Experience and Morality: Buddhist Ethics as Moral Phenomenology

🤓 Admin Zone 🛠️ hidden to non-admins
view on research edit on research Add an excerpt Add a bilingual page Add full text subpage

Dissertation

Conduct

LibraryDissertationsBibliography PDF Link

Please note that many items in our library are simply pages that represent a detailed library catalog entry and citation of someone else's work, presentation, or performance. Read our General Disclaimer for more information.

Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. The following are the first relevant paragraphs:

The Buddhist canon contains a substantial amount of material that treats the subject matter of ethics. Topics addressed in these texts include how we should live our lives, how we should treat others, classifications of right and wrong actions, and the articulation of virtues to be cultivated and vices to be avoided. The abundance of Buddhist material treating ethical issues even led O.H. de A. Wijesekera (1971) to make the grandiose claim, "It is universally recognized that Buddhism can claim to be the most ethical of all religio-philosophical systems of the world" (p. 49). Charles Goodman (2009) describes Buddhist ethics with its emphasis on non-violence and compassion as one of most appealing parts of the teachings of Buddhism. He writes, "Many people have drawn inspiration from Buddhism's emphasis on compassion, non-violence, and tolerance, its concern for animals, and its models of virtue and self-cultivation" (p. 1). Damien Keown (1992) even argues that Buddhism itself is foremost an ethical project: "Buddhism is a response to what is fundamentally an ethical problem—the perennial problem of the best kind of life for a man (sic) to lead" (p. 1).
It should be no surprise that ethics plays an important role in Buddhism, given its soteriological goal of an ideal state. Like many other religions, Buddhism calls for ethical conduct as a requirement for attaining its soteriological goal. The Buddhist canon includes extensive guidelines for conduct that foster the move from an ordinary state to an ideal state. Buddhist ethics, however, is not based on a theistic model: No omnipotent creator decrees what constitutes good and evil. Instead, I will argue that common themes underlying Buddhist ethical works are nested in the larger Buddhist project that sees suffering and its causes as the primary human existential problem. The distinction between good and bad, I will argue, depends entirely on the analysis of suffering and its causes. The Buddha explained in what Buddhists take to be his first teaching upon attaining enlightenment that it is confusion about ourselves and the world we live in that causes us to suffer, and that only knowledge of the reality of our world removes this confusion and frees us from suffering. The good, I will argue, is linked with this knowledge; the Buddhist soteriological goal of liberation from suffering is achieved not through faith, but through reason. Liberation is not a reward for ethical conduct, but is, as I aim to demonstrate in the coming chapters, the state of the morally mature person who experiences the world mediated by an accurate metaphysical understanding. (Aitken, general introduction, 1–2)

Citation

Aitken, Daniel Timothy. "Experience and Morality: Buddhist Ethics as Moral Phenomenology." PhD diss., University of Tasmania, 2016. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23404/1/Aitken_whole_thesis.pdf.

People Mentioned

Charles Goodman

Table of contents

Table of Figuresiii
Acknowledgementsiv
Chapter One: General Introduction1
- 1.1 Methodology and Sources7
  - 1.1.1 Avoiding Two Methodological Extremes: Globalized Descriptions and Radical Particularism9
  - 1.1.2 A Note on the Use of the Term "Moral Phenomenology"16
- 1.2 Outline of Chapters23
Chapter Two: Buddhist Ethics and Consequentialism27
- 2.1 Goodman's Account27
  - 2.1.1 Theravāda Ethics and Rule-Consequentialism28
  - 2.1.2 Self-sacrifice as Moral Development35
  - 2.1.3 Dedication: Transference or Transformation?44
- 2.2 An Approach to Compassion: Metaphysical or Psychological?53
- 2.3 The status of persons and its implications for Śāntideva's ethics56
Chapter Three: Buddhist Ethics and Virtue Ethics78
- 3.1 A Brief Account of the Structure of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics79
  - 3.1.1 The Highest Good79
  - 3.1.2 The Function Argument81
  - 3.1.3 Virtues82
  - 3.1.4 Moral Virtues and Intellectual Virtues83
    - 3.1.4.1 Moral virtues83
    - 3.1.4.2 Practical wisdom84
  - 3.1.5 Choice and Moral Strength85
- 3.2 Comparing the Structure of Buddhist Ethics with the Structure of Virtues Ethics87
  - 3.2.1 Describing the Highest Good: Nirvana, Eudaemonia, and 3.2.2 A Person's Function89
  - 3.2.3 Aristotelian Virtues and Buddhist Virtues94
  - 3.2.4 Moral Choice and Cetanā98
  - 3.2.5 The Moral Agent108
- Conclusion110
Chapter Four: Buddhist Theories of Perception and Experience and their Relation to Ethics113
- 4.1 Two Perspectives on Perception: Buddhist Psychology and Buddhist Epistemology114
- 4.2 The Basic Structure of Experience: A Buddhist Perspective118
  - 4.2.1 Contact120
  - 4.2.2 Feeling123
  - 4.2.3 Ascertainment128
  - 4.2.4 Cetanā137
  - 4.2.5 Attention145
- 4.3 The Application of Psychological Building Blocks of Experience147
- in Buddhist Ethical Practice147
- Conclusion157
Chapter Five: Buddhist Moral Phenomenology159
- 5.1 The Foundation of a Phenomenological Ethics: How Confusion Pervades Vice161
- 5.2 Mental States as the Determinant of Virtue and Vice166
- 5.3 Re-envisioning Merit and the Field of Merit170
- 5.4 Knowledge as the Moral Solution: A Transformation of View176
- 5.5 Moral Language181
  - 5.5.1 Moral Language and Knowledge181
  - 5.5.2 Moral Language and Mental States184
- 5.6 The Perfection of Wisdom Sūtras as a Precursor187
- to Mahāyāna Buddhist Moral Phenomenology187
Conclusion197
References206

Interconnections

Works related to this item