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

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

Probably the most widespread argument for the existence of God today is the cosmological argument. (I discount the “Reformed epistemology” argument, which is not actually an argument that God exists but only that those who already believe in him should continue to do so.) According to the cosmological argument, we need explanations for everything, and then explanations for those explanations, which ultimately must come back to a First Explanation. In the more simplistic and less satisfying versions of this argument, the First Explanation is simply a first cause, a temporal beginning that sets the universe in motion. Such a first cause has little to do with the claims I’ve been making about value. But as I’ve noted a couple of times, the First Cause is hardly a proof of anything Godlike. After that first act of creation, the First Cause can just go home and ignore us and be ignored.

But things look rather different through if we view explanation more broadly, as Aristotle did. For among Aristotle’s four aitia, the so-called “four causes” that are really four explanations, is the “final” explanation: one explains a thing through its purpose, its telos, what it is for. And on the more sophisticated cosmological argument, not merely causes but purposes must go back to something: there must be a First Purpose of sorts, the telos of every other telos, an end to end all ends. The First Purpose, as opposed to the First Cause, is exactly an explanation of value; questions of “why should I do X?” will ultimately lead back to it. And if such an ultimate purpose exists, it takes the kind of guiding role in our lives that God would be expected to take.

C.S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence claims that there is a basic universal human set of moral rules, and that this could not exist without a creator having put it there. I don’t think this argument works; differences in historically observed moral codes are far greater than Lewis takes them to be, and Lewis too readily conflates explanation at the level of value with the kind of causal explanation that evolution at least theoretically could provide. However, it seems to me that in his own confused way, Lewis is trying to get at something like the argument of the earlier weeks: to posit God as the explanation for real value. In that sense, it seems to me that Lewis’s argument, like the First Cause argument, turns out to be a confused version of the more sophisticated First Purpose argument.

Even Anselm’s ontological argument can be viewed in a somewhat similar light. Unlike the First Purpose and moral arguments, it is not exactly an attempt to explain the existence of value. But it does something parallel. It starts with an idea of value and goodness of a certain kind, observed by the mind, in the concept of a perfect being. This concept doesn’t make sense – so the argument goes – unless it exists in reality. The evaluative concept of a highest perfection, here, cannot be understood unless it turns out to really exist.

Whether the argument from design also follows a similar line of reasoning is more debatable. In a sense it works by conflating cause and purpose – by examining the purposes apparent in living beings and assuming those must be caused by an intelligent designer. But then it doesn’t really matter, because that is the one argument that – notwithstanding the arguments of intelligent design proponents – has been decisively refuted by empirical evidence. With the idea of evolution to explain the complexity of life on earth, we do not need an idea of God; of course there are gaps in evolutionary theory, as there are in any scientific theory, but they are much smaller than the gaps in any theory of divine design. Before Darwin, the design argument was by far the most compelling argument for God’s existence; now it is the least, and not because the others have gotten any stronger.

I tie together the proofs of God in this way because I want to get at the heart of the God question in philosophy – and I think that question ultimately comes down to the problem of bad and the problem of good. It is not that I necessarily buy any of the arguments discussed here, even the more sophisticated ones. The problem of suffering is too intractable – it’s at least as big a problem for those who believe in God as the problem of value is for those who don’t. But perhaps there is some sort of dialectical synthesis to be found in between?

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Because I think one of the most deep and important elements of Buddhist tradition is precisely its atheism. That atheism is, indeed, a great part of what brought me to Buddhism in the first place. The teaching on suffering was what really got me hooked on Buddhism, but it wasn’t what had got me interested in the first place; indeed, it had initially repelled me. Even despite my repulsion, I’d done a lot of reading on Buddhism during my time in Thailand; that was what made it possible for me to see how Buddhism applied directly to my life, when the time came for me to make that grand discovery. And why? Well, part of it, as I’ve said in telling the story here, was that the temples were so gorgeous and I was drawn into the worldview behind them. But there was also something that had drawn me to Buddhism well before I ever saw a Thai temple, and that was its atheism. In a journal that I wrote while travelling around India at age 19, I had noted that “in my Indian travels it was Buddhism, more than Hinduism or Islam, which seemed the most profound and interesting of the Indian religions — probably because it’s not technically a religion at all. You can be an agnostic or even an atheist and still be a Buddhist, because God or Gods don’t figure.”

