[Buddha-l] law

[Ilana Maymind]

In somewhat same vein, my question is what would be the Buddhist response to 
the following: "human beings left to their own devices are capable of 
legislating and instituting a universal morality for themselves" 
(Batnitzky, 2006, p. 193) or alternatively, there is a need for the "law's 
coercive power" ? [the quote above is not related to Buddhism but I'm 
interested to apply it to it.]

Thanks

Ilana

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have 
commentators. - Camus

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Nance" <richard.nance at gmail.com>
To: "Buddhist discussion forum" <buddha-l at mailman.swcp.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 3:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Views of morality, culture, and religion


> On 9/7/06, Malcolm Dean <malcolmdean at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If you believe in Buddhism as a system of morality, or as a religion,
>> the contradiction you point out would hold. If you believe in Buddhism
>> as a form of scientific endeavour, then it does not.
>
> I think you've missed my point. The point is that scientific endeavor
> is a form of human practice. As such, it's goverened by normative
> assumptions. If there weren't such assumptions, then there would be no
> easy way to separate what you want to call "scientific endeavor" from
> the kinds of endeavor that don't hold the same appeal for you.
>
>> Buddha typically says something like "the end of suffering is
>> (specific actions or thoughts)." He does not say something like "to
>> end suffering you *should*..."
>
> Buddhas are portrayed as saying all sorts of things; I haven't read
> enough of the enormous (and largely untranslated) wealth of texts said
> to represent buddhavacana to know what counts as "typical." Perhaps
> you have. But, as I've pointed out here before, the presence or
> absence of modal operators, optative verbs, imperative verbs, etc. is
> is not a very reliable guide to the functions that a text can end up
> being called upon to serve;  prescription doesn't always wear its
> heart on its sleeve. (There's no "should" in a sign reading "The white
> zone is for loading and unloading only" -- yet few of us have much
> difficulty recognizing the sign as prescriptive.)
>
>> You appear to hold some form of Post-modern view of normativity, such
>> that anyone's ideas can be called normative, with no hope of
>> experimental results which would support one hypothesis over others.
>
> Ah, the post-modern card. You didn't read my remarks carefully enough.
> Let me clarify what I was trying to say. Everybody's ideas are,
> indeed, informed by normative assumptions. This fact entails nothing
> about the rightness or wrongness of specific  assumptions (or the
> explicit claims that inform and are informed by them). Obviously, I
> hold some claims and assumptions to be better (more accurate and/or
> more useful) than others. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother engaging in
> this discussion. My point is simply that any assessment of correctness
> or incorrectness  -- whether pertaining to a method, a practice, a
> path, or something else -- is going to be informed by a range of
> normative assumptions about the world, what it's really like, how one
> ought to behave in it, how one ought to describe it, and which
> practices -- whether "scientific" or otherwise -- reveal the nature of
> things to us most effectively.
>
> Nothing I have said implies that a scientific approach shouldn't hold
> pride of place among these competing practices. Rather, I have tried
> to call your attention to the fact that the very claim that a
> scientific approach (or a Buddhist approach, or whatever) *should*
> hold pride of place is a *normative* claim. That's all.
>
>> I think the thrust of Buddhism is that there is, at last, a
>> fundamental nature to the Universe, and it is accessible given effort
>> and guidance. Is that simply normative belief, or is that reality?
>
> I think that we may be talking past one another. Again, let me try to
> make myself clearer. The "that" in your sentence above refers to a
> claim: "there is, at last, a fundamental nature to the Universe, and
> it is accessible given effort and guidance." This is a claim in a
> natural language. To make a claim in a natural language is to subject
> oneself to conditions of meaning. One of those conditions is a
> condition that seems to me to be irreducibly normative: if I'm to find
> an utterance meaningful, I require some notion of what it would mean
> to offer an adequate paraphrase of what the utterance says. (Note the
> personal pronoun used above: I can't understand Chinese, but I'm
> certainly not going to deny that utterances in Chinese are meaningful
> to others). Of course, ideas about adequacy are context-bound; what
> may be adequate in one situation could prove disatrously inadequate in
> others. But this idea of adequacy, flexible though it may be, is a
> normative idea: it's an idea about how I *should* go about discussing
> what has been said if I'm going to get it right (or, if you prefer,
> render it useful to others), under specific circumstances. Without an
> operable notion of adequacy hovering in the background, the utterance
> just won't succeed in meaning very much.
>
> So the distinction you've tried to draw between "normative belief" and
> "reality" is one that isn't as simple as you may think; claims about
> reality are ineluctably embedded in normative frameworks - and they
> have to be if they're going to stand a chance of meaning something.
> Again, this does not imply that all such frameworks ought to be viewed
> as equal. But again, to argue in favor of pride of place (or even in
> favor of equivalence) is to engage in an argument invested with
> normativity, like it or not.
>
>> When students bring their normative moralities, their
>> shoulda-woulda-coulda's, do Buddhist teachers respond by advising them
>> against performative contradiction?
>
> I don't know. Should I not do this?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> R. Nance
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