Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

He raises some interesting points about the current limitations of moral naturalism (of which I’m a supporter by the way — it’s clear by looking at our closest relatives that  our sense of morality has an evolutionary basis:

They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

These strike me as valid objections, and as areas that moral naturalists should be exploring

Read the rest of the article…

Related posts:

1. Beware of “moral people”
2. The moral life of babies
3. Slave of the passions

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?

Read more…

Related posts:

1. Beware of “moral people”
2. Moral naturalism
3. Wordless Wednesday — Boy on an Ethiopian Street

Whether you can be a vegan and eat animals seems like a bizarre question, like asking if you can be celibate and still have sex. The definition of a vegan is “a person who does not use or eat animal products,” after all. But Christopher Cox makes a good case in a recent Slate article for regarding oysters as compatible with a vegan diet.

Now of course oysters are animals. And vegans don’t eat animals. But why don’t vegans eat animals? The main point of veganism is to avoid causing suffering to sentient beings. A related reason is environmental reasons, since meat-eating is environmentally disastrous, but in a way that’s the same reason — avoiding causing harm. (Some people are vegan for health reasons, although those are not central to veganism, in my opinion — many people would still be vegans if doing so shaved a few months, or even years, from their lives.)

But what if there are animals that can’t feel pain? Cox points out that oysters fall into this category. And what if there were animals that had a neutral, or even positive, environmental impact? Again, oysters fit the bill.

This is what Cox has to say:

Oyster farms account for 95 percent of all oyster consumption and have a minimal negative impact on their ecosystems; there are even nonprofit projects devoted to cultivating oysters as a way to improve water quality. Since so many oysters are farmed, there’s little danger of overfishing. No forests are cleared for oysters, no fertilizer is needed, and no grain goes to waste to feed them—they have a diet of plankton, which is about as close to the bottom of the food chain as you can get. Oyster cultivation also avoids many of the negative side effects of plant agriculture: There are no bees needed to pollinate oysters, no pesticides required to kill off other insects, and for the most part, oyster farms operate without the collateral damage of accidentally killing other animals during harvesting. (Relatedly, although it’s possible to collect wild oysters sustainably, the same cannot be said for other bivalves like clams and mussels. These are often dredged from the seabed, disrupting an entire ecosystem. For that reason, it’s best to avoid them.)

Moreover, since oysters don’t have a central nervous system, they’re unlikely to experience pain in a way resembling ours—unlike a pig or a herring or even a lobster. They can’t move, so they don’t respond to injury like those animals do, either. Even monkish ethicist Peter Singer sanctioned oyster eating in Animal Liberation…

I’m assuming that Cox has his facts right, and that oysters don’t in fact have central nervous systems and can’t feel pain. That wouldn’t be surprising, given that oysters live like plants. Think about it. What’s the point of feeling pain? It’s so that you can withdraw from a harmful stimulus. If, like plants, you’re literally rooted to the spot, then you can’t withdraw from a source of pain, and so there’s no point evolving a central nervous system that can feel pain. A leaf being munched on by a caterpillar may have a chemical response to the damage that leads to increased lignification and the production of nasty tasting chemicals, but that’s not the same as pain.

Now, there’s an interesting thing, here, which is that often ideas of purity and impurity creep into veganism and vegetarianism. People become vegetarian or vegan because they want to reduce the amount of harm their diet causes. But very quickly, for many people, the thought of eating meat becomes revolting. That’s then taken as confirmation of the “rightness” of veganism/vegetarianism, but that, from a Buddhist point of view, doesn’t follow. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. A monk, for example, is recorded as having eaten the finger of a leper that fell into his begging bowl when the leper was making an offering. You or I would find that repulsive in the extreme, but was any harm caused? And was the monk motivated by greed, hatred, or delusion? (He was enlightened, so presumably not). We might flinch from eating food that has even been touched by a leper, but that flinching would actually be unethical — an action purely based on aversion. The ethically skillful thing to do would be to eat food a leper has touched.

