Abstract
This paper develops two novel views that help solve the ‘now what’ problem for moral error theorists concerning what they should do with morality once they accept it is systematically false. It does so by reconstructing aspects of the metaethical and metanormative reflections found in the Madhyamaka Buddhist, and in particular the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhist, tradition. It also aims to resolve the debate among contemporary scholars of Madhyamaka Buddhism concerning the precise metaethical status of its views, namely, whether Madhyamaka Buddhism can count as a genuine moral skepticism. The paper argues that Mādhyamikas are indeed moral skeptics, and moral skeptics more in a ‘Pyrrhonian,’ or quietist, sense if one follows the Prāsaṅgika line of thinkers. Overall, the claim is that Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhists treat morality and normativity more broadly as a source of suffering to be ultimately overcome for therapeutic reasons. They propose to do this by abolishing fully asserting genuine moral and normative beliefs while also occasionally passively and reactively pretending some normative judgments are true when it appears doing so would be salutary. These two approaches are called ‘nonassertive moral abolitionism’ and ‘reactionary moral fictionalism,’ respectively. They are developed and offered to contemporary error theorists willing to consider a non-normative and non-collectivist criterion for solving the ‘now what’ problem.
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Notes
Garner labels his version of the view ‘assertive moral abolitionism.’ We will see below we can develop a non-normative, nonassertive version of the view based on the metaethical and metanormative reflections of Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhism. Another recent abolitionist, Joel Marks, provides an apt example of the zeal of assertive moral abolitionism: ‘Finally I reached a point where I felt that, far from needing to hide my amorality from the world, I should share it with the world. It would be a gift. At the very least, it was important—perhaps the most important thing in the world! I also saw the humor in my situation: it was not lost on me that I was becoming an unbelieving proselytizer’ (Marks, 2013: 14). Suffice it to say, the views developed here out of Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhism will lack this zeal. On the other hand, what assertive and nonassertive moral abolitionism will share is a recognition of the pathological nature of morality, the fact that it often results from or induces mental turmoil. Morality almost always involves not only the issuing of false judgments, but the discharging of negative emotions like sadness, anxiety, fear, pity, anger, resentment, indignation, disgust, condemnation, outrage, and contempt (Marks, 2013: 83). One rarely moralizes joyfully, peacefully. It could be that abolishing morality brings joy and peace. That is the abolitionist’s hunch.
‘Brute desire’ might not be the most appropriate phrase here. Technically, it seems desires are of the sort that they could not be for no reason. If by ‘brute’ we mean something like ungrounded, preconscious, or instinctual, then that desires always seem to be for reasons would render them never ‘brute,’ but always grounded by some reason, by something normative. This is a threat to my approach here because I am trying to emphasize the non-normativity, or at least the non-normative nature and consequences, of the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhist tradition. Also, this brings up the possibility that Buddhism’s general approach concerning the desirability of the overcoming of suffering might itself be a normative or axiological judgment, which also brings up the older discussions about the paradox of desirability in Buddhism, the apparent paradox that Buddhists desire to cease desiring (Alt, 1980; Herman, 1979; Visvader, 1978). But there seems to be a straightforward solution to these worries. Instead of a ‘brute desire’ for release, we could say Buddhist have an instinct or taste for, an inclination or tendency toward, release, which would not reach the conscious, and hence normative or axiological, level of a desire for reasons or a supposed tapping into a mind-independent value. Even better, we could say that by a ‘brute desire’ for release, all that is meant is a mere or simple preference for overcoming suffering. Similar to the Pyrrhonian replacement of beliefs in propositions, of holding onto things for reasons, with mild non-cognitive preferences for seemings, with avowals of appearances, the Buddhist could overcome any charge of incoherence or defaulting back into any normative or axiological realism by intimating that they simply prefer release, not that they desire it. Perhaps all that we could mean by ‘brute desire’ is a preference without attachment, an inclination without reason, a tendency without an attending value judgment. This way Buddhism, especially Madhyamaka, falls into no paradoxes and is committed to nothing normatively or axiologically real in quasi-asserting a preference for release.
I follow the convention of referring to the thought as ‘Madhyamaka’ and the thinkers as ‘Mādhyamikas.’.
Tom Tillemans (2011:158–159) and Bronwyn Finnigan (2015: 776) have also remarked that Mackie’s anti-realist moral error theory might be the most appropriate contemporary metaethical label for what follows from the Madhyamaka notion of emptiness. It is also relevant to note that other Mahayana Buddhists were discussing metanormative issues, especially concerning the prospects of a normative nominalism or constructivism. See, for example, Richard P. Hayes excellent work, Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs (1988).
I employ the phrases ‘Buddhist reductionists’ and ‘Buddhism reductionism’ simply because scholars like Hidalgo, Siderits, Priest, and Goodman do. Who they group under the label ‘Buddhist reductionists’ appears to be not only obvious candidates like Abhidharmikas, but also figures like Dharmakīrti and a Mādhyamika like Śāntideva. I highlight what I see to be the chief differences between Abhidharma Buddhism and Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhism below.
Again, the Buddhists I am referring to here are those like Abhidharmikas and Dharmakīrti, who influentially held something like the Eleatic principle, a kind of causal efficacy criterion for ultimate existence, as evinced in a line by Dharmakīrti like this, ‘whatever has the capacity for causal efficacy is ultimately existent’ (quoted in Hidalgo, 2020: 980). Now, by ‘concrete’ all is meant, as far as I can tell, is causal efficacy. One could probably continue to describe the concrete as being present in the spatiotemporal manifold of the natural order, but this is all rather controversial, clearly. To say the least, the concrete/abstract distinction is quite vexed in philosophy.
While samāropa is a term one can commonly find in Advaita Vedanta texts, it is often found in Madhyamaka texts as well. For example, we find Candrakīrti speaking in the Prasannapadā of ‘the samāropa of self and dharmas’ and observing ‘the false thing as the samāropa of the self and the five aggregates appears as really existent (satyatah) for a person in transmigration following the erroneous inversion of ignorance, but it does not appear for (the sage) who is near to the insight of the reality of things’ (quoted in Tanji, 2000: 353).
That the ultimate can only be regarded from the perspective of the conventional extends to this point about the ultimate itself, leading to the famous claim from Nāgārjuna that even emptiness itself is empty (Garfield 1995: 69). The ultimate truth that everything is empty of essence is itself empty of essence and so is entirely dependent upon conventions for conception and expression. This is precisely what characterizes the middle way: all beliefs and assertions, along with all things they are purportedly about, are interdependent, hence empty, and so is that very belief and assertion, if it is in fact the literal assertion of a genuine belief, leaving one dissolved and detached from any beliefs or assertions. The conventional is ultimately empty and that emptiness is only conventionally expressible. We will return to the precise nature of the conventional below.
To step back for a moment, it could be helpful to emphasize that what I am describing here is quite unlike what we might be used to in analytic philosophy where views are presented as fully formed attempts to answer a theoretical problem. What I am discussing is closer to a therapeutic process wherein certain claims are made at the beginning and later relinquished at the end, similar to certain philosophies as ways of life in Greco-Roman philosophy (see Hadot, 1995).
Recall that Joyce’s version of moral fictionalism, following the social or collectivist criterion, was of both the force and revolutionary varieties. This means that Joyce proposed that error theorists collectively revolt and change their way of using moral discourse by reducing the assertoric force of their moral utterances and instead merely quasi-assert not full moral beliefs, but moral make-beliefs. By not claiming we (humans and error theorists) are already pretending with respect to morality means this view is not a hermeneutic fictionalism as well. And a content fictionalism, in contrast with Joyce’s view, would propose that we fully assert real beliefs in fictional versions of formerly believed to be real posits like moral facts. No, Joyce’s view is a revolutionary force moral fictionalism.
Stephen Jenkins (2016: 100–101) has provided a discussion of the relation between compassion and emptiness in Madhyamaka. He summarizes the division into three ālambana, or objects, of compassion as found in Candrakīrti and Prajñākaramati (950–1030 CE): first, there is compassion for imagined sentient beings, then there is compassion for the supposed dharmas of which all beings are composed, and finally and ultimately there is compassion for the emptiness of all things. This ultimate, great compassion is a compassion with no referent, an objectless compassion (anālambana-karuṇā) felt by no one, a subjectless compassion for the empty nonobject of the world, emptiness’s compassion for itself which occurs through a Buddha. This threefold division is also how the Buddhist notion of loving-kindness (maitrī) can be understood. Jenkins cites the description of this ultimate loving-kindness from the Akṣayamatinirdeśa Sūtra: ‘Bodhisattvas who have attained acceptance of the nonarising of dharmas have maitrī with no basis’ (Jenkins, 2016: 101). This must mean Simon Keller’s (2017) recent attempt to argue that a moral error theorist cannot love because she denies the existence of objective and independent reasons must be false, or at least not applicable to the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Buddhist tradition.
Of course, this is not to deny that Candrikīrti might be regarded as a ‘revolutionary’ in a different sense, perhaps in the sense of initiating a paradigm shift in the interpretation of Nagarjuna and laying the groundwork for the eventual emergence of the Prāsaṅgika line of Madhyamaka Buddhism.
Candrakīrti provides an image to help us grasp what such a being is like, what a Buddha’s combination of nonassertive abolition with reactionary pretense might be like. A Buddha is like a potter’s wheel spinning after a potter has ceased kicking the flywheel with her foot. The wheel spins without effort, without intention. Yet, it still coasts with great momentum. Similarly, a ‘didactic sound is emitted’ from a Buddha through her utterances in the same way the potter’s wheel spins. A Buddha stored up enough traces of beliefs and meaningful sounding speech-acts, especially moral speech-acts, while on the bodhisattva path that she can quasi-assert moral make-beliefs in contexts where they seem to be expected and might serve an upayic end, all the while remaining mindlessly detached from any normative or conceptual projection. John Dunne nicely describes a Buddha’s mode of communication: ‘a spontaneous sound effortlessly emits from him, and in it we hear what we need to hear. In short, Candrakīrti’s Buddha appears to be more a volitionless, transcendental force than a speaking, feeling human’ (Dunne, 1996: 550).
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Dockstader, J. Madhyamaka Metaethics. SOPHIA 62, 111–131 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-022-00934-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-022-00934-z