Buddhist Ethics and Kant

Last updated on: July 8, 2009 at 11:33 pm by Justin Whitaker

Buddhist Ethics and Kant 2009-07-08T23:33:00-06:00 Justin Whitaker

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In preparation for my upcoming lecture at UWest (my father gave me lectures a lot, I prefer to think of myself as giving talks…), I’m working on further clarifying the similarities in Buddhist and Kantian Ethics.

We can begin with the question of “what?” What do I mean by Buddhist and Kantian Ethics? Since I’m speaking at a Buddhist University and most readers here are well-versed in Buddhism, I can skip the five-minute introduction to Buddhism lesson. It’s old, Indian, adapted to cultures throughout Asia, made its way to the West, and focuses on suffering and the end of suffering.

But what about Kant? Or, more precisely, “Kantian.” As mentioned in this review and elsewhere there is an important difference:

The former is answerable to “textual accuracy or exegetical standards of Kant interpretation” and the latter is answerable to “the standards for thinking philosophically about ethical theory,” while also being formulated in “the basic spirit” of Kant (p. 1).

Those of you who know the Mahayana claim to have created new scriptures “in the spirit” of the Buddha’s teachings will appreciate my use of Kantian ethics rather than Kant’s ethics. Kantian ethics are rooted firmly in Kant’s works, but rely on insights and discoveries of the past two centuries to iron out inconsistencies and correct Kant’s mistakes.

Our next question is “why?” Why try to show similarities and parallels in two ethical systems so far apart, both geographically and chronologically?

The first reason is that I found myself, some six years ago, reading and appreciating the works of both and, on a very clouded and basic level, seeing each as saying much the same thing. The second reason is that as I began reading academic accounts of Buddhist ethics, I found repeated misrepresentations of Kant. Based on these misrepresentations, Kant was dismissed as a potential interlocutor with Buddhist ethics.

Finally, for now, we can ask “How?” How can we even begin to compare these systems? That brings us to the above image.

I’ll begin with “mapping” Buddhist ethics on it. The circle represents Buddhist cosmology, or view of the world or world-system. In the middle is humanity. Moving upward are various sorts of gods, and above the circle is awakening/bodhi. Down below the middle line are the hell-realms.

The next thing we find in reading Buddhist ethics is a variety of teachings and stories showing beings development or decline within that system. E.g. So-and-so, as a human, did such-and-such bad deed and thus wound up in this hell or that. Other beings in lower realms are described rising up to the human realm and above. It’s important to note that rising into heaven realms or falling to hell realms does not require death and should not be taken in a strictly literal sense. The key is simply that one’s actions lead to progress toward or falling away from the goal of awakening.

Karma is the mechanism that ensures the connection between good deeds and good outcomes.

For Kant, humanity is also positioned in the middle, with heteronomy – a fancy word meaning ruled from outside oneself – at the bottom and autonomy, self-rule, at the top. For him, outside the system would be holy beings, those who have no external pressures. To explain what Kant meant by heteronomy, we can look at various reasons for not killing (an innocent). One might be, “because I’ll get in trouble.” This is heteronomous because it is based on fear of external retribution. Another reason could be, “because my religion says it’s wrong.” This is also heteronomous, because it relies on the external authority of that religion. For Kant, the autonomous reason for not killing is that it is simply wrong. And how do we know it is wrong? The Categorical Imperative gives us a process for thinking through such things.

First, is it universalizable? If I say yes in this case, I must also accept that I am saying that killing ME would be okay.

1b. A variation of this is that we think of our reasons becoming natural laws – meaning that we think of the regularity and overall harmony of the natural world and consider whether our actions are similar.
Next, does it treat the other as an end, not merely a means? This one is very often overlooked when people speak of Kantian ethics. To treat someone as an end means to act in such a way as to encourage and elicit his/her moral or rational faculties. Killing a person obviously cannot do this.
Third is to treat all beings as autonomous, meaning that while we understand that we are all pushed an pulled from outside forces, we also have to hold people responsible for their actions. Only in doing this can we acknowledge the possibility of progress on their parts. If we treat everyone as if they are merely products of their past, or society, or biology, we are denying all morality because nobody would actually be responsible for anything.

3b. A variation on this is the idea that we consider all beings as a kingdom of ends. For Kant and fellow Christians this would mean thinking of all people as citizens of heaven already, consider them acting as they would in heaven, free of avarice and greed. With this thought in mind, we treat all people seeing their goodness as most fundamental and their flaws as temporary problems to be overcome.

The more we can think through these things and treat people accordingly, the more autonomous we become. And with this we are both more rational and moral. The orderliness of natural laws are used as an analogy (with God as a final resort) to ensure that good acts bring good results. Morality is not willy-nilly. Be good, follow the above, and your life will get better. Both systems rely on after-lives to solve the theodicy problem.

That is a bit more content than I had intended to write about today, but hopefully the structure is still clear. Below, perhaps helpful and perhaps not, is a graph I included in my 2005 M.A. dissertation:

So to return to the question of how, we see that beginning with a broad cosmological approach shows a striking similarity in these systems of ethics. Starting here, we can begin to fill in the content to bring these systems into dialog with one another…

(with a few minor grammatical corrections at 11pm)

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