I still think this is something remarkable about Buddhism, at least in its Theravāda variant. Unlike Epicureanism, a similarly atheistic tradition which died out within a century or two, Buddhist tradition survived for thousands of years while denying that there were gods out there. And I don’t think it’s just me for whom this is an appealing point: in an atheistic age where we are more aware than ever of the hideous sufferings that befall our fellow human beings, and where Darwin managed to dispense with God as the explanation for life’s diversity, Buddhism provides the kind of wise and enduring tradition that the various theisms provide, without having that God at the core. It is significant in this respect that an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris has spoken highly of “Buddhist wisdom,” even as he wishes to divorce it from “religion.”

But just as Buddhism has some of the advantages of atheism, it can also face its disadvantages – and especially, the one I first spoke of three weeks ago. I discussed the ways that the atheistic thinkers of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, like Ayer and Moore, struggle to make sense of ideas of value and goodness, often giving highly implausible responses. But I am increasingly thinking that Buddhists face the same difficulty.

Damien Keown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent experts on Buddhist ethics, has increasingly begun putting forth the view that there is no such thing: that Buddhism is “morality without ethics,” in that Buddhists do little to justify the claims they make about what we should and shouldn’t do. I have disputed this claim in my dissertation; in Śāntideva I have found many arguments why certain actions are good and others are bad. I think such arguments are found in other Buddhist thinkers as well. But I also think there is a certain way in which Keown is on to something. The most persuasive of Śāntideva’s ethical arguments appeal to values Śāntideva expects us to already have. They have a means-end approach: since we all wish to end suffering, we should therefore take whatever action is being recommended (avoid anger, avoid lust, and so on.)

But why should we wish to end suffering? What makes suffering bad? Śāntideva responds to this question directly, in a way that no other Buddhist (that I am aware of) does. But I do not find his very brief answer satisfactory. It occurs in Bodhicaryāvatāra verse VIII.103, within his famous equalization of self and other, in which he argues that since the self is unreal, one should prevent everyone’s suffering and not only one’s own. Having said this, he entertains an objection (pūrvapakṣa) to the effect of “Why is suffering to be prevented?” (kasmān nivāryaṃ cet) and responds with sarveṣām avivādataḥ: literally “Because of the non-dispute of everyone.” Or in Crosby and Skilton’s simpler and crisper translation: “No one disputes that!”

But this won’t do. It is not just that his imagined objector does indeed seem to be disputing that suffering should be prevented. What Śāntideva is doing here is very similar to Mill’s argument in Utilitarianism that the only reason one can give for finding happiness or pleasure (or anything else) desirable is “that people do actually desire it.” G.E. Moore thought this the classic example of a “naturalistic fallacy,” of illegitimately deriving a “should” from an “is,” in that “desirable” means what should be desired rather than what is; it does not mean “able to be desired” in the way that “visible” means “able to be seen.” But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out in A Short History of Ethics, there is a way to read Mill which does not rest on linguistic equivocation, and I think the same applies to Śāntideva (changing “pleasure” to “the absence of suffering”):

He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable.

I think Śāntideva’s argument is most persuasively read as just this sort of “ad hominem appeal.” But this is still insufficient. For one thing, many would indeed argue against ending suffering – most notably Nietzsche, who believed that suffering can ennoble us and make us better people. Or even Penelope Trunk, who, after considerable reflection, decided she would rather suffer because happiness is boring. One could, I suppose, bite the bullet and say “fine, then, those people don’t need Buddhism and their life will be perfectly good without it,” but this is not a response that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Buddhist tradition to date – certainly not to Śāntideva himself.

Moreover, Śāntideva’s very argument rests on denying one of our most deeply felt beliefs – the existence of a self. If even our basic selfhood – the one sole thing that Descartes thought completely indubitable – is available for dispute, then surely the prevention of suffering is as well. One might well reply to the ad hominem: “Well, yes, I believe my suffering should be prevented. But I also believe that there’s a self, and that that’s the whole reason it makes sense to prevent any suffering at all. If you really knock down the self, you knock down the prevention of suffering – and maybe the existence of suffering – with it.” (This point is roughly similar to Paul Williams’s objection.)

In short, Śāntideva – possibly the most sophisticated ethical theorist in Buddhist tradition – fails, like the twentieth-century analytic philosophers, to provide a satisfactory account of why we should value the things we do value. And I suspect that this is not a coincidence: that Buddhists, like empiricists, have a hard time justifying their value system because they do not assign value a place underlying the metaphysics of reality. The obvious objection to the claim is karma; but karma is held to be a potentially observable causal law of the universe, comparable in theory to the laws discovered by scientists. Karma does not make things valuable, and so it does not suffice as an explanation of the nature of value.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point.

