Ethics [ed: George Matthews]

[Updated July 2019]

This thread is for discussions related to the Ethics book of the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series. See the full project summary.

Book Summary:
This part explores some of the major approaches to philosophical ethics including relativism, subjectivism, divine command theory, natural law theory, virtue ethics, egoism, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian deontology and contemporary critical approaches to the tradition. Each chapter will include an outline of the position(s) in question, an introduction of some its chief historical proponents, a critical analysis of argument in favor and against the view and contemporary cases showing its continued relevance. Throughout we will seek to include voices not typically included in discussions of these topics in ethics.

How to participate:
This book is nearing publication. Weā€™re currently looking for copyeditors and formatters to assist with formatting and layout in Pressbooks

If youā€™d like to volunteer, comment below!

Relevant Documents:
Book Outline ā€“ This doc gives an overview of the part and details each of the chapters, as the book was envisioned when the project started.
Chapter Assignments ā€“ This gives a list of the chapters written for the book and the authors.
Author Guide ā€“ Read this guide to find out more about what committing to author a chapter involves.

Team: @geoslack (part editor), @clhendricksbc (lead editor), @zoe (Rebus project manager) ā€¦ and you?

OUTLINE

Here is a tentative outline for this section as I envision it at the outset. I am assuming this will all get refined and modified somewhat by authors and others involved in this project. But hereā€™s a start at least.

Each of the the following chapters would have a similar sort of framework involving the main presentation, some key arguments (perhaps integrated into the text, perhaps as sidebars or separate subsections), some account of important figures from the history of philosophy, and a few case studies which could either come from real stories that bring up relevant issues in ethics or could be made up examples or thought experiments to illustrate the main points.

The order of exposition is not strictly historical but more ā€œdialecticalā€ in the sense that it seems to me at least to follow a certain logical development. (Sorry I spent way too much time reading Hegel as a grad student!)

Chapter 1: Itā€™s All Relative Isnā€™t It?

This opening chapter would deal with the kinds of issues surrounding discussion of philosophical approaches to ethics that students tend to have at the outset (in my experience at least). In particular it would provide an overview of ethics as a discipline, a provocative example or two to raise the questions of how to live oneā€™s life or what the right thing to do is, and address the following theoretical positions:

  • Ethical relativism: included here would be a discussion of the relationship between ethics and cultural norms as well as the question of the universality of ethical principles. Explicit philosophical positions covered would be cultural relativism and ethical subjectivism.

  • Ethics and religion: this section would deal with the relationship between ethical rules and other modes of social authority, in particular religion. It would deal with Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory as explicit positions in normative ethics. The reason to include it in this chapter is that even though religious approaches to ethics are often presented as foils to relativism, in my view they share with relativism the idea that there is some non-negotiable authoritative source of ethical rules which is not answerable to human reason.

Chapter 2: Ethics and Self-Interest

This chapter explores approaches to ethics that are suggested by the demise of traditional authority as a legitimate basis of ethical norms both in theoretical terms of the failure of the positions outlined in the previous chapter and in historical terms with the advent of modernity. Here I would include discussions of:

  • Psychological Egoism: is altruism even possible given that humans are animals who make our own decisions? Here Max Stirner might be the focus.

  • Ethical Egoism: is setting oneā€™s own interests aside ever really such a good idea? This section could examine a range of positions from Ayn Randā€™s arguments against altruism to quasi-Darwinian arguments about the value of competition, to arguments along the lines of Hayek that capitalist market mechanisms produce socially optimal outcomes.

  • Social Contract theory: Even though this would also be covered in the chapter on political philosophy it seems worth covering here as an account of morality as grounded in convention based on the self-interest of free and rational agents.

Chapter 3: The Good versus the Right

This chapter would look at universalist ethical theories focusing especially on utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics. Rather than treat each in a separate chapter I like the idea of treating them as attempts to articulate and defend widely accepted but differing (and often conflicting) universalist principles, ā€œDo what benefits others,ā€ and ā€œDo the right thing.ā€

  • Utiltarianism: A consequentialist approach to ethics that treats ethical reasoning as an attempt to maximize benefit to all affected. Here Bentham and Millā€™s contrasting approaches could be explored along with the major objections to utilitarianism.

