[Buddha-l] Ethical Dilemmas

[Joy Vriens]

Hi Stefan,


> Thinking the problem through can lead to a bizarre conclusion: anything
> might afterwards have been the morally right action, especially in such
> extreme situations. Killing one man in order to save the others seems right
> from a utilitarian point of view.  Allowing the five to die seems morally
> justifiable too. There is no calculus possible here. What if one person on
> the track was a family member or a beloved?  Or what if the five persons
> were known killers? What if one of the five persons was your beloved and
> the
> rest killers? What if those five persons where suffering from a terminal
> decease? Even if you do not act, you could not be blamed for not having
> taken your responsibility. What would be that responsibility? How, if,
> would
> 'a normal person is similar circumstances' act? That is very difficult to
> discover. Not acting would motivabe not wishing to actively cause pain
>
> Hi Stefan,

When one thinks about this sort of questions, it becomes obvious that
God isn't dead, whatever His real status was before he was declared
dead. The vain ape called man has put on His suit and burdened himself with
His mission, utilitarianism (or other teleological goodies like History...),
thus turning into a schizophrene. It's not easy to be man and God at the
same time. To have both an individual point of view and at the same time
wanting to see through God's eye and act accordingly. Obviously, man doesn't
have God's eye. We don't know the outcome of things before they happen, we
don't know the intentions of others. So we piece and string together a bunch
of crappy arguments, that we consider an equivalent to God's eye. But it's
an eye that doesn't see and can only have a bit of hindsight. Reconstruing
is not seeing. The hindsight doesn't even have to be a reconstruction it may
simply be a construction and it probably is just that.
(I hope I haven't forgotten any capital letters)

According to Buddhism the person on the track is a family member.

"A disciple of the Buddha, Arya Katyayana once was in a village where he
came upon an ordinary family scene:  A mother, fondly holding a child, was
eating some a fish.  Now and then, the mother would kick away a dog trying
to get at some of the food.Through his highly developed perceptive power,
the monk saw them as they had been in a previous life: The fish had been the
woman's father, the dog had once been her mother, and the child she cuddled
had been her greatest enemy. Observing this relationship, Katyayana wept,
saying:

Eating the flesh of her father,
Beating her mother's back,
And nursing her enemy on her lap,
Should I laugh or cry at the play of this world?"

Picked up somewhere from the Internet.