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

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Hi Andy,
the classical legend about the Buddha is that he found a solution for 
what he saw as the most fundamental human problem. He didn't claim to be 
intimate with the boss of the universe, nor to have found a universal 
set of rules. Later in Mahayana teachings there is a strong confidence 
in the assumption that eventually every living being will agree with the 
Buddha. But Buddhist prescriptions are only valid for Buddhists, those 
have have taken refuge and that is something you are free to chose.
I sense some doubt in your comment about this freedom and if you look at 
Confucius and Mencius it is clear that you are not free to chose in 
their virtue ethics, because if you do not try to become a true 
gentleman you will go down in the ladder of status and become an outcast 
eventually. That is why radical Daoist revert to nature and leave 
society to dwell in solitude or live the life of an outcast. So if 
virtue ethics becomes a general duty, it loses it's individual freedom.
Now the injunction of incest is not univesal either. Levi-Strauss 
discovered that in many cultures people just don't commit incest, 
because that's 'only for rabbits'. They never thought about explicit 
laws or regulions.
So my conclusion is that in many cultures laws and injunctions are not 
top priority, but this may feel somewhat counter intuitive for someone 
who is brought up with these things.

erik

Op 14-07-11 12:41, andy schreef:
> Richard Hayes wrote:
>> On Jul 13, 2011, at 14:25 , andy wrote:
>>> So Richard, in regard to your project, are you not going to include the
>>> other main ethical theory, deontology?
>> I am the only person I can find who has suggested that one might regard
>>   Buddhist ethics as having a deontological dimension. People who write
>>   about Buddhist ethics seem to be agreed that whatever else one might think
>>   about Buddhist ethics, it is CLEARLY not deontological. So I guess a
>>   deontologist kant be a Buddhist.
>>
> Thank you for not missing the set-up!   I am disturbed, only slightly, by the
> point Eric brought up earlier, that there is no normative force behind the
> Buddhist rules.  If you want to keep suffering, by all means keep at it. There
> is your free will.  But, there is a sense in which Buddha  proposes a
> teleological ethics, that claims to be non-defeasible. The Tathagata is he who
> has done what is to be done, which implies it is to be done.  So virtue
> ethics, aimed at consequences, but these are not the usual consequences of
> happiness (a la Aristotle).  So a consequentialist ethics, based on an
> omniscient insight, is equivalent to deontology?  Kant says as much when he
> distinguishes hypothetical imperatives as rules of skill (if you want this, do
> this), and the rules of prudence (if you want to be happy, do this), with the
> difference being that where rules of skill are a priori but hypothetical,
> prudence is assumed to be a priori but the rules are a posteriori, or subject
> to doubt and experiment.  Moral rules, the categorical imperative, is supposed
> to command uncategorically, but that leaves open the possiblity that if the
> rules of prudence were known rather than surmised, they would as well be
> categorical?   Doing what is to be done, that is as close as I can get to
> making Buddhism deontological at this point.   And rationality?  Not sure what
> to make of that from a Buddhist perspective. Probably just me.