There are powerful social and religious traditions of certain foods being pure and impure, and vegans and vegetarians often buy into these cultural belief systems. But properly speaking, such aversions should have no place in either Buddhist ethics or the rational practice of veganism or vegetarianism.

To get away from issues of leprosy, the point I’m trying to make is that just because vegans or vegetarians may have a sense of revulsion at the idea of eating oysters, that doesn’t make it wrong. If Cox is right, and oysters feel no pain and are environmentally beneficial, then vegans and vegetarians should feel free to eat them. (They may have some explaining to do, but that’s another issue.) Rather, these revulsions themselves are unethical, as I once pointed out to a Buddhist who was critical of other people eating veggie-burgers. Veggie-burgers reminded him too much of meat for him to be able to partake of them. But he wasn’t being more ethical by having a revulsion of vaguely meat-like patties, he was being less ethical.

Will I be rushing out to eat oysters? I don’t think so. Long before I became a vegetarian — when I was 16 or 17 — I bought a dozen oysters in Brittany. I gingerly poured one into my mouth, but my throat went into a spasm and I was unable to persuade myself to swallow it. Just to be clear, this is revulsion I’m talking about, not an allergic response. If I had managed to swallow the slimy thing it might well have come straight back up again. I may be braver now, and so if the opportunity to eat an oyster comes up I’m open to giving it a try, but I’m not going to risk heaving up all over a restaurant in order to prove a point.

Related posts:

1. Does a vegan diet feed the ego?
2. One final book-launch party offering, via Dirk Johnson
3. If we are what we eat, we are in trouble

A less egregious, but as far as I’m aware equally inaccurate one appeared on Twitter yesterday, posted by @tricyclemag. They didn’t invent the quote — I’ve seen it circulating endlessly, and it will no doubt appear on more and more blogs (and books — it’s in dozens), and thus be accepted by more and more people as the actual word of the Buddha. Here’s the quote:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.” -Buddha

Unless I’m mistaken, this seems to be a poor paraphrase of part of the Buddha’s teaching to the Kalamas, which runs like this:

…don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them.

Now a caveat: the Buddhist scriptures are vast and I can’t claim to have read all of them. To some extent I’m relying on the tone and language of the alleged Buddha quote, plus its obvious similarity to the Kalama sutta, to state that I think it’s a false quote. I may be wrong.

But assuming I’m correct, the Tricycle quote says you should trust your reason and common sense, while the Buddha says you shouldn’t trust “logical conjecture … inference … agreement through pondering views … [and] probability.” Collectively the Buddha’s list of things you shouldn’t reply on would seem to overlap totally with those Tricycle magazine thinks we should reply upon.

The Buddha of course isn’t saying we should jettison reason and common sense. What he’s implying is that both those things can be misleading and what’s ultimately the arbiter of what’s true is experience. It’s when you “know for yourselves” that something is true through experience that you know it’s true. (Also, we can rely on the opinion of “the wise.” This doesn’t mean accepting other people’s opinions blindly. It means that in your experience you can come to know that certain people tend to have a clear perception of what’s true and helpful in terms of spiritual practice, and so you don’t have to go around making every mistake under the sun in order to establish that they are in fact mistakes.)

The Tricycle quote displaces the role of experience in spiritual practice in favor of reason and common sense, which I think is very questionable. It suggests learning is something that happens in the head, rather than something that is gained through living, and it allows us to dismiss anything that contradicts our prejudices (common sense is often nothing other than clinging to established views.

More than that, though, I think it’s ethically problematical to pass on the message “the Buddha said such-and-such” without checking out that he actually did say that. Otherwise it’s not dissimilar to gossip, although presumably better-intentioned.