The error being made here is parallel to the one that tries to prove God’s existence merely as a First Cause of the universe, not as a First Explanation. In this bastardized version of the cosmological argument, the causal processes of the universe must have a starting point, identified with God – a rather useless God, one that doesn’t mean anything more than the Big Bang. But the intellectually respectable form of the cosmological argument isn’t just about causes, but about other kinds of explanation: not just where the world comes from, but what its essence is and what it’s for.

Return more directly to the present topic: to explain the causes of value judgements, to identify where they have their origin, is not actually to explain value. What this kind of explanation explains is the bare fact that people happen to make judgements of value. What it doesn’t and can’t explain is the truth or falsity of those judgements. To have an adequate account of ethics and values, we need to know not merely why people happen to think some things good and some things bad (or why they act accordingly). We need to know why things actually are good and bad. (Our mode of explanation needs to be ethics, not ethics studies.)

Few are seriously prepared to jettison this distinction, between what actually is good or bad and what people merely believe to be so. We want to say that Pol Pot was wrong when he thought it was a good thing to commit genocide on his own people. To consistently say such a thing requires that we believe value judgements can be correct or incorrect; they need to have a referent, to refer to the action having a real goodness or badness independent of whether the agent takes the action or believes in its goodness. (Some do try and advocate a thoroughgoing value relativism, of course; I have responded to some such arguments here, here and here.)

I think the early analytic philosophers, more than those who find evolutionary explanations sufficient, at least grappled with this problem – they just failed to solve it. They asked: what do we mean when we call something good or bad? Those who try to reduce judgements of good or bad to a simple descriptive property – good is what fosters the species, produces pleasure, etc. – run into trouble pretty quickly, for it’s pretty clear that a great many usages of “good” do not simply mean any of these things. One could try and argue that those who use “good” to mean anything other than species preservation or the production of pleasure are mistaken, but they’ll have a pretty hard time making the case. Neil Sinhababu made a valiant effort, but I have argued that he failed, with some additional thoughts.

I have many problems with G.E. Moore’s concept of the naturalistic fallacy, and especially with the inadequate alternative he provided (as I discussed last week) – but I suspect that this important point is where he was coming from when he came up with it. Moore took the idea of the naturalistic fallacy much too far; I think one can legitimately make inferences from “is” to “ought” statements, but one should still be careful about doing so, especially when one puts a particular kind of descriptive claim at the heart of one’s ethics. The problem is nicely illustrated by Ayn Rand in this deeply problematic passage:

the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p.17)

What Rand doesn’t seem to have thought of is that such a view can have absolutely nothing to say to the person who chooses to kill herself – in suicide, in war, in civil disobedience. If your system of values comes out of the desire to live, it is irrelevant to anyone who takes that desire as unimportant. I think there’s a similar problem with the point Ethan makes in his comment that Buddhism is ultimately based on our desire to end suffering; not everybody treats that desire as decisively important, and I think Buddhists have a problem addressing those who don’t. (I intend to take up this point more next week.)

How to get around this problem? I note that Ethan lists Aristotle as having a “naturalist” theory of ethics comparable to Rand’s or Sinhababu’s. But Aristotle’s theory is a bit different from theirs, in that he sees value as an inextricable part of the natural world. The idea of God as First Explanation ultimately derives from his thought, because for him explanation needs to be teleological as well as causal: you need to explain things in terms of their purposes, what they’re for, as well as their (efficient) causes, what put them there. Aristotle’s views of nature are of course tied up with beliefs about causes that we cannot share in a scientific age. But it seems to me that we may still need something like them in order to make sense of value.

This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.