  • Kantian deontology: Kantā€™s attempt to defend the idea that ethical action is an end in itself; the three formulations of the categorical imperative; the standard objections to Kantā€™s claim of the exceptionless character of moral rules.

Chapter 4: Embodying Ethics

This chapter would explore different ways of looking at the relationship of ethics to whole human beings. At least that is my sense of a common thread that might run between:

  • Virtue Ethics: Aristotleā€™s account of the socially situated nature of ethical action and judgment.

  • Moral Development and Gender: including a discussion of Kolhberg, Gilligan and more recent feminist approaches to ethics.

  • Buddhist ethics: perhaps this is biting off to much but it might be nice to include an account of a non-Western approach to ethics. I see Buddhist ethics as an attempt to articulate an ethics based not so much on a theoretical position one might take concerning ethics but on the attempt to embody ethics in practice in a very broad sense of that term.

Chapter 5: Expanding the Circle

This chapter would introduce applied ethics by looking at attempts to expand the scope of ethics beyond human beings. Thus it could include sections on the following topics that draw on positions previously discussed:

  • Animals and ethics: here there could be a discussion of the question of the ethical consideration of non-human animals, animal welfare, and animal rights positions.

  • Environmental ethics: here there could be a discussion of whether ethical consideration should extend to other species, all living beings, ecosystems, etc.

Well that should be plenty to get the ball rolling. All comments, questions, objections welcome!

-George

1 Like

Oh manā€¦somehow I missed the email notification that you had posted this. Or maybe I am not subscribed to this thread so I didnā€™t get it. At any rate, I just saw that this is here and I will reply more in full as soon as I have time as well as post the link to the larger book thread and invite others to comment as well. Iā€™m so sorry I missed this!

@clhendricksbc No worries, I had just attributed the radio silence to mid-semesterā€¦

Finally getting back to thisā€¦the term is slowing down for us (next week is the last week!) so Iā€™m able to pull my head above water a bit.

I think generally this looks very good! Just a couple of questions:

  1. I donā€™t yet see how relativism, like religious ethics, has the idea of ā€œsome non-negotiable authoritative source of ethical rules which is not answerable to human reason.ā€ Is it that ethical relativists think ethics requires such a thing and then say that it doesnā€™t exist?

  2. I am not sure Iā€™m really following the thread of chapter 4. Maybe thatā€™s because when I teach ethics I always do so by focusing on three ā€œkindsā€ of theories: consequentialist, deonotological, and virtue ethics. I donā€™t separate the latter off as somehow connecting to whole human beings, but a sort of third kind of ethical theory. Still, I think I can see what you mean. But then Iā€™m not certain that feminist ethics necessarily all fall into looking at ethics in the context of a whole human life. At least, Iā€™m not seeing it right away.

  3. I agree that it would be great to get some non-Western ethics in there. I donā€™t know much about Buddhist ethics so I donā€™t have a lot to contribute about that, except to say that one would need to somehow delineate how it differs from the religious ethics discussed in chapter 1. And it would be interesting if we could look at some other form of non-Western ethics, though thatā€™s an area I know little about.

I missed this table of contents earlier also and appreciate the encouragement to take a look. Here are a few questions:

  1. Like clhendricksbc, Iā€™m also unsure about the use of ā€œanswerable to reasonā€ in chapter 1. As I understand the view, Natural Law theorists (e.g. Aquinas) think that the natural law is an ordinance of reason. So characterizing their view as relying on something ā€œnot answerable to human reasonā€ seems strange to me. Is ā€œhumanā€ there to make room for the natural lawā€™s reliance on divine reason?

  2. To what traditional sources of authority does the description of chapter 2 refer? Iā€™m concerned about characterizing those sources of authority as failures because at least some of them (e.g. natural law) have modern/contemporary proponents.

