Bile & Bodhisattvas: Śāntideva on Justified Anger

Journal of Buddhist Ethics 18:357-81 (2011)
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Abstract

In his famous text the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the 8th century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva argues that anger towards people who harm us is never justified. The usual reading of this argument rests on drawing similarities between harms caused by persons and those caused by non-persons. After laying out my own interpretation of Śāntideva's reasoning, I offer some objections to Śāntideva's claim about the similarity between animate and inanimate causes of harm inspired by contemporary philosophical literature in the West. Following this, I argue that by reading Śāntideva's argument as practical advice rather than as a philosophical claim about rational coherence, his argument can still have important insights even for those who reject his philosophical reasoning.

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Nicolas Bommarito
Simon Fraser University

Citations of this work

Virtuous and Vicious Anger.Bommarito Nicolas - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (3):1-28.
The Moral Necessity of Anger.Krista Thomason - 2020 - In Court D. Lewis & Gregory L. Bock (eds.), The Ethics of Anger. Lexington Books. pp. 83-101.
Anger and Oppression: A Tantric Buddhist Perspective.Emily McRae - 2017 - In Myisha Cherry & Owen Flanagan (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Anger. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

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References found in this work

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Virtues and vices.Philippa Foot - 1997 - In Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 163--177.
Asymmetrical freedom.Susan Wolf - 1980 - Journal of Philosophy 77 (March):151-66.
Virtues and Vices.Philippa Foot - 1997 - In Roger Crisp & Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.

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