The analytical movement in early twentieth-century philosophy rejected not only “religion” but most forms of metaphysics, looking with deep suspicion on any claims about the universe that could not be demonstrated empirically. As a result, they came up with (highly implausible) theories about ethics and value that often dismissed them entirely. For A.J. Ayer, value claims are entirely meaningless; C.L. Stevenson argued that they mean nothing more than the expressions “boo” and “hurrah,” with no rational content. G.E. Moore wasn’t quite as dismissive – the word “good” did mean something real – but it was also something undefinable, like “yellow” (referring to the subjective perception of yellowness as a colour, not the way in which yellow objects happen to refract light). What this effectively meant was that it was impossible to argue rationally about what was good; you just knew. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who knew Moore well, witnessed firsthand the anti-intellectual bullying that resulted from such an approach in Moore’s social circle:

How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue…. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method — greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity — Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility … Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”)

These various analytical attempts to analyze value judgements are all pretty clear failures, to my mind; in many cases they explain away value judgements rather than actually explaining them. But they all come within a shared context of rejecting metaphysics – and thereby rejecting any metaphysical status for goodness in the universe. It seems to me that the rejection of a metaphysics of goodness leaves them bereft of any ability to speak reasonably about what goodness actually is. Alasdair MacIntyre, with the Nietzschean wit that characterizes his early work, compares the analytic philosophers to Hawai’ian natives who would explain prohibitions by saying that they are taboo, but not be able to explain what taboo means – so that soon enough King Kamehameha II could abolish the taboos without any serious objections arising:

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten…. But had the Polynesian culture enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is clearly the name of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been available to show that taboo is the name of such a property.

MacIntyre then compares Nietzsche to Kamehameha II, shattering the pretensions of those who claim “good” still means something in the absence of the “background beliefs” that make that meaning possible. It is not that Nietzsche wins the debate, that good means nothing; but that for us to see the meaning of good we must have the kind of underlying beliefs that the twentieth-century analytic philosophers did not.

What are those underlying beliefs? It seems to me that, at base, they require goodness to have a real, objective existence, beyond that which people happen to value at any particular place and time. Reality, the larger stage in which our lives take place, what Ken Wilber calls the Kosmos – what is most often called “the universe” or “the world” except that these terms usually limit themselves to the physical – it must somehow have value and goodness as a part of its nature, at least insofar as human beings exist within it. Seeing that goodness at the heart of the world is a lot easier if you take the next step and view that world as the creation of an omnibenevolent God. But then, of course, it winds up being a lot harder to explain the world’s observed badness.

I’ve briefly discussed this question before, with a focus on ethics. Afterwards, following James Doull, I examined how it gets works out in the history of Western philosophy after the Sophists – in ethics. But as Doull knew, there is an epistemological story that parallels the ethical. God in the Hebrew Bible is the arbiter of truth as well as ethics; the Sophists reduce not merely justice and goodness, but truth, to the subject that knows them. (In a similar way, for Doull, Plato’s Sophist dialogue makes essentially the same point as the Statesman, even though it would appear that one is entirely about metaphysics and the other about politics; both are asking how ideals can relate to physical reality.)

In ethics, as I noted in the earlier post, analytic philosophers tend to use the terms internalism and externalism to describe the opposing positions on this question. In ethics, internalists say that genuine reasons for action must come from our own motivations or desires; externalists say there can be reasons that come from outside us. To use Doull’s examples, the Sophists are the ultimate ethical internalists, the Hebrew Bible the ultimate ethical externalist text. (Consider Ecclesiastes, which repeatedly advises us to fear God and follow his commandments even though it repeatedly denies the possibility of our attaining any benefit for doing so, in this life or the next.)

Now, as well as in ethics, analytic philosophers also use the terms “internalism” and “externalism” to describe positions in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Ethan Mills discussed this other form of the distinction in comments on a recent post, and I’ve been trying to learn some more about it. What follows is some preliminary attempts of mine to think through the distinction between internalism and externalism in epistemology, and relate it to the distinction in ethics. Apologies if the results are somewhat unclear, as I’m still thinking it through.

Before reading this analytical literature, I had already saw an important internal/external distinction of sorts in epistemology, parallel to the one in ethics. (Doull influenced my thinking here too.) In ethics, we may ask whether we acting subjects are the measure of goodness; just so, in epistemology, we may ask whether we knowing subjects are the measure of knowledge. Ethical internalists say our reasons for action must all come from within us, from our motivations; ethical externalists say we can have reasons to act independent of our motivations. There seems to be a parallel set of questions in epistemology: can the reasons for our beliefs be independent of the ways we come to know them? For example, can we logically speak of a truth that no subject is capable of knowing? Or as the Sophists would put it: is man the measure of truth?

It is not quite clear to me, though, that these questions are what analytic philosophers mean when they speak of “internalist” and “externalist” epistemologies. In Ethan’s comment, the key question dividing internalism and externalism is: Can we really be said to know something if we don’t or can’t know why we know it? Externalists say we can, internalists say we can’t. In online introductory works on internalism and externalism, the problem is phrased in terms of justification rather than knowledge: can our beliefs be justified even in cases where we don’t or can’t know why we hold them?

Now, when the distinction was put in this way, it was not immediately clear to me why these positions were even called “internalism” and “externalism.” In ethics the terminology seems clear enough to me: internalists say that any reasons for action must come from our motivations, which are inside us. But what is “inside us” about knowing how we know or knowing why we hold our beliefs, the hallmark of epistemological “internalism” in the analytic sense? Another article, by Joe Cruz and John Pollock, helped clarify. Internalism on Cruz and Pollock’s view “is the view that all the factors relevant to the justification of a belief are importantly internal to the believer”; our knowing how we know or why we hold our beliefs is itself internal to us. An example of the contrasting, externalist view would be “reliabilism”: the view that a belief is justified if it comes from a source that is in its nature likely to be correct, even if we don’t know that it comes from that source. (So in recent debates “common sense” was defended on the grounds that it is
“reliable.”) The distinction might be illustrated with an example from Laurence BonJour:

Norman, under certain conditions that usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power, or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against his belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.

A reliabilist would need to say that Norman’s belief that the President is in New York City is justified, because his clairvoyant power is reliable – even though Norman doesn’t know it’s reliable. (Perhaps it’s one of the first few times the power has manifested.) By contrast, an internalist, like BonJour, says that in such a case Norman’s belief is not justified – even though it’s true. Which is to say, I think, that Norman has no reason to believe the President is in New York.

It’s on this matter of “reasons to believe” that I suspect the two analytical internalism/externalism distinctions dovetail the most. The internalism/externalism question in epistemological justification asks: what counts as a good reason to believe something? In ethics, it asks: what counts as a good reason to do something? In both cases, the internalist says that the good reason must be within us.

Ethan notes in his comments that the South Asian Nyāya school is similar to the reliabilists: what matters is that knowledge is formed by the right kind of process, not anything within us. We can know without knowing how we know. So they are effectively externalists in the analytical sense at issue here. Yet at the same time, the Nyāya have a slogan that “whatever exists is nameable and knowable” – for something to exist objectively, it must be available to subjective knowledge. To speak of something which exists but we couldn’t know – that is meaningless. Here, man (or other subjective knowers) is in some sense the measure of truth, as the Sophists would have wanted to have it. On this score, the Nyāya view seems more comparable to ethical internalism, the view that good reasons must come from within us – truth is in some sense within us knowers as well. Perhaps one could describe the Nyāya as externalists epistemologically, but internalists metaphysically or ontologically?

There’s a strong philosophical allure to consequentialism, the view that the best actions are those that produced the best consequences (of whatever sort). But a problem with consequentialism is that consequences, by definition, happen in the future – and eventually there will be no future. A traditional Buddhist will believe there are potentially infinite futures ahead; but if we do not get reborn, and I do not think we do, then our lives come to an absolute end. At that last moment it is foolish to do anything for one’s own future, for there is no future left. One must live in the present. Even a few seconds before that moment, it would seem strange to act for the sake of the very last one, when one has so few left. At that point if not before, egoistic consequentialism is completely futile.

A similar point applies even to altruistic consequentialism, of which utilitarianism is a species. The future we can affect is always short-term, when we look at the big picture; even the greatest world-builders will someday be forgotten. The time from the ancient Egyptians to now is a blink of an eye in geological terms; the ecological lessons we have recently learned, about the fragility of the systems on which human life depends, should give us reason to believe that human life will not last forever. A life lived solely for the future, one’s own or others’, seems unsatisfying. Thus a major part of the appeal of ascent philosophies, which seek to take us beyond the transient world of change and death and connect us with something that endures.

In his comment on the earlier post, Thill properly questioned whether this way of thinking is justified. Our life achievements and enjoyments have value, he says, even if impermanent. “We don’t cease to enjoy a song because it has an ending!” Such a claim would certainly be disputed by the Buddha of the Pali suttas – the impermanence of conditioned things is central to their being unsatisfactory, dukkha. But I don’t agree with him; if I did, I’d be a monk now.