@clhendricksbc

RE: 1. what I am getting at there is the idea that relativism, like Divine Command Theory, assumes that moral judgments are based on pre-given precepts, and hence are not subject to reflective evaluation. Both are meta-ethical views that assume that the authoritative nature of value judgments must originate outside of the individual. One is indoctrinated into oneā€™s culture according to relativists without any possibility of standing outside of culture to evaluate its dictates. Likewise, and more obviously so for DCT.

RE 2. Maybe I am stretching it there to have everything neatly fit into four chapters! But the way I understand Aristotleā€™s virtue ethics is that the ethical agent is not anything like a modern isolated ā€œsubjectā€ making rule based judgments about right and wrong, but is an agent situated in a political and social context, who has, hopefully, cultivated habitual ways of action and has learned how to make moral judgment based on this kind of experience.

And that relates to your third point as well, about including Buddhist ethics here rather than under the heading of religion. Since Buddhism is non-theistic, and puts so much emphasis on moral precepts being something that have to be enacted through constant practice and cultivation of awareness, I thought it fit better here, rather than with approaches that see religion as a source of moral authority, rather than spiritual self-knowledge.

Maybe thus whole narrative structure that I am suggesting here is a bit forced, but the basic idea is this:
Section 1 deals with ethics as something learned and/or assimilated from authoritative sources.
Section 2 takes the modern turn to self-interest as the orienting principle and looks at theories that argue that appeals to self-interest are necessary and sufficient for morality to have any bite.
Section 3 considers universalistic moral theories that argue for the good of all (consequentialism) or what is intrinsically the right thing to do (Kant and other deontological theories) as the basis of moral judgment.
Section 4 considers approaches that take into account how morality is but one part of human life embedded in real social relations (Aristotle, also modern communitarians), gender roles, and a larger spiritual quest for self-understanding and realization. (Or maybe its just a portmanteau category of ā€œeverything else that seems worth talking about in an introduction to ethics.ā€

@kmf.aho
Yes, I see your point about Natural Law Theory and its explicit appeal to reason. But as I understand Aquinas, Reason is not to be understood as the reflective capacity of agents who are capable of autonomous action and thought, but as the capacity to read the book of nature as created by God and which provides us with a kind of template for what a moral life looks like. Maybe Iā€™m wrong on that, but I see Aquinas as essentially appealing to a divinely given order of things as the ultimate source of the normative force of ethical rules.

As for your question about chapter 2, I am thinking of the opening moves made by Hobbes in the Leviathan, where he essentially says, lets assume for the sake of argument that there is no religious authority to bind us, and there are no generally accepted and practiced cultural norms either. How would we run our lives in that case?

And the failure I am referring to, is essentially the failure of appeals to authority as the basis of moral norms, as pointed out by Plato in the Euthyphro. That there are contemporary defenders of both Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory might be something worth mentioning in the text, but I am not as concerned with accounting for all of the details of contemporary moral debate as of telling a somewhat simplified, but hopefully not wildly inaccurate story of the development of philosophical ethics.

Again I am not wedding to the overall narrative structure here, but this is an approach I have found helpful for opening up moral theory to undergraduates.

@geoslack Thanks for clarifyingā€“your point about telling a developmental story rather than accounting for the contemporary debate is quite helpful.

Classes have ended for our Spring term and I finally can breathe again and think further about this!

I think the structure here could work, though the more I think about it the more I wonder if it would be good to have a structure that hews more to what many textbooks already have, only because that is going to look familiar to lots of people and what we want to make sure to do is to have people look at this and think they can recognize how they might teach with it. I think the sections on self-interest and consequentialism/deontology fit that quite well, though it sounds like at least Karl and I had some questions about sections 1 and 4.

I typically see sections on relativism including both cultural relativism and subjectivism, and the latter doesnā€™t quite fit the narrative about how part 1 fits together I think, even though subjectivism is in the relativism chapter. Subjectivism doesnā€™t quite fit what George describes in a reply last week as holding that the ā€œauthoritative nature of value judgments must originate outside of the individual.ā€ Or maybe Iā€™m still not quite getting the point! Which is certainly possibleā€¦ :slight_smile:

And now that I think about it further, maybe itā€™s just part 1 that I am still struggling with. I have frequently seen Gilliganā€™s view of feminist ethics connected to virtue ethics, and maybe other feminist ethics could be connected to the ā€œwhole personā€ in some way too. I donā€™t know enough about Buddhist ethics to comment on whether I think that fits there!

