What is Buddhist Ethics?

The primacy of moral phenomenology

Buddhism includes specific methods for developing moral virtue, such as mettā bhāvanā, lojong and tonglen, and chöd. I have personally found these valuable. I don’t know of anything closely analogous in other systems. I think if Buddhism has anything distinctively valuable to offer ethics, it is this.

These practices don’t count as either “ethics” or “morality,” exactly, though. That is, they are not a system of principles that provide justifications for morality; nor are they moral rules or virtues.

From David Chapman’s essay, Traditional Buddhism Has No Ethical System

To someone looking at Buddhist ethics from the outside, it can often look like a kind of virtue ethics — here’s a bunch of positive moral qualities that we should cultivate in various ways. I don’t think that’s quite right. That’s because right action is about maximum responsiveness to the needs of the particular situation¹. And those needs could very much contradict any specific virtue. For example, patience is one of the Paramitas (“The 6 Perfections”). Could there be situations in which, instead, impatience is actually the most skillful and responsive way to act? Absolutely!² That isn’t to say that in some broad sense cultivating compassion, love etc. isn’t a good thing. Of course it is! Yet it seems to co-exist with a strand among Buddhist teachers that some call “crazy wisdom” - where teachers seem to flamboyantly violate ethical precepts. Some might say those violations are skillful means, while others would say those violations are extremely harmful and evidence of teacher perfidy. There are clearly obvious cases of the latter, so we have to be very careful here, but there is something deeper going on as well.

So in the spirit of trying to thread the needle³, I want to try and unpack this. There is a standard view of morality that says that we should set up a system of rules and then follow them. Those rules might be Judeo-Christian, or Utilitarian, etc. In some cases there may be a moral psychology dimension tied to this — that violations of the rules should make us feed bad, or we should exercise forbearance or caution prospectively in avoiding bad actions. We might also suggest that punishment for ourselves or others who violate those rules is warranted.

However, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of these systems - one of which is that universalizing these systems in practice seems to lead to (morally) bad outcomes. Extreme utilitarianism implying things like the repugnant conclusion is a great example of this. This can (and does) lead to real world harms⁴. Another problem is that trying to act morally from Self can lead to a kind of burnout⁵. Note: my claim here is NOT that no one should follow moral rules, or that moral rules are always bad. Instead my claim is that there’s a better alternative available to at least some people (maybe you, since you’re reading this). Here’s a quote illustrating the idea:

In Christian Ethics by Waldo Beach and H. Richard Neibuhr occurs the following wonderful passage about St. Paul:

In a sense Paul’s whole thought on the law may be interpreted as a development of Jesus’ idea that a good tree brings forth good fruit and that no amount of external conduct can make men really good. In so far as the imperative moral law remains something external to man, an affair of “You ought” and “You ought not,” it cannot make him good at the core; it cannot transform his motives. The imperative form of the law, not its content, is a relative thing which presupposes the presence in man of a desire contrary to the intention of the law. Moreover, the giving of injunctions to men is likely to arouse their self-will and so tempt them to transgress the law. Where there are imperatives, adults as well as children are tempted to see how close they can come to the edge of the forbidden. Again, imperative law cannot produce that innate, unforced graciousness of conduct evident in Jesus Christ which is so much more attractive and so much more fruitful than self-conscious goodness.

Smullyan, Raymond M.. The Tao Is Silent (pp. 80-81)

So, there is this other kind of moral phenomenology — acting from what Beach and Neibuhr call “unforced graciousness of conduct” — that could provide a different basis for acting. This basis has many names - e.g. Rigpa, Buddha-nature, the Tao, the Ground of Being, the Nature of Mind, Pure Consciousness, Dharmakaya. The claim is that coming from that place, with maximum responsiveness to the specifics of the situation, a person can be an inexhaustible font of goodness in the world. Establishing natural awakeness as the basis for your operation in the world (i.e. holding the View) has the consequence of creating new affordances for action⁶. In other words, holding the View creates new possibilities of ways we can be ethically responsive in the world. Moreover, the View, because it’s free of self-fixation, is inexhaustible — it doesn’t burn out. And because it’s maximally responsive, it isn’t bound by any particular set of rules. Which is why in some situations it can look like “crazy wisdom.” Sometimes being appropriately responsive might be getting angry, or impatient⁷.

Buddhist ethics, then, isn’t about coming up with rules for action, and isn’t reducible to some set of specific virtues. It’s much more radical than that. It posits that by establishing awake awareness in all times and all situations, the possibility for maximally moral conduct will naturally arise⁸.

1. In that sense it’s closer to moral particularlism

2. Coming up with such an example is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

3. The classic Buddhist move of the Middle Way

4. Here’s a small example from an interview with an ex-Effective Altruist: “Also there’s a lot of interesting behavioral norms in EA as a community that I disagreed with. So, for example, there is this big emphasis on maximizing your time and how you spend your marginal extra hour, whether it should be doing this or doing that. And I felt sometimes that that was kind of toxic behavior. There were people, there were higher-ups in the EA movement who would hire assistants, like young students or recent graduates who really just wanted to work in EA and were willing to get any job to be part of the movement, and they would have them picking up their laundry because they’d say my marginal hour is better spent working on this AI issue than on doing my own laundry.”

5. Again, there are great stories of EAs who end up depressed and overwhelmed by the perceived weight of their duties. That’s not a great way to live and is likely not sustainable!

6. This way of thinking of View as affordances for action comes from Ari Nielsen.

7. Reminds me of Borges’ short story positing that Judas, not Jesus, was the savior of mankind because he took upon himself the greatest sin, betrayal of Jesus, in order to redeem humanity. Getting a messiah killed might be the ultimate example of Crazy Wisdom :-)

8. I really wanted to end on that high note, but I can’t help but say that there’s something unresolved here I haven’t touched — which is what I’ve previously called “bigness / smallness”. It seems parochial and small-minded to limit the horizon of our good actions to just calling our mothers every Sunday. On the other hand, a larger horizon is a recipe for deep uncertainty about the effects of our action and can lead to ends justifying some horrible means. It seems insufficient to respond to that tension with “Just rest in Rigpa and everything will work out!”. Sure, but where should I give my charitable donations? Should I try to solve some big problem out there in the world? A Buddhist answer to this challenge might be — yeah, you should try; that’s skillful means, and getting smarter about how to do good in the world is a never ending task. But before you try and solve that, make sure your own moral psychology is sorted out first. And don’t forget to be kind to your friends and family.