Still, there’s room for further reflection on the role of time in human ends. I had once asked why the Epicureans’ philosophy, one of the few in history that depends neither on politics nor the promise of an afterlife, had not lasted; later I referred to death as a possible answer. Now historically that could be the case – it could be that Epicurus’s answer to the big questions did not resonate with the wider world – but we must note that Epicurus still had an answer. It is the answer that Pierre Hadot, explaining Epicurus, quotes from Goethe: “only the present is our happiness.” The Epicurean theory of happiness is eons away from utilitarian maximizing: a single moment of happiness is as good as an eternity of it. Where a consequentialist examines every action with reference to the future, the Epicurean considers only the present – as with Thill’s reference to the song we enjoy despite, or even because of, its ending.

And that Epicurean view takes me back to the East Asian Buddhist tradition of sudden liberation – the view, as I understand it, that we can be liberated in a single moment. As I noted before on the subject, I used to dismiss this idea but have begun to come around to it. Now the liberation that is spoken of in sudden traditions must be quite different from that spoken in the earlier, gradualist Buddhist traditions. Nibbāna to a Theravādin or nirvana to Śāntideva is not something you can lose; those eons of effort pay off forever. Sudden liberation, on the other hand, disappears; for those who have attained it so often slip back into their old bad habits. I’m not quite sure I’m giving an accurate portrayal of sudden liberation as it is described in Ch’an or other traditions; but what I’m describing strikes me as a good and helpful picture of self-improvement. I previously expressed my skepticism about the Third Noble Truth: I’ve never met anyone I would consider to have attained nirvana, a fully liberated one. But the idea that one could be fleetingly perfect just for the space of one vanishing instant, that one could get everything right just at that time: now that makes sense to me.

A while ago I felt I didn’t really understand Epicurus for these very reasons. If only the present moment is our happiness, why bother with any spiritual practices of self-cultivation? Why build an Epicurean garden if you can just go ahead and carpe diem right now?

Well, because it’s not as easy as all that. Being happy and embodying virtue even within one fleeting moment is pretty tough. The same critique can be, and has been, made with respect to Buddhist sudden liberation: why bother with Ch’an practice, or any other, if you can be liberated right now? Those who’ve studied East Asian Buddhism in more detail than I have tell me that even the advocates of the sudden path typically admit that supposedly sudden liberation usually only comes after a long period of significant effort. There’s a gradual path leading to sudden liberation; the two are not as far apart as they might first seem.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble?

The answer will necessarily be “no” if we define “virtue” (or any of its species) strictly, so that virtue is by definition individual. But I see no clear reason why we should do this. Going back to earliest accounts of the concept, Aristotle does not limit virtue to individuals; in explaining aretē, the word we translate as “virtue,” he speaks of the aretē of a knife: a virtuous (or excellent) knife is one that cuts well. Even thinking of common English usage, we can speak of an honest car dealership, one where all the sales staff are genuinely expected to be upfront with their customers and act accordingly. We can speak of a courageous action taken by a political party, when it adopts a platform that is politically unpopular but is nevertheless the principled thing to do.

Now common usage can and should be criticized; everyday speech is often inaccurate. Are these examples of category mistakes? Virtue is realized and expressed in action; if human collectivities can take action, that fact suggests that they can also be virtuous. But is it inaccurate to speak of an action taken by a collectivity? When we speak of an honest car dealership, a generous government or a humble tradition, is this merely an inexact way to say that these collectivities are generally made up of honest, generous or humble individuals?

I don’t think so, at least not necessarily. The idea that the virtues or actions of collectivities are merely those of their constituent individuals – this puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” But in this very quote Thatcher shows that she’s not ready to carry a reductionist individualism all the way: there are families, which she grants an existence distinct from the individuals who make them up. If families are not merely the individuals that make them up, then surely other institutions – including society itself – can also be more than their constituent individuals.

Collectivities can take on a life of their own. (I say “collectivities” rather than “groups” because the latter term tends to connote a mere aggregation of individuals, prejudicing the discussion in that direction.) We understand this point when we make the important distinction between the rule of law and the rule of men (or women). A government (or a corporation) works best when its members act not according to their arbitrary individual preferences, but according to the interest of the whole organization and the precedents that have been collectively established. When an organization successfully acts according to the rule of law, it is that organization as a unit and a whole, and not merely the individual members who make it up, that is acting justly. It is a just organization, not merely a bunch of individuals who happen to be just by themselves. To describe the organization as just is no category mistake; it is correct.

It is in terms similar to these that I think one may accurately speak of the humility of a tradition – and as something quite separate from the humility of individuals. As Jabali108 noted, defining the terms matters here. I set out a basic sketch of the idea of a tradition two weeks ago, as consisting of both a normative ideal and a set of institutions which often does not live up to that ideal. Thill, rightly I think, pointed out a third separable element of a tradition: its body of accumulated knowledge.