Because I write a monthly column based on quotations, I like to make sure that the statement I’m quoting is accurate and was actually made by the person in question. (Confession: I didn’t used to be so careful). There are many quotation sites that do no fact-checking at all and that are full of inaccurate, false, and misattributed quotes. Because these sites endlessly plagiarize each other, these false quotes end up all over the internet. It’s a shame that Buddhists join in with this trend, especially when it distorts the Buddha’s teaching, as I believe this “quote” does.

Related posts:

1. More Fake Buddha Quotes, or fake-ish, at least
2. The ultimate in Fake Buddha Quotes
3. Fake Buddha Quote: “It is better to travel well than to arrive.”

I just stumbled across a fascinating article (Oddly, Hypocrisy Rooted in High Morals) from LiveScience, reporting on research showing that when people have

a) a sense of themselves as being “moral people” and
b) a flexible sense of what constitutes right and wrong

they are more likely to cheat. Here’s an extract, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Morally upstanding people are the do-gooders of society, right? Actually, a new study finds that a sense of moral superiority can lead to unethical acts, such as cheating. In fact, some of the best do-gooders can become the worst cheats.

Stop us if this sounds familiar.

When asked to describe themselves, most people typically will rattle off a list of physical features and activities (for example, “I do yoga” or “I’m a paralegal”). But some people have what scientists call a moral identity, in which the answer to the question would include phrases like “I am honest” and “I am a caring person.”

Past research has suggested that people who describe themselves with words such as honest and generous are also more likely to engage in volunteer work and other socially responsible acts.

But often in life, the line between right and wrong becomes blurry, particularly when it comes to cheating on a test or in the workplace. For example, somebody could rationalize cheating on a test as a way of achieving their dream of becoming a doctor and helping people.

In the new study, detailed in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers find that when this line between right and wrong is ambiguous among people who think of themselves as having high moral standards, the do-gooders can become the worst of cheaters.

The “ends justify the means” was pretty much the hallmark of the Bush administration, which of course was headed by a president who saw himself as being “bringing morality back to the White House .” He was so moral that spying, lying, and torture were no obstacles to him achieving his aims of “ridding the world of evil.” (When you think about it, it’s astonishing that Bush wasn’t laughed out of town for declaring that he intended to rid the world of evil — what a hubristic policy goal!).

The main thing that sprung to my mind, though, was the power of labels and of self-definitions in particular. Of course it’s possible for some people to consider themselves moral people and to follow a strict code of ethics, but I’d suggest that for some people the thought “I am a moral person” is simply a label, and that the reasoning goes, “…and since I am a moral person, everything I do is therefore moral, even if it contravenes conventional morality.”

Scott Reynolds of the University of Washington Business School in Seattle, who carried out this research, suggests that ethics classes would help, although I’m not confident that’s the case. I suspect that the people who he’s identified would simply cheat on their ethics exams — after all the ends justify the means. I suspect that it takes introspective self-awareness — sometimes in an extreme fashion, as arises in intensive meditation retreats — to bring about greater honesty. I’ve sometimes found that I can only accept my own hypocrisy when I have to sit with my mind for hour after hour and finally run out of ways to hide from myself. And that’s not something you can usually force on people. Reynolds does add, “If you can recruit people with a moral identity and then train them appropriately, you’ll get some of the best behavior you can imagine,” and I think the flip-side of that is the organizations need to find ways to screen out “moral” people who considered cheating to be an ethically justifiable behavior.

Related posts:

1. Moral naturalism
2. The moral life of babies
3. How good are people at making ethical evaluations?

One of the greatest misunderstandings of what the Buddhas taught is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.” You’ll see many Buddhist teachers saying this, especially those teachers from the Tibetan traditions where this actually seems to be the accepted teaching on karma.

Karma, first of all, is just the Sanskrit word for “action” but it refers specifically to moral action. Vipaka is the word for the result of actions, which manifests as either happiness or unhappiness. The karmic status of an act depends on the underlying emotional/cognitive motivation, so that if we act on the basis of unskillful mental states such as greed, hatred, or delusion, we will experience suffering, while if we act on the basis of skillful mental states such as love, compassion, and mindfulness we’ll experience happiness. This is an example of “conditionality,” where certain causes will lead to certain results in a predictable way. It’s conditionality as it operates on the moral level.

