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.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.”

Trunk identifies happiness with contentment, in a move similar to the utilitarians who identified it with pleasure. Now it’s true that many will say pleasure or contentment is not real happiness, that true happiness consists of something larger than that state of mind – but I suspect that they primarily do this because they are wedded to older and mostly extinct uses of “happiness,” ones that survive mostly in translations of Aristotle. Etymologically, “happy” used to mean something like “fortunate” or “blessed.” But outside of a few idioms (“a happy coincidence”), we rarely use the term this way in English anymore. Rather, happiness is about contentment or pleasure, a pleasant, enjoyable, perhaps peaceful state of mind. And for Trunk, that’s not good enough.

Trunk’s rejection of mere happiness is far from a truism. It’s not only the utilitarians (such as Neil Sinhababu) who defend happiness in this sense – a view we could reasonably call hedonism. The ancient Epicureans practised a “sophisticated” hedonism, in which we should find the happiness that comes with freedom from mental disturbance. Such a hedonism is arguably quite Buddhist as well: while the early Buddhist texts are often cagey about what exactly nibbāna implies, what descriptions there are sound a lot like Epicurean ataraxia. Tranquility. Peace. Freedom from disturbance. Above all, an end to suffering. This sounds a lot more like happiness.

But is this really the best goal to pursue? At least, is it the only goal worth pursuing? I am finding myself increasingly persuaded by Trunk’s position. We’ll have plenty of time for freedom from disturbance once we’re dead. Life gives us a shot at something more.

What is that “something more”? Trunk often contrasts the happy life with the interesting life. This point comes out in her posts about New York, which I’ve discussed before: life in rural Wisconsin is happy, but it’s not interesting. Life in New York is interesting, but it isn’t happy. But maybe that’s okay. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point in “Transcending humanity,” the last chapter of her Love’s Knowledge: when the nymph Calypso offers Odysseus a chance to live with her in immortal bliss, we hope he turns it down, for we would lose the rest of the story. To be sure, a truly interesting life is often something we would only wish on somebody else, especially somebody fictional. One thinks of the apocryphal “Chinese curse”: “May you live in interesting times.” The reason this phrase is popular (and attributed, probably falsely, to the Chinese) is the idea that being interesting may be a curse, even though it’s something we often want. And while it’s true that often, on reflection, things get interesting in a way that on reflection we don’t want, that’s not necessarily the case.

The idea of this “curse” suggests that if we really thought about it, we’d realize that being happy is more important than being interesting. But is that necessarily true? Trunk doesn’t think so, at least for herself. Some of us, at least, would willingly accept a life that’s more exciting in exchange for its being less happy. Imagining myself in my eighties or nineties – knowing my death would come before too long – I would like to be able to look back on a life that’s been full and interesting, not merely happy. (It’s relevant here that for Aristotle, eudaimonia is an activity, as contentment and pleasure are not.)

Beyond Trunk’s post, there’s a point I tried to make to make to Neil Sinhababu: it seems there must be something good about truth in its own right; it’s basically self-contradictory to think otherwise. What follows from the goodness of truth, again, is harder to establish, but it’s another aim that seems like, in some cases at least, it’s worth pursuing at the expense of happiness.

The tougher question is what we do to decide or arbitrate among these competing ends: truth, interest, happiness. I suspect the question can’t really be decided in the general case; one must learn what’s more important in particular cases, and learn that through experience as one learns any other skills. I think this is a very Aristotelian answer, and it’s one reason I begin to see the vagueness in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia as an asset rather than a flaw.

Still, in many respects these results are exactly what I would expect. I found this happiness data from Penelope Trunk, who nails the problem with living in New York exactly. If you are (like me) the kind of person who loves city life, then in New York you really do have the best of everything, at least on this continent and in some cases anywhere: the best food, the best entertainment, the best shopping for almost any goods you could want, the best access to transportation, the best art. But that’s exactly the problem. On one hand, you’re competing with everyone else to have access to the best of everything, so everything is very expensive, so you have to work much harder to make more money. (A little like Dr. Seuss’s Solla Sollew, where they have no troubles except for the fact that you can’t actually live there.) On the other hand, and more insidiously, if you live in New York, it’s probably because you are the kind of person who tries to have access to the best of everything.

That is to say that New Yorkers, by and large, are maximizers rather than satisficers. The distinction comes from the economist Herbert Simon, and was recently popularized by positive psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. In brief: maximizers try to weigh every option and ensure that every choice is the best they can make, to get the best result. Satisficers, on the other hand, make choices quickly and don’t mind the idea that their choice might not have been the best.

I notice this problem in particular with respect to food. I love international food, and to me that’s the most wonderful thing of all about New York – it has a wider variety of food choices than just about anywhere else in the world. New York has Surinamese and Bajan and Xinjiang restaurants; in Manhattan you can get Burmese and Senegalese food delivered to your door, often 24 hours a day. Food writer Calvin Trillin lives in the food paradise of lower Manhattan, in some respects for exactly this reason. But in Trillin’s work one finds little gratitude for this extraordinary and unprecedented variety. Instead he maintains a list of all the food he can’t get in Manhattan, and calls it his “Register of Frustration and Deprivation.” Trillin, in other words, is a maximizer, who will never have enough and never be satisfied – and that seems to me characteristic of New York life. Even when you have the best in the world – maybe especially when you have the best in the world – it’s still not going to be good enough.

In many respects this was the lesson I learned in my youth in Thailand. What makes you unhappy is not that you don’t have enough, it’s the desire for more, itself. The Second Noble Truth again: suffering comes from craving. To live in New York seems to feed that craving.

New York makes me think of the myth of Eden – and the view, going back to St. Ambrose, that the fall from Eden made us better off (“O felix culpa.”) While there are perhaps few places in the world that are less like the Garden of Eden in a literal sense, New York shares with Eden the feeling of being a place where all desires can be satisfied. It seems to me that, if there ever had been an Eden, Adam and Eve would not actually have been happy there – they would have found ways to want more. (Indeed why else would the fall have happened?) At least for a city-lover like me, choosing to live outside of Eden, or outside of New York, is accepting and living with the fact that you can’t always get what you want – even within Eden.