From Madhyamaka to Consequentialism: A Road Map

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

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Is emptiness compatible with ethics? This fundamental question has been a major concern of Buddhist scholars in the Madhyamaka tradition throughout that tradition's history in India, Tibet, and elsewhere in Asia. And the same question faces us today. The profound teaching of emptiness subtly undermines all our dogmatic convictions and beliefs, and points toward a compelling realization of the core Buddhist ideal of "freedom from view." But if we are to realize such an ideal, what will happen to our ethical commitments? Is there a danger that following the path that leads to seeing the ultimate truth will have the side effect of turning the practitioner into a monster?
      These issues face anyone with any moral commitments who is attracted to the Madhyamaka view. But they seem particularly pressing for those scholars who interpret Buddhist ethical views as forms of consequentialism. Even if it is possible to reconcile compassionate action and nonviolent lives with emptiness, we may still have difficulty building consequentialist ethical theories on the empty space that is the only foundation Madhyamaka allows.
      One way to put the problem starts with noticing that, in Buddhism, there are only two kinds of truth: ultimate and conventional. And it is clear that, according to Madhyamaka, ethical statements cannot possibly be ultimately true. So they must be merely conventional. What, then, does it mean to say that ethics is merely conventional? It sounds like we would be saying that ethics is a social construct within each particular society, with no basis at all outside the contingent practices and customs of that society. Such a claim leaves us with a variety of extremely unattractive metaethical options, including moral relativism, ethnocentric conservatism, and error theory. And none of these options fits well at all with any universal ethical theory that aspires to provide normative guidance, however general and abstract, across places and times.
      Another concern would be that consequentialism is a grand theory that seeks to ground many diverse normative judgments and intuitions on a single underlying theoretical structure. On some ways of understanding Madhyamaka, this kind of high theory is precisely what we need to abandon. Such views could lead us to expect that the field of ethics may simply be too complex and messy to be brought into any unifying framework.
      Yet another reason for concern is that recent work advocating a consequentialist interpretation of Buddhist ethics has rightly focused on Śāntideva's strategy of drawing on the doctrine of no self, in its Abhidharma form, to lend support to the universalism that is characteristic of consequentialist thinking, and to undermine intuitions about the significance of the distinction between persons. But the doctrine of no self in the Abhidharma relies on a postulated ontological asymmetry between ultimately real simple entities and conventionally posited, unreal people. If the existence of everything is in part constituted by conceptual construction, as the Madhyamaka argues, then no such asymmetry can be sustained, and we have to ask whether Śāntideva's strategy still has any viability. If not, it will be much harder to sustain any connection between Buddhist forms of life and consequentialist ethical theory.
      This chapter will proceed on the basis of a particular philosophical reconstruction, in contemporary terms, of the Madhyamaka of the great Tibetan philosopher Tsong kha pa. (Goodman, preliminary remarks, 141–42)

Citation

Goodman, Charles. "From Madhyamaka to Consequentialism: A Road Map." In Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness, edited by The Cowherds, 141–58. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Cowherds, The. Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Books2016About this item

Contains essays exploring a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory.