtue of
patience, which is recommended as the antidote to the poison of anger. In Buddhist
practice, anger is considered a poison because of its tendency to reinscribe the
belief in a self. Our anger is directed at persons, and it involves the sense that
our dignity and worth have been violated; both components involve thinking
of persons as enduring objects with important properties. Thus it is important that
we learn not to respond with anger to harm caused by another. Here is some
of Santideva’s advice:
22. There is no anger in me toward bile and the like though they cause great
pain.
Why anger toward sentient beings? Their anger is also due to causes.
23. Just as this pain arises unwished for,
So anger also arises unwished for due to causes.
24. A person does not intentionally get angry, having thought ‘I will be angry’;
Nor does anger arise with the intention to arise.
25. Whatever transgressions and evil deeds of different sorts there are,
All occur through the power of their causes, but no autonomous power
exists.
26. Nor is there the thought ‘I will produce’ in the assemblage of conditions,
Neither does what is produced think ‘I am produced’.
27. For surely the primal stuff that is posited, the so-called self that is imagined,
These are not produced with the thought ‘I come to be’.
28. For when unarisen that does not exist, what is there that would then wish to
come to be?
And because it is concerned with its object, no cessation is possible
29. A permanent self would be unconscious like space, clearly inactive.
What action can there be with respect to what is inactive, even
in conjunction with another condition?
30. Something that at the time of the action is just like it was before, what by way
of an action is done by it,
Such that it is said to have an action? If there is connection, which of the
two is the cause of that?
31. Thus everything is constrained by something else, even that which
constrains is not without constraint;
When entities are inactive like nirvana, at what does one get angry?
32. [Objection:] Prevention [of anger] is thus not appropriate, for who prevents
what?
[Reply:] It [prevention] is taken to be appropriate with regard to
dependent origination due to the cessation of suffering. (BCA 6.22–32)
In verses 22– 6, Santideva suggests we adopt the ultimate stance toward the
object of our anger. We all agree that it would be inappropriate to be angry when
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release of bile causes me gastric distress. Anger is appropriate only when directed
at sentient agents whose intentional acts harm us. My bile means me no harm.
But likewise, when someone becomes angry at me and due to that anger causes
me harm, their anger arose due to past causes, just as did the release of bile.
Their anger did not arise out of an intention, of the person or of the anger itself.
So the harm was brought about by their anger, and that anger arose not out of an
intention but due to past causes. Hence their harming me cannot be seen as an
intentional act on their part. Like the release of bile, it is the product of impersonal
causal forces. It is thus inappropriate for me to feel anger toward them.
We might imagine that there is an alternative to the thoroughly impersonal
causal account of our being harmed, one that would justify our anger toward the
source of the harm. Perhaps the person is responsible for their anger, in that they
have freely chosen to be the sort of person who is quick to anger. For this to be
true, however, that free choice must have a source lying outside the causal nexus.
In verses 27–30, Santideva responds to this hypothesis by offering a refutation
of the notion of a self that could serve as the agent-cause of our actions. If such
a self were impermanent, it would have to be self-made, which is impossible.
Self-authorship would require that the author exists before it came into existence.
If, on the other hand, it were permanent, whatever effect it produced would be
produced ceaselessly. And to posit ancillary conditions in order to explain why
a self produced a specific effect just at one time and not always, is to make not the
self but the ancillary conditions the source of the effect, so that the self plays
no active role. An active self must undergo change, and an eternal entity is by
definition unchanging. So this strategy will not work.
This leads, however, to an interesting objection, which is stated in verse
32ab, but presupposes the point made in verse 31. When we take the ultimate
stance with respect to the person who harmed us, the person disappears and all
we see is a causal series of impersonal psycho-physical elements. This dispels our
reactive attitude of anger, for the reactive attitudes are only appropriately directed
at persons. But with our anger also goes any justification for saying that the other
person ought not to have done what they did. The reactive attitudes go together
with the various normative constraints reflected in different uses of ‘ought’.
It would be odd to say that the bile ought not to have caused me distress.15 And it
is not just toward the person who harmed me that we can take the ultimate
stance. We can take that stance toward me as well. Recall that I felt anger toward
the person who harmed me. When we take the ultimate stance toward me,
it becomes inappropriate to blame me for feeling that anger. And in that case
it cannot be said that I ought not be angry. It cannot be said that I have a reason to
refrain from being angry—for the ‘I’ has disappeared from view. All we can find
is a series of impersonal causes leading inexorably to the anger. Santideva’s advice
must fall on deaf ears.
