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

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 13, 2011, at 09:14 , Kdorje at aol.com wrote:
Konchog Dorje wrote:

> There is a distinction in law that seems to be the same. Crime malum in se  
> are those that are based on English common law and are said to the natural, 
> moral or public principles of a civilized society, sometimes said to be 
> the  result of a depraved heart. Examples are murder, theft, rape, and most  
> crimes of violence. On the other hand are crimes malum prohibitum, those acts 
> that are prohibited by statutes enacted for the efficient running of 
> society,  such as parking restrictions, speed limits, tax evasion.

That's an interesting legal distinction. These days I am living in a very strange country (whose name shall be left unmentioned) in which there are people who try to write laws that reflect what they imagine to be natural moral principles. These people often hold that it is unnatural for people of the same gender to have sexual relations. (Some of their ancestors probably agreed that it is unnatural for people of African ancestry to mingle socially with people of European ancestry, unnatural for women to be involved in politics, and unnatural for aborigines to live in forests or on the prairies instead of on reservations.)

It is interesting to think about what on earth is natural among human beings. Is it natural for one human being to kill another? Given that hardly any human society can be found that does not have a proud history of warfare in which enemies have been crushed, multilated, humiliated and enslaved, it would appear that for human beings, killing other members of the species is quite natural. And for a very long time it has been natural for human beings to kill members of other species for food and clothing; human societies that do not feed and clothe themselves by hunting game usually resort to raising animals for the purpose of killing them for food. 

Is adultery unnatural? When DNA testing was first making an appearance, there was a famous study in which DNA samples were gathered from everyone living in a tame little village in England, and one of the unexpected results was that one-third of the children had DNA indicating that their father was someone other than the husband of their mother. People were shocked to discover that adultery was considerably more widespread than anyone had hitherto suspected.

Is incest unnatural? Estimates vary, but enough women are now reporting having been sexually approached by biological relatives (are maybe not, given that so many children are not really the offspring of their putative fathers). Incestuous child molesting does seem to be common enough to make it difficult to make the case that it is unnatural.

Is it unnatural for human beings to have sexual relations for reasons other than to have a child? One hears just enough rumors to make one suspect that there are more than a few people who engage in sexual activity for 
recreational purposes, which suggests that even non-procreational sex is natural.

I have been told by more than one earnest soul that it is unnatural for a human being to be a vegetarian, unnatural for a Western person to adopt an Asian religion, unnatural for anyone to shave his or her head, unnatural for anyone past puberty and before senility to be celibate, unnatural for anyone to deny that there is an eternal self, and unnatural to deny that there are moral facts. If any of these folks are correct, quite a few of us on buddha-l are naturally in a heap of trouble. We might as well become cannibalistic pedophiles.

One of the things that seems to be natural for people is to assume that the moral guidelines they have been indoctrinated to believe (or that they have come to adopt through their own peculiar experiences) are natural, not purely conventional, not contingent, not culturally conditioned, not provisional.

Defining what exactly it means for any offense to be a natural offense is so fraught with difficulty that some thinkers through history have called into question the very idea of natural morality. Among Buddhists, Candrakīrti famously called into question whether anything can be said to be what it is naturally (prakṛtyā), which for him was a synonym of essentially (svabhāvena). For people who think like that, the distinction between malum in se and malum prohibitum breaks down; everything that human beings do to restrain behavior they would prefer not to have to live with is malum prohibitum. Only the narcissists in the crowd (which we now learn means all those who do not realize that all the categories in which we deal are purely subjective, vijñaptimātra, nothing but projections onto the world of categories that have in fact originated in the human mind and and not discoveries but superimpositions) would believe in natural (or universal) moral laws and inalienable rights and so forth. Unnatural though it may seem, some of volunteer to feel compassion for such benighted souls.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM