[Buddha-l] Non attached & mindful culinary triumphalism?

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 12, 2011, at 8:55, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> All in the name of trying to preserve the "right" to consume flesh.

Knowing how deeply Dan treasures accuracy, I feel obligated to point out that no one here has said anything about rights. Certainly nothing at all has been said or implied about anyone's right to consume flesh. Indeed, virtue ethics (which has been mentioned) is usually seen as an alternative to discussions of rights. The usual stance in virtue ethics is that having virtues is both svārtha and parārtha (beneficial to oneself and to others). It is quite rare (unheard of in me experience) for a virtues-based ethicist since Alasdair MacIntyre to focus on rights. 

Narcissism (in its more popular non-technical sense) is never, to my knowledge, mentioned as a virtue and is usually regarded as a vice, so people who are seriously pursuing a path of cultivating virtues and avoiding vices usually do their best not to cultivate narcissism. Some are more successful than others, of course, of course in pursuing virtues and avoiding vices. But I think it's pretty clear that there is no inherent danger of a person whose focus is on virtues being narcissistic. 

Dan now admits that his claim about some people being narcissistic was not aimed at anyone in particular. So I guess that makes it a predicate in search of a subject, a sort of psychological dangling modifier. Since it does not apply to anyone here, perhaps we can just forget about it and restrict ourselves to using labels, predicates and working hypotheses that are meaningful and have a subject  to which they are meant to be applied. 

Richard