As for humility, I take it to mean the awareness of one’s limits and weaknesses, not only in an intellectual sense but also in a practical one – acting on the recognition that one is fallible and dependent on others. In a more specifically intellectual or epistemological sense, it means listening carefully, recognizing that one has never thought of everything, that others very often have something valuable to contribute – even when one maintains the courage to defend one’s own sincerely held convictions. Above all, perhaps, the readiness to admit when one has been wrong. A mean between the vices of arrogance on one hand and meekness or timidity on the other, as I said to Thill. (If this definition seems imprecise, that’s intentional: spelling out the nature of a virtue too precisely implies that one already knows exactly what to strive for, which in my books itself demonstrates a lack of humility.)

On these terms I defend my previous claim, developed with Ben: natural science maintains an institutional humility as a tradition, because it does not take its claims as infallible, is ready to see them overturned when better evidence comes to light. The ideals of scientific tradition encourage its institutions to act in a humble way. This institutional humility is a very different thing from encouraging the humility of individuals; and indeed the two are in distinct tension with one another. When a tradition emphasizes its own unchanging rightness, as Buddhism or Christianity does, it is much more likely to foster a sense of individual humility – a recognition that one as an individual doesn’t have all the answers, that one has been wrong before. I think this is typically a good thing for the individual within the tradition; but it’s not so good for the health of the tradition itself. Science is a whole made humble by its arrogant members; the “religions” are wholes made arrogant by their humble members.

Harris’s article returns us to the most famous passage in Śāntideva’s work: the meditation on the equalization of self and other in Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VIII, in which Śāntideva takes metaphysical arguments for the nonexistence of self (Buddhist anātman) and uses them as a premise to argue for altruism, ethical selflessness. He asks: “Since both others and myself dislike fear and suffering, what is special about my self that I protect it and not another?” The self that I was three minutes ago is a different entity from the self I will be three minutes from now; the present self has as much reason to protect others as it does its future self. He adds: if you object that suffering should be prevented only by the one it belongs to, well, your foot’s suffering does not belong to your hand, so why should the hand do anything to protect the foot?

The Catholic Buddhologist Paul Williams has criticized this passage in depth, arguing that altruism makes no sense without selves. I’ve discussed Williams’s criticisms twice before, though I haven’t taken a position on the debate yet. I will note that several Buddhologists have already come to Śāntideva’s defence on these arguments – with varying degrees of success.

Harris is the first writer I’m aware of to defend Williams’s position (other than Williams himself). His article goes at length over the defences mounted by Mark Siderits and John Pettit, and concludes that neither adequately escapes the basic dilemma Williams has pointed to: if the self does not really exist in any sense that implies it should be privileged over others, then why should we think suffering is really bad in any sense that requires it be prevented?

Harris does finally part company from Williams, but only in his final remarks, which I think deserve additional scrutiny. Having argued that Śāntideva’s arguments in BCA VIII are not convincing, he now claims that Śāntideva’s arguments here are not supposed to be convincing; instead they are to be meditated on. He says that it is the Bodhicaryāvatāra’s ninth chapter, dealing with the virtue of theoretical understanding (prajñā), in which Śāntideva openly considers his opponents’ views and refutes them; the altruism argument is in the previous chapter, which is explicitly about the virtue of meditative concentration (dhyāna). The point isn’t to persuade people of the value of a Mahāyāna Buddhist path; it’s a meditative aid for those who are already on the path. In such a context, a contradiction doesn’t matter so much. One may switch back and forth between a perspective where suffering selves are real and their suffering should be prevented, and a perspective where they aren’t and we need to diminish our attachment to them.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that Harris is right, and Śāntideva’s arguments about altruism don’t need to stand up to rational scrutiny because they are primarily meditative aids. If that’s so, here’s the problem: what makes these verses interesting and valuable is precisely their status as potentially persuasive arguments. Arguments for particular ethical positions, perhaps especially for Mahāyāna altruism, are relatively unusual in Buddhist tradition. This is why Damien Keown has argued in Buddhist Studies from India to America (falsely, in my view) that there is no such thing as Buddhist ethics. Śāntideva’s argument appears as one of the most preeminent counterexamples, though not the only one.

