Selflessness and Normativity: Śāntideva and Emptiness Ethics
Articles/Selflessness and Normativity: Śāntideva and Emptiness Ethics
Description
The crucial issue to examine here is the relationship between the Ownership view of self, which compellingly accommodates many of our firm intuitions with respect to agency and ethics, and the various theoretical programs that revise our belief in an owner of mental occurrences. In section 2.2, I address some of the glaring challenges No-Self views face in terms of providing both a compelling, general account of agency, and a specifically convincing account of ethical agency. I argue that No-Self views require re-description of some fundamental features of forward-looking agency and language-use, and I show how such re-descriptions face formidable problems that are better met by an Ownership view. . . .
In section 2.3 of the present chapter, I will lay out the conceptual territory of contemporary views on selfhood. My goal is to better situate No-Self views. I specifically set up the conversation in light of the Madhyamaka-Buddhist "emptiness" thesis—the view that nothing in reality has intrinsic existence or inherent essence (svabhāva). I focus on Madhyamaka, because its ethical champion, Śāntideva provides one of the more systematic ethical treatises in the Mahāyāna corpus. Moreover, I need to situate Madhyamaka and Śāntideva’s altruistic project in terms of competing Buddhist No-Self views.
In 2.4, I cover with greater detail the utilitarian-leaning ethics we may extract from Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra and his Śikṣāsamuccaya. Śāntideva provides us with a version of the No-Self view that presumably aims to derive moral conclusions from ontological insights. Furthermore, as theorists like Charles Goodman have contended, Śāntideva's work aims to justify a version of act-consequentialism, which promotes altruism and agent-neutral ethics.[4] This should be taken seriously, because there are independently compelling reasons to disavow the belief in a real self or a real owner of experiences. So if we can develop a workable ethics out of such insight, then we may have an ethically compelling reason to dispense with our belief in real selves. . . .
. . . Finally, in 2.5, I will also assess some of the leading reconstructions of the crucial passages, 101-103, in chapter 8 of Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra. In these passages, Śāntideva argues that we must endorse robust altruism. I will ultimately conclude, like Harris,[7] that denying the existence of the self fails in any straightforward way to justify an altruistic moral imperative. There may be better ways to reconstruct Śāntideva's work. However, I cannot currently devise a strategy for rescuing Śāntideva's argument (although I provide some original takes on the leading critiques of his argument, while providing a metaphysical option that might bolster Śāntideva’s thesis). It seems to me that the most compelling reason I might have for helping someone—or for being committed to altruism—is through some form of identification with that person. At some general level of empathic identity, your pain might as well be my pain: this is something we can share. At some level of metaphysical description "we are all one," and so any suffering is suffering for all. At some level of social generality, I would want to be free of pain, and I believe that this is a right that anyone who is sufficiently unbiased would have to extend to everyone in a Rawlsian-contractualist sort of way. However, in all these scenarios—pace the Buddhist emphasis on "emptiness"—the important distinction between self and other is always maintained. The key to altruism, I believe, rests somewhere in the paradoxical notion of forging real identity amidst accepted difference. (Maroufkhani, introduction, 39–47)