But there are other forms of conditionality. The later Pali tradition enumerates five “niyamas”:

1. The physical inorganic
2. The biological
3. The psychological
4. The karmic
5. The dharmic/transcendental

I’m not going to explain these fully because I don’t need to in order to make my point: many of the things that happen to us are a result of the other, non-karmic levels of conditionality. If a bolt on your bicycle shears and you are injured by falling on the road, that’s got little or nothing to do with karma. (Sure, if you’re the kind of person who rides recklessly or doesn’t maintain your bike then those are karmic factors, but I’m assuming these don’t apply in this particular hypothetical situation). What’s happened is that on the level of physical/inorganic matter, a piece of metal broke as a result of the physical stresses placed upon it. No karma required.

Where the karmic level of conditionality comes into play is with how you respond to that situation. If you’ve trained your mind to be mindful and equanimous, you won’t be too upset when you take the tumble. If on the other hand you’ve trained yourself (through unmindfulness) to be angry, depressed, resentful, etc, then you’ll be plunged into mental suffering as you cast around for someone to blame, see this as a sign that the universe is out to get you, start figuring out who to sue, etc.

There are many problems with the idea that everything that happens is a result of karma. One is the absence of any causal mechanisms that would, for example, bring hundreds of people into the same plane at the same time if it was their “karma” that caused them to be in a plane crash — not to mention the absence of any causal mechanism that links their moral actions to, say, an engine catching fire. Buddhists who believe such things are positing mysterious and mystical forces at work in the world which, frankly, just aren’t there. They are, I think, uncomfortable living in a world in which random crap happens. But a universe in which random crap happens is the very kind of universe we live in. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. We need to get used to that and not create a delusion that “everything happens for a reason. It’s uncomfortable, perhaps, to accept that we live in such a universe, but the Buddha’s teaching on karma was outlined because he thought (or saw) that it was true and helpful, not in order to comfort us.

Another problem with the idea that everything that happens is a result of karma is that we inevitably end up blaming the victim. You’re a Jew who gets gassed in the Holocaust? Sorry, it’s your fault. You must have done something bad in a past life. This inevitably entails a certain loss of compassion, although not perhaps a complete loss because we can certainly observe people doing things that cause them pain and experience compassion for them. But any level of blaming people for things they have no control over involves the non-compassionate application of judgments.

Although the teaching of the five niyamas is a later elaboration, the Buddha was quite clear that not everything that happens is a result of karma. So don’t take my word for it, here’s the Buddha himself:

Once the Blessed One dwelt at Rajagaha in the Bamboo-Grove Monastery, at the Squirrel’s Feeding Place. There a wandering ascetic, Moliya Sivaka by name, called on the Blessed One, and after an exchange of courteous and friendly words, sat down at one side. Thus seated, he said:

“There are, revered Gotama, some ascetics and brahmins who have this doctrine and view: ‘Whatever a person experiences, be it pleasure, pain or neither-pain-nor-pleasure, all that is caused by previous action.’ Now, what does the revered Gotama say about this?”

“Produced by (disorders of the) bile, there arise, Sivaka, certain kinds of feelings. That this happens, can be known by oneself; also in the world it is accepted as true. Produced by (disorders of the) phlegm…of wind…of (the three) combined…by change of climate…by adverse behavior…by injuries…by the results of Kamma — (through all that), Sivaka, there arise certain kinds of feelings. That this happens can be known by oneself; also in the world it is accepted as true.

“Now when these ascetics and brahmins have such a doctrine and view that ‘whatever a person experiences, be it pleasure, pain or neither-pain-nor-pleasure, all that is caused by previous action,’ then they go beyond what they know by themselves and what is accepted as true by the world. Therefore, I say that this is wrong on the part of these ascetics and brahmins.”

When this was spoken, Moliya Sivaka, the wandering ascetic, said: “It is excellent, revered Gotama, it is excellent indeed!…May the revered Gotama regard me as a lay follower who, from today, has taken refuge in him as long as life lasts.”

Samyutta Nikaya XXXVI.21, Moliyasivaka Sutta, translated by Nyanaponika Thera

Now some Buddhists will take great exception to my contradicting their favorite Rinpoche or Lama in this way. Some get very annoyed and I’ve been called all sorts of names in the past for pointing out what the Buddha actually taught. But I think this annoyance (some) people feel is perhaps natural — when you put your faith in non-rational and unverifiable explanations for how things work in this universe, your defense of those beliefs is also likely to be non-rational. And so I’m sure someone is going to point out that I’m just not spiritual enough to appreciate that everything that happens to us is the result of our karma. Or worse.

I’d suggest that it’s always useful to check back to the closest we can come to what the Buddha taught, which is the Pali scriptures. I don’t want to imply that we need accept everything in the Pali scriptures absolutely literally, and we certainly don’t know that everything they claim the Buddha to have said was actually uttered by him, but we have to have a really good reason for deciding that something in the earliest teachings is a mistake — and the fact that some Buddhists in a later tradition have different ideas is not, in my view, a sufficient reason, especially when that view is fraught with as many difficulties as is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.”

Related posts:

1. Danger, karma at work
2. Tibetan karmic ameliorism

The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.

Related posts:

1. Wordless Wednesday 8/29/07
2. Buddhists battle residents over temple development

The notion of in vitro meat — flesh harvested from a vat rather than a living animal — seems straight from science fiction, which is perhaps not surprising given that NASA, the US space organization, originated the idea as a way to provide better-quality food for astronauts in space.

While the notion may seem far-fetched, some people are taking it very seriously indeed. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, announced in 2008 a $1 million prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the adoption of alternatives to meat, points out on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting and more humane than conventional meat.”

There are immense technical challenges in producing in vitro meat that has a suitable texture and flavour, but it may not be long before it’s an option in our supermarket shelves, alongside the Quorn, the textured vegetable protein, the tofu, and (of course) regular meat taken from the bodies of animals. What should Buddhist vegetarians make of this?

First, whether we would personally choose to eat in vitro meat ourselves, I think we should welcome the development as an alternative to the suffering that is involved in eating animals. The initial tissue for in vitro meat could presumably be obtained by means of a muscle biopsy sample that’s no more invasive or harmful than many a standard medical procedure.

The environmental benefits could be immense, there might well be less bacterial contamination, and such meat could also potentially be free from growth hormones and antibiotics.

But of course the very prospect of in vitro meat is controversial. One of the founders of PETA commented that the decision to launch the $1 million prize lead to “a near civil war” in the organization. Many committed vegetarians in PETA were repulsed by the very idea of eating meat, even if no animals were harmed.

As with the issue of transgenic vegetables (the famous tomato containing fish genes) questions of taste arise here that have nothing to do with the Buddhist ethic of non-harm. I don’t think I’d be inclined to eat in vitro meat. For one thing I don’t want to eat heavily-processed food, and for another I find the smell and sight of meat repulsive because of its associations with death and destruction. But in principle there’s no inherent ethical reason why a Buddhist vegetarian should avoid meat grown in a vat.

Related posts:

1. Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’
2. Meet your meat
3. Another good reason to be vegetarian

Apparently it’s World Philosophy Day (or maybe it recently was — I’m not too clear), and the BBC has four philosophical problems, posed by David Bain of the University of Glasgow (my alma mater) to help you exercise your mind:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

2. YOU ARE NOT THE PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you’re an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement – this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush’s brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it’s actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn’t implant your brain in Bush’s skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush’s pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There’s nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there’s a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.

But this, you might reply, doesn’t show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it’s about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it’s readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they’re generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.”

