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.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.

For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.

Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?

Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)

The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.

The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)

What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.

In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Well, the first part is easy. Rejecting Marx’s form of hope, political hope, is something I found essential to living a happy life. Right now I’m quite excited about tomorrow’s Canadian election – where the socialist NDP, which I’ve long supported, seems poised for an unprecedented breakthrough. But it is as a spectator sport, the excitement of a Boston fan seeing the Red Sox on the cusp of winning the World Series, where one shrugs and gets on with life if one’s favoured team turns out to lose as it has so many times in the past. If my happiness were tied to a real hope that politics in Canada or the US were going to get significantly better – as it was in my teens – I would be setting myself up for crushing disappointment. No, I continue to endorse at least some form of the anti-politics that I learned from Buddhism: we cannot let our well-being be tied too closely to the external goods of politics, things we cannot control. It is best to free ourselves from political hopes and focus on our own virtues, which we can control. I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

But there’s a problem here. This move from the external to the internal, from what we can’t control to what we can, is characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans. But Augustine’s perceptive critique is directed squarely at these Hellenistics: we cannot actually be as good as we think we can. The Stoics move us from hope about politics to hope about virtue. But in Augustine’s diagnosis, that hope too is bound to disappoint. Our bad habits persist; we enlist reason in the name of self-improvement, but too often it turns into rationalization. More than that, even virtue can be a matter more of luck than of effort. This is the main theme of John Rawls’s early Christian writings, which I have been finding more interesting and thought-provoking than the later political theory that made Rawls famous. Our patient endurance or our honesty themselves arise as a result of the biological and social circumstances that made them possible. The clearest example may be the case of Phineas Gage, whose former virtues of self-discipline and respectfulness nearly disappeared after he suffered brain damage. (Such a line of reasoning does suggest a denial of free will which sits uncomfortably with Rawls’s and Augustine’s other Christian convictions, but never mind: I am not concerned with whether the claim is Christian but with whether it is true.) We cannot put our hopes in our virtue, but only in God.

Now this kind of hope seems to propose a greater problem, require a greater pessimism, than does Marx’s. If politics is a problem with no solution, then fine, withdraw from politics and focus on ourselves. But what if our own virtue is a problem with no solution? If we can’t really be all that good, as Augustine says, but his God does not exist and would not deserve worship even if he did? How can such a conclusion lead us to anything but darkness and misery?

Looking back on it, I think that Buddhists provide a helpful answer, and that – as Jim Wilton argued – I may have counted the Buddhist critique of hope out too quickly. And the reason has to do with an important debate within Buddhist tradition, one that I don’t think I’ve explored enough yet: the debate between sudden and gradual liberation.

In traditional Indian Buddhism, my graduate area of study, liberation from suffering is a long, slow, painstaking, gradual process. It doesn’t just take years; it takes millennia, as you work to improve yourself across multiple rebirths to become a perfected person, an arhat or bodhisattva. But in East Asia, and above all in the Ch’an/Zen tradition – to which Jim’s comments about kōans refer – liberation comes suddenly, is experienced in a single moment. I had long been skeptical of the sudden-awakening school. It sounds too much like the worst hippie clichés of Yavanayāna Buddhism, where you don’t actually have to do anything, you can just be yourself as you are and you’ll be perfectly enlightened. It seemed to get you out of all the hard work of making yourself a better person.

And yet in contexts like the present one, I come to see the wisdom in the sudden-liberation approach. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to take the unscientific concept of rebirth out of the picture. But more importantly, it reflects a psychological truth about the achievement of happiness: that as long as one’s attention is focused primarily on happiness, one will not have it. The same is true of several virtues: if one strives to be an exemplar of perfect humility, one will not be very humble. The sleep study noted by James Maas, demonstrating that it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re trying to do so, seems to me like it can be analogically extended to a lot of noble human goals. At some point along the path, you have to stop trying and just be.

All this, I think, is why Jim effectively defended my earlier characterization of Buddhism as a critique of hope, and rejected my later presentation of the Third Noble Truth as a form of hope, the hope of nirvana. At some point along the path, a good Buddhist stops hoping; as long as there’s hope, there’s attachment and not liberation.

And I think that Jim – with the East Asian Buddhist traditions – thereby puts his finger on the reason I felt so happy after that pessimistic post, better than I had myself. The last sentence of the post struck me as upbeat then and still does: “All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.” What I was trying to get at is a transition from the future to the present – an ability to enjoy life and be good just as things are, even in the face of one’s own insurmountable imperfections.

To say that is to risk the very pitfall that made me so suspicious of sudden liberation in the first place: thinking that one is already great just as one is and doesn’t need any improving, leaving one’s weaknesses and problems to fester. But then it seems to me that finding this balance is its own kind of virtue – and like any other virtue, it is a mean between two vices. I don’t know what to call it, but it seems like a sort of meta-virtue: the ability to maintain the effort at cultivating one’s own virtue, while still remaining immersed in the moment of the virtues one already has.

The argument to this point is, I think, in perfect sympathy with Augustine. Human beings for him are invariably and inevitably flawed, in a way that makes them unworthy of our trust. Instead, Augustine wants to argue, we must place our trust in a truly perfect being, God. Augustine’s argument here underlies a great deal of conservative Christianity: even if church institutions and/or biblical scripture appear wrong to us, they are a better guide than our own weak and easily misled intellects.

For the moment, let us leave aside the question of how we know Church or Bible embody God, or even whether God exists. I think there is a far deeper question at issue here: even assuming he exists, how can we trust God?

Most of the answer to the question will hinge upon how we define God. But let us assume that God has one characteristic attributed to him by almost every believer, even by deists: that he is the creator of all that is, directly or indirectly responsible for everything that happens except (perhaps) those events caused by human free will, and perhaps the will of other free beings like angels.

If that is so, the verdict is severe: God’s track record is no better than ours. Too often we think of the “problem of evil” rather than, more correctly and appropriately, of the problem of suffering. And then we neglect to think the problem through, and blame it all on human free will. For when we live so close to the twentieth century, the readiest examples of grave horrors are human-caused; the mere mention of the names Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot make it easiest to question God. But this version of the question is also the easiest to answer: the universe would not be as good if we were not free, and this freedom is worth the possibility of evil.

But how small this human-caused misery begins to look compared to the misery caused by God. In Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Asian tsunami we have plenty of recent examples of suffering not caused by humans. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cancer have killed more than Hitler or Pol Pot ever did. The tortures of ALS make the gas chambers look humane. Crippling diseases, natural disasters, animal attacks: we didn’t do that. God did.

And that’s just a deist God, a God inferred from creation. The evidence against the God of scriptures is worse still. In the book of Exodus, God punishes every Egyptian family with ten “wonders” – diseases, crop failures and more – culminating in the deaths of all their firstborn children. They are punished not for their own actions, but for the actions of their Pharaoh – even though the text explicitly says that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” God deliberately caused the Pharaoh to do the very thing that Pharaoh is punishing him for. Later God sends horrible afflictions, including the death of his children, on his most faithful servant Job, just in order to win a bet with the Accuser (“the Satan” in Hebrew). Worse even than all this is the idea of a literal hell, not necessarily attested in the scriptures but widely believed in the traditions, including by Augustine himself. Whatever Pol Pot did to his victims, it always ended with death. God keeps going, tormenting people for all eternity, with no deterrent purpose whatsoever, leaving sheer vengeful retribution as an end in itself.

It seems to me the evidence against God is, quite literally, damning. Augustine, it seems to me, is right that humanity is fallen and sinful, not worthy of trust. The problem is that God is worse. (And let me stress again that it is not God’s existence I’m addressing here. Like Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I would not trust a creator God even if he did exist. Maybe especially if he did.)

It is not only Western traditions that face this problem. These reflections came to me when I began reading Rāmānuja‘s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā. Rāmānuja begins the text with a long homage to Vishnu as the creator of all things, who appears in the Gītā in the form of Lord Krishna. The purpose of life, according to Rāmānuja, is to reach knowledge of and devotion to this Lord. But Krishna always appears as a morally questionable sort of deity, from his childhood stealing butter, through his adulterous sexual affairs – to the advice he gives in the Mahābhārata itself. In the Gītā, Krishna tells Arjuna to kill his cousins and their armies because he should always do his duty (dharma) irrespective of the consequences. Even if one thinks this morally sound advice, the same Krishna later tells Arjuna to kill his rival Karna while Karna is fixing his chariot – an act that clearly violates all applicable rules of dharma – in order to achieve the consequence of winning the war. So too, it is Krishna who tells Yudhiṣṭhira to mislead Drona about Aśvatthāman the elephant, an act for which Yudhiṣṭhira later receives a karmic punishment – again, breaking the duty of truthfulness in order to bring about the best consequences. Krishna tells others to break the rules he himself sets out, and does so with impunity. Krishna’s bad deeds might not quite reach the scale of the Judeo-Christian God, but he is far from a moral paragon. He may be better than Pol Pot, but a human saint could surely outdo him.

So whether we are speaking of Vishnu or Jehovah, I do not think Augustine’s answer to human fallibility is acceptable. Perfect goodness is not to be found in men or in gods. But a chastened intellectualism without God seems to leave us with two unpalatable alternatives: a tyranny like Xunzi’s, or a life of miserable neurosis like Freud’s. I think this may be why Nietzsche and the existentialists view life without God as a terrifying (if perhaps ultimately fulfilling) “abyss”: if you don’t trust in God, you have to trust in man, and that’s not very comforting.

Or do you? I wasn’t thinking of it this way at the time, but I suppose all this might be part of the reason why, when I needed to pray, I turned to the bodhisattva Manjuśrī rather than to a God or Goddess as such. For Mañjuśrī, while perhaps omniscient, is not omnipotent. He lets much of the world suffer not because he chooses to – as God does – but because there’s too much he can’t prevent. A being who is omnibenevolent but not omnipotent – you can’t completely trust in such a being, because he might let you down; he can’t do everything. But if he exists – and maybe even if he doesn’t – he is at least more worthy of trust than either a human being or a creator God.

Then, the HMS Beagle made its famous voyage to the Galàpagos Islands, where Darwin observed his famous finches. A huge variety of birds, each on different islands and looking dramatically different, each well suited to the conditions of its own island – but they all turned out biologically to be finches, closely related to each other and to the finches of distant South America. It seemed needlessly complex to suggest that God would create so many different birds in so many different places and yet make them all part of the same family. A more straightforward hypothesis was that the different finches had evolved from a common ancestor, by natural selection. God was no longer needed as a scientific hypothesis – and hasn’t been needed since.

In retrospect, the point that God was once a legitimate hypothesis seems obvious to me now. But when I encountered it, it came to me as something of a surprise, because I’m so used to living in a world where any attempt to find empirical evidence for God’s existence looks like a desperate grasping at straws. The worst of these is the “First Cause” version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, that you need to have something setting the world in motion. Even if that argument works, it proves nothing like the existence of any God that has been ever worshipped. A mere First Cause is no more significant than any other cause. If God is a mere Divine Watchmaker who sets things in motion and then goes away and is no longer involved – as this hypothesis would suggest – then the universe with him is hardly different from the universe without him. This is not a God that matters.

Rather, nowadays, if you’re going to get rationally to anything like the traditional Abrahamic God, you need to keep science at arm’s length. This is one of the beauties of Anselm’s argument – it has nothing whatsoever to do with empirical evidence, it is 100% a priori, and therefore natural science simply can’t touch it. If it is wrong, its wrongness can and must be demonstrated without reference to natural science. The same seems to be true for ibn Rushd’s First Explanation cosmological argument when properly understood, though not for First Cause arguments in the usual sense. For here the question is not “what caused everything?” but “how can there be causation in the first place?” It is an explanation going much deeper. Unlike Anselm, it doesn’t necessarily get you to an omnipotent or omnibenevolent God; but it does seem to get you to something like the brahman of Śaṅkara’s or Rāmānuja’s Vedānta, a cosmic principle underlying everything, and such a principle does a lot to change the way we see the rest of the universe.

To me it’s been clear for a long time that any attempt to find God must go a priori, must not try to look in the empirical world. But looking back on Darwin’s story, it’s easier for me to realize that many people don’t see it that way. And that helps me understand contemporary views that have always struck me as a little curious. Not just the intelligent design movement, but the arch-materialistic atheists of contemporary analytic philosophy, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, who look at neuroscience and conclude that consciousness and free will don’t exist. They actually think that consciousness and free will are empirical hypotheses whose existence can be refuted with empirical evidence. Once upon a time, they, like God, might even have been exactly that.