That this argument is taken as an argument is the reason – it may be the only reason – it has attracted so much attention in recent years. A 1998 reader in ethics includes BCA verses VIII.89-140 alongside readings from Aristotle’s Ethics and Kant’s Grounding – and Xunzi, Aquinas and Epicurus – precisely because it makes an argument for a Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical ethics. David Cooper, the reader’s editor, says: “Although both authors [Śāntideva and Tsong kha pa, who also has a selection in the book] speak of ‘methods’ for inducing a compassionate attitude, we might instead think of these as arguments for why one ought to adopt such an attitude.”

So if Harris is right and Śāntideva didn’t intend the arguments to be taken seriously as arguments, this is quite a sad thing. If Harris is correct, the likely lesson to be taken is that we should stop paying such close attention to this part of Śāntideva’s work, for it isn’t really worthy of it. Better to look at parts of the BCA that make a genuine contribution, such as its sixth chapter’s beautiful thoughts on anger. If this section is worth our taking seriously at all as cross-cultural philosophers, it is because it offers an argument for Mahāyāna altruism, and is not merely a guide for meditation.

In this, MacIntyre skirts around on an idea that endures through the history of the Abrahamic traditions: that the ultimate truth is tied to one single historical event, time, place and/or people. It begins with the idea recorded in the Book of Exodus that the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews are God’s chosen people, and continues with the idea that the single human person Jesus of Nazareth was the only begotten human son of God. The Qur’an, too, is a single set of revelations made in a small geographic area to one human person, not adequately translatable (so the claim goes) into a language other than the original, which is better than any other revelation that has been or will be made.

It is in this context that I am intrigued by the Buddhist claim that there are multiple buddhas. While this claim is much more pronounced in the Mahāyāna, it is clearly there from the early Pali Buddhist texts. The Pali texts speak all the time of buddhas at different times and places in the universe. These buddhas include many pratyekabuddhas – people who attained liberation on their own, but didn’t teach it to anyone else.

What is striking to me about this view is its universality – comparable to the universalist self-conception of modern science and liberalism. Like early Buddhists, liberal scientists believe that the most important truths happened to be found in one particular historical context – the enlightenment of the historical Buddha or the experiments of Westerners from the 16th century or so onward – but there is nothing necessary, or essential, about these events happening in this particular place. Anybody who had done the right experiments with the right equipment could have found out the truths of science – and anyone who had done the right earlier experiments could have made the right equipment. So too, it happens to be that in our era Siddhattha Gotama was the only one who found out the truth on his own, and the only one who can let us find out the truth in our lifetime. But it’s not only possible that people could have done the same in other eras, it’s already happened. Even we could do it – but it would be much, much harder than listening to his teachings. (The idea that we not only could but should do it is what led to the birth of the Mahāyāna, a far more universalist tradition.)

In this way the Buddhists are distinct not merely from the Abrahamic traditions, but from the Vedic traditions they reacted against. In the Brāḥmaṇa texts, the Sanskrit sounds and words of the Vedas are absolutely central to the truth of the universe; and the brahmin varṇa (caste) has privileged access to it. Buddhism was not only more egalitarian about caste; it was also more egalitarian about linguistic and geographic origin, which is surely among the reasons it spread far wider than the Vedic traditions did.

So as it turns out, we see a tension between universal and particular views of truth (and our relation to it) in South Asia as well as the West. I don’t know as much about the East Asian case, but I suspect the same issues were faced there, since early Confucians had a tendency to treat non-Chinese as barbarians.

In nearly all of these cases, the universalist side looks far more sympathetic than the particularist – at least to those of us who are outside each particularist tradition that claims the truth as its own. But the particularists still may be on to something, as MacIntyre notices; I don’t think his way of generalizing from “this tradition” to “a tradition” succeeds, but we may need to think along similar lines. One should unhesitatingly grant the important point of modern scientists, that there is no inherent link between their historical circumstances and the truths they have found. Aliens could have discovered the same ideas, as other buddhas discovered the truth of the dharma. But just as in our age (according to the Pali tradition) only one person actually did find out the Buddha’s truth, so on this earth only the West actually did create modern science, and the various liberal modern ideas that came along with it. There were preconditions in Indian culture that made it possible for Siddhattha Gautama to be liberated there; he only meditated on enlightenment after he’d been a monk for a long time, in one of the relatively few cultural contexts that made monasticism possible at the time. So too, the particular situation of Renaissance Europe made the Western Enlightenment and the growth of modern science and liberalism possible. As I noted last time, our access to universal truth can only come through our particular, historically conditioned, human minds.