[Buddha-l] Compassionate Violence?

[Richard Hayes]

On May 31, 2013, at 21:07, "Dan Lusthaus" <vasubandhu at earthlink.net> wrote:

> The issue is intent -- he has to be willing to go to hell for his deed, not act with presumed impunity.

A lot of ink is being spilled on this issue in recent years. Charles Goodman has argued that overdemandingness is a typical feature of consequentialism. Some modern consequentialists have argued that it is immoral not to exhaust all one's personal resources as long as there are people more needy than oneself. It is immoral, they say, to own a home as long as others are homeless, or to eat when others are starving, even if the others are thousands of miles away. Goodman claims that the bodhisattva literature makes similar demands on the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva, he says, must take the risk of going to hell for killing a wicked person who would do great evil if he were allowed to live.
And this over-demandingness, he says, shows that Mahāyāna is essentially consequentialist in nature.

Those who disagree with Goodman point out that there is no suggestion that anyone is required to be a bodhisattva; being a hero is voluntary, not compulsory. And heroism—doing more than one is obliged to do—is what one associates more with virtue ethics than with consequentialism. (Of course some virtue ethicists would argue that there is nothing virtuous in purposely endangering oneself, even to save others from danger; that is rashness, not bravery, and therefore fails to find the mean between excess and deficiency. But that is really another matter.)

So far I have never seen anything that settles this dispute between those who read Buddhism as virtue ethics and those who read it as consequentialism. It may be another logomachy.

Richard