Iā€™m going to ping a few people on our list who specifically said they had an interest in ethics to comment here as well. And possibly put a call out on social media for more volunteers that specialize in ethics if need be. What we are going to need to do soon is to find volunteer authors!

Iā€™ll weigh in. I may have a different perspective from some: I teach philosophy at a college, not a university.

To me, this seems like a lot. I suppose, since students wonā€™t be paying for the text, that this might not matter much, but inasmuch as we shorten chapters to get more in, Iā€™d suggest that we keep in mind the 13-week nature of courses.

In my course, we tackle one philosopher per week, and read a short selection. I like hewing close to the primary source, although I confess I canā€™t say why. Nobody does it in physics, say, but we always read the greats in the classes I took, and so I get the students to read the greats in mineā€“mind you, itā€™s not a lot of the greats, just a littleā€”10 pages, say. Thatā€™s usually more than enough for my students.

Because reading the greats is hard, I do two things: I radically shorten them, and then I ā€˜translateā€™ them into plain, 21st-century English. (Itā€™s barbarism, I know!). Then, I add exegetical comments in the margins, to clarify and contextualize the original.

Iā€™m not saying that we should do thisā€“far from it, because my book fell stillborn from the press. But me, I would vote for integrating some primary sources in there.

1 Like

I had some time to look at the outline and follow the discussion. Here are some comments:

@adam I believe the idea is that this book should be modular and the selection of parts to be worked through should be up to the lecturer/reader. With that said, I think including original texts (where possible) with exegetical notes could work.

As for the outline itself: I think one thing that could be added to every section is a critique, that is, aside from showing the successes of any particular approach, the difficult cases or unsolved problems should be introduced as well. I believe this would convey to the students the need for careful thought and create a habit of examining the ideas theyā€™re learning about. (Of course whether itā€™s desirable to teach this attitude can be seen as an applied ethics issue in and of itself, but I canā€™t see a better option than majority consensus when writing a book as a group. I do think itā€™s a good idea myself.)

As for a more specific critique:

  • If I understood geoslack correctly, the idea is to present ethical relativism as somehow postulating that there must be an authoritative source of ethical principles/laws. This might be a vocabulary difference between what I was taught, but I am pretty certain that a pretty significant portion of relativists (metaethical ones) would actually deny the existence of a set, ā€œtrueā€ authority on what the right thing is. This seems to be actually what is said later in the explanation given by geoslack: ā€œOne is indoctrinated into oneā€™s culture according to relativists without any possibility of standing outside of culture to evaluate its dictates.ā€
  • RE: Buddhism. The subject is vast, but I cannot agree with the statement ā€œBuddhism is non-theisticā€. There exist multiple branches of Buddhism and they have varied views regarding the supernatural. There is a whole category of beings, called devas, who have various supernatural powers. Some of them have physical bodies and inhabit various, stratified heavens. The majority of Theravada lay Buddhist practice aims at ensuring a more likely rebirth in one of those heavens by accumulating good karma, according to Trainor (Buddhism: The Illustrated Guide, OUP, 2004), and Fowler (Buddhism: Beliefs and Practices, Sussex University Press, 1999) asserts that being a monk is viewed as assuring better likelihood of a good rebirth. Also, in Tibetan Buddhism there exists the notion of supernatural powers of various rituals, such as exorcisms or symbolic sacrifice (https://library.brown.edu/cds/BuddhistTempleArt/buddhism3.html), as well as healing rituals, complete with prayers to the Medicine Buddha. In conclusion, I think the ā€œnon-theisticā€ claim is at least misleading.

Thanks for the detailed responses. Iā€™ll address the various issues people raise in a few days. Itā€™s been an insanely busy semester for me and there are a couple of extra-curricular things I am doing this week as well that have been occupying my time. So sometime this weekend Iā€™ll be able to respond.