Evil, per se, is something of a red herring when it comes to theodicy. Evil is what we think of first, after the human-inflicted horrors of the twentieth century. And yet evil is the easy part. Why is there evil? Because human beings have free will, of course, and it’s good for them to have free will. Now, there are some problems with the free-will defence, questions that Augustine grapples with in On Free Choice of the Will – why is it good for humans to have free will, if it leads to all these evil acts? But the answers to those problems are pretty well thought out – determinate good is just not as good as freely chosen good.

The tougher part of the problem is those sufferings for which free will is no defence. I think people understood this part better before the twentieth century, when human-caused suffering was lesser than the suffering of natural disasters – when, as Susan Neiman notes, the one-word reply to claims of God’s goodness was not Auschwitz but Lisbon. Young children, too young to have committed any serious wrong, die in earthquakes, in hurricanes and tsunamis, from tuberculosis. Old people get afflicted by ALS, a cruel degenerative disease that makes people prisoners in their own bodies. This is “evil” only in the old sense, where “evil” just meant “bad” – this isn’t something that we did, a bad action, it’s just a bad thing that happens. Some theologians have tried to come up with justifications for this as well; but it’s much harder to justify these natural sufferings. Can we really say that the torturous drowning of innocent children is justified as part of a larger plan?

People smarter than I am have answered yes. Maybe we can still legitimately believe in God in the face of natural suffering. But let’s not distract ourselves from the real issue by calling it the “problem of evil,” and allowing believers to get out of it with the far-too-easy answer of free will. Call it the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis did; or call it the problem of suffering, a more common answer. But don’t weasel out of the problem by claiming it’s all about evil. There’s no point in explaining how God could permit Auschwitz if you can’t also explain how he could permit – or cause – Lisbon.

If one is to live in society, dependent on others, one is likely to require justice. That’s what I learned dealing with my loud neighbours in Texas: without a conception of justice, you cannot have a clear conscience; you cannot arbitrate between the competing demands that others make on you. The rub is that justice seems to require blame and moral responsibility (and therefore some kind or degree of free will). Aristotle says that justice consists of giving people what they deserve; doesn’t that very idea of desert or merit imply moral responsibility?

I don’t know Aristotle well enough to know his answer to that question. But Aristotle or not, I suspect it’s possible to have a conception of justice that doesn’t require moral responsibility. The virtue of justice is a mean, in that just behaviour lies somewhere in between taking too much and giving too little (greed, miserliness) and giving too much and taking too little (submissiveness, servility). How do you decide what’s too little or too much? It depends on the particulars of the situation, but it would surely involve some combination of prevailing social norms and mores (what Hegel would call Sittlichkeit) and something like the Golden Rule, treating others as you would wish to be treated (or in some cases as they would wish to be treated, if their desires are not inordinate). Does that require assigning moral responsibility and blame? Not as far as I can tell.

The example that first struck me is Wilson’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s metaethics. Wilson characterizes Kant’s ethics as follows:

Nature, Kant said, is a system of cause and effect, while moral choice is a matter of free will, for which there is no cause and effect. In making moral choices, in rising above mere instinct, human beings transcend the realm of nature and enter a realm of freedom that belongs to them exclusively as rational creatures. (Wilson 248-9)

Wilson isn’t wrong in his characterization so far. But he goes off the rails when he says Kant’s view is wrong because it “does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works” – and then adds “I find it hard to believe that had Kant, Moore and Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology they would have reasoned as they did.” (249) (There’s no room here to talk about Wilson’s placing of G.E. Moore in the same category as Kant.) If there is any doubt that Kant would laugh heartily at such a characterization, it would only be because Kant didn’t laugh much in general.

