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

[andy]

 Richard Hayes wrote:
> 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 [us?] volunteer to feel compassion for such
>  benighted souls.
> 

Ah, things are getting clearer!  Prohibited acts are malum in se, not malum 
prohibitum!  But of course the distinction is not all that helpful.  There is 
a similar distinction between natural law and civil law, the ius gentium or 
law of peoples, and the conventional laws of a people. The question is what 
makes a malum in se a malum at all.  We are back to universality as a sign of 
the wrongness of action, but it in no way defines the wrongness. 

Perhaps I am being too foundationalist in my thinking about ethics, or too 
critical, and asking for a ground is futile.  But to think there are two 
different rationales for Buddhist sila strikes me as unsatisfactory, especially 
when we don't know what the first one is. 

So Richard, in regard to your project, are you not going to include the other 
main ethical theory, deontology?   Certainly includes normative force, and 
universality as a sign, but I don't know if I can see Kant advocating 
compassion.  Benevolence, yes, but not quite metta.



 Andy Stroble