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

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 13, 2011, at 21:19 , Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Richard asserted that the fact that people BREAK rules indicates that 
> what rules prohibit are not "in themselves bad" (malum in se). The counter 
> case is that wherever one turns one finds such rules (with variation), and 
> that such behavior is treated as a crime, misdeed, an "ought not to." So 
> even if one grants that there are natural urges and appetites that drive 
> some (not all) people to break the rules, this is still everywhere perceived 
> and considered as a breaking of the rules. Ergo it is at least as "natural" 
> to insist on and impose such rules as it is to have urges to stray.

Yes, that is another way to state exactly what I was trying to suggest. Yet another way of saying what I was trying to get at is that everything anyone does is in a sense natural. It is natural for people to be monogamous, but also natural for people to be polygamous or celibate (in the original narrow sense of being unmarried). It is natural for people to confine their sexual activity to the marriage(s) to which they have contracted, and it is natural for people to be adulterous. It is natural for people to be heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. If people do X, then X is part of human nature. If some people do X and some do not do X, then both doing X and not doing X are part of human nature. Since one cannot both do X and not do X, it should be clear that having it in one's nature to do X (or to refrain from X) does not make it necessary that one do (or refrain from doing) X. As Dan rightly points it, having something as one's nature points only to a potentiality, not an actuality. I agree with Mencius on this. (I am, incidentally, also very much in agreement with Xunzi; contrary to the usual depiction of them as being diametrically opposed, I find they are in agreement on just about everything that they both saw as important.)

Now given that people have a multiplicity of potentials to act, only some of which will ever be realized, I find it difficult to see how any of those potential actions can be called naturally evil (or malum in se). I find it problematic to impose the notion or good and evil onto nature. I know that most of us do it all the time, but my claim is that when we do so, we are doing so gratuitously and irrationally, that is, without any warrant in the form of facts about the world. Putnam's efforts to problematize the fact/value distinction notwithstanding, I still find myself stuck with the notion that it is useful to be mindful of the difference between statements of fact and statements of value. When one says a natural action is blameworthy, then one is stating one's own personal evaluation of something in nature, but one is saying nothing whatsoever about the facts of nature. It is not a fact of nature that homosexuality is disgusted; rather, it is a fact about some human beings that they get disgusted by homosexuality. (For "homosexuality", plug in your favorite virtue or vice, and for "disgusting" plug in an evaluative adjective of your choice.)

As an historical point, I think it is unlikely that the Buddha or many of his Asian followers were as fastidious as most modern people are in being mindful of fact/value distinctions. From a modern (non-Putnamian) perspective, Buddhists tended to blur the distinction between fact and value, which means that they tended to see values as facts about the world. I imagine (and imagining is really all any of us can really do when interpreting the words of ancient writers) that ancient Buddhists believed that a careful observer could discover moral facts. At least some ancient Buddhists might have been shocked to hear someone say that what is really going on is that people have personal values that they project onto the natural world and then erroneously believe that they have discovered them in the natural world. My guess is that a lot of ancient Buddhists would have found nothing at all odd in George W. Bush's statement "The reason I find homosexuality disgusting is because it IS disgusting." (For the record, I'm not sure GWB ever said exactly that, but he did make statements of the same form as that.)

Richard Hayes