Santideva’s response is interesting, but it requires careful unpacking. He says
it is appropriate to exhort oneself (or others) to refrain from anger ‘with regard to
dependent origination’. By ‘dependent origination’ he means not the general
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formula of causation, but the Buddha’s application of this formula to the case of
suffering. The point of this doctrine is, of course, to uncover the roots of suffering
so that we can bring about its cessation. What it shows is that such poisons as
anger perpetuate suffering (by reinscribing belief in a self). Therefore it follows
that it is appropriate that one prevent the arising of one’s own anger. Anger at the
other perpetuates suffering, while refraining from anger leads to the cessation
of suffering. Notice, however, that the exhortation to refrain from anger has
a person—oneself—as its object. It is the exhortation that I exercise control over
my passions. Why is it justifiable to treat this occurrence of anger as the state of
a person, as something I can take responsibility for, when it was argued that that
stance is not appropriate with respect to the anger of the other? Because in the
one case doing so leads to cessation of suffering, in the other case it leads to
perpetuation of suffering. To see the anger of the other as something for which
they are responsible is to provide justification for my anger toward them. Treating
a causal series as a person is justifiable when it serves the larger purpose of
minimizing overall suffering. Such treatment is applied selectively in this case
because it has quite different effects when applied to one’s own case and to the
case of the other.
Notice that this means the other may, after all, be held responsible for the
action that harmed me. We misunderstand Santideva if we think he has been
developing an argument to the effect that no one is ever really responsible for
their actions.16 He has simply been describing a useful technique for suspending
the reactive attitude of anger in a case where doing so furthers the aim of
preventing overall suffering. The Buddhist will say that the case of anger is special,
given the role it plays in perpetuating belief in a self. So they might say that anger
is never appropriate. Still there are contexts in which other negative reactive
attitudes would be appropriate. The anger of the other who harmed me is a cause
of further suffering—for them as well as for me. There would be less overall
suffering if they learned to be more patient. And it may well be that they will
develop this virtue only in response to expressions of disapproval on the part of
others. True, ultimately there is no person here toward whom we might express
disapproval, or who might be seen as having a reason to be more forbearing.
But this is perfectly consistent with its being useful to think of this causal series as
a person, and to treat it accordingly. It may prove optimific to demand that they
answer for their actions, and for the character that produces them.
What this brings out is the extent to which the fiction of the person might
prove indispensable in practice. It may well be that the most effective strategy for
minimizing overall suffering requires that we continue to treat the causal series
of psycho-physical elements as a person. The Buddhist reductionist will insist,
however, that this is no bar to the person’s being dispensable in principle. And it is
this kind of dispensability that, they think, counts in the end. The underlying
intuition at work here is that our best strategy for achieving our goals is to base
our conduct on an account of reality that is fully objective. We must learn to
prescind from superimposing our needs and interests on the world. If the Buddhist
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Reductionist is right that it is in principle possible to explain all the phenomena
without supposing there are persons, then persistence in the stance that persons
are ultimately real will look like a kind of wishful thinking. And the insistence that
we not settle for the consequentialist’s second-rate substitute, that we hold out
for values grounded in the innate worth and dignity of the person, will look like
just another form of clinging.
So what do we learn from all this? Perhaps that the denial of the self does not
have the depersonalizing consequences it is sometimes alleged to have. This side
of Buddhist thought is often represented as portraying the world in the same sort
of impersonal and mechanistic terms as does natural science. Some see this as
a good thing, while others deplore it for draining away all that is valuable from our
world. Now it is true that in our culture it is part of our self-image that we are
special by virtue of our being free. What sets us apart from other animals and the
rest of the natural world is our ability to deliberate and choose based on reasons,
our capacity to obey the moral law. And this is thought to be of great value. So if
our freedom depends on our having a self that is outside the causal nexus, then
the thesis of non-self will indeed deprive us of something we value. But the
Buddhist would say this conclusion rests on forgetting the distinction between
the two truths. Of course ultimately there are no persons, so freedom cannot be
ultimately real. But it is conventionally true that persons are capable of acting
autonomously, and this capacity is of great value. We can, in short, reconcile
a naturalistic world-view with humanistic values. The conviction that this cannot
be done may be an outmoded artifact of Western culture.
NOTES
1. See Derek Parfit’s (1984) Reasons and Persons.
2. I know of no Indian Buddhist text that uses this way of supporting the claim that
wholes such as the forest are not ultimately real. But there is a passage in the
Mahaprajnaparamita Sastra (trans. Etienne Lamotte, pp. 738–40) that comes
close. (This text exists only in Chinese.) My thanks to Jonardon Ganeri for
bringing it to my attention. I also understand from Tom Tillemans that in their
oral comments Tibetan teachers will sometimes use this kind of reasoning to
supplement the ‘neither one nor many’ argument described in the preceding
paragraph.
3. A commonly raised objection to this line of thought is that there might turn out
to be nothing that is truly impartite. In that case, from the conclusion that
wholes are unreal it would follow that nothing is ultimately real. The absurdity of
the resulting nihilism could then be taken to show that there must be something
wrong with the argument for the conclusion that wholes are unreal. But this is
one of those cases where one person’s modus tollens may be another’s modus
ponens. Those Buddhist philosophers who accepted mereological reductionism
would say that, given the absurdity of nihilism, in the absence of a demonstrated
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flaw in the argument, we should take it to show that there must be genuinely
impartite entities. I discuss this objection and the Buddhist reductionist response
more fully in the fourth chapter of my Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy:
Empty Persons (2003).
4. See his ‘What would it be like to be Selfless?’ (Tillemans, 1996).
5. It is sometimes claimed that by suffering the Buddha meant the disappointment
that we experience given the fact that those things to which we might become
attached are impermanent. See, for example, David Burton’s (2004) Buddhism,
Knowledge and Liberation. While the Buddhist literature on suffering does
sometimes make this point, it represents a relatively superficial treatment of the
topic. For example, notice that someone who believes there is an eternal self
could likewise claim that we suffer because we identify with the sort of entity
that might be satisfied by transient goods such as material possessions and
sensual pleasure. It is false belief in the self that is at the heart of suffering on the
Buddhist analysis. Desire for such things as material possessions contributes to
suffering only because it tends to reinforce this belief. At baseline, suffering has
to do with the fact that one’s own impermanence—one’s mortality—
undermines the possibility that one’s life have meaning and purpose in the
long run.
6. See, for example, Chapter IX of The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) by
Buddhaghosa.
7. See Bhagavad Gıta V.13–18, XIV.23 –5. The overall tone of the Gıta is of course
theistic. But the passages in question expound views basic to Samkhya, one
of several schools of orthodox Indian philosophy that deny the existence of
a Creator.
8. See Milindapanha 40.
9. This comes out in Buddhist treatments of karma. What is said to cause the karmic
fruit is not the bodily movement—for instance, those motions that result in the
death of a sentient being—but the intention that brought about the bodily
movement. If the action is motivated by hatred, a bad karmic fruit will result.
But it is another matter if the action has a benevolent motive: I injected a drug
that is normally life-saving, and was excusably ignorant of the patient’s rare
allergy to the substance. And of course karma is meant to represent a kind of
cosmic justice; karmic fruits are thought of as deserved. So it is one’s intentional
actions that one is thought to be responsible for.
10. This is an empirical matter. It could turn out that overall welfare is actually better
served by the Weltgeist scheme. Consider, for instance, the possibility that
global warming leads to mass famine and the extinction of the species. If so, this
will probably have been due to the value we place on individual autonomy.
Perhaps the pain and suffering caused by mass famine and extinction would
have been averted had deliberation operated at the level of the Weltgeist rather
than that of the person as individual consumer.
11. See, for example, Rg Veda X.90.
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12. As is well known, this is perfectly compatible with indeterminacy at the quantum
level. See Owen Flanagan (2002) for a useful discussion.
13. See, for example, Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth
Wanting (1984).
14. A very different approach to effecting such a reconciliation is to be found in Saul
Smilansky (2000).
15. Unless we are using the ‘ought’ of expectation, as in ‘The train ought to be here
any minute’.
16. This is how Charles Goodman understands the passage. See Goodman (2002).
REFERENCES
2003. Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons, Aldershot: Ashgate.
BUDDHAGHOSA. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga).
BURTON, DAVID. 2004. Buddhism, Knowledge and Liberation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 17f.
DENNETT, DANIEL. 1984. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
FLANAGAN, OWEN. 2002. The Problem of the Soul. New York: Basic Books, 123ff.
GOODMAN, CHARLES. 2002. Resentment and Reality: Buddhism on Moral Responsibility,
American Philosophical Quarterly 39: 359–72.
PARFIT, DEREK. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SMILANSKY, SAUL. 2000. Free Will and Illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
TILLEMANS, TOM. 1996. What would it be like to be Selfless?, Asiatische Studien
50: 835–52.
Mark Siderits , Department of Philosophy, Campus Box 4540, Illinois State
University, Normal IL61790 –4540, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
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