In the mean time, I should fess up that I have a whole bunch of material ā€“ sort of a free online ethics text that Iā€™ve been working on and putting out in various forms over the last several years. And thatā€™s the basis for my perhaps not-quite-standard presentation and taxonomy of positions in normative ethics that Iā€™ve been outlining here. I havenā€™t mentioned it thus far because a) I didnā€™t want to slam it into a project that somebody else is leading, b) it seems like too much material to include here, c) I am trying to get one version of it ported over to a blog format for use in classes soon and didnā€™t really want to make a condensed version of it as well, and d) I wanted to leave space for others to contribute here, since this is maybe more of a collaborative project.

Anyway, you can have a look at the current state of it here: http://www.6worlds.net/index.php/ethicsbook/. I am using b2evolution blogging software (free and open source) for it as well as blogs that I use in other courses.

More later,
George

Just a quick note on including original texts:

There are a couple of things we could do. We could include some selections in the book itself or have a kind of accompanying set of public domain or openly licensed materials that people can include or not, or select portions of themselves.

Whichever way we go we would want to be consistent for the whole book. I favour the latter option just for the sake of keeping the text relatively short and avoiding trying to figure out exactly which parts of original texts to excerpt (many people disagree on which parts of Plato, or Mill, or Kant to include!). But Iā€™m open to being persuaded otherwise by a good argument! :slight_smile:

The plan here is that the open textbook will be easily modifiable, so if people want to excerpt parts of the original texts and include within the textbook itself, that should be easy to do.

@clhendricksbc We have a couple of anthology projects on the go that could provide a model for creating an accompanying set of texts, if you do decide to go in that direction. It would be something that could serve other/future philosophy textbooks as well, I suspect!

@clhendricksbc The narrative here is kind of loose, but the basic idea was to include in the first chapter a bunch of perspectives that say that ethical value judgments arenā€™t based much on reflection, but rather on some kind of pre-reflective reaction that doesnā€™t filter responses through much deliberation. When we make value judgments according to relativists, we are expressing a viewpoint we were indoctrinated into by those with whom we share a culture; when we do so according to subjectivists we are reacting emotionally, and when we follow the dictates of God according to Divine Command Theory, or what the light of natural reason shows us according to Natural Law Theory we are similarly not really deliberating but more responding on the basis of something kind of incontrovertible.

I am starting to think that I should drop this four chapter scheme and follow Scottā€™s lead by organizing each chapter around a central question like so:

Chapter 1: Isnā€™t it all a matter of perspective? This would deal with relativism and subjectivism, both of which claim that the answer to this question is yes. It would consider arguments in favor and those against these theories.

Chapter 2: What is the relation between ethics and religion? This would deal with Divine Command Theory and Natural Law Theory, but not with Buddhist ethics for reasons Iā€™ll get to in response to unfalsifyā€™s comments. Here the question is the question of authority, of a putative divine command giver or that of nature as revealed by a divinely tuned-up reason.

Chapter 3: Whatā€™s in it for me? This would deal with egoism and social contract theory. The first denies that ethics is compatible with self-interest and that self-interest is either built in to human decision making (psychological egoism) or that crucial values are best attained by giving self-interest free reign (ethical egoism). The second explicitly tries to show how the rules of the social game are conventions that are warranted by our real or hypothetical acceptance of them as solving certain problems we all confront as essentially self-interested, rational agents.

Chapter 4: But donā€™t others count too? This would deal with utilitarianism and Kantian ethics (each could also have a chapter on its own) as attempts to justify and explore the implications of more universalistic approaches to ethics.

Chapter 5: Is ethics really all about following rules? This is where I see virtue ethics with its emphasis on the socially embedded character or moral training and judgment; Gilliganā€™s ethics of care with its claim that the focus on rule-following as the apogee of moral development is a non-gender neutral approach to understanding moral development; and Buddhist ethics which isnā€™t so much about following rules (even though there are lots of rules in various version of Buddhism) but of attempting to realize and embody various ā€œperfectionsā€ such as wisdom, compassion, generosity, mindfulness and loving-kindness.

