P
Portofino
Guest
No, you are right – the qualifier “intrinsic good” was muddying the waters, there. I was positing that the Buddhist --like the historic Gautama, who proposed a path that was a means to the end of avoiding suffering – actually promotes what we would call an instrumental conception of the good.
I’ve just found a statement to this effect, attributed to a Tibetan Buddhist named Ringu Tulku:
“It’s extremely important to understand how our actions are connected with their results. It’s like knowing that if you put your hand in a fire, your hand will get burned. It is not a moral issue of right versus wrong but a matter of understanding cause and effect. From the Buddhist point of view, positive and negative deeds are not a moral issue; they are based on recognizing that positive actions bring benefit, and negative actions bring harm.”
This seems congruent with what I know about the historical Gautuma, with the 4 noble truths and the 8-fold path that were instrumental in the sense that they posited a means to the end of abolishing suffering. He was not telling you how to be good, strictly speaking, but telling you how to make suffering cease and to be “liberated” from the wheel of rebirth (which he posited as painful).
Regarding normative traditions, another thing that puzzles me is the assumption that it is prudent not only to choose an existing normative tradition, but to adopt it wholesale – as opposed, perhaps, to combining aspects of one tradition with aspects of another, coming up with one’s very individual “hand of cards,” so to speak (like an individual investment portfolio
), with which one wishes to wager one’s conduct. But the buck has to stop somewhere. Yes, if someone tells you it’s gravely immoral to eat meat, you could be unconvinced yet also acknowledge that you could be wrong. You could refrain from meat, “just in case” (but that entails a pretty big sacrifice, if you tell yourself “life is hard enough as it is, and a nice piece of meat is one of the pleasures of living”; looked at from the opposite perspective, why take the chance of making that sacrifice if the universe may in fact not care whether you consume meat or not?). On the other hand, there are a lot of people in the world, telling you that a lot of different things are immoral (an SDA might view someone who celebrates Sunday Sabbath as immoral, or someone who drinks alcohol; a Hindu might believe that the consumption of beef will incur negative karma). At some point, I think one obviously has to follow up the issue of, “I may be wrong about this; I am not infallible” by considering the question, “but how probable do I think it is that I’m wrong about this?” and also, “is this a chance I’m willing to take – can I live with possibly being mistaken?” All of us will have to take that chance, insofar all of us are behaving immorally in someone’s eyes, and we can’t hedge our bets by refraining from every behavior that every long-standing normative tradition has considered to be immoral. There’s no completely “safe” way, I suppose, and some will be willing to take greater chances than others (ignoring the threat of hell is a chance one takes, though not dis-analagous to ignoring the threat of bad karma if one consumes the flesh of animals).