At the SACP, Michael Barnhart proposed a way of sidestepping this debate entirely. As far as ethics itself goes, he says, Buddhism is particularist; it doesn’t adhere to any real theory, it just responds to particular situations. Where it does have a theory isn’t in ethics at all, but in something else entirely: the question of what we care about, or should care about. (Specifically, he argues, Buddhists claim we should care above all about suffering.)

Barnhart based this idea on Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “The importance of what we care about.” I didn’t comment on his paper right after the SACP, because I wanted a chance to read Frankfurt’s piece first. Having read it, I would now say that Barnhart and Frankfurt both run into a common problem: an unreasonably narrow definition of ethics.

“Ethics,” says Frankfurt, “focuses on the problem of ordering our relations with other people. It is concerned especially with the contrast between right and wrong, and with the grounds and limits of moral obligation. We are led into the third branch of inquiry [i.e. about what we care about], on the other hand, because we are interested in deciding what to do with ourselves and because we therefore need to understand what is important or, rather, what is important to us.” (The italics are Frankfurt’s.)

This view of ethics is pretty common today; both analytic philosophers like Frankfurt and Continentals like Emmanuel Lévinas will claim that ethics is all about the Other. But why exactly should we think that this is the limit of ethics? We get our term “ethics” from Aristotle’s classic work, which is unambiguously concerned with the question of what we should care about. In a sense that’s exactly what eudaimonia, human flourishing or happiness, is: Aristotle effectively defines eudaimonia as that which everyone agrees we should treat as most important, though we all disagree on what exactly this most important thing turns out to be. Ethics, for Aristotle, is the study of what we should care about. Morality might be a narrower term, but as I noted in my previous post, there’s a reason to draw a distinction between the two.

As I also noted there, Bernard Williams has been a major proponent of the ethics-morality distinction. Strangely, Barnhart reads Williams but sees him as part of the problem. Barnhart’s article treats Williams as merely asking the usual question of modern ethics: “What should one do?” But Williams’s work is in many respects an attempt to reject that question in favour of the older and broader question, “How should one live?” – a question that can and likely does include the question “What should one care about?” Williams specifically makes the distinction between the two questions on p4 of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. He defends the “How should one live?” question precisely on the grounds of its breadth, even its vagueness – narrower questions, especially “What should one do?”, take too much for granted.

Robert Gimello once suggested to me that “religion,” rather than ethics, was a better term for the more wide-ranging concern that Williams speaks of. But this seems to stress the definition of “religion” unacceptably. Avowed atheists like Lucretius and Nietzsche are clearly concerned with the question of what we should care about. People can speak, and have spoken, of atheist religion, but this seems rather a form of special pleading, very far removed from any common usage.

And what of Buddhist ethics – how then do we classify it? I feel comfortable calling it virtue ethics, only because “virtue ethics” has tended to function as a catch-all category for any ethical system that (as opposed to consequentialism and deontology) does not concern itself primarily with the trolley problem, with particular decisions in hard and rare cases. Buddhist ethics in general seems more like Stoicism and Epicureanism than like Aristotle; however we classify these systems, we are probably also right to classify Buddhist ethics. More often than not they are understood as virtue ethics, so I am happy to place Buddhist ethics there.

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.