@unfalsify Yes you are right that Buddhism has a vast panoply of various gods and demi-gods and divine boddhissatvas and hell-realms and so on. And yes, one way to understand karma is in terms of explicit metaphysical claims about past lives and a cosmology that embraces whole-heartedly the notion of reincarnation. But, Iā€™d still maintain that neither are really at the heart of, or even really essential to Buddhist ethics and that Buddhism is still in a certain sense non-theistic.

I canā€™t get into a full-blown defense here since I have class soon, so let me just cite a few points. First in the Pali canon which is the basis of Theravada Buddhism and also taken seriously by both the Mahayana and Vajrayana wings of Buddhism there is the famous ā€œparable of the arrowā€ in which the Buddha (a mortal human being by all accounts) dismisses metaphysical speculation about life after death and the cosmos as a whole to be irrelevant to the real task at hand which is the ending of suffering. Then there is the Parinibbana Sutta which reports on the Buddhaā€™s last day alive and his last words to his followers which are basically, ā€œbe lights unto yourselves, do not listen to doctrines, or authorities, but only to your own experience.ā€ There are similar cases throughout the canon to that effect. Yes they are often told with lots of very supernatural fanfare and talk of miraculous occurrences, but they are also constantly punctuated by the refrain that ā€œthe only thing I teach is suffering and the ending of suffering,ā€ or the doctrines of the eight-fold path (which makes no mention of God in the western-monotheistic sense of a supernatural and supremely powerful personal being to whom we owe obedience and allegiance).

So yes Buddhism does have a vast mythological literature, and that mythology is often invoked in rituals, but they are not held to express doctrines that must be believed to guarantee salvation. It is in that sense that Buddhism is non-theistic ā€“ there is no God of Godā€™s demanding things of us. And its ethics is much more akin to virtue ethics I would argue with its constant emphasis on wisdom and compassion as the foundation of a well-spent human life. The four noble truths are 1. there is suffering, 2. the cause of suffering is desire, 3. there is a way to end suffering, 4. that way is the eightfold path. Thatā€™s as central a doctrine as I think you can get in Buddhism, and it makes no mention of divine powers governing the universe.

Maybe part of the issue here is the somewhat arbitrary category of religion, which is a pretty modern conception and really includes many things that do not always appear together in many religions such as mythology, ritual marking of time and human life, a conception of and way of approaching the sacred, attempts to explain social, moral and physical reality, and the various institutional trappings of world religions. The bottom line for me is that yes there are many gods in Buddhist literature, but nothing akin to the God of the Abrahamic religions in terms of a being who is the creator and governor of the universe.

Anyway, perhaps there are too many hedges required here to make this case, and there are versions of Buddhist practice that are much more devotional in nature than Iā€™ve been emphasizing, and so maybe Buddhist ethics is not so appropriate for this text. I donā€™t knowā€¦

I am by no means an expert on ethics, but I am glad to see that this chapter is coming into shape!

For one thing, George, donā€™t you mean ā€˜sectionsā€™ instead of chapters? It doesnā€™t seem that important, but I wanted clarification on this in relation to the purported length of the book.

With regards to including a section on Buddhism, I would stress that this is essential. True cultural diversity requires tackling age-old questions from multiple perspectives. If the entire discussion of ethics includes only Western thinkers, we would be tacitly supporting the dominance of Western thought in academia. Just in Vancouver, where I am located, there is an increasing population of Asian students. It is only fair that their cultural heritage be considered as well.

To that end, does anybody here know a lot about Taoism? The little I know seems to imply that the discipline is both metaphysical and ethical, though I am not clear on precisely why.

I would also like to see mention of Nietzscheā€™s treatment of ethics through reference to The Genealogy of Morals, if only because that is the only ethics text that I have studied in University!

I am also motivated by this potential inclusion because it would be amazing to get permission to include this webcomic on self-driving cars from a Deontological and Will to Power perspective as a contemporary issue:

@geoslack
I think we should spend a significant amount of time defining ā€œnon-theisticā€ if we are to present Buddhism as non-theistic to the readers. For most people, I presume, a religion which posits the existence of supernatural creatures which have some degree of control over alternate realms and which can (according to some texts) even interact with this one is definitely theistic.