4. YOU DID NOT FREELY AND RESPONSIBLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one’s denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn’t really exist, so he didn’t really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred’s predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.”

IN CONCLUSION

Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it’s a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

“…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.”

Related posts:

1. Now reading: Ten Zen Questions
2. A Zen Questions Utter
3. Ten Zen Questions review

I picked it up and it immediately seemed to calm down, as if it recognized that I was less of a threat than the cat was, and I felt fraudulent, given my intention. While wild birds can become very stressed when in contact with humans they can also be very trusting. When I lived at Dhanakosa Retreat Centre in Scotland I’d often have wild birds come and sit on my shoulder or perch on my hand. One time a bird came to one of us looking for help for her mate, who had become trapped in a building.

I kept the bird out of sight as I walked back to my house; the local kids, including my daughter, were playing outside my front door and I didn’t want next door’s five-year-old to decide she wanted to try to nurse the bird back to health. There’s no point creating an attachment that you then intend to violate.

I’d decided that the quickest and least unpleasant way to kill the bird was to break its neck with a ruler. I took the bird and the ruler out onto the back deck, where there was a good, hard surface.

The first time I blew it. I placed the bird on the deck and as I was putting the ruler in position for a quick push downwards I prematurely touched the bird, which panicked and tried to hop away. The second time I was more decisive and pushed down as hard as I could. The bird jerked and struggled for a few long seconds and then it stilled and its eyes went dull.

I hope those seconds of thrashing were just reflexes and that the death wasn’t painful. But I have a feeling I caused pain and fear. The whole time I was saying “I’m sorry” under my breath. Or maybe I was just thinking it. I continued to say those words as I took a spade and buried the tiny body under a clod of earth.

It felt horrible.

The first precept of Buddhism is “I undertake the training principle of abstention from taking life.” I’m a vegetarian. I generally have a catch and release policy for insects that I find in the house. I gave up a career as a veterinarian because it wasn’t possible to avoid killing in that job. So why did I kill the bird?

The chances of it living were close to zero. I couldn’t fix its broken wing. I didn’t know what its diet was, but the pointed beak made me think it was an insect-eater. It would likely die of stress and hunger over a period of days. It didn’t even occur to me to find someone else to do the deed. I thought it was best that if death was to come it should come quickly.

A Buddhist friend once suggested, while I was struggling with the issue of having to kill as a veterinarian, that when we put an animal out of its misery we’re actually putting ourselves out of our own misery. I’m sure there’s some truth in that. It’s painful to watch an animal die slowly. But I’m inclined to think that the precepts can become contaminated by a desire for “ethical purity” where we don’t want to dirty our hands. Mahayana Buddhism, critical of this tendency, put forth hypothetical situations such as a Buddha killing a madman in order to prevent him from causing great harm to many other people. The Mahayana teaches compassion and I don’t think they were really advocating harm. I think they were saying, “Look, some Buddhists are so caught up in wanting to be ethically pure that they’d let others die rather than take on the bad karma of reluctantly using force to save other people. And shying away from difficult actions is itself an ethical defect. Ethics involved thinking about others, not about keeping your karma clean.”

I feel sympathetic to the Mahayana view. There’s a Pali canon text where the Buddha points out that it’s better for an aware person to commit a harmful act than for an unaware person to do so, because less harm is caused. The image used is of picking up a red hot iron ball. A person who is unaware will pick up the ball and mishandle it, because they don’t know what they’re doing. A person who does this with awareness will take the appropriate safeguards to make sure they don’t cause themselves or others unnecessary harm.

So I tried to kill the bird with as much awareness and compassion as possible. And afterward i tried to be mindful of the unpleasant feeling I had in the pit of my stomach, not letting myself wallow in self pity or mask the feeling.

Today I feel fine. I don’t even recall having unpleasant dreams. I think I did the right thing.

Related posts:

1. Birder Admits Killing Cat, but Was It Animal Cruelty?