Kant’s system is a system of transcendental idealism, which means that, like Anselm, most of his arguments proceed a priori, independent of sense knowledge. The whole idea is that they’re not arguments that can be proven true or false by empirical evidence; rather they are part of the conditions that make empirical knowledge, and action in the world, possible in the first place. Wilson’s argument in the preceding pages against a transcendentalist view, alas, shows no awareness of any of this; it is merely an argument against a popular kind of religious belief, one which he admits is “the one I first learned as a child in the Christian faith.” (Wilson 248)

On the matter of free will, Kant already knew, three hundred years ago, that if we study the patterns of human behaviour (whether using the methods that would become biology, psychology or sociology), we can make modestly reliable predictions. His point is that from such a standpoint our own behaviour is unintelligible. The very idea of my making an action, making a choice or decision, makes no sense whatsoever unless I consider my action to be free of causal determination, and consider it instead to be my own. This is all true even though we can study human behaviour in ways that make it predictable; all such study approaches our behaviour from a third-person standpoint, but for our own actions to be intelligible we must approach them from a first-person standpoint.

There are reasonable ways to rebut Kant’s argument here; I don’t think the argument is ironclad. But Wilson never suggests that he has understood it, or even attempted to do so. And I think Wilson’s lack of understanding is telling: he just doesn’t seem to get the idea that something might be true without being empirically testable. He’s inheriting an empiricism from David Hume, who famously said that if any statement is neither a definition nor empirically testable then we should “commit it to the flames”; but he doesn’t seem to realize that Kant’s whole philosophy was a reply to Hume’s, an attempt to show Hume wrong.

One can try to defend Hume against Kant, but to do so one must take Kant on on his home turf of logical argument; one can’t refute him with empirical evidence, because the whole point is to go beyond empirical evidence. There is a drastic flaw in the basic idea that only empirically testable statements or definitions are meaningful: that basic idea is itself not empirically testable. Therefore, by its own standard, either it’s a mere definition of “meaningless” (and therefore a semantic quibble) or it’s meaningless. It therefore is quite straightforwardly self-contradicting, and is not worthy of sustained consideration as a candidate for truth. We need standards for truth and meaning beyond empirical verifiability or falsifiability. Kant knows this, and his whole philosophy proceeds from this understanding.

Wilson is correct to say: “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.” In this case, however, Wilson was clearly baffled not by Kant’s wrongness, but rather by his profundity.

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

Goodman takes these passages at face value, reading Śāntideva as a determinist. Siderits instead calls Śāntideva a “paleo-compatibilist,” arguing that Śāntideva still makes room for “moral responsibility.” Siderits tries to derive this claim from a peculiar reading of BCA VI.32, one that adds a great deal of interpretation to the Sanskrit (and doesn’t appear to be supported by the Tibetan commentarial tradition either). But this isn’t the place to get into the details of interpreting the Sanskrit; I’m starting to write an article where I take that point on in more detail.

Here, instead, I want to call more attention to the implications of what I (with Goodman) take to be Śāntideva’s “hard determinism.” Unlike Siderits, I think that in many respects the whole idea of this passage is to reject the idea of moral responsibility and of blame, as part of his larger project of rejecting anger. What intrigues me here is that in some sense, Śāntideva may in some sense be rejecting morality per se.

Shyam Ranganathan‘s book argues for an “anger inclination thesis” of moral claims: that “moral statements are things that there is a tendency to get angry about, if the evaluative force of the statement is violated.” (pp. 53-4) Similarly, comparative studies of moral anthropology like those of Jonathan Haidt tend to find a close correlation between moral claims and the desire to punish. On such a view, given Śāntideva’s sweeping opposition to anger and his willingness to absolve blame and responsibility, it would seem that he is in a serious sense opposed to morality.

I think we can indeed see Śāntideva as opposing morality – on one very serious condition, which is that we make a sharp separation between morality and ethics, as Bernard Williams has done (and Haidt and Ranganathan do not do). Williams wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s withering critique of “morality,” while still (like Nietzsche) making claims about what is good and bad, claims that can reasonably be called ethical. And what strikes me here is the similarity between Śāntideva’s and Nietzsche’s critiques: “Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work.” (Twilight of the Idols, “The four great errors,” section 7) On ethical grounds – grounds of gentleness, of patience, of mercy, of resisting anger – one fights against morality, because of its tendency to anger and punishment.

Damien Keown (using very different definitions, of course) once proposed that Buddhism offers “morality without ethics.” In Śāntideva’s work I see the opposite: ethics without morality. And it strikes me as a very powerful ideal.

I’ll be out of town for about two weeks after today, with very spotty Internet access. Posting will be infrequent during that time, if I can manage it at all. I’ll try to find some time to reply to comments, though it might come slowly.