Second, you call the Buddha (Iā€™m assuming you mean Gautama Buddha) a ā€œmortal human being by all accountsā€. This is quite puzzling considering that the Buddha is described as having multiple supernatural powers, and on one occasion travels into Brahma godā€™s realm to lecture him. (Brahma-Nimantanika Sutta, also a part of Pali Canon, mind you)

Third, you describe Buddhism as practically doctrine-less, in the sense that there are no specific beliefs which one must hold to attain salvation. This is a particularly cleverly-worded sentence, considering that beliefs are not the only thing Buddhism is about, and in fact much more emphasis, enlightenment-wise, is put on practice. To this end, we can certainly say that there are ways believed to be much more efficient and reliable, like leading a monastic life or having an enlightened teacher - Sariputta leaped one degree closer to sainthood by listening to one verse from Assaji. (Upatissa-pasine from Vinaya Pitaka, also part of the Pali Canon) Thereā€™s even sort of a road-map for achieving enlightenment in Theravada, in the form of four stages of enlightenment. Similarly, thereā€™s definitely things one is absolutely forbidden from doing certain things (matricide, patricide, attempting to kill an Arhat, injuring a Buddha, creating a schism in a monastic community), and doing any of these will inevitably result in being reborn in Avici (a hell of constant torment). On this ground, I think that traditional Buddhist ethics is in places much closer to traditional Christian ethics, in the sense of carrot-and-stick treatment of behaviour.

The conclusion, for me, is that there is a multitude of ways one can interpret the Buddhist texts, and history shows that this has happened. This isnā€™t surprising, considering that Buddhism shares with Hinduism the approach of being all-encompassing and pluralistic. The readers, some of which might have a rosy view of the religion, should also be acquainted with its less pleasant dogmas present in some of its schools.

@sebastian-higherlearning
I think itā€™s a bit hyperbolic to say that being uncertain about including a discussion of a very broad subject in a short section is ā€œtacitly supportingā€ any dominance.

Iā€™m not an expert on Taoism, but there are metaphysical claims made in some of its texts, and it features some esotericism (alchemy and such), depending on which source you consult. As far as I know, there is no central authority, so itā€™s not really possible to nail anything down as ā€œdefinitely Taoistā€.

@unfalsify
Thanks for the detailed response. I do not disagree with any of what you are saying, but I do think we should keep things in perspective here in terms of this project. We are putting together an introductory textbook in philosophy that includes a section on ethical theory from a variety of perspectives. A certain amount of caricature is inevitable in this undertaking. Just like will not have space in the discussion of Divine Command Theory or the section on Natural Law Theory to do more than merely mention that some contemporary Protestants endorse something like Divine Command Theory and that Natural Law Theory continues to be central to the Catholic Churchā€™s understanding of ethics, we will not have the space to do anything but very briefly mention some of the very basics of Buddhism as a background for looking at what it (or one version of it) might have to contribute to philosophical discussions of ethics. Yes, Buddhism is a vast and complex religion (if it is even a singular thing or a religion, both of which are subjects of vigorous debate among scholars and adherents). There is a ton of magical thinking in Buddhism as well, not to mention reactionary politics at times, and plenty of other dirt, just as there is in the Western monotheistic religions which will be very briefly touched on in the relevant sections of the text. But I really donā€™t think, beyond maybe listing a number of books for further reading at the end of each chapter, that we really need to get into this material in the presentation itself.

The question here, as we are figuring out what to include in this text, is whether or not there is something that we might reasonably called a Buddhist approach to ethics that can serve as an illustration of something a bit different than the other approaches weā€™ll be dealing with. Maybe we should limit this to contemporary, revisionist (and also to a certain degree Western) Buddhist ethics while pointing out that there is much, much more to Buddhism than what the likes of Stephen Batchelor, Joseph Goldstein, Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh have to say about ethics.

Regards,
George